Film Focus: Dave McKean

Another old Film Focus thing, this time an interview with director Dave McKean to go with my review of Mirrormask.

Was thrilled to speak to McKean over the phone, having long been an awed fanboy. I even got on to my Art A-level course (having not done the GCSE) by showing the tutors a sketchbook mostly comprising cut-and-pasted bits of Signal to Noise from my sisters copies of The Face. Excitingly, I've since met and been on a panel with McKean at a convention. He signed a copy of Mr Punch for the Dr (I chose that one 'cos it's about a wife beater.) Anyhoo...

Dave McKean interview
Conducted 27 February 2006

As I understand it from Neil Gaiman’s blog, Henson’s found that they had two million quid stuffed down the back of the sofa and wondered if you could make a film with it. Is that roughly how Mirrormask came about?

It’s almost that, yes. That’s the funny version. The slightly less funny version is that somebody at Columbia/TriStar – who released Labyrinth and the Dark Crystal – just noticed that those films, over the years, had done very well. Actually, when they were released they did not do so well because they were expensive. But over the years they have been around all the time, and people still like them and watch them.

Is that on video and DVD?

Yes, and they’re still showing at science-fiction festivals and fantasy festivals. They are just constants, and new generations of people keep finding them and enjoying them. So they offered Henson’s the chance to make another one, but they only had the aforementioned two million quid down the back of the sofa. So yes, that’s how it came about.

How much was it to be a conscious continuation of Dark Crystal and Labyrinth?

I think those sorts of conversation carried on before Neil and I were involved. I think the very first possibility-type conversations between Lisa Henson and the folks at Columbia/TriStar were, ‘Well, maybe it could be a sequel to Labyrinth or something like that…’ Those conversations had gone by the time we came aboard. At that point it was just a fantasy film, non-specific but for a family audience. So not a blood-and-gutsy adult film. Other than that, anything we liked.

So that gave you a lot of freedom then?

Yes.

I know you principally as an illustrator, I think as most people will. You used to illustrate for things like The Face, back in the eighties…

Yeah, we did a story called Signal to Noise, which I’m hoping to make as a film next.

I’ve read interviews with people like Terry Gilliam talking about the difference between being an illustrator and making moving images. How much more difficult is it to get the same effect from a moving image?

Um… it’s actually not difficult, I’ve found.

So you don’t feel you’re compromising your vision at all?

It depends. I’ve made some short films, and am continuing to make short films here, literally on my own. In that respect, there’s no compromise at all. When you get to the level of a film like Mirrormask, there are compromises but they tend to be creative ones, meaning that the budget is fixed and that becomes your wall, the box that you’re in. Actually, that’s really liberating in a way, because it forces you to be resourceful. You can’t just continually throw money at problems, you have to use your brains a little bit.

When it gets up to Terry’s $80 million mark, you’re really dealing with a ton of money. You’re dealing with people who are very nervous and twitchy about spending all that money. That’s where it starts to get much more compromised and difficult. Obviously the possibilities are huge because you’ve got all this money to throw at the show, but you’ve also got people looking over your shoulder constantly, people who may not be sympathetic to your whim at that particular moment. Whereas on Mirrormask we could almost make it up as we went along. Obviously we didn’t, but we had a very free and easy, improvisational, ‘let’s make the most of this’ attitude to the making of it.

Is the final version of the film then as you envisaged it from the beginning?

It is, but obviously in the making of it all kinds of things happen that are not necessarily in your control. Actors do things that you weren’t expecting – good and not so good. Things work, things don’t work, actually what we set out to do in the first place maybe wasn’t any good, and then you have to rethink that. All of those sorts of creative things have compromise, but it’s free of people changing it just for changing it’s sake, or in real opposition to what we wanted to do. There’s none of that in it. Its problems are our problems, and down to our inexperience or things not working so well, those sorts of things. But basically, it’s the film we set out to make.

You say about actors. The film is grounded in reality, quite different from the hippy, slightly pantomime feel of Labyrinth. How do you get the actors to understand where you want to go with this, and the tone of it?

A lot of it is just the nature of the script. We wanted, at every turn, to try and keep the actors very naturalistic. Even though you’ve got Gina McKee dressed up in a huge wig, with black eyes and her gold skin, and in this ridiculous throne and everything, we had her dialogue be basically that of a worried mum. That was very important, to always ground it in reality.

So there’s that, and then the whole thing was story-boarded, so I could explain where we were – where they were walking through, what they were talking to. But I think very quickly they realised that it was only going to work if you connected to the human elements. Even though they were surrounded by these ridiculous things, if you don’t connect with Helena – Stephanie – and her worries and feelings about her mum, and where she is in her life at this particular point, then no about of pretty picture-making is going to be worth sitting through for an hour and a half.

It just gives it a point, as far as I’m concerned. I love looking at these baroque fantasy films. They’re enjoyable, but if I’ve got to spend two years making one, I want to know that at the end of the day it is actually about things that are important to me. Just on a basic level, my daughter is now twelve, and I know I’ve got these sort of feelings, battles and whatever coming up with her. Just on a personal level, at that point it really means something to me.

As well as the monsters, a lot of the sense of threat is from Helena just growing up – throwing away her old drawings, snogging the wrong sorts of boys and wearing punky clothes. Is that a reflection of you as a parent?

I think so. It’s probably more, at this point, a reflection of Neil’s experience. He has two grown-up children now, and they’re both great. They’ve grown up wonderfully, but I know that he went through all of these anxieties. And at that age, just because hormones are raging and you’re very confused in life – you’re not a kid any more but you’re not an adult yet – you’re really at a crossroads. You can go either way in about two minutes. One minute you’re wonderful, caring, helping with the cooking and doing all these things, and then something happens, you turn on a dime and become a horrible, spiteful and selfish brat. And you barely have control over it. That’s the state of mind.

So to deal with somebody at that age is interesting in itself, and then you give them a little life-push. Her mother getting ill, the circus off the road and everything falling around her ears: then we’re into some sort of drama that means something.

Did you have a particular audience in mind?

Families. Pretty much anybody. We didn’t have the children in mind – we didn’t want to make what you could call a kids’ film. I’ve sat through enough of those, getting nothing out of them at all and being talked down to because they’re just for five-year-olds. I didn’t want to do that.

I didn’t expect everyone to like it. Far from it, I think it’s always going to have a pretty small audience. But that small audience would, I think, be made up of people of any age, including kids and older people.

Do you have to think differently about illustrating for kids? Is there a difference between drawing for Varjak Paw and for Sandman?

I think it’s fairly obvious. It’s pointless putting in references to some obscure film or piece of literature on a kids’ drawing because you’re just being pretentious. And obviously I wouldn’t put tons of violence or nudity in a kids’ book because it’s just not appropriate. Other than that, I don’t really draw much of a distinction. I don’t like second guessing what kids will like, as much as I don’t like second guessing what adults will like. Doing signings, talks and Q and As for the children’s books, adult books and for this film, it only seems to confirm that. I have no idea who is going to show up. It seems to be any age, any sex, and social group. The statistics don’t mean anything.

I don’t like second guessing all that stuff, I’m just doing what I’m doing. If I hit a run of a few years where people are telling me I’m doing absolutely appalling work that nobody’s buying, maybe that’s the point when I rethink what I’m doing. For the moment we seem to be doing okay. I’m happy just to send these things out there, and whoever likes them likes them. I don’t expect everybody to like them, but maybe a few people will.

Are the responses you get to things surprising? Do people read in things you never knew were there?

Sure. That’s kind of part of it, really. It becomes a conversation. You think you’ve thought about it from every conceivable angle, but there’ll always be something, some connection made, that you have no control over at all. It goes out into the world and it has its own life. That’s the point. Doing the work is only 50 percent. The other half is the connection with the audience.

Where do you go next? You’ve designed a musical for Elton John…

Yes… That wasn’t quite where I planned to go next. But it came up and I’d never done anything like that before so it seemed like a fun thing to try and tackle, and a world I knew nothing about. I love to learn new things, so those were the reasons for doing that. At the time it involved making some film clips to project on the set, and that was fun to do. I was doing that last year, so again that feels like old news now.

Is that physical prop design?

Yes, it was designing all the sets, and then the physical pieces were adapted from the drawings that I did and made by a physical-set designer in New York.

The projections were of my artworks and photographs. The films changed drastically. It’s a very troubled project, actually. It will open on Broadway in late March, but it’s gone through a lot of changes and a lot of different people coming in, so it was a very confused and a difficult way of working.

That’s a project with compromise, is it?

That’s a deeply compromised project. To be honest, it had to be. It was in such a state in San Francisco where we did previews, it really needed somebody else to come in and try and give it some shape and order. But I guess you live and learn. In the meantime I’ve just been writing other films. I’d like to make another film so my plan is to try and get four or five projects up and running so that they’ll hit in the years down the line. It takes so long to set up.

As well as taking a long time to set up, Mirrormask has been waiting for release for months and months.

It’s taken longer to release it than it did to make it, which is really ridiculous. Unfortunately, that’s just a reflection of the fact that Sony really didn’t know what to do with it. It just confused them a little bit. I think they had in mind that it would just be a little, straight-to-DVD nothing, and then it got accepted into Sundance and they had to rethink that. Then we weren’t really with one department. We started with Columbia/TriStar, then that label collapsed or was absorbed and we were put somewhere else. We were up to the theatrical release department, and kept on being bounced around. It just meant that everything’s happened one after another after another, end to end, rather than all of these things happening concurrently. Usually on a film the DVD release is worked out and planned before the film even starts shooting. But all of our little blocks of time in the release of it have been laid end to end. That’s why it’s taken such a ridiculously long time.

So when did you finish the film?

We finished the film in November 2004. Is that right? It’s all a blur now. Yes, that’s right. We finished November 2004, we did Sundance 2005 in January, and then the whole of last year was trying to tease out some sort of campaign or release plan from Sony. So only now is it being released. Strange. Time flies.

And doing interviews now, it feels like old news?

It feels like such old news, I can’t believe it. I feel like I’ve been talking about this film my whole life.

Do you know how long it’s likely to be in cinemas?

It’s getting a limited release through Tartan. To be honest, no I don’t. It depends to a degree how it does. There are some places that have booked it for three weeks, but I don’t know. All of this seems to be a matter of wait and see, play it by ear.

And is the DVD release fixed on how long it’s in cinemas?

It will be influenced by that, but to be honest I think it will be out pretty quickly. The DVD is already out in America, and they’re keen to make sure that people buy the English version. I would much rather people bought the English version.

Is that because it has different things on it?

No. For other reasons that I’m being rather cryptic about, that I can’t really tell you, I’d rather people buy the English version.

Vulgar reasons like money?

No, nothing to do with money.

You talked about setting up films for the future. Will those be of a similar fantasy bent, and working with Neil again?

All of the films I’ve got planned certainly have a strong visual component to them and a surrealistic bent or fantasy element. But some are just human, adult dramas which have strange sequences in them. One or two of them are complete fantasy pieces. Some with Neil, some not. I’m interested just to write something on my own right now, just to see how it goes. The next film I’d like to make is based on a book, Signal To Noise, that Neil and I did together, but I’ve ended up writing the script.

To be honest, the book was always a favourite of mine even though it didn’t work. I always felt that we could do much better. I think the script for the film is much better, it’s a much bigger, wider story and you really understand what’s going through the character’s mind.

According to Neil, when I saw him speaking in London late last year, you and he had “discussions” about how to write Mirrormask from the off. You had cards to lay out the plot, and he wanted to just crack on and write it.

We have very different ways of writing. We found out on Mirrormask – I don’t think we ever realised that before.

So how much did working on the film change your relationship? I have this idea that usually an illustrator starts where a writer finishes.

For the books that we’ve done, that really is the relationship. Neil writes a script. Depending on the book, we talk about it beforehand, and then talk about it again afterwards. But basically Neil’s free – absolutely correctly – to just write what he wants to write. Then I come in and try to see how best to make it work visually. The trouble with the film was that Neil is used to just writing anything, and we couldn’t afford to do just anything. We couldn’t afford to do armies of orcs, the sky full of battleships and things. We just couldn’t do it. So I felt I just needed to be in the room.

I didn’t want to write it particularly, but I just wanted to be around when we were planning it to make sure that what he was writing I understood. It’s very important for me to understand it completely because I’m going to be asked 300 questions every day by different people in the cast and crew, and I’ve got to be able to know the answers, or at least have an opinion. I needed to make sure it was technically feasible, and it was not always obvious what was expensive and what was cheap. That’s why I ended up in the room.

Then, just because I was there, inevitably you start kicking ideas around, so some of the story ideas ended up being mine, and some of the scenes I ended up writing because it was just easier for me to write them because I had a good sense of them.

So does that change the “power relationship” between you?

I think it does, really. The books are much simpler and we have a strict demarcation. The words are Neil’s and the pictures are mine, and I think that’s pretty evenly balanced. Unfortunately it’s the nature of film that it comes down to the guy on the floor talking to the actors at the time, and that’s the director.

I think if you listened to Terry Gilliam talking about Tom Stoppard on Brazil, when they would have arguments about this, that and the other, Terry Gilliam would say, ‘Yeah, I appreciate all that. But at the end of the day I’m the one who’s going to be directing it, so I’m just not going to do it. I don’t understand it, and I need to direct something that I understand.’ Unfortunately, that is the nature of it. I think that is the big difference, and often the big frustration, of writing film scripts.

They are not finished objects, they are blueprints. You’ve got to understand that – Neil does understand that, because he’s written enough of them now. They are just sketches. You may fall in love with the words or this or that, but if an actor can’t say it, or if when he does it sounds completely wrong, or for whatever reason, it goes. And it goes there and then, it’s brutal. When you’re shooting a film, you’ve got a certain amount of time to do each scene. You’ve just got to make those decisions. Unfortunately it’s down to the director to do that.

Was it a quick shoot? Was it hurried?

It was hurried. It was 30 days, so six weeks: two on location and four weeks in a blue-screen studio. It’s funny, some scenes felt like we had time to really make the most of, to look around the locations and find interesting shots and angles and ways of doing it, to play with actors a little bit. But some of it felt awfully rushed, and that’s no fun at all because you end up just throwing anything at the wall, hoping to pick it up in the edit later on. Inevitably you get yourself into problems. So it would be nice to have just a little bit more money and therefore more time, next time to be able to relax and really think properly about everything.

Were the actors playing animated characters – like Lenny Henry and Andy Hamilton – on set with the actors, or recorded later?

No, they were all done later. On the set, it was just me doing an impersonation of a monkeybird, a mask on a stick for the Gryphon, or things like that, with somebody off-camera reading the lines. It was very difficult to bring all these elements together in the actor’s mind. They struggled, but I think Stephanie Leonidas got it immediately. It took her about a day to be able to just stand in the big blue room and imagine this street and the mist, surrounded by cats. She could just do it. It’s a bit of a knack, I think.

Was she cast through an audition process? Did you have people in mind when you were writing it?

I had Gina McKee in mind, but she was the only one.

Is that true of the voices for the animated characters as well?

That’s pretty true of the voices. Maybe we had Stephen Fry in mind – an incredible, wish-list hope that he might do it. But no, I don’t think any of the others we had in mind while we were writing it. Obviously they came to mind pretty quickly once we were into shooting it.

With Stephanie, my producer, Simon, just saw her in a TV film. We were gearing up to do this huge sort of trawl of theatre schools and God knows what to try and find a girl who could do this, and he just taped this film called Daddy’s Girl which she was in, and she was fantastic. So we did one day where our casting director brought in girls, and there were a couple of really good ones. So I thought we were in good shape. And then Stephanie came in at the end of the day, and just blew them all away. She was in a league of her own.

Excellent, well that’s our time up, I think. Dave McKean, thanks very much.

My pleasure. Is that really half an hour?

Film Focus: Mirrormask

More of my old reviews from Film Focus. This one got me mentioned on Neil Gaiman's blog - with a corresponding explosion of hits to this one. I'll put up my interview with director Dave McKean tomorrow.

Mirrormask
Reviewed 25 February 2006

[In brief]
Helena craves a normal, everyday life like all the other kids have. But her parents run a circus and when she’s not performing with them her only escape is her drawing. When her mum becomes seriously ill, Helena finds herself venturing even further into her strange, troubled pictures…

[In full]
A beautifully eerie and twisted vision to enthral children and terrify their parents.

While Mirrormask looks extraordinary, the story and plot both seem familiar. Following in the tradition of the Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, a not-quite-an-adult explores a strange and illogical fantasy world, encountering very odd people on the way.

Even those who aren’t actually evil are unwittingly dangerous, like adult-sized children capable of great harm. As in Labyrinth, it’s our heroine’s burgeoning maturity that sees her through – choosing her friends carefully and not snogging the wrong boys.

There are also recognisable elements from writer Neil Gaiman’s other work: the twisted mirror-world from his novella Coraline; the protagonist’s fear of embarrassment by their parents from his new novel Anansi Boys, as well as spying spiders and flocks of evil birds. The vast and strange library with its impossible books is right out of his best-selling comic-book, Sandman.

But Mirrormask is implicitly about the familiar reflected in a new and strange way. Even the real Brighton seems unreal through Helena’s eyes – the view of the beach from her home bleakly gothic, and Auntie Nan no less peculiar than the old woman with the sphinxes and cake.

Every strange and sumptuous frame is a work of art – those who’ve loved Dave McKean’s covers for Sandman and Varjak Paw cannot miss this. Mirrormask definitely rewards a second viewing just to pick up on missed details. This is a real achievement for a film made so – relatively – cheaply.

The CGI is awesome, full of brilliant creatures and textures till the end. There are occasions when the real cast don’t quite seem to be there – floating rather than touching the floor, or not seeing the wild things right in front of them. This is a minor quibble, though, and in some ways adds to the strangely dreamy effect.

All kinds of warped influences make up Helena’s world. We hear a twisted version of Bacharach and David’s “Close to you”, and see Helena and her new friend Valentine chase through a street like a Jean Miro painting. In another nice twist on the familiar, bulky Henry Moore-like sculptures float as weightless as clouds.

What becomes increasingly clear though, is that it’s Helena’s own world that’s being warped: the Prime Minister looks like her father, and is just as ineffectual in stopping the decay, while Helena’s torn feelings for her very sick mother produce two doppelganger queens, one perfect and one utterly terrifying.

This strange and inventive world is under threat from the Queen of Shadows, who vomits all kinds of monsters to help scour the land for her errant daughter. As well as the freaky spiders and monkeybirds already mentioned, there are thick, nightmarish roots to entangle even the strongest-seeming characters. However fast Helena runs, destruction and death remain close behind.

The film is full of darkness, with the intangible dread of a nightmare. Though there are some fun gags about such things as herrings, there’s little that’s nice in this world. Reality is seen to be just as random and brutal, too, with sudden sickness and fights about money.

The realism of the performances grounds the story in bleakness, and the put-upon Muppet-esque hedgehog, Small Hairy, adds to the general sense of misery rather than distracts from it. As a result, the film lacks the hippy charm of the Dark Crystal or Labyrinth, and so might not be as accessible to audiences. It’d certainly freak out younger kids.

I suspect that it’s a film more about adults than children anyway. Helena’s horror at seeing a twisted version of herself wearing make-up, snogging boys and throwing away her old, childish drawings, seems more the concern of her parents, struggling to accommodate a child wanting to break away from them. The evil, anti-Helena only wants to get away from an overly controlling mother.

At the beginning of the film, Helena longs to escape the circus and is told that she can’t spoil her father’s dream. Helena’s drawings and her adventures inside them don’t speak of a want of normalcy, but of a need for a dream of her own.

In seeing her own world differently through the distortions of the mirror world, Helena’s able to find her own space. And, of course, the right sort of boy…

Film Focus: Kidulthood

Another old Film Focus review. I worked with Noel Clarke just before Christmas, so it's probably just as well I said nice things.

Kidulthood
Reviewed 22 February 2006

[In brief]
Six messed up, West London teenagers, coping with the shitty hand life has dealt them. There’s vicious bullying at school, and little but petty crime, sex and drugs waiting outside. They’ll be lucky if they make it…

[In full]
A brilliantly played and bold film, mixing pace and sharp wit with horrific social commentary, Kidulthood will be a highlight of the year.

There’d been some worry in the press about a film claimed to celebrate happy-slapping. Nor did a ‘City of God set in Ladbroke Grove’ bode well. But this is not a hip movie about asbos. Oxford Street and the Victorian terraces of west London, so iconic and beloved in other British movies, seem soulless and oppressive here. It’s up-to-the-minute and streetwise without ever being glamorous.

If the story and events feel familiar, it’s because they’re taken from real incidents, all-too often to be read in the papers. Keeping it real, the film nicely avoids too much melodrama – even the final confrontation which the whole thing’s been leading to is wisely under-glamorised and played.

There’s plenty of sex, violence and swearing throughout, but it’s soiled and everyday. There’s something grubbily matter-of-fact about the sex in particular. Instead of special and liberating, it’s all a bit rubbish and messed up. Like the poor kids themselves.

The film offers little in the way of escape for them. A glimpse of Paul Putner’s put-upon schoolteacher says it all – there’s little he can hope to change. Especially when the parents can’t see what’s going on under their noses. Katie’s parents wilfully ignore her bruises, while when Claire’s in real danger from Sam, her mum thinks she’s being cool mentioning condoms and leaving them to it. It’s a scene that’s both funny and harrowing.

Other grown-ups are even worse role models. Becky and Alisa are sexually abused – as the law would see it – by three men who clearly know better. Trife gets caught shoplifting by men who’ve already decided he’s guilty. Then there’s his terrifying uncle…

There are only two examples of ‘positive’ adults – one shop assistant who stands up for Trife, and another who lets Alisa feel pretty. Otherwise, they have to sort it out for themselves.

Alisa and Trife give the film its heart, and it’s through them we begin to see a way out from this cycle of abuse.

Alisa’s pregnancy makes her rethink priorities, and shows up the selfishness of her peers. At one point she snaps at her best friend Becky, ‘Do you ever think of anything buy yourself?’ Becky’s response, meant in all seriousness, is telling: ‘Yes! Clothes, shoes, money, sex… Wait – sex involves me though, doesn’t it?’

This is about money, and class and status. We see inside the well-off homes as well as the council flats, and crime and prostitution is done on the promise of clothes and widescreen TVs.

But Alisa and Trife’s ultimate breakthrough is not caring what others think of them. Unlike anyone else, they forgo the respect of their peers, and don’t care what lies Sam might tell about them.

The newcomer cast are all excellent, keeping it sharp and surprising, and really making us feel for them. No one should live what these kids do. Expect to see everyone in this again, and soon.

As Sam, Noel Clarke delivers a stunning performance as a fairly mundane bully, who shows his ‘strength’ by punishing girls and boys younger than him. Clarke’s script, based on his own life and experience, really sparkles and surprises as it deftly explores the myriad power relationships.

The film compares well with City of God, and also Crash (though that makes much more of race). But don’t be fooled into thinking this is a new phenomenon – Kidulthood more readily echoes A Clockwork Orange in its violence and street slang and music.

It’s just not science fiction any more. It’s not even fiction.

Film Focus: King Kong

Another of my Film Focus reviews. (Something a bit different tomorrow, promise.)

King Kong
Reviewed 6 December 2005

[In brief]
Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) is an unknown young actress, suddenly out of work during the worst of the Depression. She’s little choice but to take a job on a new movie spectacular, to be shot on location. Though the director’s a swindler, the crew seem rogues, and Ann’s so in awe of the writer she can’t speak to him, things really get difficult when she reaches the mysterious Skull Island where the film’s to be shot, and meets her leading man… 

[In full]
Spectacular, terrifying, and genuinely affecting, Jackson’s brilliant remake of the classic monster flick is a perfect date movie. It could just do with being a bit shorter.

What makes “King Kong” win over other monster movies? In terms of basic story, it’s similar to other, lesser monster flicks, and owes something to Conan-Doyle’s “The Lost World”. Intrepid explorers find prehistoric beasts and monsters, bring one back to civilisation to parade before the masses, and it escapes and causes havoc. Kong, though, differs by not merely making the monster sympathetic, but making him the romantic lead. This is a tragic love story. No, really.

Kong (Andy Serkiss) is beautifully realised, and it’s difficult not to fall for his deep, sultry stare. As one girl sighed afterwards, “If only a man could look at you like that.” The cast are all very watchable, with suitably-arched but well-judged performances all round. Carl Denham (Jack Black) could easily have been a one-note character, but Black makes him real.

Once on the island, things pick up quickly, and the film just gets better and better. There are so many excellent sequences. Ann Darrow not seeing the dinosaur creeping up on her, and the ships’ crew being lunch for a nest of huge insects, had a core of hardened hacks squealing appreciatively in their seats. The fleshy worms that befriend Lumpy (Serkiss again) are some of the best, most convincingly textured CGI ever managed.

There are so many great moments, this could easily have been a five-star movie. However, it’s too long by an hour. It takes an age actually getting to Skull Island, with too many vignettes where we get to know the monster-fodder crew. Jamie Bell, for example, though good, gets two plots. There’s the red-herring of his mysterious background (he’s found on the ship as a boy), and his surrogate father’s efforts to keep him on the straight and narrow. Neither, though, really go anywhere, and the film would miss little without them. We don’t need to be told the significance of his reading Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” – just seeing the book in his hands would have been just as effective.

And yet there are questions the film doesn’t answer. Where do all the islanders go? They vanish the moment they’ve introduced Kong to Ann, never to be mentioned again. Then there’s the ease with which Driscoll (Adrien Brody) and Ann escape back to the town. A party of gun-totting sailors is soon eaten up by Skull Island’s monsters, but two naïve arty-types get away with hardly a scratch.

In New York, the special effects run the risk of being too cartoony, mostly because, unlike with the sailors, we don’t see the bodies. Kong’s easy killing of women-who-aren’t-Ann would be all the more striking if we saw any of the dead victims up close. It would also make more sense of the city’s response to this monster-gone-mad.

Perhaps it’s too much to expect a creature feature like this to worry too much about realism. Yet it does make the effort to confront elements in the original that are difficult. In the 1933 version, Denham’s a hero, and there’s no question that Kong’s a great prize to be shown off in New York. Jackson makes Denham more of a monster than the titular ape, doing whatever he has to just to get his own way. When members of his crew get eaten, rather than taking the hint he grandly eulogises that they’ll finish the film in their memory. And in capturing Kong, as Driscoll says, he’s only able to destroy the things he loves. (A risk Jackson also ran in remaking this beloved movie.)

This is made all the more plain in the film’s callous ending, with the ignominy of flat-footed soldiers having their pictures taken by Kong’s body, the press climbing all over him. Ann and Driscoll, refusing to go to the show in the first place, retain their integrity. Both work in the same “entertainment” industry as Denham, but Ann’s juggling and prat-falling are innocent pleasures that helped her win over Kong in the first place, and on the night of the gala performance she’s taken an anonymous role in another play. Driscoll, who’s written plays Ann so admired, has also by the end discovered the simple pleasure of light comedy.

Again, though, this thread isn’t fully resolved: why isn’t Denham arrested after Kong escapes? He grandly blames “beauty” for killing Kong, as ever refusing responsibility for all the people being killed. Jackson could have had the same, classic last line of the movie, only with Denham being carried away by the police, protesting his innocence. It feels like they’re torn between updating the original and yet not changing it…

But this really is nit-picking. “King Kong” is a hugely enjoyable, eye-popping movie that pushes all the right buttons. If they could only have been as bold in the editing as they were in the making, it would be without doubt the film of the year. The only problem with Kong is there’s just too much of him.

Film Focus: The Constant Gardener

Another old Film Focus review. I also blogged about the book in August 2005.

The Constant Gardener
Reviewed 6 October 2005

[In brief]
The wife of a British diplomat in Nairobi is brutally murdered, and at first it looks like a crime of passion committed by a man Tessa Quayle (Rachel Weisz) was having an affair with. But Tessa’s husband Justin (Ralph Fiennes) suspects something else, something to do with his wife investigating drug trials. And the more the local police and British High Commission threaten him, the more determined he is to unearth the awful truth.

[In full]
A gripping thriller that dares to confront truths we’d all rather ignore.

Tessa Quayle first meets Justin at a lecture he’s giving about foreign policy. She asks awkward questions about Iraq – Jeffrey Caine deftly bringing John le Carré’s 2001 novel up to date. The other students in the class groan and get up from their seats. They’ve heard all this stuff before. Next she’ll be on about Africa…

Justin is left floundering, unable to save her from embarrassment. His answer in the book – which he admits is “metaphysical fluff of the worst kind” – puts the story’s moral dilemma explicitly:

“You have put your finger on precisely the issue that literally none of us in the international community knows how to answer. Who are the white hats? What is an ethical foreign policy? […] When does a supposedly humanistic state become unacceptably repressive? What happens when it threatens our national interests? Who’s the humanist then?”

John le Carre, The Constant Gardener, pp. 158-9.

Caine has trimmed the book considerably, cutting much of Justin’s detective work to trace his wife’s work and killers. He travels less widely, pursuing just one doctor – Pete Postlethwaite’s Lorbeer – not three. Likewise, the truth about Tessa’s “affair” is given early on in the film, in a throwaway line.

The struggle then is not to solve the mystery but to find proof of things already known or suspected, proof with which to change things. However, the revelation of both the drug trial scandal and the story’s chief villain are less subtly handled than in the book. The reduction also makes everything rather tidy: it’s all a conspiracy, not the end result of incompetence and human weakness.

On the plus side, the high-calibre cast is uniformly excellent. Fiennes and Weisz spark off each other, while Bill Nighy and Pete Postlethwaite vie to steal the most scenes. The film is peppered with nicely-played small roles. Hubert Koundé, in particular, lends Arnold Bluhm a nobility and wit that’s only guessed at in the book.

It’s also telling how Caine has cut back on the ex-pats. Ghita Pearson and Gloria Woodrow are only glimpsed in the film, where in the book much of the action in Kenya is from their perspective. We’re spared their filtered views not only of Justin and Tessa, but also of Africa. Where the book scrutinises the British diplomatic service, the film is much more about Kenya itself.

The stunning light and colour of Kenya, even in the shanty towns, contrasts with the drab greys of London and Berlin. The music is also very effective, and the sometimes-dizzying steadicam gives the film a documentary feel, crucial to its sense of realism. As they did with City of God, director Fernando Meirelles and director of photography César Charlone make setting as much a character as the cast.

It’s remarkable that the film was actually shot in Kenya itself, which shows how much the country has changed since the book was published. Democratic elections were held in December 2002 and – to many observers’ surprise – President Moi ceded authority to the victor, Mwai Kibaki. Yet crime and corruption remain widespread, the Kenyan economy weak. The drafting of a new constitution (hoped to limit presidential powers) led to violent confrontation this summer. The Constant Gardener is released as Kenyans prepare to vote on that new constitution.

There have been various, passionate efforts this year to raise awareness about Africa’s economic misery, imposed by western governments and multinationals. It’s a sign of the competence of everyone involved that The Constant Gardener never feels hectoring or self-righteous.

Film Focus: Revolver

Another of my reviews for Film Focus. This one got quoted all over the place at the time - perhaps cos unlike so many of my peers I sat through to the end, or cos it's a fine old bit of ranting. And note that all the things I didn't like about Revolver do not apply to Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes - I like to think he was listening.

Revolver
Reviewed 19 September 2005

Cast: Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, Vincent Pastore, Andre Benjamin
Director: Guy Ritchie
Writer: Guy Ritchie
UK Release: 22 September 2005. Certificate: 15. Runtime: 115 mins.

[In brief]
Jake Green (Statham) has learnt a few tricks while he’s been in prison. In fact, nobody can beat him at the games he plays. Which is bad news for gangster Dorothy Macha (Liotta), who’s the reason Green went to jail in the first place…

[In full]
Tedious, humourless, pretentious and nasty, Revolver is not the hoped-for return to form from the writer-director of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000). It’s not just that the film lacks the lightness-of-touch and black comedy of its predecessors – this is clearly meant to be a grittier, more serious sort of film. What really lets it down is that it’s nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is.

The film is ostensibly about game-playing, and the psychology of the big con. It opens with portentous quotations from a chess manual, a banking text book and Machiavelli. These suggest there’s some great combat of wills to come, rather than Ritchie’s trademark fast-cutting, soundtrack-led shoot-‘em-ups. Guess which we actually get? Even though the same lofty quotations reappear through the film, as if we’re making some kind of philosophical progress, this is a film that’s all style and no substance.

The camera work is eye-poppingly opulent, but feels more self-indulgent than clever. When Green (for no very good reason) tumbles headlong down some stairs, we’re treated to a slow-motion pan, looking down on him. Yeah, it’s kind of pretty, but, er… why? Likewise, there’s a bit when he’s suddenly hit by a car, smashing through the windscreen to land dead in the back seat. It’s a shocking, audacious moment – one of the few times the film makes you sit up and take notice.

And then we rewind, in (you guessed it) slow motion. Green unsmashes his way back through the windscreen, is unhit by the car, and then – time playing forwards now – he gets a call on his mobile, which just stops him walking out in front of the car. It’s a tortuously long sequence all in all, and to tell us what? That Green’s too stupid to look where he’s going; that whoever it is calling on the phone is magic; that the writer-director is pissing about.

There’s more, like the cartoons on the telly matching what’s actually happening in the hotel room, or subtitles that pop up in different places round the screen. These flourishes only distract us from the story, rather than adding to it. For a film where the lead character fights with himself, it’s ironic that the director seems embarrassed by the writer.

Statham makes for a dull lead, though that’s hardly the actor’s fault. A pivotal scene in a lift, with him coming unhinged, ranting and boggle-eyed, is a glimpse at a much more exciting performance and film. As it is, he plods around moodily, his growling narration a litany of clichés. Liotta is similarly a one-note thug, a comedy grotesque played, for some reason, straight. Goofing about in unflattering states of undress, or pinned right in the line of fire by the men trying to protect him, he just seems pathetic. Which means Green turning out not to be scared of him doesn’t really work as a revelation.

There’s really only one character who elicits our sympathies. Mark Strong perfectly plays “Sorter”, the brilliant, cold, nerdy assassin whose crisis of conscience is more gripping and emotionally charged than Green’s kidnapped niece with a gun to her head.

Revolver wants desperately to convince us of its own cleverness, without ever showing us proof that it’s smart. The plot contrives miracles and coincidence to suggest there’s something deeper going on behind the free-wheeling mess onscreen. The ending offers some kind of resolution to the game Green was playing all along, but we’re long past caring, and there’s still so much left unanswered.

Was it all a dream? Was it all inside Green’s head? Why didn’t I just get up in the middle and leave, like the girl right in front of me?

But you shouldn't be here at the same time, with him

How splendid that Doctor Who Confidential caught the moment that Matt Smith met Russell T Davies – the latter trying not to be in the way. Naw.

But it occurred to me after a Spitfire or two that there was no sign of Tennant and Smith being there at the same time. And that films of more than one Doctor are rare. Excluding Doctor Who itself, this is what m'colleague Will Howells reckons is the definitive list of multiple Doctors in film and TV:

• Escape (1948) – William Hartnell as “Inspector Harris”, Patrick Troughton as “Jim – a shepherd”
• Would Any Gentlemen...? (1953) – Hartnell as “Detective Inspector Martin”, Jon Pertwee as “Charley Sterling”
• Dial 999 ep 1.16: “50,000 Hands” (1959) – Hartnell as “Jeff Richards”, Troughton as “Tramp - uncredited”
• All Creatures Great and Small ep 3.4: “Hair of the Dog” (1980) – Troughton as “Roddy – uncredited”, Peter Davison as “Tristan Farnon”
• Jude (1996)- Christopher Eccleston as “Jude Fawley”, David Tennant as “Drunk undergraduate”
• Mrs Bradley Mysteries ep 1.1: “Death at the Opera” (1999) – Davison as “Inspector Henry Christmas”, Tennant as “Max Valentine”

Then welcome

To a star-studded showing of the star-studded "Jam" last night, the short film written by my pal Lizzie Hopley and directo-produced by the clever teens behind www.buyacredit.com.



It's a fun film, in which Annette Badland and Patricia Hodge are competing to make the best jam, as judged by Frank Skinner. The cast includes Linda Bellingham, Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee, Stephen Fry, Gary Rhodes and Philip Schofield. And also, on the left-hand back row, two other chums of mine.

Having dabbled a bit in short films myself this year (I was a runner on "Origin", a crucial-to-the-plot copper in "Girl Number 9" and am trying to set up my own effort at the moment), was really impressed by the look of the thing, the money on screen, the comic timing and just what can be achieved for next-to no money. Damn them.

On the strength of this short, I'm keen to see what they can do with Clovis Dardentor, the feature film they're trying to set up, based on a little-known Jules Verne novel from 1896 and also adapted by Lizzie. You can help by buying a credit.

The event at BAFTA was packed with frighteningly young and pretty people. I hunched in a corner with a couple of folk I already knew, feeling old and ugly. But there was a free beer, and mostly I was just consumed with envy.

“He likes cats, but not from kindness”

For what might one day be a work thing, I asked m'colleague M to recommend Dirk Bogarde films from the early 60s. Am woefully ill-read in the man's work, so blimey: three compelling, peculiar movies.

In The Singer Not The Song (1961), Bogarde is an oddly well-spoken Mexican bandit. Anacleto preys on a small town until Irish priest John Mills walks in. Mills is determined to win Bogarde over to the side of the angels; Bogarde wants to drag Mills down to his own level.

It's a sumptuous film in full colour, filmed in southern Spain. The story is raunchily Catholic – about community and duty and salvation. There are small roles for Doctor Who later regulars Roger Delgado, Laurence Payne and Eileen Way. And it doesn't quite all come together.

Bogarde, who's grown up through the revolution to hate the church as part of the old regime, speaks in perfect English. Locha – daughter of a rich Mexican (Delgado) and his glamorous, American wife – speaks with a distinctly French lilt. And Bogarde's performance is... well, he doesn't seem all that bothered.

It was apparently the last film he shot in his seven-year contract for Rank. On the DVD extra, director Roy Ward Baker says there was an enmity on set between Bogarde and Mills. But Michael Brooke for ScreenOnline argues that it has the opposite effect on the film: charging it with homoerotic subtext. I'm not wholly convinced.

That's not, though, true of Bogarde's next film. In Victim (also 1961), Bogarde plays a top London lawyer with a pretty wife (Sylvia Syms), who finds himself open to blackmail for giving a gay young chap a lift home. This is six years before the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and the film is apparently the first mainstream effort to directly address the issue.

It takes a comparatively long time, though, for the film to name the love that dare not speak its name. Until then, its lots of people being worried and in a rush, not quite saying why. That sells us on the basic wheeze – that this is a thriller, with a villain to be spotted from the many rich characters – and means by the time we find out what it's about we're already hooked. I can see the producers worrying that audiences of the time might not flock if they knew the subject.

The film puts across a lot of points of view on the subject. In fact, there are several almost-soliloquies, where peripheral characters state their Opinion on the matter. It seems keen to encompass a range of views, but they puncture the thrill of the story, taking us out of the action.

It's beautifully played by Bogarde and Syms, with a nice turn from Alan MacNaughtan (who I recognised from Sandbaggers and To Serve Them All Our Days) and a whole world of people who would later be in Doctor Who.

The film is much written on elsewhere, mostly noting that it's a brave choice of role for Bogarde a) because he was mostly then known as a teen idol and 2) because he kept his own private life private.

But if I'm not misunderstanding, Bogarde's character is not a practising homosexual. He promises Syms that he hasn't broken his promise to her – that he only gave Boy Barrett a lift in his car a few times. An earlier, alluded-to dalliance at college doesn't seem to have been acted on either. And before we know what the film's about, we see Bogarde in a passionate snog with Syms.

Rather, Bogarde seems open to blackmail for a thought crime - “I wanted him!” he declares to Syms in a pivotal moment. The all-important photograph – which we ourselves never see – shows him sat next to Barrett. As is said in the film, the only thing to suggest anything untoward is that Barrett is crying.

If Bogarde weren't such the moral type, I could see him easily bluffing his way through – especially since the Establishment seem just as bent as he is, or don't care what he does in his own time. But it's an extraordinary film; a complex and involving thriller with a rich cast of possible villains and some neat twists along the way.

You can still hear Matthew Sweet's interview with Syms about the film on The Film Programme in July.

The Mind Benders (1963) is a bit like an English version of the Manchurian Candidate (1962) – though rather than Communist villains brainwashing a man to assassinate a Presidential candidate, here a chap's colleagues at Oxford make him perfectly beastly to his wife.

Again, there are some fun cameos to watch out for – Delgado again, a young Edward Fox, and Wendy Craig as the university bike.

The method for making Bogarde nasty is an eight-hour spell in a flotation tank. I'd half expected the plot to develop with Bogarde then exposed to extreme aromatherapy. But instead it does something just as extraordinary – and pulls back on the promise of a tragic ending to put everything right again. There's not a lot of apology from the chaps, but otherwise everyone ends up okay.

In all three films, Bogarde seems above the petty concerns of ordinary mortals; his gaze falls with equal withering on priests, bigots and women. He's gaunt, elegant, bequiffed – and eminently watchable for such striking and strange roles.

Can you save her?

First details are up at www.canyousaveher.com of "Girl Number 9", a six-part dark drama thingie written by James Moran and starring folk from Torchwood, being webcast from the end of October. There's also a Twitter feed for the film, upon which more nuggets of goodness are promised. How very exciting.

Khaaaaaan!

There's a new interview with me at the Gallifrey Vortex, discussing Dr Who books. Also, I made the Dr watch Star Trek II last night.

I'd remembered it as a fast and all-action thriller. But that's not the film at all. It takes a long, long time for there to be any fighting. And then it's two rooms (or the same room redressed) of people watching a TV screen with bad reception. There's a lot of that thing I hate with Star Trek; people walking down corridors or sitting in their rooms discussing portentous morality.

Besides the large regular cast (for whom it's always a struggle to find things to do), there's a relatively small number of speaking roles and sets. Though the model shots and mattes and nascent computer graphics are all rather breathtaking, it struck me as quite a cheap movie.

So why did I remember it as so big and exciting? Because it's brilliantly written and directed, using its limited resources to best advantage. Rather than zippy dogfights in space like Star Wars (whose shadow it's clearly trying to escape), this is more old-skool naval warfare, like Master and Commander. The first engagement between the Enterprise and Reliant is all to do with the protocols of signaling not being observed - they might as well be using flags.

There's lots of manoeuvres and fleet regulations, and the ending sees the wounded Enterprise sailing into the fog to even things up with the less-wounded enemy. The tension comes from anticipation, and the Enterprise being outgunned. Kirk's enemy is better than he is. While Kirk is feeling old and needs glasses and a command, Khan is looking good for his 200 years, and showing off his pecs.

The multi-racial Federation fights Khan's Aryan gang who are all into eugenics (a modern nod; in the original TV episode Khan had black hair). While the only aliens I spotted where Vulcans and them things in people's ears, there's evidence of Star Fleet being an equal opportunities employer. There's a black starship captain and the young female lieutenant Saavik also gets command of the Enterprise. But when McCoy mutters about Spock's green blood, his colleagues just roll their eyes indulgently. He also gets away with smuggling illegal booze.

Also, this is the first time I've heard Star Fleet referred to as "the military", and David's angry reaction to Star Fleet interference suggests they already have a reputation for muscling in on science. Star Trek is not brilliant at engaging in arguments against its shiny utopia, but the weaponised potential of the Genesis torpedo made us think of debates over the Star Wars programme, though President Reagan only announced the strategic defence initiative a year after Khan was released.

There are a lot of "gosh wow" moments, but they're not at the awe of space. Kirk's mouth drops open when he sees the Enterprise again and when he sees the Genesis cave. The amazement is at man-made achievement, not at the vast, empty and dangerous frontier. The nebula, the moon and the planet we visit are all inimical to life - which makes the creation of the Genesis planet all the more of an achievement.

Space is difficult enough without a madman hell-bent on killing you. The wounds on the casualties - the burnt flesh and blood - are the most visceral I can think of in Star Trek. This continually reinforces how hard this adventure is, upping the stakes and engaging us. And then, to win victory, Star Fleet expects every man to do his duty...

Spock's logic that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one nicely sets up his death. It's also the logic of service - of a navy in space. And it's a little bit fascist (when they're fighting Aryan supremacists).

The Dr, though, was left cold by Spock's death - assuming he'd get better using his alien powers. Which is odd; I think I saw Star Trek III first and still get itchy-eyed as Spock says he has been and ever shall be Kirk's friend.

It's still, I think, the best of the Trek movies, followed by VI and XI. Which the Dr admitted she'd like to see.

Soon you'll grow so take a chance

TV's James Moran is evangelising that you - YOU! - should go and see Moon. But the Dr and I were going anyway, and have just returned. Screen 3 at the Ritzy in Brixton was full, if not very big in the first place (and the dimming lights weren't working so we watched trailers in the gaudy glare of the "cleaning lights").

Anyhow, what a splendid film. It's difficult to speak of without spoiling it's many delights - you really should go see it. The plot is old-skool sci-fi clever but with an emotional wossname that got the Dr hooked. She feared tedious physics for too long (what she wearily refers to as "moon porn"), but I caught her snuffling at the end. Hah. Tomorrow, she's being made to watch The Wrath of Khan on Blue-Ray as part of my ongoing Professor Higginsing.

I loved the tactile weight of the old-skool model shots and the sly setting-up of the revelations. I loved the warm logic of the small role played by Kevin Spacey, and the familiarity / claustrophobia of the small set. It had jokes and intelligence and awe in the face of the vast, dead grey rock. And, my cleverer colleagues inform me, the physics is pretty good, too if you can forgive the central conceit.

All that, and this review doesn't mention the director's kook parents. Think that must be a first.

No cheese cauldron

The Dr took me to see Harry Potter VI last night - the second time she'd seen it. What a lifetime it's been since I read the book. The film boils the plot down to the bare necessities, dumping all the stuff set in the Ministry and focusing in on the teen snogging. While the last film, I thought, was better than the book, this one is good but not as good.

Jonny's right about the over-grading. Changing the colour and tone of each frame also makes the film grainy. As Cathode Blue Ray and Mos-Def television give way to ever more pin-sharp home cinema, I wonder how the evolved beings of tomorrow will look back on the murky gravel of our age.

I also think they got the tone wrong. Those memories of freak-boy Young Voldemort are all in graded blue-grey to suggest coldness and evil. But the whole blimmin' point is that no one saw he was a wrong 'un until it was too late. In the book, Dumbledore - and so we - sympathise with the bullied kid who magics things from his tormentors, just as Harry did with Dudley Dursley in book one. Dumbledore chides Tom Riddle for stealing but still takes him under his wing.

Likewise, Riddle charms Professor Slughorn, showing interest in his lessons and buying his favourite sweets. Before he went Obviously Bad, Tom Riddle was liked, the teachers almost indulging his breaking of rules and small magic revenges on those bullies who deserved it.

Young Riddle is all too like young Harry Potter. As Harry grows up, and the 'parental' adults around him take a step back, his future is down to the choices he makes.

Harry could still yet do terrible things. So could any of us.

Long playing

So. Turned 33 on Wednesday: the same age as Jesus when the Romans killed him, and (if my sums are right) the age of David Tennant when he was cast as Doctor Who.

(Of no interest to anyone, but Peter Davison became a former Doctor Who a month before turning 33. So I'm now older than two Doctors, as old as one, with another eight still to catch up.)

Derren Brown's Enigma show was superb. I have some theories about how some of his tricks might have worked, and also about the imagery and associations he uses. But I'll hold off until I've read his Tricks of the Mind, which a kind person got me for my birthday.

Did splendidly well for loot, too: all of The Wire, The Deadly Assassin (I concede all Mr Gillatt says in his recent DWM review, and yet I still love this story), Party Animals, Vonnegut's A Man Without A Country, a duvet, some pants, a long-sleeved tee-shirt, various London bus maps from different years in the last century and a cheesecake.

But mostly I have been working on things as-yet unannounced. One thing Paul Cornell speaks of should get an official announcement next week, and I've pretty much finished my bits of it. Then there's rewrites today, and a script to be written for the CBBC competition which closes on Wednesday. And rewrites on another spec script, thanks to the kind diligence of L. And I'm awaiting notes on something else. And a “go” on a couple of other big things, too...

In the meantime, Danny Stack has set up an official site and trailer for Origin, the short film he wrote and directed on which I was a runner and associate producer. It stars Lee Ross (Kenny in Press Gang) and Katy Carmichael (Twist in Spaced) – both of whom I served murky tea.

Oh, and my Primeval novel has also just had a glowing 9 out of 10 review:

“Author Simon Guerrier manages to stuff 231 pages with way more action, adventure and twists than I thought possible ... He writes short, punchy chapters which flip between the characters so quickly - with an endless supply of cliff-hangers - that you are constantly on the edge of your seat as the twists and turns are thrown at you ... This could be the most enjoyable book you purchase this year.”

Nick Smithson, Book Review – Primeval: Fire and Water, Sci-fi-Online.

(I seem to have lost a point for using the new team at the ARC.)

Things Exploding 2: Everything’s Exploding!

For research purposes, obviously, the Dr and I went on a date to see Night at the Museum 2. Spent most of the weekend proofing 310 pages of a new book, with the film ticking through the back of my brain. Here are some too-serious thoughts.

It should really be “Night at the Museums”, as night-watchman Ben Stiller leaves the American Museum of Natural History in New York for the Smithsonian in Washington DC – which, he reminds us, is really 19 museums arranged round a lawn (and, in the movie, sharing underground vaults). Though the National Gallery of Art isn’t part of the Smithsonian. And also Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” is in the Chicago Art Institute. But hush. It’s only a movie.

It’s a fun and funny movie, with a massive cast it struggles to fully accommodate. Much of the cast of the first film spends most of this one stuck in a crate. Then there are weird cameos – a couple of would-be villains from other franchises, and a scene with the Smithsonian’s own guard. Both are funny at first but just go on and on…

There are some great comic moments and absurd characters and performances, but I kept feeling it was a rough draft, everything in the script filmed and edited into order before the judicious pruning.

The film is full of incongruous, odd things: a love interest who can’t be a love interest because she’s a museum object; Stiller leaving his son – so crucial to the first film – home alone in another city while he jets off to have this adventure…

A Doctor Who episode like Love & Monsters makes a virtue of the strange incongruity of real life; here everything’s put neatly back in the box. In the final scene, the awkward love interest gets swapped for a real woman played by the same actress (no mention of the artefact-woman flying off stiff-lipped to her death).

And it’s really talkie. Like American football, as soon as there’s a bit of action and excitement, it stops to discuss it in depth. There is much tedious guff about the brilliance of America – and obviously no mention of the cultural imperialism implicit in the museums’ display of precious objects from all round the world. What’s the provenance, say, of this ancient Egyptian portal to Hell?

For all the moral is Stiller realising the nobility of his vocation in guarding these artefacts, the ending depends on a big brawl where a whole load of old stuff gets trashed. The Dr watched in horror – at one point, as the first ever airplane smashed into a huge cabinet of precious things, she even grabbed my hand.

At the end, the museum is bustling with thrilled and interested public from a cross-section of demographic groups – a museum’s happy ending. But what does the mannequin Theodore Roosevelt offer that his (evil) computer hologram version didn’t? He tells the kids the years he was born and died, and we see he rode a horse… The hologram’s just the same, but you don’t need to stay up late to see it.

The museums’ presidents and cowboys get to offer stoic wisdom, but it never really suggests why museums might be important or worth preserving. The artefacts here are only of interest because they come to life.

Witching hours

I’ve seen a lot of blue sky in the small hours recently. On Thursday, I was on the 05.44 train into town to get to Watford by half seven. There, Danny Stack was busy marshalling truck-loads of equipment and volunteers for the making of his short film.

Me and Codename Moose spent the day running – something I’ve not done before. It meant having my own walkie-talkie and making lots of tea for actors. I also had to go back into Soho to pick up 16mm film cores, cans, labels and black bags. And I asked three different people to delay mowing their lawns for ten minutes while we finished a scene. Fun, educational and exhausting – didn’t get home until just after 10 pm.

Next day, Codename Moose and I met up at Liverpool Street for the trek to Stansted and then Tallinn, where the in-between brother was having his stag do. There were two other stag parties on our planes there and back – I pity the civilians lumped with us.

Tallinn’s a pretty place, indulging the medieval theme for the tourists. Codename Moose says that under the USSR the buildings in these eastern European countries had to be uniform grey, which is why they’re now embracing such pretty pastel shades today.

Surprisingly, there was quite a lot of drinking over the weekend. Drank medieval drinks in the Olde Hansa (they did not know what we meant by the incantation “vodka and coke”), watched the Liverpool game in the pub with no name, danced on stage in the Hollywood club and even had a pint in the Depeche Mode bar. No, really. I took pictures so I’d believe it.

While there's a smoking ban in operation, the bars and restaurants all had smoking rooms, clouded and stinking and alluring. My eyes are still sore.

The main event was the Lada racing on Saturday – which, rather fittingly, the Best Man won. The Ladas were battered, stiff-geared and protesting, the back wheels slipping out underneath you twisted round the clogged, muddy track. I lost to the senior brother (though, er, he did cheat), but felt I did okay. In the finale R. smacked into A., smashing the window, showering her in glass and denting the door so hard it wouldn’t open again. R. could only get out of his own car by climbing out the window. Proper, solid boy fun.

Hungover on Saturday, Codename Moose and I ventured out into the sunshine to climb up the tower of St Olav’s church. I also went pootling round yesterday so see what my map called Fat Margaret’s Tower. Then there was lunch and more boozing – but I was bowed out of any more than one cinnamon beer and let the boys explore new frontiers of inebriation without me.

Bundle of things to get done and fast now: need to finish a script by Monday, got another one waiting behind that, and a bundle of other stuff I’m still waiting to here on. And this morning I received copies of my Primeval novel, Fire and Water – perfect timing as it’s set between last Saturday’s thrilling fungus monster and this Saturday’s… well, wait and see. But my book foreshadows some of it.

Who stocks the Guardian?

So what to to make of Watchmen? I loved the comic in my teens (though not as much as I loved V For Vendetta), and recall the bloke who wrote Batman (1989) and Terry Gilliam both saying it could never be filmed. It's complex and strange, packed full of incident and the juxtaposition of repeated images. So any film would surely just be not quite as good as the source. Which is what's happened whenever they've put Alan Moore's other great comics on screen.

And yet for the most part I think Watchmen works as a movie. It's complex and strange and I keep picking over it like with the gap between my teeth. There's an awful lot that I like – Rorshach's mask and his performance, the opening titles, the look and feel of Archie. But there's also much that is bothersome...

Spoilers

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The choice in any adaptation is what to keep and what to cut out. Director Zack Snyder has slavishly kept close to the source: it's evident Dave Gibbons' artwork has been used to storyboard the film, and whole sections of the film's dialogue are lifted from the comic's balloons.

I'm surprised by how much of the comic makes it into the film. In fact, it feels too long at two-and-a-half hours. They could have cut back more.

The change to the ending in the comic keeps things simpler, and cuts out a whole sub-plot about pirate comics and a writer off making a movie. Veidt setting up Dr Manhattan works better than the comic's faked alien menace anyway. It makes Manhattan's slow separation from humanity part of the plot rather than an intriguing aside.

But my major concern is not with what's been taken out but added. In the comic, the murder of the Comedian is shown in the first four pages, in flashback, pressed in between panels of the cops looking round over the dead man's flat. Eddie Blake doesn't have a chance to fight back.

In the movie, there's a whole martial arts sequence like out of any superhero movie. Blake goes out fighting, punching through bricks and the kitchen cabinets, revealing super-human speed and strength. It misses something fundamental about what the comic's doing: grounding the outlandish events and characters in a grubby, mundane reality. These heroes are (for the most part) ordinary mortals. They're as fallible, flawed and falling apart as the rest of us.

The film's costumed heroes sport the same PVC chic as the comic-book movies since Batman in '89. They fight in the same ways as other comic-book movies, and there are the same fast CGI pull-backs to reveal huge buildings and landscapes. As a result it feels like a response to those movies: more about the X-Men of the 21st century than the 1980s.

That's not helped by the music. I know a few people who love the film's music, but I found the choices of tune just odd. It doesn't give any sense of the period: Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix both suggest the 60s. “All along the watchtower” is used in Withnail & I to a much better effect.

While the comic had a very particular sense of its period – an alternative, awful “now” - the film is a mish-mash of the nostalgic and contemporary, and neither quite feels right. If only it could have felt more like the brilliant title sequence, showing American history with the added bonus of heroes. Well, brilliant but for one little grumble.

The sequence shows assassination of JFK and then shows the Comedian wielding the rifle. It's a crass realisation of what in the comic is just an aside, the Comedian boasting to some mates at a party.

Too often the film favours the crass and simplistic over the more intriguing and complex. Laurie tells her mother she loves her, while in the comic those words never need to be said because its implicit in the scene.

The Dr was concerned by the not-quite-brilliant qualities of the actresses playing Laurie and her mum. But there’s no subtlety in their dialogue to play off: they seem awkward and stupid for stating the bleeding obvious.

More than that, special effects movies mean playing to green curtains and ping-pong balls on sticks. The film's editor can be more thrilled by the assembly of the disparate elements of the shot than the quality of performance. Just as Dr Manhattan sees human beings and their feelings as merely some tricky jigsaw. (See also the affect on Star Wars once technology let George Lucas build his empire whatever way he liked.)

It also doesn't help how “false” a lot of the film feels. The comic is grounded in realism: heroes who get dementia and drunk, who get old and die. There's something still strange and disturbing about superheroes being drafted into the war in Vietnam. In the film, the Nam sequences felt especially contrived, more Photoshop than photo realism.

There's been some mocking of the prosthetics and President Nixon's nose. The film makes more of him – and Kissinger – than the comic does, which diminishes his impact. He's a weird caricature in the film, a credible world leader bent under terrible pressure when we glimpse him in the comic – where he never says a word. There's nothing in the comic I can think of that Nixon's estate might want to sue.

The film also gets in a gag about Americans not accepting a cowboy into the White House. To do this they fudge a better gag in the comic, where it's Robert Redford standing for election in 1988. Would Reagan have been well enough to stand in ’88? And surely the point about Redford is he offers an alternative to the hard-line Republicanism Nixon represents in this world. The film throws out the political reality in favour of a cheap gag.

Likewise, Ozymandias says in the film that he's “not a comic book villain”, when that's plainly what he is. In the comic its “republic serial villain” because in a world where there are real superheroes, they don’t feature in comics. Again, the film loses out by putting things so bluntly.

The comic is violent but this is more so: there are extended and bigger fight scenes, a man having his arms cut off where he's just quickly stabbed in the comic, Dr Manhattan not just disintegrating people but spattering them all over the ceiling.

While the comic shows sex and bosoms and a full frontal blue willy, in the film it feels much more like titillation. Like some of the swearing in the first series of Torchwood (or when I took over Benny) this desperate effort to appear more adult just makes it seem more adolescent. The sex scene between Dan and Laurie should have felt more like the one in Don't Look Now: no soft focus, unglamorous, tender.

But the film also pulls its punches. The scenes of devastated New York are much bloodier in the comic. Even the “clean” nuclear explosion would leave people burned and horribly disfigured. Perhaps this film plays to a modern audience's subconscious horror of 9/11 (I was surprised not to see the Twin Towers collapse in that final attack), but it didn’t seem horrific enough. We need to be utterly appalled by what Veidt has done for the moral conundrum of the last scenes to carry any weight. It's not enough in the film that one of those killed in New York is Rorschach's psychologist. The comic introduces a whole load of familiar faces, and we don't even know their names.

It's a bold film full of flickers of brilliance. This great long post suggests I didn't enjoy it when I largely did. But I keep thinking how it might have been done differently. How the same cast and crew made a better version. Just in a world not that different from our own...

Three items with increasingly tenuous links to Victorians

First, 2009 is the 150th anniversary of Big Ben – the bell inside the clock tower of the what tourists call the Houses of Parliament. The official Big Ben website has a neat Flash wossname showing how the clock works, plus a wealth of info and images. I’m particularly pleased with HJ Brewer’s perspective view of the old Palace of Westminster in the reign of Henry VIII.

Secondly, you’ve five days left to hear the Radio 3’s Sunday night feature, “Vril”. Says the BBC's own website:

“Matthew Sweet finds out about Vril, the infinitely powerful energy source of the species of superhumans which featured in Victorian author and politician Edward Bulwer Lytton's pioneering science fiction novel The Coming Race (1871). Although it was completely fictional, many people were desperate to believe it really existed and had the power to transform their lives. With a visit to Knebworth House, Lytton's vast, grandiloquent Gothic mansion, where Matthew meets Lytton's great-great-great-grandson, and hears how his book was meant to be a warning about technology, soulless materialism and utopian dreams. At London's Royal Albert Hall, he discovers how a doctor, Herbert Tibbits, along with a handful of aristocrats, tried to promote the notion of electrical cures and the possibility of a 'coming race'. Along the way, Matthew and his contributors consider why so many English people have been so desperate to see the fantasy of regeneration transformed into fact.”

Thirdly, last night the Dr and I attended a special screening of Slumdog Millionaire, followed by a Q and A with director Danny Boyle.

A lowly “chai wallah” in Mumbai makes it to the last round of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? The police can’t believe he’s not cheating, so attach electrodes and smack him about. Slowly they unfold his story…

It’s a great, on-the-whole feel-good film, probably Boyle’s best since Trainspotting. In fact, it’s full of the same chases, frenetic editing, wild mix of comedy and horror, and even a bit that’s quite like the “worst toilet in Scotland”. It’s fast and noisy and vivid, buzzing with wild, desperate life.

Jamal’s brother and the use of local talent (plus Dev Patel from Skins) reminded me of Children of God, but screenwriter Simon Beaufoy says its “Dickensian”. I can kind of see that, with the comedy and tragedy as pressed together as the very rich and very poor. It made me think of Charles Booth’s 1891 poverty map of London – which I only saw last week. There are issues of urban development, social mobility and education that might spring from Victorian novels or pamphlets. Yet Dickens made much more memorable wrong ‘uns – there’s no Skimpole, Micawber or Dombey here, just a motley crew of hoods.

The questioners – uniquely, in my experience – didn’t ask for advice for budding film-makers but instead challenged Boyle on the morality, truth and disregard for the horizon in his films. Some who knew India expressed amazement at his getting past red tape and state interference (he said they allowed the film to show police torturing a suspect so long as it involved no one of higher rank than inspector).

He talked about the complex moral quagmire of casting people from the real slums: does he take them and their families to the Oscars? And he explained that, with Disney and Sony already producing their first films in Hindi, we’re going to see much more erosion of the line between Bolly- and Hollywood.

Afterwards, we went for a pizza and shared a bottle of wine and a Banoffi pie. The Banoffi pie was, of course, first invented by Nigel McKenzie for the Hungry Monk restaurant, Jevington, in 1972. No, I can’t think of a way to link this last bit to the Victorians.

Előbb-utóbb

A bloke at work recommended this short, Hungarian film, thinking it might be my kind of thing. And it is.

I have a name for my pain

M. rather marvellously smuggled me into the IMAX last night for a press screening of The Dark Knight. It's a huge, 2.5 hour epic full of thrill and excitement, and six whole scenes of especially IMAX-tastic hugeness. Golly.

Long-toothed readers of this blog may recall my review of Batman Begins for Film Focus, where I dared suggest the general cool marvellousness was a little dulled by the lack of good roles for women. Rachel, now played by Maggie Gyllenhaal rather than Mrs Tom Cruise, seems to agree. She's now shacking up with Harvey Dent, the cool district attorney and white knight to the city – a man who's everything Bruce/Bats can't be.

But Harvey doesn't just want Bruce's girl, he also wants in on Batman's crusade to bring down the Gotham mob. The mob, led by my old mate Eric Roberts (well, I met him once), is a bit cheesed off by all this and then find themselves being made an offer they can't refuse by a kray-zee new kid called the Joker.

The late Heath Ledger's performance has been the focus for a lot of reviews so far, and it's an eye-popping, compelling and terrifying thing. Yes, Ledger should get an Oscar nomination, but then Nicholson should have had one for the same role 19 years ago. To my delight, there's no (single) explanation for where the Joker comes from here or what unhinged him. He's all the more appalling for not being explained. While Bats and Bruce and all their good-guy pals wrangle over how and when they can bend their own rules, Joker's an anarchic live-wire just in it for the explosions. The violence comes without warning; it's a shocking, brutal film and not all the regulars will be back for the third one.

As I argued with the first one, comic-book movies are all about reshuffling the established genre rules and conventions so that they come out looking new. The Dark Knight is a lot more complex, rich and full of strange moral ideas than it has really any need to be, which give the huge-scale set pieces and fast-cut fighting that much more of an edge.

It's still relentlessly male. There's really only two women in it besides Rachel: Jim Gordon's colleague Ramirez and his wife Barbara. And, I'd argue, both are there because of what they add to Jim, rather than having roles and motives of their own.

Yet it's notable that our regulars are faced with these reflections; their motives and behaviour is constantly being questioned by all sides. This doesn't bolster one particular viewpoint that comes with all the answers (as in Socratic dialogue) as to continually muddy the water. The film has plenty to say about vigilantes and civil liberties, but from lots of different voices. Batman and the goodies give their best to the cause, but the question hanging over them through it whether that best is good enough.

Batman Begins seemed to be riffing of stuff in old comics Year One and The Long Halloween. This nicks elements from The Dark Knight Returns and, I'd argue, The Killing Joke. Spider-Man has already done the hero as emblematic of the city at large, an inspiration to ever more kray-zee super-villains and yet also to the noble instincts of the city's people. There's a nice prisoner's dilemma late on in this (which I won't spoil here) that hangs on how Joker – and Batman – expect people to behave.

It reminded me of Midnight in that it's not just the predicament that's so horrifying but how characters react to it. The result, though, felt a bit too plot convenient rather than earned: two characters respond in way that's surprising because it's not consistent with what little we know about them...

That makes it sound like a criticism, but it's less a niggle as it having been swimming round my feeble brain all day. While I'm meant to be writing my own set-piece action adventure I'm tonguing the sore-tooth of the film's “message”. I'm not sure it has one. Does Batman win at the end? Are things any better for his having been involved? How thrilling, innovative and bold that such a mainstream movie doesn't seem to know...