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Seen with ms_siobhan and planet_andy at the National Media Museum in Bradford, where they are having a bit of a Gene Kelly season at the moment (complete with an evening course!).

It's a feelgood movie with a witty script about three sailors on 24 hours shore-leave in New York, who inevitably find and hook up with three pretty girls, and sing and dance with them a great deal in glorious technicolor. The music isn't the kind I would normally seek out to listen to, but in the context of the film it worked pretty well, and some of the dance numbers were fantastic - as were the amazing dresses which the girls (and especially Ann Miller) wore to dance them. The big, swinging circle-skirts which most of us associate with the 1950s (and are now enjoying a renaissance on the rockabilly and burlesque scenes) were obviously just coming in, and get a full work-out here.

The gender dynamics of the film reflect the period when it was made, and the romantic comedy genre, in the ways that you would largely expect. But perhaps because the setting is New York, and it is obviously standing in the film as an icon of modernity and sophistication, there are also some quite progressive notes in the portrayal of its three female lead characters which I didn't really expect. Most striking was the female cab-driver, Hildy Esterhazy (played by Betty Garrett), who declares that she didn't see why she should give up a job she liked just because the war was over, and is also very clear about her own sexual desires without ever being condemned for this. Considerably more shaky is Claire Huddesen (played by Ann Miller), who is doing a degree in anthropology - but turns out to be doing it (on the orders of a man) as an intended cure for nymphomania, and quickly discovers that all she really wanted all along was a nice primitive man all of her own. Okay... Meanwhile, Ivy Smith (played by Vera-Ellen), who is leading man Gene Kelly's love interest, is the perfect all-American girl of the era - an accomplished dancer who aspires to a career in the Big Apple, but secretly just wants to hook up with a fine fellow and retreat to small-town domestic bliss. But hey - at least the film treats her career aspirations seriously, presents her as hard-working and dedicated to her goals, and actually leaves the question of whether she ever really will return to her home town and settle down with the sailor she has met open at the end.

Some other interesting features included the use of quite extensive montage sequences, for example to portray the sailors' first few hours of sight-seeing in the city, or Ivy Smith's life in New York. But then I already spotted Great Expectations doing that in 1946 a couple of months ago, so it's not as surprising as it might have been. Gene Kelly also slips into a reverie for a few minutes, prompted by a poster for a Broadway show, in which he imagines the story of the film as it has been shown so far in the form of a stylised and condensed ballet. Obviously, this is an explicit meta-reference to the film's origins as a Broadway musical, but as ms_siobhan pointed out, it must be quite an unusual example of a meta-drama which actually tells the story of the very drama which it sits within, rather than a different story which feeds into it in some way. The only other example of that which I can think of is the show put on by the players in the middle of Wyrd Sisters, though even that doesn't tell the full story of the book - only the story of King Verence's murder. Do feel free to suggest others if you know of any!

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Seen on Tuesday with ms_siobhan, planet_andy and their chums Phil and Tony at the Cottage Road cinema.

I've wanted to see the American TV series this is based on ever since my mid-teenage years spent poring over a book named Horrorshows - my personal filmic and televisual Horror bible. Sadly, I've still yet to have the pleasure, but my appetite has definitely been piqued all the further by the film. Who knows - if others feel the same in its wake, maybe soon the original TV series too will find its way to British screens at last?

The film itself (like the TV series) is the story of an Addams or Munsterish family, living in a big Gothic mansion on a hill above a fishing port which they founded two centuries earlier. It's typically Tim Burtonish, in the sense of starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter, involving almost cartoonish make-up and costumes, and mingling Gothic horror with kitsch comedy. Dear old Tim does keep on and on making the same film, but then again, it's not a bad film, and I certainly liked this iteration better than the last one of his I saw - the musically and comedically dismal Sweeney Todd. This one is vastly better musically, thanks to being set in 1972 (which for me = love), and having a period-appropriate sound-track replete with the likes of T-Rex, The Carpenters etc. It's also hugely funnier, provoking many a guffaw along our row of the cinema.

( The main cast )

( The cameos )

( The gender politics )

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10. The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists (2012), dir. Peter Lord and Jeff Newitt

I saw this in Bristol while visiting hollyione and her family - which seemed very appropriate, given that that is the home of Aardman Animations. Ever down with da kids, it was my first ever viewing of a (modern) 3D film - which was much as I expected it to be, really. Fun, novel and perfectly effective, but I wouldn't say it added enormous amounts to the experience of watching the film. I think seeing a live-action film in 3D for the first time will be quite a different experience from seeing an animated one - and in fact maybe it is something that's better-suited to animated films anyway. But I'm glad I've got some idea of what it's all about now, and I'm sure I will get round to a live-action equivalent sooner or later.

The film itself was good stuff, packed with silliness, steampunkery and deliberate anachronisms, and including a particularly enjoyable turn from a plotting, scheming, Samurai sword-wielding Queen Victoria, lots of great jokes in the background (e.g. a dentist's surgery owned by one D.K. Ying), and a super-intelligent chimpanzee owned by Charles Darwin who talks by using flash-cards. It's heavily reliant on tropes and clichés, only some of which it really challenges, but I guess that's about all I was expecting from a light-hearted child-oriented comedy. I assume that a sequel is planned, as there was a running joke throughout about none of the pirates realising that one of their number was very obviously a woman in a bad fake beard which was never resolved. I'll see it if I get the opportunity, but probably won't go out of my way to do so.


11. The Sorcerers (1967), dir. Michael Reeves

I saw this two years ago at the Bradford Fantastic Film Weekend, absolutely loved it, and bought it on DVD soon afterwards. So when ms_siobhan was round at mine recently and we wanted something to watch, it was readily available, and seemed the obvious suggestion, given our shared appreciation of both vintage British horror films and its star, the delectable Ian Ogilvy. I don't think I have too much more to say about it beyond what I wrote last time, but it remains a real classic, boasting a winning combination of charming period detail, a genuinely compelling story, strong character-driven dramatic tensions and a really first-rate cast. 'Twas a pleasure to watch it, too, with ms_siobhan, who appreciated its finer features just as much as I did, and also very impressively worked out exactly how the story would resolve from a few fairly minor clues, long in advance of the actual denouement. This is definitely one I will keep coming back to, I think.


12. Ziegfeld Follies (1946), multiple directors

Finally, I saw this on the May Day bank holiday Monday, again in company with the lovely ms_siobhan. It's kind of at once both the glorious apogee and the dying gasp of the musical variety theatre show genre of vintage films. Wikipedia relates how the original Ziegfeld Follies were a series of real-life Broadway stage shows, inspired of course by the Parisian Folies Bergères, which ran from 1907 to 1931. This film, made after Ziegfeld himself had died, brings that show to the big screen - and in full technicolor. But while there are many films from the 1920s and 1930s which essentially import the theatrical song-and-dance show format into the cinema, most of them make at least some effort to tie the big numbers together with some kind of rudimentary plot. This one? Didn't bother. There was an opening vignette of the great Ziegfeld up in heaven, imagining what it would be like to produce one last show, but after that it was just dance number after song after comedy sketch, without even returning to Ziegfeld saying how marvellous it had all been at the end. It was simply a big-screen presentation of the same sorts of acts which (presumably) featured in the original show.

But what a spectacle, though! The sweeping ball-gowns! The fairy-tale sets! The hair-pieces! The bubble-machines! The underwater synchronised swimming! The horses with their hooves covered in glitter! And an all-start line-up including Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire and Lucille Bremer. In fact, Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire do a duet at one point, which includes the two of them waltzing together - surely a thing few other films can offer. On the whole, I could have done without the comedy sketches in between the songs and the dances - although one about what it'll be like when television takes off was certainly very interesting in terms of revealing cinema's anxieties about the competition. It was all based around a spoof of a show sponsored by 'Guzzler's Gin', whose host kept on slugging back the stuff to his obvious displeasure, while getting increasingly pickled and insisting that it is 'a good, smooth drink'. The songs and dances, though - they could not have been any more extravagant and spectacular if they had been staged on a set made of pure diamonds.

But that's what I mean about it being both apogee and dying gasp. This genre really belongs to the 1930s, when it offered a form of escapism from the depression, and it has very obviously been taken to its logical extreme in this film. There is just nowhere else left to go. Plus, it was 1946! There'd just been a war - cities had been ravaged and men were returning broken from the trenches. People in Europe had already started making sombre black-and-white films about their experiences, and a huge musical song-and-dance extravaganza looks embarrassingly out of place next to all that, even at a distance of nearly 70 years. It was definitely time to hang up those dancing shoes by the time this film was made - but nonetheless I'm glad that the final waltz was captured for posterity in all its colourful glory.

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Seen with ms_siobhan and planet_andy at the Cottage Road Cinema last Wednesday.

I read the stage play version of this story (itself based on an earlier novel) about ten years ago, so had a broad sense of the plot before I went in, although I'd forgotten the details. Not that it makes a huge amount of difference - it is very much a standard Victorian gothic ghost story, and although the stage play version includes a meta-referential twist at the end, the film doesn't do anything much that a regular horror film-goer won't be able to predict.



Overall, then, definitely a Hammer film - but I think that now they have caught the public's attention with this one, they need to do something a little less predictable next time.

---

1. I'm not completely sure about the patterning on the tablecloths.

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So I assume we all know by now that Tory party co-treasurer Peter Cruddas has been caught out by the Sunday Times offering businesses direct personal access to David Cameron for a minimum donation of £100,000. This BBC news article has the video if you haven't seen it. And just to be absolutely clear that this is not simply a matter of a few hand-shakes and photo-ops, let's take particular notice of this phrase from Cruddas' sales-pitch:

"If you're unhappy about something, we will listen to you and put it into the policy committee at number 10 - we feed all feedback to the policy committee."

Lobbying is a perfectly normal part of a functional and healthy democracy. It's what you do when you write to your MP, what campaign groups like Equal Marriage do when they organise petitions, and what business leaders do when they arrange meetings with ministers to express their concerns about current government policy. The problem with cases like the current Peter Cruddas scandal is that access to policy-makers is being arranged behind closed doors and being used as a money-making exercise which excludes those who can't afford to pay for it from the process.

This is why a full, robust and transparent lobbying register is needed, so that we can all see who exactly is talking to ministers, how much they are paying for the privilege and what they are saying.

As it happens, prompted by previous scandals of this nature, the government has recently published proposals for such a register. But their proposals represent a poor shadow of what's actually needed for real transparency, covering only lobbying done by agencies (roughly a quarter of the industry) and not directly by firms' in-house lobbyists (the other three-quarters), and recording only the minimum level of information about their meetings. This is why Unlock Democracy are currently campaigning for a full and effective lobbying register to be introduced, rather than the sop which is currently on the table.

If you'd like to lend your voice to that campaign, please take two minutes to sign Unlock Democracy's letter calling for a full lobbying register here.

You can also read more about their campaign, including details on how to contribute directly to the public consultation on lobbying, here.

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I have been out in my garden doing some weeding this afternoon, and am impressed to find that the top of my garden has become a genuinely pleasant place to be. This is what the garden looked like when I first moved in:



Basically featureless and neglected, and set on a very steep slope complete with the sunken ghosts of old grassed-over flowerbeds, which meant that my poor little electric lawnmower simply couldn't cope with the job, and kept overheating and conking out.

Most of it, to be fair, is still pretty much like that. But just over a year ago, I got my gardener to rip out all the wild brambles and ferns from the bank at the top, and plant a nice mixture of flowering shrubs, heathers and ferns instead. Then this January, he also replaced the awful dangerous rotting wooden pallet which was serving as a flight of 'steps' to go up the bank into the area behind where the shed stands with a proper flight of nice brick steps with Yorkshire stone treads:



So this is what the area looks like now:



There are even branches with apple blossom and weeping willow fronds drooping down from the adjoining garden, and eventually the rose bushes which I have planted either side of the arch in the trellis will grow their way up and over and make a lovely conjoined bower.

There's still a lot wrong with the garden as a whole, but this does feel like a genuine 'step' (boom-tish) in the right direction.

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I popped this on my Lovefilm list just over a year ago, after Mark Gatiss in his A History of Horror documentary likened it to two of my favourite horror films of all time: Witchfinder General (1968) and The Wicker Man (1973). He dubbed them ‘folk horror’, on the grounds that all three portray worlds of rural magic and superstition, drawing freely on the hippy aesthetic of the late ’60s. I get what he meant and I do see the links between the three films. Blood borrows Witchfinder’s broadly 17th-18th century (it’s a bit hazy) period setting, and its basic focus on a government official (in this case the local Judge) rooting out witchcraft. It also anticipates Wicker in its portrayal of Bacchanalian rituals, including buxom young ladies taking their clothes off and offering themselves to upright religious men. But there are also an awfully large number of ways in which Blood is a very poor relation to the other two.

( Why Blood just isn't as good as Witchfinder or Wicker )

In other words, if you watch this film hoping for another Witchfinder General or The Wicker Man, you're likely to come away pretty disappointed. And I wish Mark Gatiss hadn't set me up for that, because Blood isn't actually a dreadful film, and I'd probably have enjoyed it a lot more if I hadn't had my hopes raised so much.

( Blood on Satan's Claw in its own right )

In short, then, it's a decent workaday horror film which certainly helps me to understand the wider context of Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man rather better than I did before. But it just isn't really in the same league as either of those films in its own right.

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This was the latest of the wonderful Cottage Classics film nights, which I attended along with the lovely ms_siobhan, planet_andy and big_daz. As usual, the evening opened with a selection of vintage adverts, including some fab numbers from the '80s. I particularly enjoyed witnessing the 're-launch' of the Ford Escort, hearing about the amazing capabilities of my childhood computer, the fabulous Acorn Electron, and being apprised of the delicious sophistication of Babycham. All of that, though, faded into insignificance next to this public information broadcast featuring the New Seekers lending their vocal talents to the Keep Britain Tidy campaign:


I'm not sure I have ever seen the essence of 1970s culture so successfully captured in a single three-minute film. And all that was before the main feature even started!

The film itself is justly famous, and seems to be spoken of most frequently for featuring Jean Simmons as the young Estella. She is certainly fantastic in the role, but then again the whole cast was a delight to watch. Dickens might as well have written all of his novels with the great tradition of British character acting directly in mind, and the people playing Jaggers the lawyer, his assistant Wemmick, Miss Havisham, Magwitch the convict, the scrawny young Herbert Pocket and the Aged P. in this film really did his comi-tragic characters proud. It was especially fun, though, to see a young Alec Guinness playing the older version of Pip's dandyish room-mate Herbert Pocket.

I read the novel in my late teens, and distinctly remember failing to give a terribly good answer to the question "Why could Pip never marry Estella?" in my interview at Bristol.¹ The film slims down the plot a little, for example omitting a quite distressing sub-plot in which Pip's sister is attacked in the forge, and ends up bedridden and unable to speak, and also changes the ending so that the question asked of me in the interview is entirely begged. But on the whole the outline is fairly faithful to the novel, with I think a fair amount of Dickens' dialogue preserved.

That's not to say it is a ploddingly conventional film, though - far from it. It had quite a few features which I think must have been rather innovative for the time. For example, early on when Pip sneaks off across the marshes to take a stolen pie and file to Magwitch, he hears the voices of critical adults all around him as a projection of his guilt, including emanating from a group of cows who give him withering stares as he passes. It also features a training montage, as Pip learns to waltz and fence in his early days in London - a device which became famous with Rocky in the late '70s, but obviously goes back rather earlier if you know where to look. As ms_siobhan rightly says, it's also very rich in the fabulous use of light, contrast and composition that all the best films of this era do so well.

I saw parts of the new BBC adaptation over Christmas, and that had a lot to offer too. But this version will always remain a Classic, and I'm very glad I saw it.

---

1. I interviewed for a place to study English, and got it, but then switched to Ancient History in my first week. It remains one of the most obviously life-changing decisions I've ever taken.

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In favour of equal civil marriages? Then it's ACTION TIME! The government's consultation on introducing them opens today, and it's very important for positive voices to be heard. This is not a foregone conclusion, and if we want it, we need to say so loudly and clearly.

It's About Time gives information on the consultation, tips on what sorts of things supporters might say, and a link to where to go to say them (click on 'Take Part'). Please take the time to speak up if you support this proposal. This is not just another online petition, but a direct government consultation where you can really have an influence.

I saw this last Sunday evening with ms_siobhan and a bonus unexpected maviscruet. It was put on in a venue I haven't been to before - the Left Bank on Cardigan Road, Leeds, which is a formerly-disused church, now taken over as a community arts venue and in the process of being restored. So far, the roof has been repaired and the place cleaned up, but the budget hasn't yet stretched as far as installing any heating. So the place was completely freezing!

But that was OK. We'd been warned as much on the tickets, so turned up bundled in nice thick coats and hats, purchased hot steaming cups of coffee from the bar in one corner, and sat huddled over our drinks and watching our breath turn to mist. Somehow, given the type of film we were watching, it was all part of the experience and part of the fun. Meanwhile, the seating had been arranged at round cabaret-style tables with tea-lights in stained-glass holders flickering on each one, and once the lights were turned down we were surrounded by ghostly Gothic arches stretching out emptily around us - and somehow the slight desire to shiver, combined with all of that, really added to the atmosphere.

The film itself was played in a silent format, although actually Wikipedia tells me that it originally also had some spoken dialogue, almost bridging the gulf between silent films and talkies. That would explain something which we found confusing on the night, which was why in some places there were modern on-screen English subtitles, but no sign of any intertitles or other means to help the original audience understand what was being said. It wasn't that intertitles had been removed (the best explanation we could come up with at the time), but that there had actually been audible dialogue there in the original film - which makes sense, really, given the release date.

In place of the original soundtrack, though, we were instead treated to a performance of an original live musical soundtrack composed for the film especially by Steven Severin, the original bassist from Siouxsie and the Banshees. His soundtrack was performed via an electronic toolkit - laptop, mixer, etc. - but included things like strings, bells and banjoes as well as synthesised sounds, as and when appropriate to the events unfolding on screen. Obviously, as a soundtrack its function was to support and enhance the film, rather than distract attention away from it, but I thought it did that very well, adding yet more appropriately-atmospheric spookiness on top of the experience of watching a vampire film in a dark, cavernous, wintry-cold church.

As for the film itself, I had seen about the first ten minutes of it once before, but not the whole thing - a shameful oversight, given how much I love and actively seek out vampire films wherever possible. So it was great to just have the chance to remedy that at long last. I could see lots of small, iconic touches in it which crop up in many a later vampire film, too - like the young man arriving at the door of the inn, finding it locked, and being greeted instead by a woman peering out of an upstairs dormer window (e.g. Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969)), or the older, wiser man dying, and passing on the task of protecting his young female charge from vampires to an inexperienced paramour (e.g. Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968)). It's nice to have a better sense now of where some of those first originated.

The story itself is surreal, including things like an extended dream-sequence, and indeed many other events which are generally dream-like in quality. In fact, it seems to bridge different worlds in a number of ways - the worlds of waking and dreaming, of silent and talking pictures (as I've said above), of the modern, urbane world represented by its dapper young hero and the simple rural village where he finds himself, and of the German-speaking and French-speaking communities who apparently inhabit the village where it is set side by side, so that written signs appear in both languages, and the characters have names from both cultures. It leaves a lot of questions unanswered, and indeed comes across more as a series of vignettes than a coherent story as such. But that, I would say, is its charm.

Talking of charm, ms_siobhan and I couldn't help but emerge afterwards swooning and sighing over the film's tall, dark, handsome and extremely smartly be-suited male star, Nicolas de Gunzburg (credited as Julian West). Sadly, this was the only film he ever made, so we are denied the chance of further dreamy gazing at his three-piece suit and slicked-back hair, but he certainly provides value for money in his sole cinematic outing. The young lady whom he (somewhat haphazardly) saves was amazingly balletic too, both in her costume and in her movements - a quality which I also remember noticing in near-contemporary silent film Metropolis. Again according to Wikipedia, the cast mainly consisted of non-professional actors (apparently including Einstein and the First Doctor!), but given that the atmosphere of the film called for quite mannered performances anyway, this wasn't something which particularly stood out to me while watching it.

All in all, a beautifully atmospheric film, seen in circumstances which really set it off to its best effect. Very glad to be able to tick off yet another entry in the 'Vampires' chapter of my favourite horror film encyclopedia. :-)

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I saw this with ms_siobhan at the Cottage Road cinema on a brilliantly sunny Sunday afternoon (see picture), and it was fab. Obviously I normally like to review the films I've seen in exhaustive detail, but that would rather spoil this one I think. It was just ace fun - really owning the naff songs and the campy nostalgia and rolling with it, and absolutely packed with self-referential humour and word-play. A lot of the celebrity cameos were lost on me, but I appreciated the ones I did recognise - especially Emily Blunt and Sarah Silverman. And as far as I could tell the children in the cinema enjoyed it as much as me and ms_siobhan, although we were definitely laughing at quite different bits. Highly recommended - but I'm sure you know that already.

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A friend lent me this, and it lay around unwatched in my lounge for about a fortnight because it looked kind of dire from the box. What I was getting from the packaging was 'rom-com with a mild male-fantasy-style kink twist'. But now that I've actually sat down and watched it, I think it's only fair to say that it was quite a lot more character-driven and intelligent than that would suggest.

The blurb on the back of the box reads as follows:

"When Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) gets a job as a secretary in a small firm she does her best to please. But her new boss (James Spader) finds fault with her typing and administers a rather unconventional kind of punishment. Soon Lee realises that she is not only becoming the perfect secretary, but also the woman she always wanted to be."

But what that doesn't really convey is that the film isn't just 'secretary and her boss start an S&M relationship' (which would be quite dull and almost certainly misogynistic and shot through with clichés and moral hypocrisy), but that it is also ( a story of genuine character growth )

Around that strong central plot, there is a lot of ( intelligent detail and design )

But there were some things about the film I wasn't so keen on, and that includes the ( happily-ever-after ending )

On the whole, though, not bad at all. It's just a pity that it is packaged and marketed as a less interesting film than it actually is.

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I didn't write anything about this episode when it aired, as I was too close up against an article deadline to have any spare energy for blogging. But I did watch it at the time, and also rewatched it after I'd submitted the article, and enjoyed it very much. And besides, I've written about every other episode of Sherlock which has aired so far - so I may as well keep up that record by noting down a few things I particularly enjoyed about it.

Sherlock has always had incredibly strong design / mise-en-scène, but two examples of that particularly impressed me in this episode. Firstly, the rain cascading down the window-pane behind John when we see him in therapy at the very beginning, looking for all the world like a waterfall. It seemed to me almost like a declaration right from the very start that yes, that's what this story is all about, but it is going to be handled allegorically.

Secondly, the fact that in every one of the three high-security locations which Moriarty infiltrated - the Tower of London, the Bank of England and Pentonville Prison - we specifically saw cups of tea being splashed or spilt as part of the scenes of panic when people realised what was happening. What a fantastically British way to signal a terrible catastrophe.

Then there was Molly being the one to spot that Sherlock was sad when no-one was looking, and being brave enough to ask him about it, and clearly clever and trustworthy enough to play a major role in helping him to fake his own death at the end. Her scenes in this episode suddenly rounded out her character enormously, and brought out new sides to Sherlock, too, so that their interactions were incredibly affecting and touching. I could go on about this I'm sure, but I think this lady has already nailed it.

As for Sherlock's apparent death, and how he did it, there are a whole bunch of theories collected here. I'm not quite sure what I think, mainly because some crucial issues hang on what the 'rules' of Sherlock actually are. In particular, is this the sort of show in which we're supposed to believe that someone could jump off a tall building and into a garbage truck full of sacks and survive the experience? Perhaps if the sacks were maybe stuffed with something extremely good at absorbing shocks, like the squash ball Sherlock is seen bouncing against a bench in the lab? It's possible, as we have seen Sherlock pull off some pretty super-human physical feats before, particularly in fights - but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work in real life.

Also worth asking - is Moriarty actually dead? His apparent death could certainly be faked to a level that would convince most ordinary people by simply using a fake gun and a bag of fake blood. Sherlock Holmes probably wouldn't be fooled by that - but then again, given his ultimate aim of throwing Moriarty's henchmen off the scent by faking his own death, Sherlock would have no particular incentive to call Moriarty's bluff if he knew Moriarty was faking it. Maybe Sherlock knows perfectly well that Moriarty isn't dead, but goes ahead with his own fake-death plan anyway, because he knows that that is a better way of resolving the immediate situation? Given Moffat's track record on this issue, it seems to me wise to reserve judgement on Moriarty until we know for sure either way.

My only real complaint with this episode was the usual one - that when Sherlock and John are running away from the police in hand-cuffs, Sherlock instructs John to take his hand, and John has to respond with an uncomfortable joke: "People will definitely talk!" So I guess I'm still waiting for the episode of Sherlock in which that tired old trope isn't dragged out for another flogging - which is pretty depressing, six episodes in.

Other than that, though, this felt to me like pretty much the perfect Sherlock episode. I await the next series with pleasure.

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Seen this afternoon at the Hyde Park Picture House with ms_siobhan and planet_andy. I'll keep my notes on it short, as I've got a looming deadline, so can't spare much time or brain-juice for non-work writing at the moment. But I enjoyed it hugely and can highly recommend it.

Obviously we all know the crack for this film - that it's a careful pastiche of a 1920s silent movie. And so it is, and it does that beautifully, capturing all the motifs and devices of the era, all the while tipping the audience a knowing wink about what it is doing. We see a great deal of the business of film-viewing and film-making, both literally through the developments of the plot, but also more allusively through the use of paintings, photographs, screens, mirrors, windows etc. Similarly, the mannered use of the silent movie genre very obviously renders every reference to sound and / or silence heavily significant, and an enormous amount is done with this throughout the film - though I won't spoil it by saying exactly what

I wasn't 100% sure about the gender politics of the main romance plot. The older male character starts out as a hero of silent films, but then wrecks his own career by refusing to make the move into talkies, enters a downward spiral of debt and booze, and ends up in half-dead in hospital - and yet the young bright rising female star is still supposed to think he is worth rescuing from his own idiocy. Then again, though, she does get to build up a dazzlingly successful career entirely in her own right, be independently-motivated and self-assured throughout the movie and - yeah - rescue the poor little gentleman in distress at the end. So maybe it's not so bad.

I'm not surprised everyone has been raving about the little dog, but actually I liked everyone in this movie, including John Goodman, whom I normally avoid like the plague. As for the dresses, sets, finger-waves, cinema palaces etc - oh yeah, baby! Everything I was hoping for. :-)

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I meant to see this when it came out, fairly obviously given the buttons of mine which it pushes. But I was busy, and it wasn't on release for very long, so I missed the chance. I popped it on my Lovefilm list instead, and its arrival has now coincided usefully with a time when I'm busy thinking about biopics in the context of my research.

As a female biopic, it follows a quite different template from the more conventional one exemplified by the Marilyn Monroe film I saw last week, in that for most of the film there is no conflict between Hypatia's public life and intellectual achievements and her personal life. She finds complete fulfilment in her work on astronomy, her harmonious relationship with her students and father, and her role as semi-official advisor to the prefect Orestes, while the men around her grumble about this occasionally, but in general are happy to leave her to it.

Given how little we really know about Hypatia's life, this is a narrative which is by no means imposed by the sources, and a more conventionally-approached biopic could very well have focused throughout on conflicts between Hypatia and a series of men who want to force her into a more traditional feminine role. I'm very glad that this one didn't - instead, if anything it probably rather over-emphasised the freedom from criticism which even a woman like Hypatia could realistically have enjoyed in the ancient world, and the extent of her scientific achievements. The victimhood which Bingham identifies as characteristic of female biopic stories obviously does intrude, shockingly and suddenly, at the end - as it has to, given that this (sadly) is the main 'hook' that has made Hypatia's story of enough interest to be transmitted to us in the first place. But even then, Amenábar does what he can to spare her suffering, by introducing the (unattested) scene in which Davus suffocates Hypatia in order to save her the pain of being stoned to death.

The film actually reweaves the historical record quite significantly, with the details of how it does so neatly summarised on Wikipedia for anyone who's interested. Most of that I'm perfectly happy about, as Hypatia's own life is not very well-documented, and the shifts of time or geography that are made generally help to build a more compelling story - e.g. linking the library and its destruction with the destruction of the Serapeum. But where I felt it fell down rather for me was in conveying a clear sense of what it was that motivated any of the violent mobs - whether Christian, pagan or Jewish - to behave as they did.

We see Davus, for example, not only converting from paganism to Christianity, but then also joining in with mob violence and eventually becoming an ascetic monk who spends his days brutally rooting out immorality across the city. But I saw too little on the screen to help me understand why he might do this - neither the unrequited nature of his love for Hypatia, nor the characteristics of the Christian religion seemed to be presented as sufficiently traumatic or attractive forces to have this effect. Nor, on the other side, did I feel I'd gathered any real sense of what motivated the pagans to go out and attack the Christians who were insulting their statues. A few words were spoken about not being able to let the insult go unavenged, but to me they felt empty when I hadn't seen any real evidence of their emotional engagement with their religion any more than I had for the Christians. Possibly the point was meant to be that it was empty and futile on both sides - but I couldn't escape the feeling that the conflicts were happening because the historical context demanded it, rather than because the characters were really driven to engage in them.

Never mind. Meanwhile, the sets, the costumes, the make-up, the props and the CGI views of the city were superb. And I loved the way that the shots of Alexandria from far up in the atmosphere, or even of the Earth from out in space, a) fitted the astronomical theme of the film, b) evoked the smallness of human lives and endeavours and c) created a sense of distance from the narrative, gently reminding us that it was taking place in a world far-removed from our own. Joanna Paul, in a paper which she presented at the Cinema and Antiquity conference last June, spoke brilliantly about the scenes showing the destruction of the library, and how they dramatise the random process of textual loss and survival, and literally show the whole world being turned upside-down - and she is absolutely right about how powerful and clever those scenes are. And more generally, how can I fail to like a film which celebrates the achievements of classical antiquity, mourns their loss to ignorance and brutality, reminds us how delicate the balance between the two always is, and revolves around a powerfully self-assured and self-directed intellectual woman? *crushes madly on Hypatia*

It's all the more of a pity in that case that some aspects of the film don't entirely make emotional sense. Some deleted scenes on the DVD help to flesh things out a little - in particular giving us some extra scenes of life amongst the elders of the Serapeum, and amongst the ascetic monks, which allow slightly more insight into their mind-sets. But even they don't quite seem to go far enough, and ultimately perhaps the story the film is trying to tell is too rich and complex to do justice to in only two hours.

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I think the second episode of this season's Sherlock fell for me into the category of 'perfectly decent, but not outstanding' TV. Above all, its characters were not seeking to deceive one another on the same scale as had made last week's episode so thrillingly alive with alternative possibilities for me. Oh, sure, there was misdirection early on to the effect that Frankland was a friendly and reliable fellow while Stapleton was an eeeviiiilll mad scientist, but there was nothing on the scale of battle of wits between Sherlock, Adler, Mycroft and Moriarty from the previous story, and the motivations of the regular characters were never really in doubt.

Partly, of course, that's just the nature of the original Arthur Conan Doyle story, and there's also a fair case for saying that the middle episode of the series needs to rein in the pace a little between the sha-bang of the opening episode and what is clearly going to be an epic confrontation next week. But even with that understood, I felt I could have asked for a little more from it. What The Hound of the Baskervilles can offer is a creepy atmosphere of growing tension, and I felt that was missed, too.

Perhaps I wrecked the suspense for myself by reading the lovely thanatos_kalos's write-up of the preview screening shown in Cardiff on Tuesday, so that I knew before the story began that the fearful visions which the characters would experience were the result of hallucinogenic drugs. But I certainly felt that with Sherlock in particular, his attack of the terrors came on too quickly and too intensively for us to stand any real chance of believing that he was seriously facing up to a new and unsettling emotional experience. This would have been far more effective for me if we had seen him experience a few smaller moments of self-doubt earlier on (whether brought about by real experiences or by lower doses of the drug), so that we could believe the full-scale attack was an escalation of genuine fear, rather than obviously something anomalous. It could have been a really amazing moment in the ongoing development of his screen character to believe that he was really experiencing the break-down of his treasured logic and self-assuredness - but it didn't happen for me.

Still, it was great to have Russell Tovey on board, especially in the scene where his outside light kept getting set off, reducing him to a ball of sobbing terror. That really did look like a man who had been slowly and systematically pushed beyond the limits of endurance. And Sherlock's relationship with Watson developed a little bit when he described him as a 'friend' for the first time. Plus I liked the way the flashing light on the moor was at first misdirection (Morse code), then a joke (a different kind of dogging), then a plot device to ensure Watson wasn't exposed to the hallucinogens the first time around and finally the prod needed to help Sherlock figure out that 'hound' might be an acronym. That is definitely getting good value out of a single device.

Problematic portrayals were less of an issue than last week - but of course that's partly by dint of keeping women in the role of secondary assistant characters and not having any ethnic minorities (that I could spot) at all. And meanwhile, there, yet again, is that ridiculous running 'joke' about how everyone keeps mis-reading Watson and Sherlock as a gay couple. I liked this in the first ever episode, because any acknowledgement of queer sexuality on mainstream TV is cheering, and found the prospect of a heterosexual and heteronormative Watson being prompted to rethink his own attitudes by finding himself labelled as gay appealing. But that really isn't how it has turned out. Instead it is just the same childish gag about what a trial it is for a straight person to be continuously mislabelled as gay, like a broken record week after week, and it is REALLY annoying me now. Partly because it is offensive, but also because it is taking up screen time which could be used for more nuanced character development, or more intricate plotting, or - well - anything really.

So now I feel like one of those people who makes others wonder why they even watch a show if all they can do is criticise it. To which I can only give the classic reply to that accusation, which is that there is so much about Sherlock which I do like that it makes the flaws doubly annoying - and meanwhile I have written enough about it previously to feel that I can take its strengths as read now, and don't need to repeat them. In case it needs re-stating, though, I do think that Sherlock and Watson as characters are brilliantly drawn, that the plotting of the adventures they share together is (nearly) fantastic, that the scripts are witty and lively and clever, and that the visual design is absolutely outstanding. I bloody love this series, and can't wait until next week's grand finale. But I still think it could be better.

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I saw this, my first film of 2012, today with ms_siobhan and planet_andy at the Hyde Park Picture House, and we all really enjoyed it.

I'm by no means an expert on Marilyn Monroe, so can't judge how accurate this portrayal of either the week in question or her character more generally was, but I am particularly interested in biopics at the moment because of an article which I am writing about screen portrayals of the emperor Augustus, so I watched it partly from that angle. I've been reading a rather good book by Dennis Bingham on the biopic as a genre, which emphasises how very much the biopic intersects and overlaps with other genres, and also argues that the lives of men and women are treated so differently in biopics that they virtually need to be understood as different genres themselves. Bingham suggests that biopics of women frequently view their lives in terms of suffering or victimhood, and particularly portray them as struggling (usually unsuccessfully) to negotiate an irresolvable tension between their public role and their personal life. All of this is easily identifiable in My Week with Marilyn - hardly surprisingly since it is central to her life-story anyway, at least in the mythologised version which most of us know.

The decision to focus on a short snapshot of her life was more interesting and innovative. Obviously, from the point of view of Colin Clark this was determined by the circumstances of his encounter with her, but the success of his memoirs and the decision to make it into a film say a lot about how effective this format can be for a biopic. It dispenses with the expectation of a comprehensive coverage, allowing the story to allude to earlier events and point the way to future ones as much or as little as suits it, while concentrating instead on drawing a rich and vivid character. I felt this worked very well here, especially combined with the use of Colin Clark as a point-of-view character who begins with a highly idealised view of Marilyn, and gradually moves to a much more real and intimate knowledge of her.

The cast was a veritable feast of British character-actors, many familiar from the small screen (My Family, Downton Abbey, Poirot), and they all deliver - but perhaps especially Kenneth Branagh as a wonderfully irritable Laurence Olivier. The script is sharp, and does a good job of exploring relevant issues such as the objectificaton of women, the effects of ageing, and the tension between the British theatrical acting tradition and the Hollywood screen equivalent. Colin Clark is very obviously a privileged posh-boy who gets where he does thanks to family money and connections, despite his protestations to the contrary, but that's not glossed over, and nor does he get away entirely without being criticised for it.

If you like biopics, Marilyn Monroe, portraits of the film production business, pretty scenery or British character actors, this one's for you.

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So Sherlock is back - complete with the problems that surrounded its treatment of minority groups in the first season. Within a couple of hours of the first story airing, Stavvers argued that the treatment of Irene Adler had seen what looked like a genuinely strong and self-directed female character reduced to tropish helplessness when we learnt that Moriarty had been advising her on her criminal activities, saw her security code compromised by her foolish willingness to be influenced by her romantic attraction to Sherlock, and then saw Sherlock rescue her from execution. Jane Clare Jones followed up in the Guardian saying much the same.

While I absolutely agree that problematic portrayals of female characters are, well, problematic, and fully recognise that Moffat is particularly prone to perpetrating them, the problems with this particular character didn't strike me as forcefully as they obviously did some viewers. I think this was because Sherlock as a programme makes so much use of misdirection, and reveals the 'true' solutions to its mysteries only fairly sparingly and sketchily. By comparison with, say, Moffat's recent Doctor Who Christmas special, this leaves an awful lot of room for us as viewers to generate our own alternate readings - indeed, it actively encourages us to do so.

Take, for example, the issue of how Irene Adler really feels about Sherlock. Our understanding of this is reversed multiple times during this story. For a long time, we're encouraged to believe that she is falling in love with him - all those comments about how 'brainy is the new sexy', the flirty texts, the conversation in Battersea Power Station where she suggests to Watson that both of them are strongly attracted to Sherlock in spite of their usual sexuality, the intimate scene between them in his flat. But on Mycroft's flight of the dead and in his office afterwards this apparent scenario is reversed, when she claims that she was playing Sherlock for a fool all along, entrapping him into decoding the Ministry of Defence official's email for her by merely making him believe she was in love with him. And moments later, the switch is flipped once more when Sherlock states that by taking her pulse and observing her dilated pupils in his flat he was able to detect the real truth - that her act had become a reality, and she had genuinely fallen for him after all.

I've no doubt that that is basically where Moffat signs off. This is his intended portrayal of the characters' motivations, and we are then meant to understand that Adler is undone by the weak, feminine sentimentality which drove her (already some six months earlier) to use a pun on Sherlock's name as the PIN code for her phone. That is problematic. But by the time this scenario was presented to me, I found I had got into a state whereby I was automatically reading everything I saw as potentially untrue. Sherlock was telling me assuredly that Adler had been attracted to him. But was even he right about that? Or, indeed, was that what he really thought, as opposed to (say) a bluff intended for Mycroft? And meanwhile, so much else in the episode remains ambiguous or incompletely explained. For example, did Sherlock ever really think that Irene Adler was actually dead the first time? After all, he'd had every opportunity to study her naked body in great detail. Would he really have been fooled by the substitution of a body which merely had the same measurements, when (for example) the shape and size of a woman's nipples, belly-button and indeed other parts are so very distinctive? Or was he complicit in helping her to fake her death that first time, too?

In that frame of mind, and with so much room for manoeuvre, almost everything about the story becomes extremely fluid. To continue with the example I've used above, it isn't hard to flip the switch on the does she / doesn't she fancy him question yet again. I've already suggested above that Sherlock himself may be lying about what Irene's pulse and pupils revealed to him - perhaps as part of a wider collaboration between the two of them of the sort which Roz Kaveney sketches out in the comments on Stavvers' blog. But even if he's not, she could have faked those symptoms. A little bit of ecstasy taken at the right moment would probably do the trick, for example - and she is clearly a woman who knows how to obtain and use illicit drugs effectively.

From that point onwards, you can go on to build all sorts of variant interpretations of the closing scenes. Did Irene, for example, a) make Sherlock believe she was in love with him so that he would finally figure out the code to her phone, as well as b) carefully manipulating him into falling in love with her in spite of himself so that he could then be relied upon to protect her from the consequences of that by helping her to fake her own death a second time? Because that could actually work out quite well for her by creating a clean break if she had begun to feel her embroilments with people like Moriarty had got rather too deep and she wanted a way out of it all - and she would have maintained total control of her own destiny throughout that scenario.

I am not saying that the above is the 'correct' reading of this episode, or even that it's the one I most subscribe to myself. My point is simply that this series fosters variant readings of itself to such as extent that even when the script-writers' intentions are problematic, I find the impact of that on me as a viewer is considerably watered down by the pervading sense that many different readings of what I am seeing are all true at once, and that I can never be 100% sure of any of the characters' aims and motivations. This, of course, is part of what make the show so irresistible, whatever the final verdict on Irene Adler.

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Well, here's wishing you a very happy New Year, oh denizens of livejournal! May it be one of good health, happiness, fulfilment and success for all of you.

I spent the last hours of 2011 chez moi, having a splendid time in the company of the lovely ms_siobhan, planet_andy, a roaring fire, some silly games and a great deal of champagne and canapés. At the start of the evening we played a QI board game which I'd got for Christmas, and all agreed that the best thing about the game by far was the red plunger-button that came with it, and which made the sound of the dumb-obvious-answer QI klaxon when you pressed it.

By the time we'd finished that, we were ready to move on to this year's death and scandal lists. We did quite poorly last year - on the scandal front, George Osborne did have to look a bit contrite about his cocaine-snorting habits, but still seems to be resolutely in-post. On the death front, Jimmy Savile (whose name I see I spelt incorrectly last year) is of course no longer with us, but that seems to be about it. So our approach this year was to take a scatter-gun approach to the death list in particular, basically just shoving anyone who is getting on a bit on there, along with a scattering of wild-card younger types. We typed it up directly this time, rather than scrawling it on bits of paper, so here it is exactly as we produced it last night, complete with our wild veerings backwards and forwards between celebrity entertainers and foreign dignitaries:

( Death list )

On the scandal front we have been more restrained, and also much more specific. We reckon the rule is that we can cash in if any scandal affects the people listed, but that we get bonus points if it happens as we have envisaged:

( Scandal list )

By the time we'd done all that it was pretty much midnight, so we got out the Piper-Heidsieck champagne, watched the count-down with Big Ben on the telly, and toasted in the New Year to a stereo display of London fireworks on the telly and local ones outside the window. After that, we turned our attention to sillier games - principally ms_siobhan's Spongebob Squarepants clam-catching game, which is chuffing brilliant, especially after a few glasses of bubbly, and prompted much laughing, shrieking, dastardly cheating, and exclamations along the lines of "I've put it in a different hole!" (as, of course, the Bishop said to the actress). Here are ms_siobhan and planet_andy locked in a deadly clam-catching duel:



Then it was on to Jenga-with-the-giggles, playing with a remote-controlled Dalek whose failing batteries made him seem comically elderly, and plotting possible epic journeys to Northumberland. All in all a great start to the year, and I hope it continues as merrily as it began. :-)

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On the way back from the 2010 Fantastic Film Weekend, fresh from having seen The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, I remarked to ms_siobhan and planet_andy that in recent decades people had managed to make vampires, werewolves, ghosts and witches sexy, but I couldn't see how it could very well be done for zombies - what with all the rotting flesh, brainless lumbering and so forth. "Aha!" said ms_siobhan. "Actually I've got this book at home where somebody has done exactly that. It's a high-school zombie romance - would you like to borrow it?" So I did.

It's still a slight exaggeration to say that this book makes zombies sexy as such. But it does manage to make them sympathetic and teen-romantic. The basic set-up is that some recently-deceased teenagers (and only teenagers) have started coming back to life for no reason that anyone is very clear about. It happens pretty much straight after death, so there are no half-rotten corpses clambering out of graves. Rather, the people come back - but they aren't the same. They are pale, and slow of movement and thought, but surprisingly strong and resilient to injury. Some of them are rejected by their horrified families, but others are accepted and put back into high-school. And the book deals with everyone's responses to this - embarrassed friends, concerned adults, bullying jocks, and fascinated strangers.

Mainly, the returned teenagers are treated as a metaphor for any outsider or minority group of the reader's choice. Polite terminology has been developed to describe their condition - 'living impaired' or 'different biotic, rather than 'undead' or 'zombies', although some of them choose to adopt and reclaim that term. A research institute called the Hunter Foundation has been set up to try to find out what is going on, and particularly why it is that some of the returned teenagers have almost the same capabilities as their living peers, while others do not. And those who have been rejected by their families have set up their own hide-out in an abandoned house, where they hold all-night parties and develop their own subculture.

Meanwhile, the main plot focuses on a living goth girl called Phoebe, who knows what it is like to be treated as an outsider herself, and becomes fascinated with a living-impaired football player called Tommy. Tommy keeps a blog (available as a real-life spin-off) in which he chronicles the life of an undead person, and the violence and murders being perpetrated against them - yet never reported in the news. But as their friendship grows, and touches on becoming a romance, this culture of violence draws closer and closer in on them, until it has terrible consequences for one of Phoebe's oldest friends.

It's a sweet story, and I certainly enjoyed it - though more simply as a high-school story with a supernatural slant than as anything hugely challenging or ground-breaking. But there are aspects of it which feel unsatisfying, and particularly the sub-plot with the Hunter Foundation. All sorts of hints are dropped that this may be more sinister than it appears, as living impaired kids disappear off for 'testing' and are never seen again, but this is never resolved, and seems simply to be dropped in the last few chapters of the book. Then again, there are apparently two sequels, so maybe the story of the Hunter Foundation is picked up and continued there?

Anyway, it won't change your life, or indeed probably make you squirm with pleasure over the delightful possibilities of the English language. But if you're up for a high-school zombie romance, then this is exactly the book for you.

(See, told you I had this one ready-written. And that is 2010 done - woo-hoo and yay and hoorah!)

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