24 no more...

The following takes place between 7.30 and 8.15 pm - well if you use the fast forward on Sky+ you can watch an episode of 24 in about 45 minutes - and is my first chance to catch up with 24 since the news of its cancellation broke last week. The series is to end after the current run - Day 8 in 24 chronology - and probably not before time.

Three or four times a series the producers will kick in a game changing episode and this week's comes into that category with a major gun battle, a crisis at CPU, some internecine wrangling with the NSA, and a surprise reveal at the end which should change things quite a lot.

That apart there is no getting away from the fact that this series has been running on fumes and there have been one or two episodes where literally nothing happens. The main plot - about a load of nuclear rods - is somewhat less than urgent and Jack seems more concerned about mooning around after FBI agent Renee Walker than denying bad guys their constitutional rights. Also, whisper it, Jack Bauer - to quote Danny Glover - is getting too old for this sh*t. He is a grandad now and the whole series takes place in the one day delay to his plans to go to Los Angeles and look after his granddaughter. Also the subsidiary story involving Katee Sackhoff and Freddie Prinze Jr is just embarrassingly bad, although that may change.

The producers are promising a slam bang finale for this series and I hope they live up to their word. 24 has been a great show, it broke the mould for episodic drama, it reflected a disturbing climate in US politics, and Jack Bauer is one of the great TV heroes. Let's hope he gets to go out taking names and kicking butt and not babysitting a grandchild.

Why won't people face reality about this show?

I've never quite got why people are so quick to dismiss the American version of The Office. The prevailing wisdom among the chattering classes is that it is a pale imitation of the genius that is Ricky Gervais. That is if you believe Gervais is a genius, as opposed to a short egocentric whose talent is being stretched to the point of transparency.

Gervais's version of The Office takes place in a paper company in Milton Keynes run by David Brent, a deluded autocrat with dreams of fame. The American version takes place in Scranton, Pennyslvania in the office of a paper company this time managed by Michael Scott, played by Steve Carrell. The UK version ran for two seasons and stopped, the US version is currently on season six although we are currently only up to Season Four here (ITV4, Mondays and Wednesdays).

Again the prevailing wisdom is that two seasons in the UK left us with a gem of comic brilliance in which Gervais and co exited at the top of their game leaving us wanting more. Wrong. Given that the US series shows no sign of dropping its quality in six series we can only assume that Gervais either got bored or ran out of ideas. The UK version of the show is an exercise in egocentricity; David Brent is not a character he is simply a collection of characteristics. The supporting cast, with the exception of Martin Freeman, Mackenzie Crook and Lucy Davis, merely stand around rolling their eyes or looking aghast at Brent's antics. It doesn't help that Gervais is a very limited actor.

The American show however is a masterpiece of ensemble comedy. Steve Carrell's Michael Scott is a touching buffoon with a completely rounded set of unrealistic hopes and dreams and thwarted ambitions. There are no background artists in this show, there is no one here to make the central character look good, they are all fully realised characters with storylines and internal lives that contribute to the overall narrative arc.

There really is no comparison between the two shows. The US version is far superior and illustrates that while in the UK we often have the better ideas, US television is structurally set up to get the best out of those ideas.

Dying is easy...

Richard Attenborough tells the story of the great character actor Edmund Gwenn - trivia buffs should note that both men played Santa Claus in separate versions of Miracle on 34th Street. Anyway Gwenn was on his deathbed and the family were gathering round to pay their respects. Among them was his small granddaughter who, when it was explained to her what has happening, had a question. 'Grandpa' she asked. 'Is dying difficult?' Gwenn thought for a moment before replying. 'No sweetheart,' he said. 'Dying is easy, comedy is difficult.'

And if you needed any proof of that you only have to look at Sandra Bullock's Best Actress Oscar for The Blind Side. When she went up to receive the trophy Bullock wondered aloud 'Did I earn this or did I just wear you down?' It's a nice self-deprecating line but there is more than a grain of truth in it.

Bullock is a gifted comedienne. She has been doing excellent work for years but because it was in films such as Demolition Man, Speed, While Y0u Were Sleeping, and Miss Congeniality - a seriously under rated performance - it attracted no attention whatsoever. However she does a drama and suddenly she is a contender; it was the same when she appeared in the ensemble cast of Crash.

Not having seen The Blind Side I may be doing Bullock a disservice but I'm guessing it is not a performance to make Meryl Streep consider her future career options. I'm sure it is a fine, effective performance but I am equally sure she has done better. It's just that comedy exists, along with a number of other genres, on the Academy's blind side. Perhaps the Academy should remember what Edmund Gwenn said and widen its horizons in future.

How to avoid jumping the shark

I caught up with the latest episode of Mad Men on BBC3 (Series 3, Ep 6 'Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency) and saw once again concrete proof of the greatness of this show. Sultry Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) was taking her leave of the Sterling Cooper ad agency for a life of unlikely domesticity but the plot twist in the episode gives her a moment with Creative Director Don Draper (Jon Hamm).

These two (pictured left) are the alpha male and alpha female of Sterling Cooper, they are apex predators in every sense of the word. Joan is sex on legs, the sort of woman who would make Marilyn Monroe feel frumpy, while Don is testosterone on a stick, the manliest man on television. Ever! It would make sense in lesser hands that their moment contains at least an indication of the seething passions that each must hold for the unattainable other. Not so.

There is an acknowledgement from Draper that she will be missed, and a demure peck on the cheek from Joan in return. That's it - that and a secret smile from each of them that speaks volumes about their relationship. The circling shark recedes into the distance its dorsal fin slipping beneath the waves resolutely unjumped. Having Don and Joan get it on would be suicide for a show which excels in its quietest intimate moments. Show runner Matthew Weiner knows these two are like Superman and Wonder Woman; everyone thinks they should be together but they know better.

It's brilliant writing, superb playing, and another example of why every episode of this series should be cherished.

How long would you wait to see a film?

How about 46 years? That's how long it has taken me to get round to seeing Becket and believe me it was worth the wait. I was so keen to see this film that I even bought the Sunday Telegraph this week to get the free DVD. A couple of days without satellite meant I had no excuse not to watch it and I have to say it is one of the best films I have seen recently.

For those of you not up on your 12th century English history Thomas Becket was the boyhood friend of Henry II. When Henry was having problems with the Church who rather unreasonably refused to pass his laws, he thought that making his boyhood chum Archbishop of Canterbury might solve things. However once Becket became Archbishop he unexpectedly found himself called to God rather than the King. An exasperated Henry cries out 'Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest' - not what he actually said but you get the gist - four passing knights mistake a rhetorical question for an instruction and before you know where you aee Becket is lying mortally wounded in the nave of Canterbury Cathedral.

For a film that runs for a whisker under two and a half hours there's not a lot of action other than what I've described above. What there is is dialogue, lots and lots of dialogue, and what dialogue it is. Allowing for the fact that some characters spend a lot of time thinking aloud in front of crucifixes, this is one of the best written films I have seen. The dialogue is intelligent, provocative, subtle and an absolute gift for the cast.

The big deal with Becket in 1964 was the pairing of Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton, fresh from their successes in Lawrence of Arabia and Cleopatra. This was a clash of the giants. It is easy for us to think of these two great actors as they were towards the end of their careers with their powers much diminished, but this is them in their magnificent pomp. The intensity and dynamism of their performances is spellbinding; the power of Burton's rich tones and the mercurial volatility of O'Toole as a king who only wants to be loved make a heady combination.

Both actors were among the films twelve Oscar nominations - they lost out in the Best Actor category to Rex Harrison for My Fair Lady - but in the end the only win was for Edward Anhalt's magnificent screenplay.

Even so the film is stunningly shot, superbly played, and a constant joy.

Some thoughts on BAFTA

The potential for disaster was there but happily BAFTA resisted the temptation to embrace the faddish and deeply flawed Avatar and instead honoured a deserving film in The Hurt Locker. The six BAFTA haul was a decent tally for a film that looks certain to have a long and prosperous life ahead of it on DVD and satellite after being ignored on its theatrical release.

As for Dances with Smurfs it ended up with two awards - special visual effects and production design - which strikes me as one too many. Visual effects at a stretch but production design, surely not. We are not talking about someone like William Cameron Menzies creating Gone With the Wind here; production design on Avatar amounts to 'if you imagine it we can draw it' which is hardly an insurmountable challenge.

I should declare an interest here as a BAFTA voter in that I was desperately keen to avoid the sort of embarrassment that regularly afflicts the Oscars; how many Oscar winning movies of the past ten years will be regarded as genuinely great films ten years from now? I suspect Oscar may embarrass himself again this year by giving the big prize to Avatar, which is a clever film, and shutting out The Hurt Locker which has the potential to be a film that defines its era. Of course they will give Kathryn Bigelow a well deserved Best Director Oscar and use that as the fig leaf to cover the shame of not having honoured a woman in this category in the past. As for James Cameron, what he did on Avatar was clever and worthy of some kind of recognition but I'm not sure it was directing.

This years results also rather neatly encompass the discussion in BAFTA circles about just how British these awards are. In the Britain vs. Hollywood argument I remain fairly agnostic. There are plenty of awards out there that cater exclusively for British films and for BAFTA to go down this path would be insular and restrictive. British creatives work in a global industry and the awards should reflect this; that said it would have been nice for A Prophet, White Ribbon, or Let the Right One In to have broken out of the foreign language ghetto. It would also be nice if UK audiences were a bit more enthusiastic about home grown product. I'm not talking about blindly supporting UK movies just because they are British - what an awful thought! - but it would be nice in a year when we produced An Education, Nowhere Boy, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll and Moon, to name a few, if at least one of them had done well at the box office.

The closest the awards came to tokenism is in the Leading Actor and Leading Actress category. I think Carey Mulligan is a deserved winner for An Education but, personally, I think Jeff Bridges on Crazy Heart is better than Colin Firth in A Single Man. However if this did come down to a Yanks vs. Brits contest it would be churlish to grudge Firth for a great performance which comes midway through a career of great performances. Both Bridges and Firth have in common the fact that although they have made bad movies they have seldom been bad in them. Their weakness has always been in their choices and an opportunity like this may never come along again; it's a shame it comes for both of them in the same year.

Some (genre) rules are meant to be broken

I finally found the time to go and see Zombieland which was a treat I had been promising myself for some weeks. In the end it was a toss up between Zombieland and Disney's A Christmas Carol. Dickens novella is one of my favourite books but there is something flat out weird about going to see Christmas movies before Armistice Day so that will be a pleasure deferred; or not, if most of the reviews are to be believed.
Anyway Zombieland seemed appropriate given that we have been spending so much time with DFTV2 talking about the repertoire of elements that make up any genre film. One of the key elements in a zombie flick is that the zombies should shamble and stumble their way towards their intended prey. Personally I have always found that to be a bit of a flaw when it comes to generating tension - 'Oh look, here come the zombies, let's finish what we're doing and then saunter away, they'll never catch us'.
Zombieland has all of the usual zombie tropes but with one big exception - these guys could give Usain Bolt a head start and still have him for lunch. Of course it breaks the number one rule in the zombie movie code but it works. The reason it works is that the film makers understand all the other rules of zombie flicks so by cutting themselves some slack here they have a film that is fun, exciting, different and - above all - pacy. It's a different kind of zombie movie and all the better for it.
That's part of the fun of genre film-making and that's why it's important to know the rules. If you know the rules of the game then you get to dictate how it's played and if the audience know that you know they'll go with you. A perfect example? Tremors - a little gem of a film with two super performances from Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward. Remarkably it's almost twenty years old and it still works as well now as it did in 1990. What makes the film so successful is that Ron Underwood knows his creature features and he knows that the audience knows them too so he can set up all the usual perilous situations and then inventively find new ways out of them.
And that's why we spend a while on genre theory; you need to know the rules before you can break them.

Through a glass, darkly

One of the interesting things about cinema is the way it allows us the chance to arrive at a mediated view of our unpleasant past. By that I mean that it gives us the distance to be objective and with that distance comes insight.

For example, with the exception of The Hurt Locker and In the Valley of Elah, there have been no films that deal with 9/11 and the war it prompted in any meaningful way. They also tend to fail at the box office because people generally insist it's just too soon and memories are too raw. They may have a point because, with the exception of The Deer Hunter, the first film to engage with Vietnam in a meaningful way was Platoon which came out more than ten years after the end of the war. Given that there is no serious end to America's middle eastern conflicts in sight then we may have to wait a while before we see it dealt with on the cinema screen.

In Europe however we are going through what I think of as 'second generation syndrome' and this has led to a number of interesting films about the Second World War. From Holland we have Black Book, from Germany Downfall and Sophie Scholl, from France Days of Glory, Female Agents and most recently Army of Crime. Each of these films examines different, not always pleasant, aspects of the wartime experience with candour and frankness and the results are often touching and always powerful. What is most interesting, it seems to me, is that these subjects were left largely untouched by the generation that was most directly involved in the war; it was simply too painful for them to deal with. Generally they have been made by the generation that came after - I accept that Paul Verhoeven lived through the war but he was very young - and as such they are able to take a detached look at events which may only seem shameful with the passage of time.

These musings are prompted by just having watched Katyn which is a stunning piece of cinema from the Polish director Andrzej Wajda which was deservedly Oscar nominated this year. Wajda is one of the most underrated of European directors and perhaps the least celebrated of the greats, but he is still making films at the age of 83 and his talent remains undiminished.

Katyn is the story of the titular massacre of Polish soldiers in the early days of the Second World War. Twelve thousand officers were killed and that's a big number to get your head around; Wajda's inspired device is to tell the story through their families waiting anxiously for news of loved ones. The background may be epic but the story in the foreground is intimate and affecting - Richard Attenborough does it all the time.

Katyn is actually what cinema is all about. It highlights a story which is an absolute outrage but it also makes important points about identity and nationalism and the ultimate tragedy of all of those people caught in the middle. And even though the story takes place almost seventy years ago I couldn't help but feel contemporary resonances which is the real power of cinema in the hands of a genius such as Wajda.

Pride and the importance of performance

The London Film Festival starts tomorrow and for the first time our DFTV course is represented. The Search is a film directed by Mark Buchanan and written by Gregor Barclay, who were graduates of the first DFTV course. It has been selected as an official entrant in the LFF Short Film section which is something of a coup for us. And it is a double celebration for the course because Believe, a short film by Paul Wright who graduated the year after Mark and Gregor is also being screened at the LFF. This comes in a year in which Believe was also selected for Edinburgh and won a prize at Locarno. The industry is already predicting great things for Paul http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/london_film_festival/article6867715.ece

Obviously with a new cohort of first year students taking their initial steps into the industry the achievements of their predecessors - and recent predecessors at that since the course has only been running for six years - can hopefully act as an inspiration.

What is so inspiring about both The Search and Believe is the quality of performance. These are great looking films but, within reason, a lot of people can do that. What sets them apart are the nuanced shaded performances that Mark and Paul have drawn from excellent casts. And in a year when so many Scottish films are blighted by weak scripts and performances barely worthy of the name, it is genuinely encouraging to see work such as this. I remember when Paul's graduation film Hikikomori screened at the RSAMD and at the end there was that wonderful beat of awed silence as the audience realised they had seen something special before the Concert Hall erupted into sustained applause. I overheard someone afterwards saying 'You know with most student films you wonder when it will end, with that one I wondered how it would end'. That's a rare compliment.

Both Believe and The Search deal with big themes - almost epic in fact - but they also deal with real people and that's why they are so accessible and so successful. You will wonder how they are going to end but you will be haunted and touched by the way that they do.

100 Minutes I'll Never Get Back

Although it wasn't my first choice I was sufficiently intrigued by The Invention of Lying to think it might be a worthwhile night at the pictures. Reviews had been mixed but the premise was intriguing.
The film allegedly does what it says on the tin; Ricky Gervais is the man who invents a lie in a world where everyone tells the truth. Except that it's not really; this appears to be set in a world where people are so naive they believe everything they are told which is an entirely different prospect.
The film lost me about ten minutes in, after it had expended all of the predictable blunt spoken gags. After that it became an exercise in deconstruction to try to work out just how awful it is and where it goes wrong; the answers are 'very' and 'everywhere'.
Let's leave aside the notion that Ricky Gervais is a very limited actor - this character, as are all his others, is a retread of David Brent and Andy Millman - but whatever appeal he has is limited to the small screen. Projected on a big screen he is a charisma vacuum leaving a large hole where his character ought to be. Let's hear it for co-stars Jennifer Garner and Rob Lowe who do what stars are supposed to do and twinkle as if their lives depend on it.
The frustrating thing about the film is that it has the potential to be a very powerful satire but bottles it in the end. Gervais seems to be making a point about organised religion when one of his fabrications - the only well-intentioned one - becomes an article of faith for a desperate populace. How sad are their lives when they latch on to this one shred of hope, an interesting point which isn't explored.
Incidentally only when Gervais becomes the new Messiah do the people start to question things. Why don't they just accept what he tells them as they do in every other part of the film.
The notion of religion being the ultimate lie is similarly intriguing but it is discarded without much examination once it has served Gervais's short term comic purpose. Rather than explore this issue we go for a sappy rom-com ending which relies on almost everything we have seen before being turned on its head.
However given this film's capacity for somersaults that should come as no surprise.

Is it that time already?

On the basis of doing as I say and not as I do this blog has been neglected while I have been encouraging students to maintain their own contributions. However with a new cohort of students it seems reasonable to take virtual pen in hand once more.

Looking back on this summer has been a discouraging cinematic experience - there were so few films that I felt I wanted to see and with those for which I did express mild interest, the feeling soon passed. I find myself more and more waiting for the joys of Sky Movies, especially Sky Movies Classics.

Just this week I found myself in something of an Eighties nostalgia fest in watching Point Break and 48 Hours back to back. A couple of things occurred to me. First, how watchable Patrick Swayze could be when he was on top form, second how Eddie Murphy squandered the potential to be one of the greats, and finally why does no one rave about Walter Hill.

Hill is a writer turned director who also does a bit of producing - a sort of two-fisted Renaissance man. As a director his work includes The Warriors, The Long Riders, Southern Comfort, and The Driver - each of them a masterclass in economy of narrative and providing the maximum bangs for the studio's buck . 48 Hours is in the same mould; tough, red-blooded and unremittingly macho but at the same time capturing a fundamental sweetness at the heart of the relationship between tough cop Nick Nolte and released convict Eddie Murphy.

Relationships are also at the heart of Point Break with FBI agent Keanu Reeves torn between surf guru Patrick Swayze and petite Lori Petty. But we know which one he really loves - he didn't travel halfway round the world for her! Like Hill's work on 48 Hours, Kathryn Bigelow directs the action scenes in Point Break with commendable and almost reckless vigour, especially surfing scenes which even now are jaw-dropping in their spectacle. It's interesting to consider what a modern director would have made of either of these movies. I suspect they would have taken comfort in digital technology but the physical effects of the pre-digital era take a lot of beating.

Looking back after almost thirty years these films seem cheesey but it is important to remember that we are looking back through a window that they created - the buddy movie may seem tired now but these two films along with Richard Donner's Lethal Weapon franchise created the genre.

As for Bigelow, her time has come again with The Hurt Locker - still on my must-see list - which is being touted as an Oscar contender. Hill hasn't directed a film for ten years but he did give us Deadwood as a producer and for that alone we should be grateful.