Sherlock Holmes

Theres's a lot more explodium in Victorian London than I had ever suspected, but that's not something I ever complain about. And I really enjoyed Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes. It's not that it's terribly well written, or that it makes any sense, or that the plot and pacing are out of the ordinary. It's simply that Robert Downey seems to be going through a phase in his career where he can't get anything wrong. He's just wonderful. Thanks to him, the film gets away with blue murder. A day after I saw it, I can't remember a single line from the film other than stuff I'd already seen in the trailer, but as long as Downey's on the screen everything seems uproarious.

I gather that a lot of people have been crabbing that it has nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes as it was written. I don't really know if that's even a legitimate gripe, but I once read all of the Sherlock Holmes canon in the space of a few weeks as a teenager, and it was really quite dull. Holmes as written is a tremendously dry character. So if the film's not true to the canon, that isn't something that would really trouble me much. The canon's not much fun.

Mind you, there's a lot for me to niggle about. The science isn't up to much. Actually, it's not science. One of the big reveals at the end is that all the apparent magic the villain has used is actually science, but it might as well be magic for the all the link the alleged science has to anything in the real world. (personal favourite has to be the notion of an antidote to cyanide which can be administered orally the day before exposure. Mmmm yeah. That would work).

I don't mind this because science in movies is always bunkum. The thing which actually bugged me at the time is that the villain is called Lord Blackwood. This didn't bother me at first because I hate the aristocracy instinctively and it makes perfect sense to me that the evil genius is from the ruling class. Then half way through we get told that he's the son of the Lord Chief Justice - but that this is a secret. And my mind starts going, wait a minute. Lord Blackwood's father is the Lord Chief Justice, and his mother is some dead chick who died giving birth to him. And no-one knows that Lord Chief Justice is the father. So how did Lord Blackwood get to be a Lord at all? This is a time when the peerage was still more or less exclusively hereditary; if you didn't inherit your title, the only way you were going to be Lord anything was when you were well into a very successful career of public works. Lord Blackwood was in his thirties and had devoted his life to being a complete bastard. Now in our day, that makes you a New Labour peer, but this is Victorian England. SO that didn't add up for me.

Now I have to be fair here. It's not like suspension of disbelief was an issue in the first place; for goodness sake, this is Guy Ritchie's reimagining of Sherlock Holmes. It's not as though it was ever going to make sense. But somehow this bugged me, as did the passing reference to Lord Blackwood's cunning plan to take back the lost colonies of America; a pushover because they were weakened by the aftermath of the Civil War. Yeah, right. Tower Bridge is half completed (placing the film between 1890 and 1894). So it's been twenty five or thirty years since the Civil War ended and America is completely over it. Within five years they'll be invading Cuba.

Those things to one side, the movie is huge fun. It's basically a bunch of setpieces, many of which (Holmes' bareknuckle fight in the first act for instance) seem to be there just because Ritchie likes making movies with those kinds of scene in them. Check your brain at the door and enjoy watching Downey's winning streak roll out into a fourth year. Then go home and rent a copy of Charlie Bartlett, which is a much better film in most of the ways that really count, and will let you appreciate just how much - and in some ways how little - Downey is doing in this blockbuster.

Front Line; would be so much better if it was a real front line, with shooting.

Since I got tired of wargaming, I've been spending Monday evenings at home and watching TV I'd never seen before.

Which is how I'm getting to see Pat Kenny's The Front Line, or rather how I'm getting to see about twenty minutes of it before I remember that after a 20 per cent pay cut I probably can't afford to replace the TV every week and so I'm going to need to change channels before I actually jump up and head butt the screen so hard I wind up wearing the Sony like a toilet seat round the neck of some cartoon character. If it doesn't do anything else it might eventually drive me back to wargaming, because it's getting so that being furious with losing isn't as bad in my memory as the the red mist that I get from watching Front Line, or as it should probably be called, Ireland's most annoying whiners.

I was pitching the theory to John the other night that The Front Line existed because Joe Duffy has always hated Pat Kenny and wanted to make him look like a fool, so he pitched the idea in the RTE canteen one morning that what Pat should do was run his own version of Liveline or whatever it is that Joe Duffy's morning moan-fest is called. John riffed on it beautifully, suggesting that the actual pitch would have been for Joe to say "You know what I always wanted to do? Do Liveline late at night on the TV." Which I agree, is much more subtle. However it happened, Pat's run with the idea, and there he is with his very own live line clone on TV.

Dear, suffering, holy, god almighty tonight, it's enough to make you despair of the ability of the average Irish person to buy a bus ticket without a UN peacekeeping force to handle the complex paperwork and fraught commercial negotiations. You've got a studio audience full of people who volunteered to be on the show. As you can imagine, the kind of people who volunteer to be on the audience of a TV show devoted to grilling politicians for getting things wrong - well, you're not moved to volunteer because you've no strong feelings about anything. It would be easy to single out some of the whingers for detailed excoriation, but it doesn't feel entirely fair, even though I've never managed to watch the show for more than twenty minutes without conceiving the visceral urge to go down to Montrose and beat at least one specific individual until I died of exhaustion.

Despite all that, it's fairer to generalise. And in general the vocal part of the audience of The Front Line consists entirely of a selected band of cretins who will reliably advance the same set of moronic opinions each week:

1. The government should take personal responsibility for every single thing that ever happens and collectively resign en masse every time anyone stubs a toe, fails to win the lottery or overhears something which hurts their feelings
2. Nothing that happens is ever the fault of "ordinary decent people"
3. Everything that happens is the cause of deep anger in the overwhelming majority of the population. Bonus points if you can get two consecutive speakers to announce that two diametrically opposed things are both unanimously opposed by everyone. Bonus points are awarded no later than fifteen minutes into every damn show
4. The government should pick up the tab for every trifling need of every single citizen
5. No citizen should actually pay taxes
6. No service, of any kind, should attract any form of charge
7. Everyone should be paid more than the average wage, because we're all entitled to loads of money
8. Everyone should be paid less than the average wage, because we need to be more competitive
9. Notwithstanding 2. above, there would be no problems at all in Ireland if people just took responsibility for looking after things like they used to back in the good old days

If for any reason the audience forgets its responsibilities, there's almost invariably some invited guest who can be depended on to say something which would give any reflective person an aneurysm. It's hard, sometimes, to believe that we live in a world where you go on the TV and announce you're an expert in something that hasn't traditionally had professional certification, and the very worst you can expect to happen is that they'll give you an appearance fee. I'm still waiting for the moment when the host of these lunkfests turns around to one of these walk-on opinion-wranglers and says "So, Mr Leotard, you claim to be an expert in the challenging field of prospering in a collapsing economy. Just how much money have you personally made other than through selling gullible people dumb ideas you haven't been stupid enough to try yourself?" or "So, Dr Ludaramaun, you claim to be an expert in disaster recovery technology. How many lives have you actually saved in the course of your long and successful career as a superhero?"

Brain exploded yet? Mine usually has by this stage.

The thing which makes it clear that this is actually Joe Duffy's subtle revenge on Pat Kenny - doubtless Pat squatted on something important to Joe, like the Late Late Show or something - is that as the season has rolled on, the audience has got progressively more likely to include at least one mouth-breathing redneck under-achieving cretin who will bring his intervention around to everyone's favourite, an unfocused rant about how "ordinary decent people" are getting shafted while the government cossets druggies and pikeys and immigrants and so on and so on. Now when Joe gets that on the radio, they just hang up the phone and say something like "Whoops, we seem to have lost the connection". When Pat gets that, he's stuck with it. It's live TV, and the goon's physically there. They can take the camera off him, but they can't actually gag him. And no amount of audience-screening is going to protect Pat from this. Joe can have his researchers chat away to the phone-callers for a couple of minutes to decide whether they're going to be a disgrace, but Pat has the clown show bussed in hours ahead of time and it's no struggle for them to put up a facade of calm till their moment in the spotlight. It was kind of hilarious when some maniac spoke for us all and ripped into Pat for telling everyone else they should accept less pay and benefits while he got paid sixty times what someone on benefits can hope for. But when every week you can be sure that you're going to get the kind of bigot - well let's put it this way; a lot of these guys, if they were in a taxi, after three minutes the driver would stop and refuse to move until they got out.

Yep, getting beat stupid by my friends is starting to look more inviting every week.

Daybreakers

There's no way to talk about this without discussing the ending, so don't read on if that's an issue.

When I saw the trailer for Daybreakers, it went on to my must see list. I wasn't for one moment deceived into thinking that it was going to be great art, it was just that it had Willem Dafoe and Sam Neill, it had an interesting take on vampires and it looked like there would be lots of the Human Resistance attacking the vampires.

I'm devastated to report that there's a quite noticeable shortage of resistance-on-vampire action. For your human death squad whacking vampire needs, I have to direct you to aisle six and John Carpenter's Vampire$(TM) which is the actual legal title of the damn movie. Also, once they clear out the first vamp nest, stop watching, because the film kind of blows after that.

While Daybreakers is a little short on action, there is, however, a surprising amount of pure cleverness.

Daybreakers is what I think of as a one-joke movie, (I think in Hollywood they call this high concept, but one-joke is a lot truer to what's usually going on) where the joke is what if vampires were the majority? In fact,most serious stabs at the vampire genre have to dance around this problem quite a bit. Vampires live forever and everyone they bite can turn into a vampire, and they're crazy hard to kill. So logically, there ought to be nothing else after a while, what with all the guys that get turned never going away and such. Now that kind of logic just ruins the story, so the writers usually come up with some handwave that either makes vampires easy to kill, or hard to make or both. Daybreakers decides to run in the opposite direction, and shows us a world where within ten years of the first vampire getting turned, there's so few humans left that they have to be farmed and the total known supply of human blood is expected to run out within a month.

So there's a crisis, but it faces the bad guys. And just to make the crisis more interesting, once a vampire hasn't had any juicy delicious blood for a while, he or she starts devolving into nosferatu. So it's not just that they're going to starve; along the way they're going to turn into mindless horrible looking killing machines who will attack everything around them. Whee. And standing between vampirekind and this undesirable outcome is Ethan Hawke's terribly ethical reseearch scientist and his effort to come up with a blood substitute. No pressure, then.

The movie has a lot of fun setting out its milieu; no-one goes out in daylight, blood's replaced (or more accurately been added to) coffee, and life goes on with little changes like everyone working at night and the city being honeycombed with subwalks so that vampires can get around during daylight. In this vision, vampirism gives you little fangs (they must have had to loop everyone's dialogue) yellow eyes, a tendency to explode when staked and catch fire in strong direct sunlight, but not a lot of the other popular tropes. No-one, for example, falls asleep at dawn, and no-one needs to sleep in a coffin. Garlic and silver don't seem to have been outlawed either. And while they dodge daylight, it looks as though only direct contact of an actual beam of light on their skin is anything to worry about, which makes it perhaps a little too easy for the vampires to be out and about in the day time.

But the initial fun's in the little touches; the massively adapted vehicles which can drive in daylight by using video feeds into the darkened interior, the by-the-way observation that "vampiric small animals unaware of their condition are now the leading cause of forest fires" and above all in the way that normal American corporate life isn't shown to have changed in its essential particulars just because practically everyone in gainful employment is a bloodsucking fiend.

Earlier I mentioned the way in which writers often have to tweak the powers of their vampires to stop them from being so dangerous as to be unstoppable; Daybreakers has an ingenious tweak to level the playing field between living and undead; humans are now so scarce that killing one is out of the question and the army has to be equipped with non-lethal weapons so as to capture them alive; the humans aren't so bothered about inflicting casualties, but of course need to get a dead centre hit with a crossbow. This is clever and internally consistent, though unfortunately there's only one stand up fight to let us see this in action and it ends badly for the humans anyway. And being taken alive is no picnic; we don't see any of them again.

So you have the clever opening, which is unfortunately followed by a whole bunch of middle in which there's an annoying paucity of explosions. There is the cute discovery that the vampire army can work in daylight by using light proof armour, which is endearingly kludgy in its approach to helmets, but that aside it's a bit of a trudge until you get past the discovery that there's a cure for vampirism, which boils down to extreme sunbathing with someone on hand to put you out just before you go extra crispy. Every bit as much fun as it sounds, so you're kind of wondering if Ethan's going to be able to market this to his corporate bosses.

At this point the film feels like it's spinning its wheels a bit, because the human resistance, who are more like refugees than resistance, haven't been making a great fist of things and our heroes have been whittled down to three; two ex-vamps and one human, versus well everyone else in the movie more or less. Then the ex-vamps get cornered, and one of them is fanged up, and we get what I thought at the time was a very lame reveal; that if vamp who's been turned back into a human gets bitten, the vampire who did the biting gets turned back into a human. Which seemed almost as convenient as the fix for vampirism in Near Dark without having nearly as cool a movie in back of it to save it from lameness.

I judged too soon, because in a moment of sublime genius, Ethan Hawke walks back into corporate HQ and goads Sam Neill into biting him. Whereupon Sam Neill turns into a human, which still didn't strike me as being much of an improvement, until Ethan bundles him into a lift and sends him down the basement where thirty hungry vampire soldiers were getting ready to come up. And when they see Sam, looking just like a tasty human - well there's a blood famine and here's a Big Mac. They tear into Sam, and in turn revert to human - at which point they're tasty snacks to the next group of vampires to show up - and suddenly it's very elegant because here's a completely plausible way in which just one ex-vamp can turn the whole population back into ordinary humans - albeit at the cost of most of those humans lasting about as long as a happy meal at a six year old's birthday party. Russian in its simplicity. It's the first time in ages that I've seen a movie with a last minute fix for a universal problem which actually had a plausible delivery mechanism for the last minute fix and a built in way to limit the problem in the future. Sheer genius.

I often wonder what's going through Ethan Hawke's mind when he does action movies because, a) he's too good for them and b) he's not actually good in them. He's not that kind of an actor; he just isn't right for action roles. He's clearly a thoughtful person in real life and in action films he makes a serious effort to portray a realistic intelligent person wrestling with a problem. As a result, he's usually completely out of place and so it plays out in Daybreakers. Willem Dafoe is capable of almost anything, which unfortunately means that he's capable of showing up with an expression of complete disinterest on his face and sleepwalking through a whole movie where he ought in fact to be lighting up the room. In Daybreakers, he isn't really breaking a sweat, but at least he's awake. Sam Neill, on the other hand, can add yet another to his showcase of bastard-coated bastards with creamy bastard filling. Sam's fun as a good guy, but he's always more fun as a bad guy. He has the face and the voice for devilry, and he does a wonderful turn here as someone who slowly reveals layers of inner complexity, for values of complexity that equal jawdropping wickedness. Great fun, and completely coherent. He's bad, until you realise that he's worse, until you realise that he's much worse, until you realise that he's not only beyond redemption but blissfully unaware that redemption is necessary. All without raising his voice. He bottoms out nicely with his explanation that Ethan's work on blood substitutes and cures and what have you is all very well, but what Sam's company is interested in is repeat business, so there'll be no more talk of curing vampires, and full steam ahead on synthetic blood, and for the better-off types, genuine fresh human blood - at the appropriate premium.

I have to say that while I enjoyed the satirical intent behind depicting profit driven corporations and exploitation of repeat business and helpless resources as the logical line of work for vampires, I did wonder whether mere money would continue to drive the greedy in a world where a lot of what humans need and pay for has become largely unnecessary. You're dead; you don't eat, breathe, sleep much, sweat or feel hot or cold. All you need - though you need it badly - is blood. An awful lot of the conventional economy would collapse. What would money actually be for at that point?

So hats off to the Spierig Brothers for a great idea for the milieu and a genuinely clever punchline, but they have to lose some points for not having enough meat to the middle. And for hiring Ethan Hawke when there were better things he could have been doing.

Twelve; Jasper Kent

New exercise.

Try to write something about each book I read.

I could have started this by trying to write something about the books I've been reading in the last few weeks, but re-reading the Baroque Cycle is one of those things which leaves you thinking that there's nothing you can possibly add to all that Stephenson pumped into the books.

So instead I figured to start the exercise with the first book I've started and finished in the New Year.

Twelve is something I've been looking forward to reading since I first saw it in trade paperback. It seemed like such a neat idea. Vampires on Napoleon's retreat from Moscow.

Of course I put off buying it until it was in normal size. Nothing like re-reading Stephenson in trade paperback size to remind me of just what a pain it can be to read a book that's bigger than it needs to be. So I didn't actually buy the book till just before Christmas, and what with one thing and another I didn't start reading it until a few days ago.

It's not a book I can see myself reading again. It's not a bad book, it's just not very involving. I remember a long time ago trying to read a translation of the Gulag Archipelago and giving up because it was too flat and ugly. To this day I haven't decided whether Russian's an inherently inelegant language or whether I was reading a bad translation; I haven't been interested enough in the Gulag Archipelago to give it a second try. Now Jasper Kent wasn't writing in Russian and getting translated, so it's not same problem, it's just that reading his prose reminded me of that.

I think that Kent tripped over the problem of trying to write a narrator who's true to his time, and true to his character. Now, it's always a good idea to try to make your protagonist an everyman, because that's - to use a word I hate - relateable. The problem is that if you make him your narrator, you're stuck with the problem that your narrator's an everyman and it would ring false to have him write well. Because Alexei Danilov is supposed to a shallow and rather unreflective Russian officer (whose lack of speed on the uptake is important to the speed with which the plot unfolds), he has to write like one. Which makes for a very flat narrative.

The result is a book which moves along efficiently but unmemorably, and which doesn't draw you to re-read it. Once you've gone through the plot, you've got all you're going to get from it because there's no particular pleasure to be derived from the prose.

Which is a shame, really. The idea's a good one, and the execution is intelligent and consistent. It would have been easier to write a more engaging book. Kent set out to write a book which was anchored in its period, and he pretty much succeeded. His hero is a reasonably clever man who makes a lot of mistakes but does his best to remedy them along the way. The book unfolds in a very believable way and it's plain that there was a lot of research before he set out to write it. The vampires are tough to kill without being impossible, and the only way the hero can prevail is to pick them off piecemeal and at great personal cost. It all hangs together nicely and the characters are preoccupied with very human concerns. It ought to be a better book than it is. But I'm at a loss to figure out how it could have been made a better book without the author being false to his purpose.

Inglourious Basterds

No matter what Tarantino may say, I'm convinced that the bloody awkward (or even blahdy orkwerd) title of his movie is driven by two things; making damn sure that no-one buys Inglorious Bastards by mistake next year, depriving him of sweet, sweet royalties; and making sure that nerds in firewalled drone jobs can send emails about the movie without getting blocked by the profanity filter.

I've always taken the view that Tarantino was born out of his time; he'd make a great writer for radio. His determination to write for the movies is one of those weird overstretches, like thinking that hideously bad portrayals of weird men-children in films like Dusk til Dawn qualified him to take on Alan Arkin's role in Wait Until Dark. While no single performance on stage by any human being is ever likely to overtake Pia Zadora's turn in the Diary of Ann Frank, Quentin's in Wait Until Dark has always annoyed me far far more.

Much like the man himself, I like to open with the digressions, and then, if possible, continue with them. Self-referentially, if at all possible.

The movie; well let's get the headline items out of the way. It's not as bad as Death Proof. It's not as good as Pulp Fiction. It's not remotely as good as it thinks it is, and it isn't half as good as it could be. In fact, it isn't even as good as its best performance, because Tarantino couldn't resist completely buggering even that up.

It's hard to believe, watching the film, that the script was ten years in the making. Until you think about anything you've ever seen in a friend's house which took ten years to make. A big percentage of that ten years would have been spent on blind alleys, and on slowly internalising the fact that his talents weren't equal to his vision, and painfully coming first to accept, and then not even to notice, that the finished work looked more and more as though an assortment of hyperactive five year olds had thrown it together while their minds were on something else. Quentin doesn't seem to have heard that perfection comes in discarding the things which are less than perfect until only the perfect is left. He's more the guy who makes a really neat part for the project, realises that it doesn't fit and yet can't bear to throw it away. If Quentin modded cars, they'd have fins. And dams. And spoilers. And each would have notches cut into them to let the other parts fit around them, and - well, you'd have Inglourious Basterds is what you'd have.

The first thing which has to be said is that a lot less movie would have been a very good idea. I thought the same thing about Kill Bill; in fact I waited for a while hoping that Quentin would get the idea and release the film it ought to have been - Kill Bill, part the whole damn thing in one 100 minute movie with all the damn self indulgent flab taken off. But he didn't. So I wasn't very surprised when IB came in at 153 minutes. If anything, my only surprise was that it didn't come in as three 140 minute movies about nothing in particular, which I discovered on the internets last night was the original plan.

Usually, the criticism of QT is simply that he rambles on too long and that the movie should be edited down (I saw the long version of Death Proof, and thought at the time - as I fast forwarded through the interminable first half - that it must been less annoying when it was 40 minutes shorter and crammed into Grindhouse. I now think it would have been ever better at trailer length).

With IB, shortening the movie would have been simpler. Just leave out the eponymous basterds completely. Take out Brad Pitt, Donnie wotsit, Hugo Stiglitz, Mike Myers and whatever dick it was that Michael Fassbender was trying to make us like. All those guys. Bang, just like that, you'd get rid of an hour, and it would be the worst hour. And you could also give the movie a title that didn't annoy everyone. It would be like a more useful version of those editions of Phantom Menace that have Jar Jar Binks edited out (to which I say, it's a start, but it doesn't go anything LIKE far enough). Do that and you'd still keep Bridget Von Hammersmark, Colonel Landa, Shoshana Dreyfus and Frederick Zoller. Which is all you need, because it would help a LOT to get rid of the Nazi High Command as long as you've got the scissors handy. At the end of getting rid of all the crap bits, you'd be left with a tight little French/German resistance movie with some genuinely compelling performances and a real sense of hazard to characters you're invested in.

At the moment, the structure of the movie is this:

Chapter 1, which is more of a prologue, introduces Colonel Landa, hunting Jews in France. It's pure Tarantino, a long talky section in which Colonel Landa, without ever resorting to overt menace, slowly pressures an apparently decent French farmer to admit he's sheltering fugitive Jews beneath his floorboards. Christoph Waltz's performance as Landa has been rightly hailed as a star turn, not least because he's the first person in history ever to have delivered so many Tarantino monologues in so many different languages. He shifts seamlessly from French to German to English and back and at all times the florid digressions and Tarantino tics seem completely unforced. It's probably the best inhabitation of the weird backalleys of Tarantino's mind since Samuel L Jackson brought us Jules.

Chapter 2 introduces the basterds and their working practices, and you could drop the whole thing without doing any damage to anything which matters. You've got Brad Pitt's bombastic recruiting talk, which is funny, but not funny enough, and then you've got the basterds in France scalping people and beating them to death with baseball bats, and it's jarring and ugly and for a movie which is supposed to be about glorifying Jews taking the war to their tormentors, it's weirdly counterproductive because the German they beat to death acquits himself with more dignity and poise than his nemeses do.

Chapter 3 introduces us to Shoshana Dreyfus and Frederick Zoller, and sets the main plot into motion. It's pretty terrific. While Zoller, German war hero turned actor (he's set up as the German Audie Murphy, but no-one has heard of Audie Murphy yet in 1944, so they don't say that) is a bit of a pill, it's a good character; a shallow person trying to be deep. And Shoshana is very good indeed; the sole survivor of the Jew Hunt we saw at the beginning, she's holed up in Paris hiding in plain sight as the manager of a cinema. Mélanie Laurent brings just the right mix of toughness and vulnerability to the role. And when Zoller takes a shine to her and wants his new film to premiere in her cinema, it leads her right into last place she wants to be; collaborating with the Nazis and being scrutinised by none other than Col Landa. The scene where Landa amiably asks her about her background while eating strudel is masterful. When he takes his leave and Shoshana almost collapses from stress, I could feel the whole audience joining in. This whole bit is pretty well paced and acted, and you could keep all of that.

Chapter 4 takes us back to the basterds. The British have got wind through a double agent that Zoller's premiere is going to be packed with German brass and they've conceived a plan to blow up the cinema with the brass inside. Michael Fassbender's character, conveniently but largely irrelevantly, a film critic is sent off to liaise with the basterds and the double agent to make it happen. There's a completely unnecessary scene with Mike Myers setting that up which could just GO, and there's an incredibly long scene in a basement bar where the double agent tries to meet up with Fassbender which has divided the critics. Although I enjoyed the scene immensely, I can see why lots of critics hated it. It's incredibly long, and it doesn't really advance the plot. It's very well acted, and at times it's very very tense, but when it's all over, practically everyone is dead except the double agent, and really for nothing. So although I enjoyed it a lot, I think it could just as easily be dropped (taking with it my favourite Brad Pitt line of the whole movie, in which he explains that it's hard to fight in a basement, because, you're fighting in a basement.)

Chapter 5 is just the biggest mess imaginable. On the one hand, you've got basterds trying to blow up the cinema and on the other hand you've got Shoshana and her projectionist trying to burn it down. Either would have been enough. Both is stupid. Conveniently, losing the basterds completely would have made for a thematically satisfying and much less annoying final act. You would lose Landa negotiating with Brad Pitt, but it would be a small price to pay, particularly as it would let you lose the one false note in Waltz's performance, when he goes nuts and strangles someone. Right up to that moment, and rather annoyingly, from right after that moment, he's been the soul of urbane menace, a clever talker who loves to achieve his effects by thought and word and leaves the hard work to real thugs. And then he chokes someone to death for no very good reason. It comes out of nowhere and it GOES nowhere. So we drop that too.

And there you have it; Inglourious Basterds, the non-directors cut. Now with 100% less basterds but all the good stuff you'd want to keep.

A few small quibbles; our peasant French farmer - remember him? - is introduced to us chopping wood. Except all he's chopping is the chopping block. It's stupid. Eli Roth'e entrance with the baseball bat; even if we weren't cutting him out completely, that needs to take a lot less time than it does. I don't know why Tarantino thinks credits look better when there are five different type faces involved, but honestly, they don't. Having a narrator, but only sometimes, is leotarded, even if QT DOES think it's metatextual. Zoller's movie, Pride of the Nation looks good. It looks far too good to be a war movie made in 1944 in Germany. They didn't have the techniques we see being used. I bet the DVD extras have the whole thing on them.

As the credits rolled, I already had most of these thoughts fully formed in my head. And one last one. I bet that as I type this, QT is thinking about doing the sequel, where the IBs, or something like them but even worse, go off to end the war in the Pacific. I can't help thinking that for Tarantino, the thought of having John Wayne behind the Japanese lines beheading people with Samurai swords is probably giving him dangerous palpitations in his castle made out of money right now.

Angels and Demons; a film to stay away from at all costs

I'm not sure why I never blogged on The Da Vinci Code, a movie so garishly awful that watching it became a perverse pleasure. I'll always cherish the utter bankrupt lameness of trying to make us buy Lincoln Cathedral as a stand in for Westminister Abbey by putting a fake sign in the exterior shot saying "Westminster Abbey" and I can never tire of the wonderful moment when Jean Reno drags away Ian McKellen in handcuffs - I always dub my own soundtrack on to that, with Jean saying "Come wiss me Sir Ian, ziss is no place for real actors like us." The movie actually gets a lot worse after Jean and Ian head off - I thought it was over at that stage, but instead it trudges on for a while more, with both Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou looking almost as desperate for the movie to end as I was.

Watching their numb and tortured expressions as The Da Vinci Code limps to a close is a pretty mean pleasure, but it was more pleasure than I got from the whole of Angels and Demons.

Angels and Demons was published in 2000, three years before the Da Vinci Code, and went pretty much as unremarked as all of Dan Brown's other books. I'm not being wilfully cruel here; Dan Brown got a paperback deal for his potboilers and that means he's better at getting published than I'll ever be, and that even before he started making stupid money out of the Da Vinci Code, he'd made more money from writing than I'll ever make from my day job. But Digital Fortress, Deception Point and Angels and Demons were no big deal; just part of the landscape of throwaway crap you could buy in airports to pass the time. The Da Vinci Code was something else; for a while there, if you were in a public place, there was someone in your field of vision reading that damn book. I read it. It's one of the worst written books I've ever read; I think that Jeffrey Archer's Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less is still the worst book I'll ever read from start to finish, but The Da Vinci Code is up there with the complete works of Matthew Reilly and anything by Stel Pavlou. It succeeds in being bad in so many ways. There just isn't any characterisation. The dialogue seems to have been thought up by someone who's made a point of never having a conversation. The research - well, on anything I knew anything about, it was just plain wrong. So I assume that the quality control was uniform throughout and none of the "facts" in the book were solid. Often, I was reminded of Niels Bohr's comment on a bad paper from a student "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."

From what I can gather, Angels and Demons was generally considered to be quite a lot worse than the Da Vinci Code. But a book which sells as many copies as Code has to be filmed - it's just a law. And if the film doesn't actually cause the studio to collapse, there has to be a sequel. So time to dig out Angels and Demons and make a movie out of it. And we'll make it a sequel, because a prequel would be harder for the audience to get their heads around.

Lord, I wish they hadn't. I'd have been spared so much. And as is so often the case, all you can do is blame the writers. The actors are doing their best, and the production look is very glossy. There probably aren't as many disused churches in the whole of Rome as the film would have us believe are in Vatican City (yeah, imagine that, disused churches in the Vatican; a real movie might have done something with the irony), but that niggle apart, it's pretty. It's just moronic.

Fiction always takes place to some extent in a parallel universe; if you use real life institutions you have to bend and warp them and you can't use the real life holders of big offices for all kinds of reasons. So Angels and Demons HAS to be in a parallel universe where the Pope is Celestine V, or rather was because he's all dead now. I accepted that as part of what you do in the world of fiction. It's also taking place in a parallel universe where it takes almost an hour to cross the Vatican in a fast car. In real life, you could walk across the Vatican in twenty minutes with a bag on your head. So in bizarro world, the Vatican's a lot bigger than it is in reality.

Let's get the acting out of the way. Tom Hanks is barely there, except when he's sneering. Robert Langdon is pretty much a dick. He spends the whole movie delivering mini-lectures and put downs to the Catholics littering the place. Before the movie opened people were worrying that it would make the church look bad. They can relax. The movie could have shown the college of cardinals beating Tom Hanks to death with live babies and they'd still have looked good compared to the supercilious sneering git they were putting down. Actually, that's a scene they can put in the director's cut. People would probably like it. Armin Mueller Stahl is wonderful, as always. Playing Cardinal Red Herring, he's perfect as the guy who seems to be too smooth to be anything other than the evil mastermind. Stahl can do warm monsters better than anyone alive, so he was a good casting choice, except for the fact that the target audience for this movie probably hasn't seen another movie with him in it. Same with Stellan Skarsgaard - the savvy casting directors were probably hoping that everyone would get an untrustworthy vibe off him from all of his assorted roles as smart but unscrupulous scoundrels (Gregor in Ronin is about the best known) Ewan McGregor can stop worrying that his Alex Guinness impersonation was the most horrible work he's ever done for money, because Father Patrick McKenna is (I can only hope) head and shoulders the worst performance he's ever likely to give. He has a long speech in the middle of the movie about the need for a kinder gentler church which is more or less the worst three minutes of acting I expect to see this decade. And there's a chick and there's a utility heavy, and any number of redshirted cardinals and cops and they more or less get their work done - they're all fine. Hanks and McGregor should hang their heads in shame, but everyone else did as well as can be expected. And I only single out Hanks and McGregor because either one of them could have pulled a strop and shot one of the writers. Part of what sinks McGregor is that his character is, perversely, set up as Irish, which strands McGregor trying to deliver jaw droppingly turgid dialogue in an accent he can't do properly. I thought that this was just something they were stuck with, but before I started writing this, I looked at a summary of the book, and it turns out that the character was originally written as Italian. Once they were changing, why not change to an accent that McGregor could do? Scottish is about the only which springs to mind, but hey....

But the true horror lies in the writing. And now that I know they weren't really tied down by the original book, my hat's off to the writing team for making such a piss-poor job of the adaptation. The one thing that they did do was make the conspiracy less ramshackle; whereby hangs a tale.

Usually I care about spoilers, but this film comes pre spoiled, so I'm just going to rip in. Tom Hanks has been called in at short notice by the Vatican to use his huge knowledge of arcane bullshit to find the Illuminati plotters who have kidnapped the four most likely future popes and planted an anti-matter bomb in the Vatican someplace. "Thank Goodness," snarks Stellan Skarsgaard's chief of security "The symbologist has arrived". Hanks divides his screen time between delivering lectures on how sucky the Church is and having blinding insights into stuff which doesn't make any sense. So the Illuminati Conspiracy involves them seizing these four guys, killing them in symbolic ways and then destroying the Vatican in an explosion which will completely obliterate all traces of the symbolism and every witness who might conceivably have been impressed with the symbolism in the first place. Oh yeah, and the Illuminati were driven by the Church into swearing eternal enmity and adopting utter secrecy. Weirdly, they implemented this plan by meeting in Churches and festooning the city of Rome with symbols of their meeting places which can be doped out by, well, Tom Hanks. As clandestine conspiracies go, it's like infiltrating the Nazi party in a yarmulke.

The thing is, the plan is completely leotarded right out of the box. You just gape at the screen thinking, Scooby Doo would have been embarrassed by this. Hanks lurches from one landmark to another seizing on random sticky out bits of the scenery and declaring that these are the signs to the next step on the scavenger hunt. Why? Because he says so, that's why.

Which is not to say that he's an action hero. Anything but. There's one shoot out, which he survives by ducking for cover and falling into a cellar. His other moment of personal jeopardy comes when he gets locked into a chamber in the Vatican Archives which suddenly starts to run out of oxygen. He tries to smash his way out with a bookcase, and wonderfully it bounces off the glass wall without breaking it. So he shoots the glass wall, which cracks it a bit, but still doesn't break it. The wall finally collapses about three seconds before they switch the air back on anyway. The audience loved it. Robert Langdon is just pants at action. Somehow, that and the fact that he's a dick are the only believable facets of his character. The idea that he's a genius who just sees all these connections in the puzzle - well firstly the puzzle's dumb, and secondly he's never persuasive as someone who could think his way out of a problem.

So, the plan again. The Pope's dead (we discover halfway through that this was murder), the Illuminati have kidnapped the four cardinals most likely to succeed him, and they've planted an anti-matter bomb in the Vatican. Every hour on the hour, they're going to whack a cardinal, and as a grand finale, they're going to blow up the Vatican with anti-matter. Just so you know they mean it, they've put a "wireless" camera in with their bomb, so you can see that they've got one, and that its fuse is ticking down. But because it's a wireless camera, "It could be ANYwhere."

Fittingly, since the film is ostensibly about the tension between science and faith, Ewan McGregor's Deputy Pope (It's shorthand, I'm not going to bore myself with the crap they used to handwave him) suggests that the camera could be located by switching off the power to bits of the Vatican in turn; he's cunningly noticed that the bomb is lit by artificial light, so if they can switch that off, they'll know what sector of the Vatican powergrid the bomb is in. For the rest of the movie, lights go on and off at random in the Vatican, which has a poor grasp of search algorithms and doesn't seem to realise that first you switch off HALF the lights, then half of the lights in the zone that indicates, and so on. Take about five flips of the switch, ten minutes or so. Or, as John pointed out WIREless camera; triangulate the signal with radio detectors. But you can't expect men of faith to have good engineering skills, now can you?

Though they must have had, at some point - the Vatican Archive is like Google HQ with all the electronic doors and the Swiss Guard Offices make the Pentagon look like a Taliban guard shack. Of course, as already noted, this does seem to be a much bigger Vatican than the one we know about. Hmmm.

Anyhow, other than shedding convenient darkness on scenes better not lit up, the great flicking the light switches plan doesn't do much and Hanks rackets around the Vatican, always missing the chance to save the latest victim by a matter of moments. It's down to them driving, I think. It seems to take much longer to get round the Holy City by Lancia than I ever could on foot. Finally, in the very nick of time, they realise that the plot must centre on the Deputy Pope, and they run back to find him flat on his back with Stellan Skarsgaard looming over him. So Stellan gets plugged; he's been well dodgy all along and it's obvious that he's the villain of the piece, the sinister mind behind the plot (the sinister hands of the plot have just blown themselves up by falling for that old chestnut of getting into a car that's been wired to explode). Hanks and the Deputy Pope realise that the last piece of the puzzle has fallen into place and they race for the bomb, getting there just five minutes before it's due to blow up. How can they defuse it? The chick was supposed to do that, but she gets cold feet at the last minute and there's nothing for it but to try to get the bomb far enough away from the Vatican to detonate without damaging anything. How can our intrepid heroes do it? Especially as they've pretty much decimated the Vatican security forces in the course of the last hour. Luckily, there's a helicopter in St Peter's Square! Even more luckily, Deputy Pope Ewan McGregor can fly a helicopter!

Just pause here, we have to do a quick critique of the worst back-story foreshaow in the history of fiction; Deputy Pope McGregor used to be just a wee little boy in Northern Ireland, and then the UVF let off a bomb in protest at the visit to Belfast of an Archbishop, which orphaned the future deputy pope. So saddened was the archbishop that he adopted the Little Orphan Boy and brought him to Italy. Where, in defiance of all logic he a) developed a Southern Irish accent (albeit a terrible one) and b) got conscripted into the Italian army where he learned to fly helicopters, and rescued the wounded. Right, in all those wars Italy's been in lately, I know. Believe it or not, in the book, the backstory is even more insane. And, yeah, the UVF were bastards, but even if an Archbishop had ever visited Northern Ireland (archbishops not being actually in short supply there to be begin with) it's unlikely that the UVF would have let a bomb off, if only because they were, by and large, far too stupid to build a bomb which would actually go off. Anyhow the important thing is that the Deputy Pope knows how to fly a chopper.

So Deputy Pope McGregor flies up into the sky with the bomb, and we think well, that's actually kind of manly, and not at all as crap as it could have been because it's a real self sacrifice. Then a parachute appears. It's the Deputy Pope. By some magic we can only guess at, he's figured out a way to a) lock the autopilot into continuous climb and b) find a parachute and c) get into it and d) jump out of the helicopter all within the less than five minutes between grabbing the bomb in the basement and running out into the piazza - well, anyhow, you can see that it's physically impossible even if helicopters had parachutes in them, which they pretty much don't. He's still descending on this impossible parachute when the bomb goes off, about three different times and four different ways (I imagine the CGI team said "well, we could do this, or this, or this" and Ron Howard (whose fault most of this is) said "Hell, do all of them." The pressure wave is intense, making holes in the dome of St Peters, but magically not turning everyone in St Peter's Square into jelly; I guess there are things about anti-matter which science can't explain.... Again, the book is actually dumber; in the book, Langdon goes up in the chopper but doesn't have a parachute, so he uses a HELICOPTER DOOR as an improvised paraglider to make a safe splashdown in the Tiber....

Turns out, though, that all the stupid, stupid holes in the Illumnati plan are there on purpose, because Ewan McGregor has made the whole thing up so as to orchestrate his own election as pope. I mean, there he is, heroically sacrificing himself and surviving only through a miracle. It must be God's will that he be Pope. Big spoiler, no, because in the nick of time Langdon dopes it all out and rats him out to the Cardinals, who shun him, so he goes off and for some completely crazy pants reason, sets fire to himself. Because that would be a fun way to go.

The sort of cool thing is that with that reveal, all the weaknesses in the Illuminati plot go away. The time wasting stupid plan to find the camera by switching the lights off (doubly doomed to failure - when we finally see the bomb, the light shining on it is running off a big truck battery) was Deputy Pope McGregor's own suggestion. And now it's easy to see how there'd be a parachute in the chopper. And the crazypants plot which if it had succeeded would have left no witnesses to its own brilliance - not a problem if it was only meant to showcase the Deputy Pope's awesomeness. And even Langdon's magical ability to figure out the clues; not so amazing if you figure that Deputy Pope crazypants McGregor has been manipulating him from the beginning, setting up a plot which would be obvious to the academic patsy he's brought in to uncover things at just the right speed to kill off all his rivals yet leave him untouched....

All in all, you start to think it could have been a pretty cool movie if they'd shown it from the right angles - imagine if it had been shown as Langdon deluding himself the whole time and then realising that he'd been played.

And it's tempting to think of what it might have been like with a better director (and better writers); JJ Abrams could have run with it much better. Or Mel Gibson's version. That would have been fun. Is it too soon for the remake?

Can I ask you a stupid question?

The only appropriate and safe answer is "Yes".

Here's why. No matter what the problem is, there's only going to be a couple of questions which will help you get closer to the solution. All the other ones are going to be stupid questions. And let's face it; no halfway sensible person asks questions they already know the answer to, or which they could figure out the answer to by sitting quietly for a second. So if you ask a question, it's because you don't know stuff, and the chances are that you don't even know enough about the subject to know what a good question would be. So the chances are that any question you ever get asked, on its merits, is going to sound pretty stupid. For that matter, the chances are that any question you ever ask is going to be stupid.

If you're unlucky enough to work in a job with easily defined parameters, most of the questions you're going to get asked will be non stupid ones, but they'll all be the same question, more or less; they'll be versions of "can you tell me when the next train leaves/whether this item is in stock/what price extra fries are?". If you're lucky enough to have a job that pays well, it's almost certainly paying you well because it requires you to think. And if you're paid money to think, it's invariably because there are lots of people coming by your shop who find it too much trouble to think about the things that you're being paid to think about. Those people are going to ask you stupid questions.

Rejoice. For two reasons. The first is that your job wouldn't exist if it weren't for stupidity. I've made a good living for twenty five years out of the fact that the world is full of people who don't know how to do things that I know how to do. It's frustrating dealing with the consequences of stupidity, but whenever I find myself wishing that for once people would just get a clue, I remind myself that if they ever did, the first sensible follow-up would be to put me on a farm somewhere. And the second reason to rejoice is that stupidity is neither general nor incurable. There are irretrievably stupid people out there, but the majority of stupid people are specialists. Just as no-one can know everything, no-one can be ignorant of everything. And people can, and sometimes even do, learn.

So when someone comes up and says "Can I ask you a stupid question?" fight the temptation to embroider your reply. It would be amusing to say "Apparently, you can." or "Only time will tell." Lord knows, I've said that often enough. It's tempting to say condescendingly "No such thing as a stupid question.", although I hope I've just talked you out of that fallacy. The simple and true answer is "Yes." With no baggage or condescension, and with the humble awareness that your own turn in the barrel is coming, say "Yes." It won't make you feel much better about the idiocy to come or the mental gymnastics needed to jump over it. But at least it won't make the person asking the question feel like any more of an idiot than they have to.