The Big Whatsit

After the relative high of Star Trek, I have found some of this season’s new movies to be rather flat and disappointing. Perhaps it’s the curse of the sequel, beginning with the leaden Night at the Museum 2, which retreads virtually the entire material of its prequel (including many of its gags!) presumably in an effort to squeeze more money out of the franchise. I saw no point to any of it, which was made worse by the fact I quite enjoyed the first instalment. Then, as now, Steve Coogan was the funniest thing on display but he isn’t in this one as much. Mine wife is a big Dan Brown fan, and as such we simply had to see Angels and Demons. I went in with low expectations, particularly given some of the reviews, and had a ball, thanks mainly to the way the film hurtles along at breakneck speed and made me forget to worry too much about what was happening because, oh look, here’s another murdered priest. It was terrible, of course, yet not without merit, and surely the Tourist Board of Rome will be able to set up some marketing gimmick with all those statues that just happen to be pointing at things and in the world of the movie that means a clue.

If I’m being overly kind to ‘good crap’ like Angels and Demons, then worse is to come. Nothing prepared me for the unremitting awfulness of Goal III. Well, that isn’t entirely true. Its ’straight to DVD’ status suggested I wasn’t in for a treat, nor the fact Amazon had already slashed the price considerably one week into its release. The one-star reviews on IMDb weren’t exactly encouraging, and I guess it was only ‘brand loyalty’ that persuaded me to order a copy. After all, I had seen the first two chapters at the cinema and a lingering hope that it might just be watchable spurred me to part with my cash. Big mistake.

The first chapter was no one’s idea of a masterpiece, but it was glossily produced and weaved its yarn about a young Mexican who lands a trial at Newcastle United with some style. A lot rested on the shoulders of Kuno Becker, in the lead role of Santiago ‘Santi’ Munez. Whereas many critics were content to slate him both for his apparent lack of football talent and ‘rabbit caught in headlights’ acting style, he brought enough boyish charm to the part to win most viewers over. The film was helped by the participation of various football people, including the Newcastle first team, David Beckham and then England manager, Sven-Goran Eriksson, all of whom giving the project a degree of credibility, indeed Goal! was made with the blessing and participation of FIFA, who approved of its core message that anyone can indeed make it to the top, providing they have the talent and dedication. I imagine this sentiment will cock the eyebrows of most Chairmen outside the Premiership’s top four clubs, but that’s the movie’s fantasy for you.

Goal 2 showed signs of an already ailing franchise. Slipped quietly onto screens in the UK, its premise - Santi is transferred to Real Madrid and contests the Champions League - held little of the charm of its predecessor. The story of WAGs and rich footballers who learn that money isn’t everything gave nothing for the ordinary viewer to identify with, and its best parts concerned the struggles of Santi’s teammate, Gavin (Alessandro Nivola), who was coping with the onset of retirement. Less surefooted was Anna Friel, our hero’s girlfriend who ended the film pregnant and alone, and a subplot that had Santi scouring the backstreets of Madrid for his mother seemed to be shoehorned in for the sake of a cheap human interest story.

Both movies ran along the same faultline, one that proved a fatal flaw, as it has for any football-based fiction. It is that as dramatic as the Goal trilogy might have purported to be, it could never match the unscripted, arbitrary and occasionally unfair highs and lows that come with following soccer in real life. Several days before watching Goal III, I caught Brazil taking on Egypt in the Confederations Cup, a match that sounded like a procession for the former yet ended in a squeaky bum 4-3 win, the decider scored with minutes left on the clock. The game was a rollercoaster, a saga of your football minnow standing up to one of the best sides in the world and almost claiming a result. With stuff like this taking place all the time in football, there’s very little left for fiction to cling on to, and I think it speaks volumes that the most successful soccer novel critically by some distance - David Peace’s The Damned United - is an imagining of real life events that bastardises most of its characters and upset the Clough family with its one note sketching of Brian as a boorish, boozy big head.

None of the above forgives Goal III. If the downturn in quality between the first two instalments is noticeable, here it’s in free fall. Every element of the production points towards a film that has been rushed out on the cheap, released because the series was supposed to contain three parts yet nobody is very interested in seeing it through to its conclusion. The whole affair plays like a rejected script from the Sky One series, Dream Team. Yes, it really is that bad.

Let’s start with the plot. Though ostensibly still following the fortunes of Santi - who features prominently on the DVD cover - Goal III is barely about him at all. He’s there, but his role now is to interact with the two English footballers who are attempting to stake their places in Sven’s World Cup squad for Germany (yep, we’re stuck in 2006) whilst igniting their love lives. One falls for an actress he meets on the set of a movie production and, erm, that’s about it. The other, who’s a bugger for the bottle, finds out he has a young child via some lost sweetheart who still appears to be waiting for him to reappear in her life years after he left her with one in the oven. And that’s about it. Friel clearly had enough sense to steer clear of this turkey. Her character is dismissed in a passing conversation, as though that’s all she deserves, though having watched Goal III it’s for certain she had the last laugh.

Any actual football appears rarely, and there’s a good reason for that. The first two Goal films featured the actors mixing with real-life stars of the game, lending the action a degree of realism, but that’s all over with now. Goal III is allowed to use footage from England’s internationals during the World Cup finals yet the actors either appear ‘away’ from the players, or are superimposed against a background of supporters and done so very obviously. The effect of this is horrible and belongs in a pre-CGI era of naff cheapness, looking like something you might have once played on the Commodore 64.

Worse still is the fact that these budgetary limits mean there’s no tinkering with the conclusion of England’s World Cup. Anyone who knows when England were knocked out - and who by - will find no change in the narrative here because the producers can’t afford to shoot any additional footage. The tournament ends on the fluffed penalty of one of the actors and, er, that’s it once again. And what was the point of any of that? Clearly, by this stage in the franchise the soccer is no longer the point, or even a significant facet, of the story. It’s incidental, inserted by obligation to the film’s title but nothing more than a footnote of the sub-soap plotting.

I don’t suppose that would matter if Goal III was suspenseful, gripping or satisfying on any dramatic level, but it isn’t. In fact it’s boring, which is something you could never accuse the previous episodes of being, for all their other faults. The actors aren’t good enough to make you care for them, being the cheeky lads mag stereotypes who seem to have walked straight out of a Wkd commercial, neither does the script give them any depth. Becker pops up sporadically to remind you this is an official sequel, sporting a ridiculous haircut and now carrying more poundage than in the earlier films. However you choose to look at it, the film is terrible, churned out to squeeze the last possible drop of revenue from the franchise and amazingly making the other lacklustre sequels of the summer look like gems in comparison. In a final insult to its audience, Goal III only features one cameo from a ‘football person,’ and it’s reviled Newcastle owner, Mike Ashley, who tells Nick Moran’s oily agent where to go. Moran has the good grace to spend much of the film looking pretty apologetic about what he’s doing. Ashley actually appears to believe he’s doing a good turn for his own public image, which isn’t the only own goal scored before this sorry mess crawls to a finish.

DVD has done many good things for the Hammer back catalogue, and the best surely has to be its ability to dust off forgotten films like Captain Clegg and restore them for a new generation of viewers. Tucked away on Side B of the second disc within Universal’s superior The Hammer Horror Series set, Captain Clegg might have none of the lustre that comes with the studio’s Dracula or Frankenstein features but that doesn’t make it inferior. Give it several minutes to warm up and this swashbuckling tale of south coast skullduggery - disguised as horror fare - is incredibly good fun, moves with the pace of a densely layered plot stuffed into 82 minutes, and features some cracking performances.

The tale of how Captain Clegg made it onto the screen is legend in itself. His story is part of the adventures of the Reverend Doctor Christopher Syn, the lead character in a popular series of novels by Russell Thorndike. Anthony Hinds was forced to make changes to his screenplay for the film once it transpired that Disney had bought the rights to adapt Thorndike’s books for the screen, and sure enough the tale was dramatised in a mini-series starring Patrick McGoohan (edited for cinema audiences in the UK). The main amendment in Hammer’s version saw Clegg become Parson Blyss, removing any reference to Dr Syn in the process. The character’s mythology remains, however, almost in its entirety, as does the supporting cast. Some of the dialogue between Blyss and Mipps in the film hints at a back story that could only mean anything to followers of Thorndike’s novels and, as luck would have it, gives Captain Clegg a lot more depth than it might otherwise achieve.

In America, the film was released as Night Creatures, and indeed this is what it’s called on the R1 set. According to its Wiki, Hammer has promised their American distributor a picture based on Richard Matheson’s novel, I am Legend, which would be entitled Night Creatures. They were warned off continuing the project because the subject matter would make it too strong for the certifiers. A contract was a contract, however, and Hammer offered Captain Clegg instead, emphasising the spectres that haunt the marshes in the story in order to justify the title. A shame, as the story was strong enough when focusing on the derring-do of the smugglers. Ultimately, it was this that really differentiated Hammer’s picture from that produced by Disney, the latter released as a straightforward family offering whilst Night Creatures was marketed to a more mature audience.

The ‘night creatures’ - men on horseback wearing skeleton costumes with luminous paint - are actually the weakest element of the film. Of far more interest is the good Parson (Peter Cushing), who in his first scene admonishes his congregation for their half-hearted hymn signing. It’s clear that Cushing is having a whale of a time in this picture. Whether playing the angelic Blyss or flipping his character fluidly to become the leader of the smugglers (and Cushing is subtle enough to make his change look absolutely natural), he’s in imperial form and runs rings around Patrick Allen as the virtuous Captain Collier. Collier is in Romney Marshes to investigate a claim of smuggling but finds next to no evidence. Fortunately for him, the community is flawed enough to give him sufficient motivation to stick around, and then there are the erratic actions of his captive Mulatto (Milton Reid) to consider. Why does the mute giant, who was rendered so and left for dead by Clegg, take such a deadly interest in the Parson? What lies behind the legend of the marsh creatures? Something’s not right, whether it’s in the scarecrow that appears to be in various places at once, and might even make the occasional gesture, or the bottles of fine wine that turn up in the cabinets of the Parson and the spineless Squire (Derek Frances).

In reality, all Collier ever needed to do was look into the background of Imogene (Yvonne Romain), the village tavern’s serving wench. Nobody that exotic should be anywhere near the Suffolk coast and there’s an easy connection between her and Clegg - alleged to be hanged and then buried in the churchyard - that any investigator worth his salt would explore. But not Collier. Like much of the audience, he sees Imogene as nothing more than eye candy, lovely eye candy for sure but that’s where her story ends. Or does it?

Neither does Collier bother much with the Squire’s son, Harry (Oliver Reed), Imogene’s lover and a key member of the smugglers. Reed is fantastic in Captain Clegg. Even though his role is that of a callow youth, the young gun to Clegg’s old hand, the actor has far too much smouldering intensity to be boring. Watching Reed in these early roles, it’s clear why he still commanded so much attention during his ‘Wild Thing’ years. The charismatic talent was there. Bags of it. Of the remaining cast, Michael Ripper is his usual likeable self, thoroughly enjoying himself as Mipps, a jolly jack-tar if ever there was one. Everyone knows that Hammer films are onto a winner when Ripper ‘rips’ up the stage. The man gives a full-blooded turn, as ever. And then there’s Collier, who is turned into a surprisingly sympathetic character by Allen. Despite his squarest of jaws, the good Captain has some depth in the hands of this fine actor whose brief was surely just to make a two-dimensional authority figure of his part.

The smugglers’ attempts to dodge the authorities are what make this movie such good, roister-doistering fun. In one scene, a villager sends Collier’s entire company deep into Romney Marshes on a search for the night creatures, a diversion while his mates arrange a shipment of continental wine. It’s so high-spirited that you could forget smuggling was nothing like the knockabout high jinks portrayed here and personified in Mipps’s easy laughter. There’s nothing of the desperate cut-throatery of real life where these fellows are concerned. The smugglers are the good guys, and if there is a concern that we aren’t cheering them on enough it transpires Clegg is doing it all to put money back into the community, stealing from the rich - the government - and giving to the poor. Bless.

But then, Hammer’s mandate was rarely to offer a slice of gritty, hard life in their work but rather to entertain, and Captain Clegg delivers on that front. It might have been forgotten if not for the efforts of a group of loving restorers, and it’s certainly deemed to be among the lesser works of the studio’s catalogue, but the film represents nothing less than Hammer at its considerable creative peak.

‘Darling, I give you very best duck.‘

In You Only Live Twice, SPECTRE have their headquarters in a hollowed out volcano, complete with a retractable fake lake. The scheme involves playing off the Russians and Americans against each other in the space race by pretending to be ‘the other side’ and sending a shuttle off into the heavens to literally swallow satellites that are already out there. Watching it all happen, I was left thinking about how much their subversive antics would have cost and concluding that surely the money was better spent elsewhere. Come to think of it, if Blofeld aka #1 saw James Bond as such a threat, why didn’t he just divert a few million into some account that would pay for endless assassins, and keep hiring them until the job was done? After all, even 007 must sleep sometimes. They’d get him, if they really tried.

But then, looking beneath YOLT to find any sense of what’s going on is virtually impossible. By now, the Bond movie franchise had moved so far from its literary roots that very little beside the book titles remained of Ian Fleming’s source material. 007 himself was less a spy and more a kind of superhero, strolling out of danger with his suit uncreased and hair in place, an appropriate quip about the only acknowledgement he’d make that anything had in fact happened. In other words, it’s pure fantasy, comic book fare. Roald Dahl was given two rules before he went off to write the screenplay - (i) it has to be set in Japan (ii) SPECTRE’s base has to be inside a volcano, and the resulting script is a wild and crazy thing. Dahl truly lets rip on the narrative, including helicopters equipped with enormous magnets that can lift a car off the ground and Bond being disguised as a Japanese peasant for almost no reason at all.

For me, the movie is a guilty pleasure. I know that YOLT is a load of hogwash. I know that it probably should have suffered for Sean Connery’s half-hearted playing of the title role, let alone the flat disappointment of Donald Pleasance’s turn as Blofeld (previously an anonymous figure who was never seen by the audience). I know that this entry more than any other Bond film provided the material for Mike Myers’s Austin Powers trilogy. But I love it. Accepting YOLT for what it is, and ignoring the fact that the genuinely brilliant From Russia with Love was just three movies ago, it soon becomes clear that the producers wanted their audiences to have nothing more than good, knockabout fun with what was taking place on the screen and I think it achieves that.

The first big plus point comes with John Barry’s score. I haven’t discussed Barry’s work in too much detail when covering the previous Bond films. There’s a reason for that, and it is the sheer bodacity he brings to this movie. In places, YOLT’s score is like a mix of all the best bits from the previous outings. The Bond theme itself makes a welcome return as 007 fights enemy helicopters. Elsewhere, Barry comes up with an Orient-inspired title song, which features the beautiful tones of Nancy Sinatra, and then there’s ‘Capsule in Space,’ a rather gorgeous concoction of wonder and terror that accompanies shots of American and Russian satellites being swallowed up by SPECTRE vessels.

It’s widely believed that Lewis Gilbert made a fairly pedestrian fist at directing YOLT. Fortunately, he had Oscar-winning cinematographer, Freddie Young, on his staff, which means the film never looks less than gorgeous. You see Young’s hand in some of the early scenes, indulgent, expansive shots of Japan at sunset with orange skies framing the vista. Lovely stuff. Equally ravishing are the scenes where Bond flies over the countryside in Little Nellie. Below, Japan’s volcanic regions are lusciously framed and worthy of any travelogue. Elsewhere, the blistering script and high production values mean that all Gilbert really has to do is point the camera and shoot. YOLT is no director’s picture. Rarely is a great deal of imagination put into its composition, though there’s one effective shot where Bond is racing across a roof, pursued by many baddies, and the camera simply pans back to take a passive, bird’s eye view of the action.

In terms of its story, YOLT is forgettable; indeed the plot seems to have been set up to string together grand set pieces. At no point is it the most coherent piece of work, beginning with the pre-credits moment where Bond is ‘killed’ so that SPECTRE will stop pursuing him and thus allow him to infiltrate their plans undetected. Are there no other agents who could do this? Besides which, 007 doesn’t waste any time in getting himself noticed once he sets foot in Japan (after being fired out of a frickin’ submarine in the general direction of the Japanese coast, presumably somewhere near Tokyo because that’s where he pops up next), so what was the point exactly? Similar craziness comes later in the infamous scene where Bond is disguised as a Japanese peasant. Naturally, he leaves what is made out to be a lengthy process of prosthetic application (performed by girls wearing bikinis!) looking pretty much exactly the same as before, nor does there turn out to be any good reason for the work in the first place. By the time he’s made his way into SPECTRE’s volcanic HQ, the disguise mysteriously disappears, maybe out of sheer embarassment. In any event, this hasn’t stopped the scene from being lampooned to death, most effectively in Team America.

For all the criticism, once YOLT reveals its grandest effect - Blofeld’s hollowed out volcano, which cost anything over $1m to build at Pinewood studios - all is forgiven. It’s a superb set, produced on a vast scale, and demonstrated the producers’ commitment to spectacle over gritty realism. They had a point. The takings for Thunderball were such that audiences clearly wanted to see things to make their jaws drop and the sheer imagination that went into designing SPECTRE’s headquarters must have done just that. What made it even more gripping was knowing that the whole thing would be destroyed, Bond living to fight another day.

Only in this instance, Bond would indeed live but in a different guise. Connery made it clear during production that this would be his last turn as the spy, and even though the sentiment turned out to be premature, it made the hype surrounding YOLT all the more frenetic. What drove him to hang up the Walther PPK remains something of a mystery. The official line was the sheer level of hounding that Connery suffered at the hands of the media whenever he was filming as Bond. By all accounts, he enjoyed little to no privacy, though further causes could have been the way the character was changing into an invulnerable superhero, the lack of effort he had to put in as an actor when people turned up to see the sets, effects and locations, coupled with sheer boredom. There was certainly a point where this argument was concerned. By now, the franchise was developing into a circus attraction, a visually impressive fantasy ahead of such secondary elements as plot and character development. And ironically, YOLT turned out to be nothing like the box office bonanza that Thunderball had produced. With a new Bond came a fresh approach to the material, a back to basics effort that would turn the agent back into a human being. Of sorts.

‘Dear girl, don’t flatter yourself. What I did this evening was for Queen and country. You don’t think it gave me any pleasure, do you?’

Thunderball remains the most successful of all Bond movies at the box office. Adjusted for inflation, its take (at 2008 prices) was a formidable $966.4m. Neither is it hard to see why the film did so well. All the right elements were in place - Connery, Young, Barry, Binder, etc - along with the things that we now traditionally associate with the franchise. Much of the action takes place in the Bahamas, which have rarely looked more like a paradise location. Bond gets various glamorous women to play with, not to mention an array of enemies and the uncovering of a dastardly SPECTRE plot.

Scratch beneath the surface, however, and the cracks appear. After an extravagant pre-credits sequence in which Bond breaks just about anything worth breaking during a fight before escaping with the help of a rather unecessary jet pack, we get to meet this episode’s baddie. Enter Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi), also SPECTRE #2, a figure of sufficient portent to make gendarmes shy away from issuing him with a parket ticket yet in reality a hired hand to the still anonymous #1. A heavy he is, whether being effortlessly duped by 007 or letting the agent work under his nose for much of the movie’s duration. Largo has so many opportunities to see off Bond yet fails entirely to do so, instead allowing the agent to give him the slip again and again, not to mention making off with his ‘kept’ girl, Domino (Claudine Auger).

That wouldn’t be so bad, but much of Bond’s detective work takes place underwater. Thunderball’s producers clearly spent an awful lot of money on their acquatic scenes, enough to ensure we watch stuff happening beneath the waves again and again. The film scored a first for the detail and clarity of its underwater footage and for that feat alone it deserves some kudos. But the troubles with acquatic filming soon become apparent. One is that it is by definition slower and more sluggish than normal action. The second is that it isn’t often obvious who’s who; the protagonists wear swimming masks and that makes it difficult to pick people out, indeed in one action sequence the only way you can tell who’s Bond is from the fact that he alone is wearing shorts. The sheer number of underwater scenes doesn’t quite turn the film into ‘Thunderbore’ but it doesn’t fall too far short.

Things bode far from well during Bond’s stay on a health farm. His near death on a back stretching machine - followed by his vengenance involving a steam tub and a strategically positioned broom - along with his interminably slow uncovering of a SPECTRE plot is bad enough, but worse comes with his treatment of Nurse Molly (Patricia Fearing). 007 has his usual eye for the lady, but this is the first time in the series that his advances are more lecherous than charming; his wooing of her via an opportunistic bit of blackmail is uncomfortable, certainly from a twenty first century perspective, and has an unfortunate whiff of ‘Carry on Bond’ about it. I remember a time when the agent could win a girl’s heart with his winning smile and boyish quips; this is just seedy.

Of course, being a Terence Young movie Thunderball is never really bad. What irks is it’s nod to excess. It was felt quite clearly that high concept action is what audiences wanted, hence Thunderball’s budget being far greater than that lavished on any of the previous outings. Money was sunk into the replica model of the hijacked nuclear jet. A cool $500k went on Largo’s yacht, Disco Valante. Unfortunately, it seems this where much of the creative effort went also, leaving us with a good looking piece yet a drama that plods too often. It picks up whenever Fiona Volpe (Luciana Paluzzi) is on the screen, so much so that you can almost forgive the film for its bland lead villain. Fiona is SPECTRE’s femme fatale. Like any decent Bond bad girl (see also Xenia Onatopp (groan!) in Goldeneye), she’s instantly more attractive than the heroine and uses this as a weapon. When not luring the luckless Derval (Paul Stassino) to his doom, she’s bedding Bond himself, via the slaying of his assistant Paula (an underused Martine Beswick). Later, she very nearly sees off the agent, or at least puts him in a state of some peril, which is more than can be said for the fairly rubbish Largo. His weapon of choice - a lampoon-friendly shark-infested pool - can’t match Fiona’s deadly, desirable charms.

Fiona introduces herself to the movie with a seduction scene. She keeps Derval occupied before he goes off to test pilot a British Vulcan bomber, which just happens to be armed with two nuclear warheads. In anticipation of this, SPECTRE have spent two years training a doppelganger, who thanks also to plastic surgery looks and acts exactly like Derval, all the better for impersonating him. The double, Angelo Palazzi (also Stassino) kills the original and then naturally demands more money for carrying out his sabotage work on the plane. I like this bit, as much as I enjoy the scene where #1 kills a henchman for embezzlement (using a frickin’ electric chair, no less). It seems that SPECTRE, an organisation made up of crooks and thieves, occasionally has to deal with people from within who are trying to steal from it, which is entirely credible.

Thunderball runs for 130 minutes, which makes it the lengthiest of the Bond movies to date and also noticeably the flabbiest. Too often the action is cut short with scenes of Largo and 007 talking, and these bits are just weird. After all, Bond’s opposition to the eyepatch wearing villain is pretty much established from their first meeting and yet they maintain a strange semblance of feigned friendliness in their conversation. Certainly, Largo is blase enough to let Bond carry on with Domino. We’re supposed to believe that she helps James because she’s Derval’s sister and the agent recruits her to the cause by telling her of his fate. By this late point, however, she’s fallen for him already, indeed there’s no question she’s his from the moment he pulls her flipper from a coral in their opening seconds together. Auger certainly makes for a comely Domino, but she’s no match for Fiona in terms of sex appeal and simperingly messes up the one favour Bond asks of her. This leads to one of Thunderball’s most unintentionally comic moments. Largo advances on her, wielding what looks like a cigarette and some ice cubes and explaining that ‘This for heat, these for cold, applied scientifically and slowly’ will lead to untold levels of pain. No please, make it stop! Then she’s rescued by a scientist who has hardly appeared in the film up to this point, no doubt a character whose scenes have nearly all been cut. It’s a bit of a mess, in truth, and just as bad as the film’s conclusion, which involves Largo’s boat heading at top speed towards a reef, which is rather clumsily represented by the outside footage being played quickly through the yacht windows.

The special edition DVD features an excellent documentary on the Bond phenomenom, which of course it was by this stage. A mixture of audience favour and sheer momentum (they were releasing one film per year, putting it on a par with the rolling hype garnered by the Lord of the Rings trilogy) meant that by the time Thunderball was due for release over the Christmas holiday in 1965, you could buy just about anything featuring the 007 brand. The marketing and anticipation surrounding the movie meant it couldn’t fail, and it didn’t. Regardless of its ‘by the numbers’ direction and working to strict formula, the public lapped it up, greenlighting the direction into which the franchise was heading. Following its initial run at the theatres, Thunderball was rereleased as a double bill. One trailer on the DVD blends scenes from the movie with others off From Russia with Love, the films being shown on one ticket, and already there appears a gulf in class and imagination between the pictures. This wasn’t too gapingly apparent yet. Connery was still on board and the franchise retained enough ideas to keep Bond fresh. Yet Thunderball offered an early glimpse of what happened to the series when money and spectacle were chosen ahead of characterisation and plot development. It’s just okay, and that isn’t good enough for this secret agent.

Introduction (the following morning) - so was it worth stopping up for? Booking a day’s precious leave? I’ve had roughly two and a half hours’ sleep and now I’ve dropped mine wife off at the station and taken The Boy to school I am thinking very seriously about spending the rest of the morning in bed. For the record, my preparation for this year’s ’stop up’ was poor indeed. I’d had a long Sunday and no sort of sleep beforehand, which meant that when the ceremony slowed down at certain points I too began to drift. I remember a couple of occasions when I was reading what I had typed and not knowing what on earth I was rambling about.

Slumdog Millionaire’s triumph was certainly worth seeing. I reckon the British picture was good for its victory, though I was left wondering just how accidental its success had been. Was it the case that Slumdog really came from nowhere to be the year’s best film? Or had it been very cleverly marketed, the number of occasions when the crew’s feigned ‘What? Us? Our tiny film?’ comments starting to wear thin by Oscar night? We’ll never know for certain and it doesn’t really matter, of course. Slumdog is a great movie. The sight of producer Christian Colson sharing the stage with half the film’s cast and crew at the end of the ceremony was genuinely emotional. It had been a collaborative effort. It meant a lot to many people.

I was pleased that Milk turned out to be the main rival to Danny Boyle’s Mumbai adventure. As the evening wore on (and my God, didn’t it?), it was becoming increasingly clear that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button had been blown away. Sean Penn’s surprising - yet deserved - win in the Best Actor category hinted at some momentum gathering for Milk during the ceremony itself, though ultimately where it scored points was probably where it deserved to. After all, it was this year’s actors’ picture. Had Josh Brolin not been given the impossible job of winning over the late Heath Ledger for Best Supporting Actor, I’m sure he’d have clinched it, and if not him then how about James Franco?

Elsewhere, Kate Winslet’s Best Actress award was met with a near audible sigh of relief from, well, everyone. No longer do we have to hear about what a gracious loser she is. I bet the Academy is already looking forward to being held to emotional ransom by next year’s sob story. It was just a shame that Winslet won for The Reader rather than Revolutionary Road, which really coaxes the best out of her. Would it be overly cynical of me to suspect that the deciding factor was her willingness to wear nothing for large swathes of the former and that this as much as anything remains a tick box for actresses aiming for Oscar glory?

As for the ceremony itself, I didn’t expect a lot from Hugh Jackman yet his was a superb turn, a cheeky, amiable performance from someone who’s at his best when playing showmen. I wasn’t quite so sure about the format of bringing former winners in the acting categories onto the stage to eulogise about a current nominee direct to their face. The word ’sickly’ springs to mind, particularly when there were hints of insincerity in the praise e.g. Nicole Kidman saying all the right things about Angelina Jolie, yet refusing to look her in the face. How funny Rogen and Franco were when reprising their stoner roles from Pineapple Express is up to the viewer. I was left cold, but then the only dope-fuelled double act for me is Jay and Silent Bob, and besides it’s worth bearing in mind that the showpiece ceremony for the enormous American movie industry featured a long-running pot gag.

All in all, I really enjoyed myself, agreed with the majority of awards and thought it was a fantastic night for British talent. If I could only got some bleeding shut eye!

And now, on to the live blog, with spellings and grammar corrected where necessary, and the odd photo thrown in…

Preamble (11.30 pm) - Hello, good evening and welcome to TBW’s coverage of this year’s Academy Awards. I’ll be selflessly stopping up and commenting on the action, as it happens, and drinking lots and lots of Douwe Egbert; in fact plug it into my vein please.

In preparation, I decided to watch a previous winner of the Best Film category today. At a bum-numbing 251 minutes, it was the special extended DVD edition of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, the one with even more rings for your money. The trouble with this movie is that I’ve seen it so many times that I barely have to pay attention anymore; instead I just soak up the amazing visuals and bemoan the fact that Gandalf’s confrontation with the Witch King was omitted from the theatrical cut. It’s almost impossible to imagine a project like LOTR being greenlit now. It was a massive gamble and had the first episode been badly received could have lost stacks of money. Instead, the release of each instalment over a three-year period meant it built its own momentum. By the time the climactic episode came out, there was barely anything else worth bothering with. I know. I took The Boy to see Brother Bear at around the same time. The multiplex was packed, yet we were the only two people in our theatre.

Unbelievably, Return of the King won its weight in Academy Awards in 2004 - five years ago! Where does that time go? On the box now is Vanilla Sky, a movie with no claim on the Oscars (and rightly so) yet directed by Cameron Crowe, whose screenplay for Almost Famous snagged him a statuette in 2000. I quite like Crowe’s stuff. Whether his films are Oscar-worthy is a matter for bigger brains than mine, but he’s always accessible and likeable, even when turning out tosh like this.

Sigh! It’s still nearly two hours until Sky’s coverage begins. What to do until then? Tom Cruise’s wooing of Penelope Cruz on TV is starting to really irritate me. Maybe I’m tired. Or could it be the Cruise’s utter lack of sincerity?

11.35 pm - If you are planning to stop by this humble page this evening from time to time, or even if you aren’t, please take a peek at my article on this year’s nominees - here. Or check out my live blog from last year, when I couldn’t sleep, got up and found some bizarre logic in both watching and writing about the ceremony as it took place. This time, I’ve pre-booked the day off and caught as many of the movies that matter as I could.

12.15 am - Penelope Cruz rescues a mutilated Tom Cruise under a Monet sky, and it looks as though this could be the most easy to predict Academy Awards in some years. Slumdog and Danny Boyle are hot favourites to take the gongs for best film and director. You might as well catch a power nap when Heath Ledger wins the Best Supporting Actor award posthumously - it’s that open and shut, and by all accounts Kate Winslet is as close to a sure thing as her character is in The Reader. Things could be more interesting in the Best Actor category, where Sean Penn may yet buck the odds and beat Mickey Rourke to the honours. I haven’t seen The Wrestler so I have no idea how much of a renaissance Rourke undergoes, but he’d have to be pretty bloody good. Penn was excellent in Milk. So was Josh Brolin, but he’s up against Ledger and should therefore get comfortable in his chair.

12.50 am - Apparently I’m missing Fearne Cotton talking to Oscar hopefuls as they turn up, and suddenly Vanilla Sky isn’t so bad after all.

1.15 am - Oh god, not just Cotton, not even Cotton and Winkelman, but Gok Wan also. If there was a triumvirate of presenters that was spewed from the very bowels of hell, this would be it. We’ve got commercials now, and believe me it seems like a relief. Can we have the one featuring the guilt-ridden bloke and the dead kids please?

In fairness (and please appreciate I’m typing this out of a need to do something) Fearne’s job is pretty thankless, isn’t it? She’s being paid to schmooze with the stars and that can’t be easy. In her place, I just couldn’t be arsed and would end up getting exclusive interviews with no one, or if I’m really unlucky Mickey Rourke. That said, what are people going to say? Who designed their dress and how they rate their chances? It’s hardly must-see stuff, and perhaps that is why Sky have turned away from Fearne to interview Stephanie Beacham.

A nice mix of clips are on now that depict Brits winning Oscars. Julie Andrews sounded like she was very lovely, sweet and charming. She was also articulate in her acceptance speech. Will we say the same for Winslet?

1.30 am - I’m currently following the live blogs at the Guardian and BBC. The latter is filling in the time before things kick off by trying to work out the morning headlines. I like ‘Kate Winalot’ if Ms Winslet indeed turns out to be the best actress.

Winkelman introduces Danny Wallace and then cuts to Hollywood before he can get a word in. Not such a bad thing - I’m getting a bit sick of Wallace and his ‘everywhere-ness.’

Hugh Jackman is hosting the awards ceremony and he looks the part. He’s also quite witty and either I need to go to sleep or he’s broken into a complicated song and dance routine. This is fantastic. Really, it is.

1.40 am - Wow! Jackman kills it! He is Wolverine! This is already my favourite award ceremony of all time and nothing’s happened yet.

1.45 am - Sack the curtain opener!

1.50 am - Is it just me who thinks that Goldie Hawn is beginning to turn into the character she played in Death Becomes Her? Hawn is one of five previous Best Supporting Actress award winners hauled on stage to present this year’s statuette, which goes to Penelope Cruz. Fair enough, I guess. I really liked Vicky Cristina Barcelona but thought Rebecca Hall was actually the star turn. Still, any recognition for Woody Allen is better than none at all. Cruz goes on quite a bit in her acceptance speech. I typed most of this while she was banging on and I’m a two-finger typist using an old laptop.

2.00 am - Poor old Steve Martin. I can’t look at him without thinking of his mauling off of Dennis Pennis all those years ago. Hey, Steve got his own back, starring in The Pink Panther and all those other, er, great hit movies. His co-presenter for the Best Original Screenplay award, Tina Fey, gets more applause, for Dr Hfuhruhurr’s sake.

The presentation of the nominees is a classy affair in which bits of the script are read out over scenes from the movie. I like it. In a perfect world for us Brits, Mike Leigh would win this but it’s actually Dustin Lance Black for Milk; his speech is a testament of how he wrote the screenplay from a position of some emotional investment in the real-life figure.

Simon Beaufoy wins the Adapted Screenplay award for Slumdog Millionaire. Cool! It was a thrilling script packed with wit. Is this the first of many gold figurines for the dog of the slum variety?

2.10 am - Animated Feature is next. After a series of clips, WALL-E is named as Oscar winner. Quelle surprise! as the French would say. I have to admit to a soft spot for Kung Fu Panda but what do you do against the inevitability of Pixar?

Short Animated Feature is next, and will Pixar make it a double? No! It’s in fact La Maison en petits cubes, which is brilliantly hard to type for those of us trying to keep up with the breakneck pace of this year’s ceremony. Couldn’t they have just started it a couple of hours sooner and stretched it out a bit more? In any event, I have no idea what director Kunio Kato is on about.

2.18 am - The Art Direction award goes to Benjamin Button. My belief is that the ‘technical’ gongs will be shared between this and The Dark Knight in order to compensate them for the ‘major’ awards going elsewhere. Let’s see if I’m right.

2.20 am - It’s time for Costume Design, presented somewhat appropriately - if without much imagination - by Sarah Jessica Parker. Her co-presenter, Daniel Craig, looks a bit bored. This one is handed to The Duchess, a tip to the British and from the clips I’ve seen a rather lavish production. Personally (treachorously?), I wanted Revolutionary Road to get this but then I quite fancy buying a three-piece suit, slapping on the Dapper Dan and going to work for a 1960s advertising agency. Who wouldn’t want to do that?

Benjamin Button gets the award for Make-Up, and rightly so. Greg Cannom’s speech is a roll call of names and I quickly lose attention.

2.30 am - More clips, this time themed around romance, and a rare opportunity for me to take a breather and read through your comments.

That was quick. Off to make a brew.

2.35 am - Natalie Portman and Ben Stiller are here (on the telly, not in my living room and besides, I’d have little for them if they did show up other than the unedifying sight of someone in his pyjamas and dressing gown tapping away on a laptop and swearing at it because it’s a small keyboard not suited to his chubby fingers - damn my chubby fingers). Stiller is wearing a ‘comedy’ beard for no apparent reason and Portman doesn’t seem to know what to do about it, almost as though she’s acting against green screen.

The award for Cinematography belongs to Slumdog Millionaire and therefore another Brit. It’s Anthony Dod Mantle, who tells his kids off for still being up at half two in the morning. He’s not wrong. It is a school night, after all.

2.40 am - Oh, okay. Stiller was doing a clever pastiche of Joaquin Phoenix. It sailed straight over my head but many things do when you’ve been awake for nearly 24 hours. Hey, it’s my lifestyle choice.

2.47 am - I’m flagging now. The hysterical reprisal of their roles from Pineapple Express by Seth Rogen and James Franco didn’t raise much of a smile from this couch, and then I start to feel a bit irritable when they give the award for Best Short Live Action Film to the difficult-to-type Spielzeugland. Franco and Rogen manage to mispronounce the film and look pretty satisfied with themselves about it, but award winner Jochen Freydank has more than enough class to shrug it off. Good on him.

2.53 am - Oh yes - Jackman’s singing again. He can’t actually sing, but for sheer good-natured willingness and buffoonery you can’t knock him.

3.00 am - As the lad with the axe embedded in his head from The Shining once claimed, great party, isn’t it? Hugh Jackman is quickly emerging as the best of hosts. Beyonce Knowles has done a turn, which is ace, and there’s an air of everyone taking the bombast and pomp not too seriously at all. In other words, the stars have turned out tonight to entertain, which could have something to do with the recession, giving something back, etc.

Best Supporting Actor time and alleged to be the most clear-cut of awards. Still, the Academy goes through the motions, dredging up some previous recipients to praise the individuals nominated this time around. Unfortunately, this includes Cuba Gooding Jr, who gets to do the outraged schizz with Robert  Downey Jr’s turn in Tropic Thunder. Downey Jr laps it up. He isn’t here to win, after all, and as Kevin Kline gushes over Heath Ledger’s performance, the camera swoops to members of his family sat in the audience. If the award wasn’t signed, sealed and delivered beforehand, it is now, and up they step to collect the statuette. Winslet puts on her emotional face.

3.15 am - Here comes the award for Best Documentary, presented by Bill Maher who makes a few bums shuffle uncomfortably as he raises the always tricky subject of organised religion. If Man on Wire wins, it will be another British success, and that’s exactly what happens. Of all the documentaries nominated, this is the one I really want to see. The acceptance speech from Philippe Petit is a superb piece of showmanship.

In quick succession comes the Oscar for Documentary Short. This is handed to Smile Pinki.

3.25 am - Will Smith is here to tell us about Visual Effects. The award is a toss-up between The Dark Knight, Iron Man and Benjamin Button and it’s the latter that collects. As if to compensate it, The Dark Knight walks off with the Oscar for Sound Editing. I don’t know, readers (reader?); the nominated films seem pretty interchangeable to me. Iron Man was as good as anything in both categories, but were the films that won chosen because the Academy liked them more generally rather than in the specific category? Slumdog Millionaire gets the award for Sound Mixing. Fine by me, and dare I do the knucklehead bit and ponder over the difference between editing and mixing?

3.35 am - Will Smith stays on to present the award for Film Editing. And it’s Slumdog again! Chris Dickens collects on what is shaping up to be a big night both for Britain and for this amazing little film.

3.48 am - The TBW laptop is labouring now, having been made to work for a continuous three hour-stretch, and the person using it isn’t far behind. I find myself yawning through Jerry Lewis’s acceptance speech for the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian award, given for his charity work. Nothing wrong with Lewis’s words, more that I just want them to get on with it.

In the build-up to the music-related awards, we get some excerpts from the nominated scores. Time for a wee.

3.56 am - One emergency banana consumed and one award missed. It’s for Original Score, won by Slumdog Millionaire and A R Rahman, whose acceptance speech looks as though it’s been scribbled on the back of a coaster.

4.00 am - Strange. Rahman has collected his award and is then made to perform a couple of songs from Slumdog in the build-up to Best Original Song. In between his tunes is the other contender, Peter Gabriel’s Down to Earth as written for WALL-E, before the show ends with a weird collision of songs and their wildly different styles. It’s like a competition to see who can drown each other out, the Oscar going to the loudest singer. Rahman throws his head back, belts out Jai Ho and wins. He says it’s all about love, which strikes me as a well, dur! moment.

4.07 am - It’s now time for the Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film, which has always appeared to me a bit of an oddity as it seems to go to individual countries as much as the movies themselves. Liam Neeson presents with a wry wink… at who? Frieda Pinto is decoration. Departures wins for Japan. The fella who collects sounds like he’s auditioning for Banzai.

4.15 am - Blimey, there have been some notable deaths in the last year. Charlton Heston… Paul Newman… Roy Scheider… And that’s just the actors, nor have I mentioned the loss of Ricardo ‘Khaaaaaaaaannnnnnn!’ Montalban.

Ulp! Best Director time, and here’s Reese Witherspoon to introduce some true heavyweight names. And Danny Boyle, who clinches it for Slumdog Millionaire. Obviously it’s fantastic to see someone from northern England win such an important award, let alone from the city I call home. I think he’s brilliant. I would have given him the Oscar for Trainspotting, so this one only comes in thirteen years too late. A nice man and a deserving recipient.

4.28 am - Hankies out! The Best Actress award is here, and in the style of the evening is presented by five previous winners. Thrillingly, one of these is Sophia Loren, who still looks great.

Personally I reckon this is excruciating stuff. Shirley MacClaine is praising Anne Hathaway, to her face, in front of millions. It’s like having your end of year report read out before the entire school. Anyway, time for a tears check. Hathaway is going. Winslet looks ready to blub. Leo just seems happy to be there. Streep looks vaguely amused by it all. Jolie appears poised for disappointment though in all fairness she was the best I saw of this lot.

And of course Kate Winslet wins it (do you see?) for The Reader, the culmination of a seemingly endless quest for Oscar glory. Her speech proves her credentials for the award, an out of breath odyssey that suddenly becomes a poised torrent of words when it matters. Fair play to her. At last she’s done it - can this stop being an issue now?

4.38 am - Straight on to Best Actor. Sean Penn should win. Mickey Rourke probably will. I’m fashioning sticks to wedge my eyelids apart and I’ve got time to do it as the gushings from the likes of De Niro and Hopkins spill out. Come on! The previous award winners are delivering more actorly, mannered performances than the people they’re honouring.

Oh yes! Penn’s done it! Sean Penn wins for Milk, which is just great to see. Thoroughly deserved and I’m pleased to see at least one of my predictions be wrong. Really I am. Nobody wants a 100% predictable ceremony, do they?

4.50 am - As Penn delivers an elegant winner’s speech, I notice there’s only one award left to dole out, that for Best Film. Steven Spielberg is an obvious choice to present this one, with his Mekon head and geeky, nasal voice. Doesn’t he serve up this award every year? Sorry, but I’ve only just realised how big his head actually is - that’s one cavernous cranium, or an unfortunate meeting with his comb.

I reckon this one’s between Slumdog and Milk, with Benjamin Button an outside bet and the others making up the numbers. I like the splicing of old winners with the current nominees, in particular the footage of Ralph Fiennes in both Schindler’s List and The Reader.

What’s it to be then, dearie?

4.53 am - And with brilliant inevitability, it’s Slumdog Millionaire that wins. Producer Christian Colson shares the stage with much of the film’s cast and crew and seems to demonstrate just how much of a collaborative labour of love it was for everybody.

Right, that’s it. I’m cream crackered. Good night.

Just like last year, TBW will be stopping up on Oscar night, suited and booted for the occasion (pyjamas and dressing gown) and quaffing the finest beverages (instant coffee) with the stars (watching it on Sky). Hey, if you too are captivated by the glamour, insincere smiles from losers and shots of Jack Nicholson wearing his shades indoors, then why not let me know I’m not alone and leave a comment from time to time? It might not be as polished as The Guardian’s live blog, but I guarantee it will be just as world weary and snide.

In the meantime, I’ve gone to some effort this time around to actually watch many of the films that are nominated. This includes all five movies up for Best Film and various others, though to my own shame I’m yet to see more than one of the Foreign Language hopefuls. Once a Philistine, always a Philistine, it would appear. As usual, keeping up with the Oscars stops me from breaking my poor heart over trying to find an answer to Middlesbrough Football Club’s forlorn attempts to beat the drop.

According to Paddy Power, Slumdog Millionaire has emerged as the overwhelming favourite for glory tonight. Whether this is because it is the best thing on offer, or the influence of pre-Academy Awards bashes such as the BAFTA ceremony is anyone’s guess, though the British alternative was uncannily accurate at guessing the winners in 2008 and there’s no reason to suggest this year will be any different. Indeed, the pull of BAFTA is now so great that it can even persuade Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie to grace the ceremony with their presence, before cheekily sending them home without an award between them. Ha! Holding the BAFTAs before Oscar night has turned out to be a considerable masterstroke. In the past, no one of any note turned up to pick up their trinkets, whereas it has now become a fair barometer of where the Academy will shower their favour.

Another thing BAFTA got right was in its recognition of Hunger, which quite possibly was the best picture of 2008. Director and Turner Prize winner, Steve McQueen, was handed the Carl Foreman award for knocking out a bleak, visually intelligent piece of work that in all honesty knocked the socks off an obvious melodrama like The Reader. I was also quite surprised to find Revolutionary Road shunned by the Academy, nominated mainly in the design categories, which to me is a bit like saying there was no room for it in the ‘biggies’ but here, take something. Not only is it a better film than The Reader, it features a stronger performance from Kate Winslet whose tension fuelled on-screen chemistry with Leonardo DiCaprio beats any amount of bedroom gymnastics with David Kross. It’s wonderfully staged and at times almost unbearable. Sam Mendes really got it right with his choice of actors and adaptation of the subject matter; its omission suggests that the publicity teams for other movies were simply more on the ball when it came down to wooing the Academy.

As a fan of animation, I would like to have seen WALL-E nominated for best film. First (and crucially), because it was one of the best movies of the last twelve months. Second, it would be nice to come across more recognition for the work of animators like Pixar, who have been churning out top notch films for years. Finally, it’s obviously going to win in the category for which it has been nominated - Best Animated Feature Film - and I would like to have seen this go to Kung Fu Panda, which I thought was absolutely delightful. Waltz with Bashir, a daring and unique movie, has been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. Had it been placed correctly in the animation category, it would have given the Academy real headaches as it might be even better than Pixar’s latest offering.

Looking at the five ‘Best Film’ nominations then, let’s start with David Fincher’s long, expensive odyssey, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I don’t want to suggest there’s anything cynical in the making of this picture, but if I was to create a movie loaded to reap glory on Oscar night, Benjamin Button wouldn’t be far from the result. It makes great use of the latest cinema technology, tackles the kind of ‘fantastic stroke social statement’ premise that always goes down well with the Academy, features a cast that’s a mixture of Hollywood royalty (Brad Pitt) and award fodder (Tilda Swinton, Cate Blanchett), and is directed by someone who might no longer be the hip young thing responsible for Seven and The Game, but who is ready to enter the fold of establishment auteurs. Recent reviews of the film - especially from British critics - have derided it as Forrest Gump for the twenty first century, and indeed both movies enjoy the writing talents of Eric Roth. Apparently, this is a bad thing, though I thought Gump was really witty and entertaining, even if the awards damned it with faint praise.

If Benjamin Button reminded me of another movie, it was in fact Tim Burton’s Big Fish, which took similar slices from its main character’s life and descended into sentimental mush in its closing act. Unfortunately, Benji’s ‘closing act’ lasts for around an hour. The first half of the film is riveting, as our hero gets older/younger and goes off to war. Impressive is the movie’s work in matching Brad Pitt’s face with the body of a much older man, ageing his features similarly in the process. Once he catches up with Daisy (Cate Blanchett), however, the course of the movie is pretty much charted. Its revelations aren’t at all revelatory, and it winds up being a bit of a sugary mess. Worse still is its wasting of Julia Ormond who has little to do other than link the story together and track Hurricane Katrina as it looms over New Orleans. On the other hand, Tilda Swinton is great in her limited screen time, effortlessly providing the movie’s memorable female screen presence.

As I thought about what I didn’t like about the film, it occurred to me more and more that one of its biggest problems was Cate Blanchett. There was something too ’stagey’ about her performance. I never felt as though I was watching anything other than her acting, rather than her character. Contrast this with Angelina Jolie in Changeling and Blanchett’s failings become even more apparent. Though it could be suggested that Jolie’s hysterics in the movie is the actress screaming for Academy recognition, the fact is she does a superb job as Christine Collins and I believed in her completely. When discussion over this year’s Oscars started, it seemed she simply had to turn up to the ceremony to collect the award for Best Actress, but now all the momentum is with Kate Winslet for The Reader. Neither as good as the hype might suggest, nor as bad as the claims of its UK reviews, Stephen Daldry’s movie features a strong turn from Winslet, also from David Kross as her student lover. Its first hour is the better. Long before the Nazi element of the story is introduced, it’s about a young man’s passionate affair with an older woman. While his beautiful student peers lounge around pools in their swimwear, Kross shuns the youthful things for Winslet’s thirty-something tram conductor. He’s fantastic, conveying perfectly the self-satisfaction and first flush of love he’s experiencing, whilst there’s just enough awkwardness and reserve in Winslet’s work to hint at her inner turmoil.

The movie starts to fall away once her SS past is exposed, though during her trial you are left with the uncomfortable sense that your sympathies are actually with someone who has knowingly played a part in the deaths of hundreds of people. I also felt that Winslet’s character could have done herself a lot more good had she just learned to read sooner. Instead, through her unwillingness to admit to her lack of education she spends more years in prison than she might have done, listening to tape after tape of readings that have been posted to her by her former lover, now played by Ralph Fiennes with trouble etched permanently on his face. He’s over-earnest. The scene between them as she is about to be released, now an old woman, ought to be a dramatic high point. Instead, I wanted them to skip to the end.

Of the two movies based on real life events, I liked Milk better. Gus Van Sant’s biopic of California’s first openly gay elected official is a sympathetic and touching piece, energised by a winning performance by Sean Penn. Though it seems Mickey Rourke is the overwhelming favourite for Best Actor (I haven’t seen The Wrestler, but other people’s comments would suggest it’s as much a sympathy vote as it is genuinely deserved), Penn is excellent as the charismatic, likeable and ultimately accessible Milk. I also really liked James Franco and Josh Brolin; the latter just can’t seem to be bad in any of his movies, even if the films themselves aren’t that great. Milk does an amazing job of casting actors and making them up to look like the people they’re playing. Over the closing credits, shots of the actors are followed by those of the real people; Brolin’s resemblance to Dan White is really quite uncanny.

If I have a problem with Milk, it is that its argument is so one-sided that those in opposition to the gay rights movement are almost lampooned as facile bigots. Hey, perhaps it was like that. Maybe State Senator Briggs was exactly as dumb as he’s made to look here. It’s just that Denis O’Hare has little choice but to play him as a closed, outright baddie. All he missed was the top hat, cape and waxed moustache and we would have known he was a proper villain. Quite simply, we don’t get enough of ‘the other side’ to appreciate where everyone is coming from and to get some sense of proportion. Then again, it’s easy to forget that we live in more enlightened times and that, scarily enough, the events depicted in the film took place a mere thirty years ago. The overriding impression I got was that Milk is indeed good for you.

Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon depicts the real life interview between David Frost and Richard Nixon following the President’s resignation and disgrace. The film is based on a play and features many of the same actors from the stage, including its principals Michael Sheen and Frank Langella. The focus has been on Langella, who has been nominated for Best Actor, though it’s Sheen who really commands the screen in his chameleonic interpretation of David Frost. I can’t wait to see his take on Brian Clough in the upcoming The Damned United.

Bizarrely enough, once the movie has got the introductions out of the way its structure is similar to a Stallone Rocky movie. There’s the training (research for the interview), pre-bout banter and each interview session is staged like a boxing round, both combatants circling each other and jabbing with their teasing questions from Frost and the pummel of Nixon’s blustering replies. They even have people coming up to them after each ’round’ to say things like ‘Good answers’ and wind them up for the next session. As it turns out, Nixon has Frost against the ropes for much of the interview before disappointingly he just seems to cave in and give up the fight. Frost is portrayed rather unfairly as a bit of a chancer who happens across the opportunity for a scoop and lucks out by being in the right place when the ex-President turns all confessional. It isn’t a particularly good film, in all fairness, but it does tackle a great subject and I suspect its nomination lies in America’s reconciliation of itself with the memory and legacy of Richard M Nixon. For an altogether better quality and more rounded feature on one of the more complicated personalities to hold the office of President, I would recommend Oliver Stone’s Nixon.

That leaves Slumdog Millionaire, which is the pick of the five nominees and, should it win, will give Danny Boyle the recognition he deserves. Boyle’s directorial career is one I have been able to follow throughout my adult life, starting with his TV work and breakthrough feature, Shallow Grave. Even many of Boyle’s failures have been more interesting than many people’s successes. Slumdog is captivating from start to finish. Using as its spine the simple concept of someone appearing on Who wants to be a Milliionare? the film explores life in the Mumbai slums and features unsettling scenes of child mutilation, made worse by the knowledge that these things really happen. Other scenes, such as the young Jamal’s willingness to crawl literally through shit in order to get an autograph from his favourite Bollywood star, are trademark examples of the biting humour from Boyle and writer Simon ‘Full Monty’ Beaufoy.

Slumdog has been marketed as a ‘feelgood’ movie, though you will have do an awful lot of feeling bad before you get to the ‘good’ part. The gritty subject matter doesn’t always gel perfectly with the rather coincidental progression of the plot and Jamal’s romance with Latika, which at its heart is the stuff fairytales are made of. But then, even the stoniest hearted critic should agree it’s a great yarn, told with pace and style. The action never lets up and it’s some way into the picture before you realise you are reading subtitles much of the time. It’s the only picture within the list of nominees that I would regard as essential viewing, and the one I believe will last.

Of the rest, it seems the public is disappointed to find The Dark Knight failing to make the Best Picture category, its sole nomination in the majors being Heath Ledger’s ’sure thing’ for Best Supporting Actor. I have to admit to being one of the very few who didn’t think it changed my world, and I certainly missed the sense of fun that was present in such offerings as Iron Man. Still, my criticism would suggest superhero films really can’t win. When we slate them for being too ‘comic book’ a serious director like Christopher Nolan produces a sober crime flick, only to come across as lacking in thrill value. I’m sure The Dark Knight will make up for it in the technical categories, where Benjamin Button provides the heavyweight opposition. I really enjoyed Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and though I’m pleased that Penelope Cruz is leading the charge for Best Supporting Actress would like to offer a small shout for Rebecca Hall, who’s radiant in Woody Allen’s most entertaining film in ages. And how about some props for This Way Up, the brilliant and good natured short animated feature from Adam Foulkes and Alan Smith? You can watch it online here. It’s up against Pixar’s Presto, which is as funny as you’d expect, so much so that you can almost forget the technical wizardry that’s gone into it.
Finally, my obligatory punt for who will win, and who should, and how much egg there’ll be on my face later when it turns out to be completely wrong:

I don’t know why I watch ‘teen flicks.’ They just make me feel nostalgic for a time in my life that wasn’t very good when it was actually happening, perhaps because so often these films present a stylised vision of being between the ages of 16 and 19 that doesn’t ring true in reality. The music’s much better in the movies also. I guess the pick of the genre when I represented the target audience was Heathers and Pump up the Volume. Both starred Christian Slater, then the prototype angry young man for all casting needs. In Heathers, Slater plays the coolest kid in school, but he’s also a psycopath, bumping off the ‘elite’ clique of girls - all called Heather - when not wooing Winona Ryder. The underrated Pump up the Volume cast him as Hard Harry, a painfully shy bookworm during the day and by night the uber-hip DJ who reaches out to ‘the kids’ and instils rebellion. Harry’s signature tune is Leonard Cohen’s Everybody Knows, here transformed into a calling card for teen angst and bad behaviour.

Both movies dangle their feet over the waters of fantasy. Their plots are possible yet highly unlikely, though they’re not quite as implausible as the wish-fulfillment likes of Weird Science and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, nor as out there as Donnie Darko, probably the best teen flick of them all… if indeed a teen flick is what it is. The current crop are more realistic. The killer soundtracks remain but the stories are believable and the casting reflect this. Whilst Slater was far too good looking to truly identify with, recent efforts like Juno and Superbad showcase the earthy talents of Michael Cera. If anyone could play the boy next door, Cera is surely it. Few people do awkward better, and though there’s definitely something about him, he’s nobody’s idea of the new Johnny Depp. What he reminds me of most is a young Woody Allen. He has the slightly whiney, high pitched voice, not to mention the awkward mannerisms. Only a pair of thick-rimmed glasses and self-depreciating humour would complete the Allen-isation.

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist is the ideal vehicle for Cera, the only real concern being that he has proved he can do this kind of thing with some ease and must be ready to move on. The film’s story is simple, proto-teen flick fare. Cera plays Nick. He is the guitarist and sole heterosexual band member of The Jerk Offs, and he’s also failing to get over his break-up with Tris (Alexis Dziena). Going down the classic dumped bloke route of making CD compilations for her, little does Nick know that she bins the discs within moments of receiving them. What Tris fails to realise is her schoolmate and rival, Norah (Kat Dennings) is rescuing the CDs and falling in love with their maker. During a fateful night out in Manhattan, Nick and Norah’s paths collide. Their relationship develops via an evening of hunting down Norah’s drunk friend and an elusive band that both characters admire. But will love blossom, or will Nick’s freshly scorned ex, Tris, spoil the party?

It’s slight stuff, and the trouble with it is that you don’t need to be a veteran of teen flicks to see where the story’s going. Nick and Norah are obviously perfect for each other from the start. Tris is obviously a cow. No amount of clever little subplots and moments of black humour can hide the fact that there’s little going on in terms of narrative development. For that, it’s worth returning to Juno, in which it was never totally clear whether the eponymous heroine was going to wind up with nice Paulie. But then Juno won an Oscar for its screenplay. It had depth, albeit worn lightly. Nick and Norah is all froth. It’s characters are neatly drawn yet the story comes straight from the pen of Jane Austen, only advanced a couple of hundred years and featuring the music of We are Scientists and Vampire Weekend.

What saves it are the winning performances of its two leads. Cera is of course on reliable territory. After playing similar-to-identical characters in Superbad and Juno, he can no doubt phone in his work by this stage, but he isn’t at the point where it’s become too tiresome and that matters. Dennings is a revelation as Norah. Quirky - though not as defined by it as was Ellen Page in Juno - and giving every impression of acting naturally, she’s absolutely adorable. Her ’secret’ comes out pretty quickly, but knowing this doesn’t really spoil her character. She could be a major star in the making. The chemistry between her and Cera makes this writer hope that it won’t be the last time they team up on the screen.

Good support is offered by the rest of the cast. The pick is Ari Graynor as Caroline. Norah’s best friend, Caroline promises she won’t get too drunk before they go out, only she does exactly that, spending the majority of the film embarking on a pissed adventure that’s both nightmarish (check out the toilet scene) and very, very funny. It’s the sort of booze-addled rollercoaster we’ve all been on at some point and Graynor looks scarily authentic when riding it.

Nick and Norah’s finest asset is its release date. Recently, I’ve been watching the Oscar hopefuls. Of the ‘Best Film’ contenders, I only have Milk yet to see and this isn’t an accident as it looks like a fairly dry viewing experience. Given the ‘quality’ on offer at this time of year, it’s great to watch a puff pastry light teen flick like Nick and Norah. It isn’t much, but it doesn’t have to be, and I found myself wishing only good things for them as the movie’s ninety minutes flashed past. On the downside, one of the best things about the likes of Heathers was what it had to say about the feelings of alienation and anger that evey teenager experiences. That’s absent here. Nick and Norah in fact has nothing to tell us, and that makes it a fun but unmemorable watch.

WARNING - THIS ARTICLE PRETTY MUCH GIVES AWAY THE ENTIRE PLOT OF THE MOVIES!

Ironically, I bought The Bride of Frankenstein in a DVD pack alongside Frankenstein for £4.99, as a promotional effort geared towards Van Helsing. With the latter serving as an homage to the classic Universal monster movies, rereleasing the old things in cheap, accessible double bills was a great thing to do, only they happen to be far superior to the Hugh Jackman affair, which by most standards was somewhat underwhelming. Not only could Helsing’s director, Stephen Sommers, have learned something from watching these movies again, but their budget price availability brought them home to a new generation of viewers. Whether you find the horror flicks of the 1930s to be defined by their tameness or their contemporary power, you can’t really call yourselves fans of the genre if you haven’t soaked them up at some point. Alongside the likes of Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolfman and their mates, ‘Franky’ stands as a template for most horror movies that have followed. You can see its influence in nearly everything, from the cheapest nasty through to £100m blockbusters. And of those classic monsters, Frankenstein’s monster remains the most powerful.

Both movies were based on Mary Shelley’s novel, the gothic bestseller that has its mythical roots in a contest between Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and herself whilst holidaying, an attempt to see who could come up with the scariest yarn. Mary’s tale, about the moral horrors of dabbling with creation, effortlessly beat the lads, and went on to become a favourite not only of readers, but also those looking for a good story to be adapted for the theatre. By the time James Whale made the now definitive 1931 version, it had been doing its rounds on the stage for some years, and various silent efforts for the screen were already gathering dust.

Yet for all that, Frankenstein the novel is hardly an obvious source for all this attention. It’s a good read, but the scares take some time to arrive, and in fact it works much better as a philosophical poser than as straight horror. In the book, the creature is most certainly not the real monster. Reviled by its maker almost as soon as he brings it to life, the luckless thing finds itself shunned and wandering the local forests, scaring everyone who comes across its path until by chance it is taken in by a blind hermit desperate for company. As a result, it learns to speak, and eventually confronts Frankenstein to demand from him a mate. With the threat of danger to his own fiance hanging over him, the scientist returns to his research and indeed creates a woman, only the thought of these creatures propagating detests him to the extent that he destroys it before it gets a chance to live. The fiance then dies at the hands of the creature, exactly as he grimly promised. What follows is a spiral of self-destruction as both creator and creation dance around each other, one demanding the other’s obliteration, the second unable to understand its own existence.

The immediate loathing that strikes every character who sees the monster seems to have been the reason for all the plays and films. Everyone loves a good scare and make-up maestros worked their socks off to knock out creations that could inspire ever greater degrees of revulsion. Quite often however, the aim of the producers was simply to frighten their audiences, to turn the monster into a mindless killing machine. Whale’s film was the first to take a different approach.

It was released in 1931, on the back of the box office winner, Dracula. That movie’s star, Bela Lugosi, was originally scheduled to play the monster, but turned down the role because of the lashings of make-up involved. It instead went to little-known English actor, Boris Karloff, whose gaunt, angular features were perfect for bringing out the deathly, pallid visage of the monster. In the movie, he doesn’t put in an appearance for thirty minutes or so. Until that point, the narrative concerns itself with Henry (Victor in the novel - no idea why it’s changed) Frankenstein, a brilliant young scientist who has been shunned by the community for his blasphemous belief in the ability to produce artificial life. Played by stage star Colin Clive, he’s a study in barely suppressed dementia, a genius who is forced to rob graves to provide body parts for his creation. Eventually, he strikes gold. On a visually stunning stormy night, the monster lies under sheets and bandages, waiting for the final spark of life. A burst of lightning is the key, the sudden electrical energy that is the secret of animation. Amidst Frankenstein’s laboratory, a playground of machinery, flashing lights and crackles and hums, the monster’s fingers move, and with a triumphant cry the doctor declares he knows what it’s like to be God.

The next we see of Henry, he’s having a satisfied smoke and looking decidedly pleased with himself. Confronted with his former University professor, he reveals his creation for the very first time. Painfully slowly, wringing out every last knot of tension, the monster enters the room, shuffling in backwards, so that the camera can linger on him as it turns around to face us. We all know what we’re going to see, but imagine it’s 1931 and you don’t have all those other horror movie precedents to cushion the shock. Lifeless eyes stare out from a heavy brow, thin lips stark against pale, alabaster skin, and above the scar running along its forehead is the flat head, mottled with limp black hair that barely covers the stitches. It’s a horrific sight, designed to repulse, and later the monster’s attitude seems to match its cruel visage by killing Frankenstein’s assistant and going on the rampage. It turns out the same assistant had been teasing it with fire before it turned on him. And then we see Frankenstein’s look of terror as he is informed the prized brain he stole for the monster is that of a sub-intelligent criminal. Oh dear…

But the monster itself is an innocent. It plays with a little girl for a moment, tossing flowers into a lake with her, before it unwittingly throws her in after them, not knowing what’s going on as she drowns. The scene was considered so hard going by the censors of the time that it was cut out, only being restored much later. In the original edit, we see the monster and girl larking around in one scene; the next shows her father carrying her dead body through the streets. It’s enough to assemble an angry mob of villagers, wielding the vintage pitchforks and torches and determined for retribution. It’s joined by Frankenstein himself, who’s just as keen to destroy his creation. He has seen the monster almost kill his own bride, Elizabeth, and is thus persuaded it has to go. The crowds pursue it to an old mill, but not before it captures the doctor himself. In a final act of pathos, as the mill is being burned to the ground it throws Frankenstein to a fiery death and then falls itself, presumably gone for good.

Or has it? The success of Frankenstein brought demands for a sequel, though Whale himself was far from enthusiastic to be involved again. The same was true for Karloff, who didn’t miss the hours of preparation before each day’s filming. His was a painful experience, partly from having to act in weighed down boots to give him a lumbering gait, also after a scene in which he had to carry Frankenstein and damaged his back. Money however talked the loudest. The production team were handed a considerably larger budget to come up with the follow-up, a sequel that would fly in the face of conventional wisdom by being far superior to its predecessor.

The 1931 original remains a true classic, and much imitated in later years, but it’s by no means perfect. For one thing, it moves slowly, taking as much time as possible before revealing the monster, which increased the anticipation at the time, but surely has current viewers watching the clock. It’s clear also that the first sight of the monster - artfully done, with successive shots moving in closer to Karloff’s dead face - is its biggest treat. Once that’s out of the way, the narrative moves to a quite obvious conclusion, whilst it’s never fully clear why the doctor doesn’t take a more protective role over his creation. He’s persuaded quickly enough that it’s a bad thing and that he must abandon it, despite all that work putting it together in the first place. Like everyone else, by the end he wants nothing more than its destruction.

All the same, it’s a masterly work in terms of technical production. The lighting is superb, the acting consistently good. Frankenstein’s laboratory looks great, and of course the amazing make-up work done to create the monster itself is the stuff of legend. What Bride does is take these elements, throws in a gripping story and adds humour to produce what may be the great horror film of them all.

It opens by taking us back to the moment after the novel was first written. Byron and Shelley are both spellbound by Mary’s work, and make a big fuss over the fact that - in their terms - such a pretty thing can conjure up a book as frightful as Frankenstein. She explains that the story doesn’t end with the twin deaths of creator and creation. Taking us through a brief recap of earlier events, she begins the story at the very point the last one ended. Frankenstein’s supposedly dead body is pulled from the wreckage and carted off to his stately home. In the meantime, the parents of the first movie’s murdered girl determine to ensure the monster is gone. It hasn’t. As luck would have it, the creature dropped into an underground cavern, and makes short work of both mother and father before shuffling off into the wild once again.

We don’t see much of the monster for a while. The story picks up with Henry, who recovers from his near death experience, and nobly vows to Elizabeth that this is the end of all his experiments. He should be so lucky. Enter Doctor Pretorios, played with a unique combination of sinister campness by Ernest Thesiger. Pretorios has been working along similar lines to Frankenstein, and now wants to collaborate with him on creating a mate for the monster. At first, the Baron wants nothing to do with it, but Pretorios persuades him with a mixture of threats and tapping into his desires to improve on his work. There’s a comic moment where Pretorios demonstrates the results of his own science, as a number of miniature humans are revealed, living in jars and dressed up as kings, queens and wizards. At one point, the king escapes from his bottle and attempts to woo the queen, before he’s picked up and dumped unceremoniously back.

At first, Frankenstein is willing to share his knowledge, and the pair work together on a new creation. They’re assisted by two grisly heavies (as opposed to hunchback Fritz who worked alone in part one), whose duties consist of finding bodies to be used. This mainly involves robbing graves, but they’re not averse to killing the odd citizen themselves if needs be.

We then cut back to the monster, who is wandering through a lush forest. The music joining it is light and cheery, like it’s the start of a new and better chapter for the misunderstood creature. In a marked contrast to the first episode, the monster discovers a young woman drowning, and pulls her out of the water to safety. Her reaction? The usual abject horror. Her cries bring the mob back, and this time they catch the monster, tying it to a stake and later locking it up in a prison cell. But normal bars can’t hold a monster such as this. Within moments, it has broken free, torn through the village and returns to the wild.

Is there any hope for the monster, who by now could be forgiven for developing a complex? Clearly, it’s a ‘he’ by now, as it takes on greater human attributes, and at one point comes close to knowing happiness. Chancing across a house in the thick of the forest, the monster learns it belongs to a blind old man living by himself. By chance, the man wants exactly the same things as the creature - companionship, and pretty soon, they’re shacked up together, enjoying food, wine, and what looks to me like a decent-sized spliff. The reaction to smoking on the monster’s face suggests as much, in any case. Most importantly, ‘he’ learns speech, something Karloff was quite opposed to, though he was wrong - the monster is suddenly even more human, an important element to his character as he remains a fugitive. His bliss can’t last. Hunters arrive at the cottage, and upon sight of the monster chase him back into the woods. Alone again, he stumbles through what else but a graveyard shrouded in mist. One gravestone is a crucifix, which carries enough obvious images for the viewer, but the more revealing one is a grim figure of Death. However much the creature wants peace and friendship, he will always be associated with death, and we see him disappear in a catacomb.

But he isn’t alone. Pretorios and the henchmen are removing corpses, and as the latter take their coffins away, the doctor remains, enjoying lunch on top of a sarcophagus. Enticed by the sight of wine and the smell of cigar smoke, the monster is lured out. Pretorios doesn’t shrink. He shows not the mildest concern as he shares his table. These unlikely allies are about to learn that working together is very good for them, as meanwhile Frankenstein is having big doubts. His initial enthusiasm for the scheme has passed, and his own morals are telling him that once is enough, twice quite ridiculous. Unfortunately, he isn’t given the chance to turn aside. Pretorios kidnaps Elizabeth with the monster’s help, and they both force Frankenstein to complete his work… or else.

We then move back to the laboratory. As before, everything happens in a Gothic tower, somewhere on a remote hilltop. In a mirror of the first movie, the doctors go through the routine of bringing the bride to life, amidst equipment that is spectacular enough to suggest the process of doing so is well beyond the average human mind. And give her life they do. Frankenstein and Pretorios prepare the bride, fitting a white dress around her, letting her totter around a little. Unlike the monster, she actually looks like a piece of work. Elsa Lanchester played her, in a curious parallel to her other role in the film, that of Mary Shelley herself. Despite her now famous jerky head movements and wild black hair pouring from her head, complete with white streak, she’s very nearly a vision, and a clear inspiration for Marge Simpson. She makes a step towards Frankenstein, as though he’s the one she’s intended for, but life isn’t that perfect. The monster comes into view. He’s attracted. She, like nearly everyone else he’s come across, is revolted, letting out a clipped cry of horror as he approaches. In one of the film’s best moments, he tries to sit with her, and stroke her hand. It’s not going to happen. The bride stares at what is holding her, lets out another wail and at that point the monster seems to know that whatever else might happen, he isn’t going to find a female companion. In his eyes, it’s better to die than live alone, hunted and despised. He allows Frankenstein to escape, but sends Pretorios and his bride - who hisses at him, catlike, as though he hasn’t endured enough of her disgust - to hell by destroying the laboratory. The last we see is Henry and Elizabeth running away as the tower collapses in on itself.

The film’s production is superb. With his lavish budget, Whale was able to create a much larger world for his story than in the first movie, and we never see where the money goes better than in the climax, in Pretorios’s funfair of a laboratory. In terms of effects, it’s a world away from the rest of the era. The scene with the miniatures is smooth, beautifully conceived and doesn’t clash too jarringly when superimposed against the lifesize actors. However, it’s the story and the acting that really sell it. Compared with Frankenstein, Bride is a real thriller, peeling back its revelations with every scene. If the mere sight of the monster did the business earlier, the need for upping the ante this time around is felt clearly. Giving us a second manmade creature isn’t enough. There are subplots running throughout, from the occasional focus on Frankenstein’s maid, played with hammy hysteria by Una O’Connor, to the more important bit about Elizabeth being kidnapped. It’s worth remembering that this is a 75-minute film - so much is crammed into it that there’s no chance of flabbiness. At no point does it feel ponderous and worthy.

As far as the acting is concerned, it’s difficult to see past Boris Karloff, who is billed simply as KARLOFF in the credits. That’s an improvement on part one, where a stark question mark sits in the ‘Players’ column next to the Monster, as if we may believe for a moment it really might have been created from spare parts. Here, Karloff rules. He fills every scene with a combination of pathos and menace. It’s a tough job to do, but despite the 40-odd pounds of make-up, prosthetics and weights, he pulls it off, making us both fear and feel sympathy for his creature. The scenes in which he is supposed to provide the laughs work equally well. The expression on the monster’s face as he tries cigarettes and alcohol for the first time is a picture - we’ve all been there, mate. Ernest Thesiger as Pretorios provides fine support, turning out to be one of the campest villians in horror movie history, a bit like watching a malevolent Charles Hawtrey. Thesiger can silence his opponents with a stare; he can also reduce us to hysterics with his pithy asides and black comedy. As in the first film, Colin Clive walks the line between sanity and madness suitably well, and there’s also great support from Valerie Hobson as Elizabeth. She was 17 when she appeared in this picture, but you wouldn’t know it. Franz Waxman’s luxurious score is a real thing of beauty, the music accompanying both the monster and his mate a sublime mixture of strangeness and doomed romance.

The Bride of Frankenstein does what every really good sequel ought to - it expands its own universe, offering something new in the spirit of the original, whilst not being a simple retread. It’s also a subversive film, in the sense that lashings of camp humour are allowed to float past the censors and onto the screen, hidden within the plot but noticeable to the modern viewer. This may be the best horror film of all time though like most movies from the 1930s it has inevitably dated. Scenes that might have put contemporary audiences in shock are so mimicked and parodied to our well trained eyes that its effects have no chance of remaining as powerful. But then, true horror is about more than being simply scary. When done properly, it should force us to run a gamut of emotions, particularly empathy for the monsters therein so that unlike, say Freddy Krueger, we can appreciate why they’re the twisted things they are, why they are a menace. Bride achieves that perfectly. From the opening through to Frankenstein’s ‘She’s alive! Alive!’ cry, Karloff makes us see what being a monster is all about, and indeed is the most human of all the characters by the end.

Over the weekend, I watched Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, the biographical documentary that was packaged with the ‘Stanley Kubrick: Collection’ set. How it made me want to catch up with some of the old master’s work, not least the series of earlier works (Killer’s Kiss, The Killing, Paths of Glory) I bought recently and is now sat on a shelf begging ‘Play me… play me…’

It also got me thinking about The Shining, the only Kubrick I ever felt able to comment on and did so in an article I wrote several years ago. The trouble with The Shining, let alone the trouble with Kubrick generally, is that with each viewing of the movie I have very different reactions and feelings to what’s happening. Sometimes I think it’s all in crazy Jack’s head. On other occasions I watch it as a straightforward ghost story. Both interpretations work, as do various alternatives - is it all in Danny’s head?

Ultimately all that really matters is The Shining’s status as a great movie. It’s very scary, particularly in a creepy, unsettling way, and it leaves more questions than answers, which all good horror movies should. To date I am yet to see anyone look more frightened in a film than Shelley Duvall, and hopefully that wasn’t the culmination of regular bollockings from Kubrick. It contains many memorable scenes. Among the best has Wendy reading through Jack’s ‘writing,’ a bit of movie magic so potent that plans are afoot to publish a Torrance manuscript. But there are so many, from the camera tracking Danny Big Wheeling along the endless hotel corridors through to Jack standing over a replica of the maze before it becomes the maze itself, complete with Wendy and Danny trying it out. And what about Jack’s conversation with Lloyd, the demon bartender of the Overlook? Or his chat with Grady, the tension heightened by the fact both protagonists are almost perfectly still while delivering their lines?

Memorably, Stephen King disliked Kubrick’s interpretation of his novel, disagreeing entirely with the choice of acting personnel. Had the author been given his own way, Jon Voight might have been cast as Jack, the logic being that - as in the book - the character would experience a descent into madness, whereas Nicholson plays him as already being at least halfway there. King also saw Duvall as the wrong choice for Wendy. In his eyes, she looked too emotionally damaged already, before having to deal with Jack’s antics in the Overlook. Needless to say, King was wrong. Nicholson and Duvall are superb in The Shining, giving definitive performances, whilst the casting of Steven Weber and Rebecca de Mornay in the King-approved, 1997 mini-series led to an unmemorable experience and a largely forgotten production.

Anyway, what follows is my rather lengthy review from 2004, written for a long-dead website. This is kind of a Director’s Cut, tidied up with bits cropped and added here and there. I really like this film and intend to follow publishing this piece with another viewing, lights off and surround sound on for that supremely unsettling score and disturbing sense of claustrophobia. All work and no play…

—

There was once this haunted house in the middle of nowhere. During the summer, it was a hotel, and lots of people stayed there, never seeing the ghosts. But later, when the snow fell and the house was cut off from the outside world, and only the caretaker and his family remained, the ghosts came out…

The Shining is about more than that, of course. ‘Haunted house’ stories are ten a penny, and most of them follow the same sort of path. Where The Shining differs is in its subtlety, the inference that maybe, just maybe, there are no ghosts at all, and that what you’re seeing is a family breaking through the strain of being locked up in a building together with no realistic route of escape. There’s plenty in the movie to suggest this isn’t the case, that what we’re watching is indeed the classic tale of a man falling under the presence of malevolent spirits, but I don’t think things are ever that easy.

I read the book long before seeing the film. Back in my early teens, Stephen King was more or less the gateway into adult literature yet in the specific case of this book, I didn’t think it was one of his best. All the ingredients were there, but it just didn’t appear to deliver a spooky whammy in the way Salem’s Lot did, nor did it have the emotional core of Pet Sematary. It fell way behind Misery in terms of sheer suspense, the latter being a tome I read in several breathless hours. The novel of The Shining had a greater sense of fantasy, of being a tale of the supernatural, than the picture - there aren’t, for instance, any shrubberies that come alive in the celluloid version, and a good thing too.

King’s novels were great because they could be genuinely scary, believed in the power of building up tension (this is his secret; not that it’s really a secret at all, but you have to appreciate his ability to mount the suspense until it hangs by the very last thread) and the characters swore occasionally. That was something you didn’t get in Fighting Fantasy. But unlike many of the movie adaptations based on his work, Stanley Kubrick’s take on The Shining blew the book away.

On with the plot, which starts with Jack Torrance visiting the Overlook Hotel in the Rockies. He’s applying for the job of winter caretaker, a position that will see him more or less incarcerated in the place because of the harsh winter. Quite brusquely, he waves off any suggestion that life will be difficult for his wife and child, explaining they’ll love it, whilst it’ll give him a chance to crack on undisturbed with some writing. Does the implicitly creepy note that the hotel is built on an ancient Indian burial ground (quite a common theme in King’s work this) deter him? Course not. What about the fact that a previous caretaker, Grady, ran amok and killed his family? Not a problem.

Thus armed with this information, Jack gets the job and shows up at the appointed time with his wife, Wendy, and little boy, Danny. We soon learn that the latter is a bit special. He has a gift that is outlined to him as ’shining’, an ability to see into the future, know things that are happening far away, etc. It’s a form of telepathy, in other words, only here it’s used more abstractly, and because Danny’s a child it is personified in an immature way. During a quick chat with the hotel’s chef, Dick Halloran (played by Scatman ‘Heeeenrific!’ Crothers), the boy learns he isn’t the only one with this talent, and is warned that some of the memories left in the hotel aren’t all good. You can say that again. Within minutes of walking over the threshold, Danny is visited by the spirits of twin girls, shades of Grady’s murdered daughters, and will do so again before the end.

The Torrances start life on their own. Pretty soon, the storms are rolling in, cutting telephone communications and making them rely on a radio to the nearest police station (which, we assume, is miles away). Danny and Wendy explore the hotel, in particular its magnificent maze, and Jack writes. Or does he? Shorn of inspiration, we see him aimlessly bouncing a ball against the wall. Later, he’s doing nothing at all, simply staring out of the window. The ideas aren’t coming, he tells Wendy, and a note of irritative sarcasm enters his voice more and more. This threatens to spill over into violence later when Wendy happens to disturb him at his typewriter. But then Danny enters an open bedroom during one of his frequent Big Wheels trips around the floors, and things get worse very quickly.

During these early scenes, the slow breakdown is taking place before our very eyes. Not only is Jack struggling to work, but he’s also experiencing some weird feelings about the hotel. He senses he might have been there before, and in a chat with Danny declares he wishes he could stay there ‘forever and ever’, which for the boy is an echo of something the ghost twins said to him previously. After Danny goes into the bedroom, he emerges with marks around his neck and tells Wendy a ‘crazy woman’ tried to strangle him. It’s now time for Jack’s visions to take over. Having been blamed by Wendy for attacking their son, he tiredly makes his way to one of the opulent bars. And he isn’t alone. In my personal favourite scene from the picture, Jack finds that Lloyd the barman is waiting and ready to serve him whiskey, which naturally is on the house. On the subject of Lloyd, have there been many more demonic characters than him in the movies? I don’t mean in the Al Pacino shouting his head off as Satan, but for sheer creepiness and quiet malevolence. I’m not sure what it is - the lighting that brings out all the lines in his face, his deep, serpent-pleasant voice or the easy vice he allows, but there’s something purely evil about him.

Is The Shining a horror film? It certainly is, and an extremely atmospheric one at that. Kubrick pushed all the right buttons in delivering frights by putting everything into the build-up to the moment rather than the moment itself. As is often the case in such fare, the music often gives a clue as to what is about to happen, and here it’s absolutely spooky, barely music at all when it comes down to it, but instead the sounds of nerves audibly jangling. The Shing is no ‘traditional’ horror. There’s no hand reaching out of the earth to clutch the heroine’s wrist as in Carrie. Kids don’t see their dead kin floating outside their bedroom windows, eyes burning white, as happens in Salem’s Lot. In fact, you see very little that’s deliberately scary. Ninety per cent of the frights come from the actors themselves. You see it in Jack Nicholson’s deranged performance as Torrance, in the looks of abject terror on Wendy’s face. Most haunted of all is Danny, who does so well in portraying childlike fear. The bit where he sees the dead girls and covers his eyes with his fingers, only later removing them slowly to let one eye peek out, is exactly what a small kid would do.

The movie relies on Nicholson, however. In 1980, he was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, an Oscar winner thanks to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and a veteran of Chinatown and Five Easy Pieces. In his early scenes, such as his job interview, he talks quite deliberately, almost forced, as though the madness is never that far away. Indeed, later we learn that he’s cracking up before he even goes to the hotel, a victim of his recovery from alcoholism, writing failures and domestic problems. All this spills over into his experiences whilst being the caretaker. When he speaks to Wendy, his dialogue is punctuated by slow, eyebrow-jerking nastiness, a man on the very edge. It’s only with his ghosts that he becomes more natural, and even here there’s a twist in store. Notice the times he banters with Lloyd and Grady, supposed spirits from the building’s past. He’s actually looking at himself in the mirror, speaking to himself. In other words, all the ghosts are in his head.

That isn’t to say The Shining doesn’t contain spectres. Explaining away Wendy’s visitations in the last act are more difficult, though how much reason does anyone have when they’re running around in terror? What she glimpses are instances from the past, memories of parties that took place long ago. Finally, there’s the elevator doors gushing out blood. I have an explanation for this, which readers may or may not choose to accept. Always an image I had difficulty in taking on board, it’s only when I revisited the film and recalled the bit about it being built on your Indian burial ground that it made any kind of sense. We all know about the ‘pioneering spirit’ in the USA that led to thousands of native Americans being slaughtered, captured and having their heritage demolished. The Overlook Hotel is a symbol of this very act. Its erection shows a casual disregard for the native population, and its grandeur a poke in the eye - what could be worse than having a graveyard where your parents lie being torn down in favour of a hotel for the rich? So is the place representative of a society built on blood, on the destruction of one group of people by another? Maybe…

And that’s only one theory behind the hidden meanings of The Shining. One of Kubrick’s typically ambiguous works, it defies easy explanation and I ought to know. In preparation for this review, I’ve read a vast array of comments and there’s only one certainty - nobody agrees on it. One suggestion was that it was a satire on modern television, that Jack’s uttering of TV lines at the climax are the end product of a clever criticism of the goggle box. Or is it a rumination on depression? Is it about a failed marriage, or the projections of a child with powerful telepathic capabilities? Or, as the most astute comments suggest, does this matter at all? Can’t we just see it as a great ghost story and have done with it? Of course we can, and that’s what’s so good about it. You can delve into the potential allegory, or you can sit down, turn the lights off and prepare to be afraid. And I think you will be.

Kubrick himself remained oblique about his intentions, which is really what we want. His job was to throw together the elements of gothic horror, sublime camerawork (e.g. following Danny as he races headlong through the maze; tracking back from Wendy while she reads the ‘All work and no play’ papers and Jack, unnoticed, is creeping up on her), mounting suspense and Jack Nicholson’s mesmerising performance, and leave the interpretations to us. One more point I’ll make before I leave you to rush off to your beloved shelf of films and dust off your DVD copy. The majority of us enjoy being with our families. I like living with mine wife and The Boy. No problems there. But if we were placed in a similar situation, how long would it take before I became irritated to the point of insanity by their foibles, to have the things they say and do become magnified because I had no counterpoint, no balance in my life to play against their annoying nuances? At what point would I lose it? And when I did start to ‘kick off’, what would I do about it?

While it’s possible to look upon such films as City of Ember and The Dark is Rising as rather cynical attempts to cash in on the success of Harry Potter, it would take some effort to beat the desperate gold rush that took place in the wake of Star Wars. Movie after movie was churned out, the majority of them hopeless dreck (seriously, can anyone watch Battle Beyond the Stars without cringing?) that proved science fiction done on the cheap just does not work.

One decidedly lucrative alternative to the Imperial Wars, however, was Star Trek: The Motion Picture, released in 1979 at considerable expense and with a fair amount of hype behind it. At the time, the original series was being repeated on BBC2, no doubt a further consequence of the Wars bandwagon. Considering how shabbily the show was treated, particularly towards its premature end, the fact Paramount plunged a hefty $35m into a spin-off feature film ought to have come as something of a surprise. Even more amazing was the sheer talent drafted in to get the thing made. Two-time Academy Award winner, Robert Wise (this site gushed over The Day the Earth Stood Still several weeks ago) was hired to direct. Jerry Goldsmith (who had clinched an Oscar for The Omen) provided the score. Richard Kline (two previous nominations) was the cinematographer, and the film also had the considerable likes of Douglas Trumbull - who produced the groundbreaking special effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey - to call upon. A more marquee crew you can barely imagine, though it was only with the reassembling of the original cast that the production really gelled. The hardest of these to entice back into his unflatteringly tight-fitting uniform was Leonard Nimoy, who was involved in a legal dispute with Paramount at the time and had to have this settled out of court in order to don the ears once more.

The story, originally conceived by Gene Roddenberry and written by science fiction novelist Alan Dean Foster before Harold Livingston polished it off, was intended to form the pilot of a new Star Trek TV series. For various reasons, the show never came close to being made, but the film was. In a pre-release marketing bonanza that was reminiscent of a certain other science fiction epic, we could buy all sorts of Trek related goodies, including Klingon action figures that seemed a bit redundant considering they hardly feature in the movie at all. Indeed, the rather solemn picture that finally hit the screens bore little resemblance to the ripping action adventure promised in the trailers and publicity. The Motion Picture was far from a blockbuster of Wars proportions. It did all right commercially, but to younger viewers expecting another special effects driven boys’ own story it must have been a great disappointment to come across this stately epic, the ‘action’ rarely leaving the bridge of the Enterprise.

It’s only with later viewings that the intelligence of the screenplay, a cast that manages to take it all so seriously, Goldsmith’s beautiful score and some superb special effects work come to the fore. The flagging pace of TMP remains a problem. Much of the film’s first hour is taken up with reuniting the Enterprise’s crew, from McCoy’s unwillingness to step foot on a transporter through to Spock’s spiritual journey back to the ship. The extended scene where Kirk is shuttled to the refitted Enterprise is an exercise in sheer indulgence as we get to see the old thing from almost every conceivable angle. Hardcore ‘Trekkies’ might love this stuff. For the rest of us it’s unforgivably dull, as though the production team insist on their audience sharing with them the experience of putting this much effort into innovative effects.

Eventually, The Motion Picture sets into, er, motion. Suddenly, the serene character setting we’ve been treated to begins making sense. We get the tension between Kirk and Decker quite early. The former, now an Admiral, wants the Enterprise back and uses the threat of a potential alien invasion to gazump the much younger Decker out of the captain’s chair. Once the ship catches up with the approaching cloud of matter that makes up the enemy, Kirk gets niggly with his executive officer, his respect only growing once Decker’s quick thinking and knowledge of the Enterprise gets them out of one or two tight spots. For Decker, the appearance of his old flame, Ilia, on the ship creates yet more tension and leads to the film’s final, decisive twist.

Spock comes with a fair amount of baggage also. At first he’s at his most imperiously haughty with his comrades, but this is just a facade. Spock’s journey is one of exploration. He’s the first to guess at the entity’s purpose and by this stage his austere, Vulcan front drops entirely. Little wonder that Nimoy agreed to play Spock once more. The character is allowed far more depth than he ever got on the TV series.

As is so often the case, however, it’s James T Kirk who holds the space opera together. William Shatner puts in a performance that’s entirely winning. Slimmed down, effortlessly charismatic and showing few of the mannerisms that give impressionists hours of material, it’s like he has never been away. One of the running issues Kirk experiences during the Trek film series is that of age, of becoming old. It’s present in The Motion Picture, shown most clearly in his spats with the younger Decker, Dr McCoy never far away to administer a summary of the good Captain’s failings.

Shatner and Nimoy are the best things in the movie’s cast, but Stephen Collins is worthy of note as Decker, his latest appearance in a promising career that perhaps didn’t go as far as he would have liked (I, for one, loved Tales of the Gold Monkey). Indian actress Persis Khambatta plays Ilia, beautiful enough to go bald-headed for the role and striking a considerable rare note in Trek by playing a woman who has some significant part to play in the plot i.e. not some cursory love interest or minor character.

The edition I bought is the Director’s Cut. This doesn’t add anything in terms of deleted scenes that have since been spliced into the main picture. Instead, under the supervision of Wise himself the main difference is in its visual effects, which have come in for a series of CGI enhancements. The fortunate thing is that this doesn’t mean endless Lucas-esque tinkering with backgrounds, digitally inserted characters, etc, though in certain scenes it’s pretty clear that technicians working in 1979 could not have produced the effects we’re watching. For the most part, the enhancements are reasonably subtle, upgrading shots to twenty first century standards quite unobtrusively. They can do this because the original effects were hardly terrible. Money, time and love was invested on this stuff. The shots of the Enterprise passing through the outer layers of the alien entity, V’ger, still make various lists of best special effects, rubbing shoulders with any number of CGI monstrosities.

If the Motion Picture isn’t exactly Star Wars, then it’s obvious inspiration is 2001, and certainly the scenes described above are very reminiscent of the ‘Jupiter journey’ sequences in Kubrick’s masterpiece. It can’t quite manage the profundity of 2001, but at the same time it’s far more accessible. Kirk and Co’s discovery of what V’ger is and what it’s about has emotional resonance and delivers a rather thoughtful payload that wouldn’t have been achieved with a straightforward comic book movie. And if everything happens too slowly, then perhaps that’s not the film’s fault but ours for expecting a different kind of experience, especially after the marketing. In any event, the box office spoke loudest. The Motion Picture’s sequel, though perhaps the best in the run of Star Trek movies, gave audiences what they wanted in terms of action and explosions and shifted the tone away from what this episode tried to produce.