 
Anne Billson on Film 2009

collected columns from the Guardian, 2009

Copyright 2012 Anne Billson

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Foreword

The following pieces were originally published in _The Guardian_ 's Film & Music section in 2009. The sharpwitted among you may have already worked out that you could probably read them for free on the _Guardian_ 's own website, so what can I offer here to make you feel your outlay of 99 cents has been worthwhile?

Firstly, of course, there's the convenience of having all these columns collected under one cover, whence they can easily be downloaded to your e-reading device, thus absolving you of the need to scour the web, and ensuring you don't accidentally skip a single pearl of my accumulated wisdom. Then there's the knowledge that - for better or for worse - the pieces are you are about to read are the raw unadulterated texts, unmodified by subeditors and untrimmed by the necessity to accommodate last-minute advertising on the printed page.

And then - I'd like to think - there's the satisfaction of knowing you are helping, in some small way, to sustain the career of a struggling writer. It could well be that the job of arts journalist, film critic, will shortly cease to exist as a paid profession, and will instead become the province of people with lots of time or private income on their hands. I'm not suggesting this is necessarily a Bad Thing, just that I wish I'd got the memo back in the early 1980s, when I was starting out, so I could have learnt a more useful trade, such as plumbing or dentistry.

But as an extra sweetener, I have added to the end of this collection _The Psycho Murders_ , a novella inspired by the 1973 Vincent Price movie _Theatre of Blood_ and first published on Twitter in increments of 140 characters. It used to be on my blog, but now it's a piece of writing you can find _nowhere on the web_.

I'm afraid I've had to remove all the accents from the following texts, as I'm told unusual key combinations can play havoc with e-publishing. So apologies to Beatrice, Francois and Seraphine.

In any case, whatever you think of the finished results, I'd like to thank you for buying and reading. Please feel free to tell me what you think (preferably in a civilised manner) via Twitter or on one of my blogs, links to which you can find at the end of this collection.

Anne Billson, 2012

Chapter 1: Films for People Who Don't Like Films

I don't normally like to read too much about a film before watching it, but I made an exception for _The Reader_ , since I was having trouble working out what kind of movie it was. _The Graduate_ with a lurking concentration camp motif? A _Stanley & Iris_-style study of illiteracy with a dash of _The Night Porter_?

But the more I read about it, the less it appealed, because I can't imagine how this film could surprise or enlighten or delight me in any way whatsoever. And now I've got it confused with _Revolutionary Road_ , which I haven't seen either, and not just because both titles begin with R. _Revolutionary Road_ , like _The Reader_ , features Kate Winslet getting naked, is adapted from an acclaimed novel, and is directed by someone who made his name in British Theatre. One such film is happenstance; two practically constitutes a genre, and I think I've finally worked out what that genre is. It's Films For People Who Don't Really Like Films.

People who don't view cinema as a viable artform are only drawn to films which have been slapped with a cultural seal of approval: critically approved source material, or directors who have made their names in more venerable artforms, such as literature or theatre. They wouldn't dream of going to see thrillers starring Jason Statham, or comedies starring Will Ferrell, or horror movies starring no-one they've ever heard of, though I would argue there's likely to be more true cinematic feeling in such movies' little fingers than in the entire bloated corpus of _Atonement_ or _Proof_ or _Possession_ (and I'm not talking about the one where Isabelle Adjani has sex with a tentacled monster). Let's face it, film-makers who try to reproduce the virtues of literature or theatre or fine art without understanding that film is an entirely different medium, with its own peculiar virtues, only ever succeed in coming up with ponderous, meretricious, upmarket kitsch.

I'm not saying such films are wholly without their pleasures, if not necessarily the ones their makers intended. For instance, I couldn't tear my eyes away from Nicole Kidman's fake nose in _The Hours_. And perhaps Kate getting naked will in itself enough to make _The Reader_ and _Revolutionary Road_ worth the haul. (And yes, I will get round to watching them at some point, and wouldn't it be great if they did surprise me and force me to eat my words?)

I'm with the Surrealists on this one, which I discovered by chance (and not, I assure you, because I was seeking intellectual justification for my sins) while flicking through Ado Kyrou's _Le surrealisme au cinema_. Kyrou writes (pardon my clunky translation) "Let us look at commercial cinema through new eyes, because it's there that one finds the most unexpected riches." I'm all for that. The films I'm most looking forward to seeing are not worthy Oscar bait like _Milk_ or _Doubt_ , though Sean Penn's fake nose and Meryl Streep looking stern in a black bonnet may well afford the odd unexpected thrill, and I've already ascertained that _Frost/Nixon_ is worth watching purely on the strength of one or two of Frank Langella's more complicated facial expressions.

But what I _really_ want to see is Stephen Rea embedded in Mena Suvari's windscreen for half the running-time of _Stuck_. I want to see Tony Leung, the most beautiful actor in the world, as a Chinese warlord in John Woo's _Red Cliff_ , and Lee Byung-hun, second most beautiful actor in the world, poncing around in cool scar make-up and tight black trousers in Kim Ji-woon's wacky Leone homage, _The Good, The Bad, The Weird_. I want to see _My Bloody Valentine_ in 3-D, and _Outlander_ , starring Jim Caviezel as an alien who teams up with the Vikings. And right at the top of my dance-card, I'm afraid, is _Beverly Hills Chihuahua_ , which I just _have_ to see on the basis of that stupid title alone. I'm sure some of these films will be rubbish, but equally sure that even the worst will yield moments of cinematic joy entirely absent from the likes of _Revolutionary Road_. If you want intellectual justification for _Beverly Hills Chihuahua_ , I could probably rustle it up, but do we really need it? _This_ is Cinema.

Chapter 2: When Actors Play Real People

Actors playing real people is like actors speaking in funny foreign accents, or playing autistic savants or paraplegics - an in-your-face signifier that they're Acting with a capital A, instead of just swanning around being themselves. There's a whole bunch of Real People Performances jostling for position right now, because we're well into awards season. Nine of the past 12 Oscars for Best Actor and Actress have gone to portrayals of Real People. In the eyes of the easily impressed, playing a made-up character just doesn't have the same cachet.

Michael Sheen squaring off against Frank Langella in _Frost/Nixon_? It's the Battle of the Impersonations! Apart from one terrific if slightly on-the-nose late-night phone call from one antagonist to the other, entirely dreamt up by playwright/screenwriter Peter Morgan, I kept thinking I might as well have been watching the original TV face-off instead of Ron Howard's recreation of the edited hightlights. Gus Van Sant doesn't dig any deeper into the character of Milk than the 1984 documentary _The Times of Harvey Milk_ , and Sean Penn's two-dimensional caricature is easily outplayed by Josh Brolin, who invests Dan White with so much unspoken back story you can't help wishing the film had been about him, rather than the (as presented here) saintly paragon he murdered. (And by the way, I have yet to hear anyone questioning the wisdom of Penn's prosthetic nasal addition to his Smiley Face impression, though there would no doubt have been a lot of squawking about anti-semitism if he'd strapped on a fake nose to play Fagin or Shylock.)

Stephen Soderbergh's _Che_ gives us an hour and a half of Benicio del Toro being charismatic in the jungle before he finally gets hold of a beret and starts looking like the iconic Korda photo familiar from a million posters and T-shirts, though I swear that if I hadn't already seen _The Motorcycle Diaries_ , I'd have been left wondering just who the hell this guy was. But isn't it all a bit Barnum & Bailey? All a bit wow, he may look nothing like the bloke he's playing but isn't it an uncannily accurate impression nonetheless? Apart from a couple (or, in _Che_ 's case, a lot) of hours' running-time, there's not much separating these panto turns from equally uncannily accurate impressions by Mike Yarwood, say, or Rory Bremner. I admire Forest Whitaker but, honestly, how hard can it have been to play a larger-than-life monster like Idi Amin in _The Last King of Scotland_? All credit to Helen Mirren, then, who in _The Queen_ actually did succeed in tricking us into thinking that not only was there more to the profile from the stamps and coins than meets the eye, but that we'd somehow never noticed Her Majesty had been a looker all along.

There's something inescapably shallow about the way traditional biopics traipse from childhood trauma to early career to alcohol or drug-related setback to triumphant comeback, all the while showcasing a shameless example of is-it-real-or-is-it-Memorex grandstanding from Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon as Johnny Cash and June Carter, or Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles. I reckon the less a Real Person Movie pays lip service to known facts, the more hope it has of capturing something of the essence of its subject, which is why that one late-night phone call offers more insight than the rest of _Frost/Nixon_ laid end to end.

Many critics, somehow overlooking the word "imaginary" in the title, whinged that _Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus_ bore scant resemblance to the photographer or her life, but Nicole Kidman's Alice-in-Freaksville performance and her erotic shaving scene with hairy Robert Downey Jr touched on strange emotional and artistic truths that would have been beyond the scope of a more orthodox biopic. Todd Haynes' decision to cast six different actors in _I'm Not There_ really did hint at the complexity of Bob Dylan, even if the results were uneven. And in _Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters_ , maybe the best writer biopic ever made, Ken Ogata looked nothing like the Japanese writer, but Paul Schrader got under the man's skin by taking off into flights of artistic delirium that Gus Van Sant and Stephen Soderbergh can only dream of.

Chapter 3: Old-Age Acting

It seems unfair that Brad Pitt should be nominated for an Oscar when six other actors helped him play the title role in _The Curious Case of Benjamin Button_. That some of these other actors had to play it with bags over their heads, so that Brad's face could be digitally imposed on to theirs, only increases my admiration for them. Anyway, it's not Brad who impresses me the most, but Tom Everett, who plays the character between the ages of 69 and 67. I needed a calculator to work this out, by the way, and would have greatly appreciated a small counter in one corner of the screen conveying the precise ratio of Benjamin's physical to mental age at any given moment, which might have had the added advantage of reminding me I wasn't watching a film about a person whose life was of no interest whatsoever.

But old-age acting isn't just about physiognomy. The most conspicuous physical symptoms of age aren't so much wrinkles as gait and posture, which is why Everett's grasp of the way an old guy moves impresses me more than Brad looking adorable with varying amounts of hair. You can even spot the exact moment when Benjamin starts being Brad all over; his body language abruptly becomes laconic.

The official world record for Greatest Age Span Portrayed by a Movie Actor is still held by Dustin Hoffman, who ran the gamut from 17 to 121 years old as Jack Crabb, sole white survivor of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, in Arthur Penn's revisionist western _Little Big Man_. I've never met a 121-year-old, but I'll wager he'd waggle his head much like Dustin, who also screamed for two hours prior to shooting to achieve the papery voice effect. Given the Academy's predeliction for this sort of grandstanding, it seems odd he didn't get nominated for an Oscar in the same year that Ryan O'Neal, say, got the nod for _Love Story_ ; one can only conclude the film itself wasn't much liked. The Best Make-up category didn't exist in 1970, otherwise Dick Smith would surely have been a shoo-in for his pioneering foam latex wizardry and blinkable eyelids. (Hoffman has since played a 243-year-old in _Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium_ \- for which he reportedly didn't need any special slap at all. Go figure.)

Even further back, in 1941, Maurice Seiderman's old-geezer make-up for _Citizen Kane_ does as well as can be expected for the era, but what's even more persuasive than the wrinkles is that Orson Welles seems to grow not just balder, but broader and rounder as Kane ages from the film-maker's own 25 years to a prematurely decrepit 70. This was coincidentally the same age at which Welles himself would die of a heart attack, looking in his last years (according to photos) not so very different from old Charles Foster Kane, albeit somewhat jollier and hairier.

The best case of pre-digital ageing, for my money, is that of Robert De Niro, effortlessly spanning four decades in _Once Upon a Time in America_ as washed-up gangster Noodles. No thanks to the make-up people, who go overboard on grey lines as though mistakenly thinking themselves hired for a provincial opera company production of _Falstaff_. James Woods does what he can with implausible silver hair-topping; Elizabeth McGovern cops out altogether by pushing cleansing cream around her face for ten minutes, like an anorexic fiddling with mashed potato. But De Niro is a marvel; he doesn't just pull off the posture and the gait - he also nails the slightly vague expression of someone whose eyesight isn't quite as sharp as it used to be.

And the booby prize for acting old? I'm afraid it's James Dean in _Giant_. The doomed 24-year-old strikes iconic poses a-plenty as young ranch hand Jett Rink, but makes a hash of playing the same character as an oil tycoon a couple of decades later, though admittedly he's not helped by a naff moustache. This older Rink is only 46, for heaven's sake, but young Jimmy plays him like a hammy impersonation of Ted from _The Fast Show_. You feel like pointing at him and sneering, "Ha! Where's your precious Method now?"

Chapter 4: Shopping and Weddings

Men, I share your pain. Chick-flicks really suck. Especially in this post- _Sex and the_ City period, when their focus seems to have shrunk down to shopping and weddings, as if those are the only subjects women could possibly be interested in. I gaze, bemused and, yes, fascinated, at curious anthropological artefacts like _Bride Wars_ or _He's Just Not That Into You_ and _Confessions of a Shopaholic_ , in which Kate Hudson or Ginnifer Goodwin or Isla Fisher play characters who might almost belong to a third gender, a bubble-headed one that emits ear-splitting shrieks, teeters constantly on the verge of hysteria and acts as indiscriminate product placement mouthpiece for overpriced tat.

Perhaps the recession will finally put the kibosh on all this vulgar Jimmy Choo-ing and Vera Wang-ing. Perhaps designer name-dropping is fated to go the way of the dinosaur, to be replaced (please God) by comic situations that don't involve tulle-clad brides tussling in the aisle or catfights over Gucci boots, or maybe even (dare one dream) by a smidgeon of emotional truth and some witty, clever dialogue. In fact, I'd probably settle for slapstick and cheap sarcasm, just so long as it's not wedding related.

It's not as though there's a shortage of female talent capable of delivering a well-timed quip. Even the most _Friends_ -phobic curmudgeon has to admit that ten years' toil on a popular sitcom will have honed Jennifer Aniston's comic chops. So where are they now? Nowhere to be seen or heard in _He's Just Not That Into You_ , that's for sure, where all she wants is... to get married. Isla Fisher carries _Confessions of a Shopaholic_ on her adorable shoulders, but it's clear she's punching below her weight. For God's sake, someone give these girls something they can sink their teeth into.

And it doesn't have to be like this! Think back, for example, to _His Girl Friday_ , in which Rosalind Russell not only juggles fiancé, ex-husband, speed-of-light dialogue and the ethics of journalism, but performs an impressive rugby-tackle. Maybe the secret is that the role was originally written for a man, which lends it a breadth missing from the usual chick-flick stereotypes, though Russell has her cake and eats it by getting to wear extravagant hats as well.

So I'd like to see a little more role reversal, please. I'm fed up with charmless slackers like Seth Rogen getting off with hotties, so how about a rom-com in which a girl geek gets knocked up by an overachieving Mr McDreamy? How about Sarah Silverman playing a 40-year-old spinster who sets out to lose her virginity? Or some edgy comic business relating to abortion, or menstruation? (Too much to ask, I know.) More to the point, where is the female Judd Apatow, playing godmother to a new wave of funny ladies in femme-oriented comedies that allow their characters to live lives beyond Prada? Five years ago, with Mean Girls, Tina Fey looked as though she might be shaping up to fill that role, and of course in 2008 she was elected Most Admired Comedienne in America for her perfect Sarah Palin and _30 Rock_. And yet her last big screen outing was the brain-dead _Baby Mama_. Though I guess women being interested in nothing but babies makes a change from them being interested in nothing but shopping and weddings.

But why can't someone write a female equivalent of, say, the mock-biopic _Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story_ , so Anna Faris could expand on her scene-stealing Britney Spears impersonation from _Just Good Friends_ with a potted send-up of half a century of girl music, instead of being stuck in cutesy fluff like _The House Bunny_? Or how about a female stoner comedy? Actually, there already is one of these - Gregg Araki's _Smiley Face_ , in which Faris eats all of her flatmate's hash-cupcakes, leading to a masterclass in 101 dope-addled expressions as her day devolves into a paranoid nightmare of botched auditions, sausage factories and a first edition of The Communist Manifesto. Now that's funny, but for some reason, the film was never given a proper release in this country (though you ought to be able to find it on DVD). British distributors evidently concluded there wasn't enough shopping and wedding in it.

Chapter 5: In Praise of Supporting Actors

It's not because I'm a costume pic junkie that I'm salivating at the prospect of _The Young Victoria_. It's because I can't wait to see Mark Strong as Miranda Richardson's drunken, controlling, abusive, dog-kicking secretary with ambitions to rule Britain. As far as I'm concerned, Strong can rule Britain any time, because he is, for me, one of those supporting actors who make films worth watching.

Who cares about Gerard Butler and his dreary scam in _RocknRolla_? I wanted to see what Strong's dapper henchman was up to. Let Michelle Pfeiffer cut out Claire Danes' heart in _Stardust_ , for Chrissake, so we can get back to the adventures of Strong as the Seventh Prince. And forget about Leonard DiCaprio and Russell Crowe in _Body of Lies_ \- I would rather spend time with Strong as that lovely chap from the Jordanian secret service, the one who calls Leonardo "my dear" and whom everyone keeps calling "honey". (I swear the movie unspooling in my head was more fun than the one I was watching, even when the credits rolled and I found out the bloke's name was actually "Hani".)

So now I find myself getting unfeasibly excited about Guy Ritchie's _Sherlock Holmes_ and Ridley Scott's _Robin Hood_ , simply because Strong will be playing Satanic cult leader Lord Blackwood in the former, and Guy of Gisborne, a potentially scene-stealing role if ever there was one (cf Basil Rathbone) in the latter. Hey, wouldn't it be brilliant if someone cast this guy in a leading role?

But wait. Maybe it wouldn't be such a bright idea after all. Scene-stealers often lose their edgy allure once they're bumped up to leading-man status. Kevin Spacey was a riot in _The Usual Suspects_ , _Seven_ and _LA Confidential_ , but pretty much an unconvincing ham in _American Beauty_ , _Pay It Forward_ and _The Shipping News_. Philip Seymour Hoffman was a scream in _Boogie Nights_ , _Happiness_ and _The Talented Mr Ripley_ , but a crashing bore in _Doubt_ , and nearly two hours of him as Truman Capote is, frankly, pushing it, though I grant you he can still bring home the bacon in smaller-scale productions such as _The Savages_.

Isn't it a crime against nature to cast Matthew McConaughey in rom-com leading roles when he - and we - are clearly having more fun with his wacky turns in _Dazed and Confused_ or _Reign of Fire_ or Tropic _Thunder_? And when will casting directors realise that a little of Jude Law goes a long, long way in _The Talented Mr Ripley_ , or with bad tooth make-up in _The Road to Perdition_ , but that his pretty-boy presence overstays its welcome, and then some, in _Breaking and Entering_ or _My Blueberry Nights_?

No doubt it's easier to pull off a relatively brief but flamboyant character turn than to carry an entire movie on one's shoulders, but imagine how much poorer cinema history would be without the likes of Walter Brennan, Eugene Pallette or Claude Rains, who for my money steals _Casablanca_ out from under the noses of Bogart and Bergman. There's a sad tendency these days to shove the star in our faces at the expense of juicy secondary roles. Part of my frustration with the _Mission: Impossible_ movies (spun off from a TV show that was, may I remind you, all about teamwork) was Tom Cruise snaffling all the best stuff for himself and reducing a promising supporting cast to also-rans, with barely a decent line of dialogue between them.

Two of my favourite latterday scene-stealers are no longer with us, alas, but their great movie moments are seared more indelibly into my brain than all the heavy-duty thesping from today's starring actors laid end to end. Who can forget J.T. Walsh effortlessly making his mark on _The Last Seduction_ as a sleazy lawyer whose scant two seconds of screen time ("Still a self-serving bitch?") don't even take place in the same room as his leading lady? Or how about _The Godfather: Part II_ \- packed with memorable explosions of violence, but few of them quite as treasurable as the low-key scene in which young Clemenza initiates Vito Corleone into a life of crime by rolling up a rug? Bruno Kirby, you are much missed.

Chapter 6: When Horror Comedy Goes Wrong

Still cheesed off by the soppy emo vampires of _Twilight_? Fret ye not. The lunkhead demographic gets its own back with _Lesbian Vampire Killers_ , in which two unappetising TV comedians get to phwoar at babelicious lesbian vampires before knocking them around and cutting their heads off. Far be it from me to suggest that this is a chucklesome expression of every Cro-Magnon's secret misogynist fantasy, because obviously these chicks are vampires! And lesbians! And thus fair game.

_Lesbian Vampire Killers_ is only the latest manifestation of a long and not always honourable hybrid genre: the British horror-comedy. Its distributors would have us believe it cleaves to the tradition of _Shaun of the Dead_ , so let us keep our fingers crossed that James Corden and Matthew Horne are not following in the footsteps of Kenny Everett in _Bloodbath at the House of Death_ instead. If there are any would-be horror-comedy film-makers out there, please note that you can't just stick TV comedians in an undernourished plot, shovel in a few horror clichés and a shower of disconnected gags, and then slap the result with an over-the-top title and expect it to work. For horror-comedy to succeed, you must treat both the humour and the horror with respect. It's a tricky balancing act; _The Cottage_ toppled off the tightrope by allowing the splatter to swamp the characters, so that by the end one might as well have been watching any old American mutant-hillbilly slasher flick stocked with a cast of anonymous cannon-fodder.

Horror and comedy are bedmates by default: neither genre, in its rawest form, is appreciated by mainstream critics. Both revel in the gross-out effect; splatter and slapstick are intimately related, the fruit of their congress being moments like that icky business with the intestines from _Dog Soldiers_. Comedy, like horror, plays on a dread of what might happen, loss of control, imminent chaos. When a horror movie goes wrong, the audience responds with laughter. When a horror-comedy goes wrong, there's not even that laughter to fall back on - the results are just painful.

If a director is sufficiently well-versed in genre clichés, however, the slaughtering of foolish comic characters in unexpectedly grisly ways within a strong narrative framework can reap dividends by often being even more shocking than non-comic horror, with the stakes accordingly raised, as it were, for the survivors. Neil Marshall with _Dog Soldiers_ , Christopher Smith in _Severance_ and Edgar Wright in _Shaun of the Dead_ all clearly knew what they were doing here. There are few moments in modern British cinema more distressing than Dylan Moran getting torn to pieces by zombies; by that stage of _Shaun of the Dead_ he seemed less a TV comedian than a credibly obnoxious character we'd got to know and hate, but _no-one_ deserves to die like that. Except maybe Joseph Pilato in _Day of the Dead_.

Horror-comedy found its poster-boy in Vincent Price, whose sardonic blend of camp and sinister seems more unsettling now, in retrospect, than it did back in the 1970s, when he starred in a strain of American-funded yet essentially British Grand Guignol in which a full complement of well-known character actors were slaughtered in flamboyantly ghastly ways. _The Abominable Dr Phibes_ and its sequel are full of queasy moments like Alex Scott's head being crushed in a booby-trapped frog mask - a death more horridly baroque than any in the _Saw_ movies. As for _Theatre of Blood_ , I was so upset at seeing Price sawing off Arthur Lowe's head (nooo! Captain Mainwaring!) and force-feeding Robert Morley with his own poodles that I obsessed about it for days. It just wasn't _right_ to treat loveable character actors like that. Which was precisely what made it work so well. If anyone's interested, by the way, I have a long list of much-loved TV comedians I would like to see disembowelled.

Two of the best British-style horror-comedies were directed by non-Brits, who managed to respect our homegrown Gothic traditions without succumbing to their cosier tendencies. Some people still complain that Roman Polanski's _Dance of the Vampires_ isn't funny (I would disagree - Jack MacGowran is a scream) but don't tell me it isn't the stuff of nightmares when our fearless vampire killers find themselves the only dancers reflected in the ballroom mirror. And why is _An American Werewolf in London_ still the yardstick by which all horror-comedies must be judged? Because John Landis never forgets he's directing a werewolf movie, and that the humour should never be gratuitous but should spring naturally from the characters. Even if, like Griffin Dunne, they're rotting corpses.

ETA: I had a bit of a senior moment when I was writing this column and mistakenly thought my word count was 750 instead of its usual 700. Not surprising, then, that it got cut down for publication. The sub-editors did a pretty good job of it in the end, but this is the uncut version.

Chapter 7: Can British Films Get Any Worse?

Can British films get any worse? _The Boat That Rocks_ has already triggered a debate as to whether it's even crummier than _Lesbian Vampire Killers_. Francois Truffaut said, "There's something about England that's anti-cinematic", and English film-makers, and quite possibly Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish ones as well, always seem to be falling over themselves to prove him right.

I seldom go and see British films for pleasure. I go out of duty, and invariably regret it. _Love Actually_ and _The History Boys_ were so ineptly crafted and emotionally dishonest they left me depressed for days. The only thing that stopped me slitting my wrists after _Atonement_ was that _No Country for Old Men_ and _Sweeney Todd_ were coming out a week later, and I was looking forward to seeing those. I got so bored during _The Wind That Shakes the Barley_ that I actually started trying to read a magazine. In the cinema! In the dark!

Of course, there are exceptions. _Happy-Go-Lucky_ was interesting (mainly because it forced me to examine the reasons why I wanted to kill the Sally Hawkins character) and _The Bank Job_ mildly diverting, but most British output seems divided between prestige period pics by inheritors of the Merchant-Ivory mantle, and ladmag fodder, exemplified by all those ghastly British gangster films that spoiled my stint as a bona fide film critic in the 1990s. There isn't space here for me to bang on about all my wacky theories about what Truffaut called the "incompatibility between the terms 'cinema' and 'Britain'," so I'll limit myself to just a couple.

I once heard a British film director say in a televised interview that he wasn't interested in telling a story visually (why were you directing a bloody film then, you wanker?) and it's clear he's not the only one. Historically, Britain has produced more world-class writers than painters, and words tend to be valued far above visual imagery, if only because reading and listening apparently require more effort than looking, and so are deemed to be worthier pursuits. A lot of British film-makers think that screenplay equals dialogue, and because the Brits still haven't glommed on to William Goldman's maxim that "Screenplay is structure", we get endless redundant exposition and a plodding procession of scenes unfurling like stage plays. Scene begins, there's some dialogue, scene ends, next scene begins, more dialogue and so on. Lawks-a-mercy, we might as well be watching a Restoration Drama at the Old Vic! Worst recent offender in this area was _Revolutionary Road_ , which may not have been strictly British, but its director was, and he sure as hell managed to imbue it with his achingly dull theatrical sensibility. I'm not saying theatre is dull, you understand, just that there's a time and a place for it, and it's not up there on the cinema screen.

Even when British directors do try and tell a story visually, the best they can manage is to copy other, better film-makers, usually American ones. They think a bit of _Goodfellas_ -style steadicam would be cool, for example. The likes of Guy Ritchie or Nick Love fail utterly to grasp that the reason a fancy editing or camera effect might originally have worked was because the director was using it to advance the narrative or make an emotional point, instead of doing it just to show off or to try and be "visual" without actually thinking in visual terms, like poor old Kenneth Branagh, who inserted so many pointless camera parabolas into _Mary Shelley's Frankenstein_ the results were quite comical.

That the British distrust all genres except the one in which people wear bonnets doesn't help their cause, but just as big a problem is the undue reverence they have for realism. Fantasy is routinely frowned upon, or dismissed as fare for kiddies or spotty adolescents. Yet the British films that have best stood the test of time are not critically revered kitchen-sink dramas like _A Taste of Honey_ or _Saturday Night and Sunday Morning_ , but Hammer's Gothic fairytales, Ealing's often unexpectedly bracing whimsy, and the sublime romantic fabulations of Powell and Pressburger.

Chapter 8: The Private Life of Vampires

The fundamental problem with modern vampire movies is they're made by 12-year-olds. I exaggerate, but you know what I mean. Young people's notions of a vampire lifestyle don't extend much beyond wearing tight leather trousers, leaping around to bad techno music and bragging that humans are your bitches. Let's face it, anyone over thirty would have grown out of that sort of behaviour years ago.

All the more reason, then, to welcome _Let the Right One In_ , which rescues vampires from the lame goth posing of the _Blade_ or _Underworld_ films, and touches on the nuts-and-bolts practicalities of unfeasibly long life and needing to drink blood in the modern age.

There are two schools of thought here. One is the notion that eternal life bestows on you large castles and limitless resources that are only interrupted when Van Helsing comes a-calling with stakes and holy water. Dracula and his ilk sometimes dabble in real estate and, in _The Satanic Rites of Dracula_ , property development, but by and large, these vampire plutocrats never have to worry about income or housing.

Likewise, in _The Hunger_ , centuries-old Catherine Deneuve leads a life of elegant luxury in a Manhattan brownstone (worth between $2,200,000 and $3,500,000 in today's market). Though she goes to the disco to pick up victims, it's clear she prefers Delibes or Schumann to goth-rock, while in _Twilight_ , Edward Cullen's cultural tastes don't seem to have evolved beyond an adolescent predeliction for _Clair de Lune_ (he's a 100 years old, and that's the best he can do?). His "family", meanwhile, prefers Frank Lloyd Wright-style airiness to the traditional cobwebbed castle. It's just as well that sunlight doesn't kill the Cullens, since their crib has a lot of picture windows, but it's still a devilishly stylish slice of real estate, reportedly owned in real life by a Nike executive.

_Let the Right One In_ 's Eli, on the other hand, contents herself with a bog-standard flat on a Swedish housing estate, where her interest in decor stops at customising the bathroom so it's light-tight. Since she has a Fabergé nest-egg at her disposal, it would seem this is not so much a lifestyle decision based on financial expediency, more a consequence of having lived so long. It's logical that, after a couple of centuries, bourgeois trappings would lose their allure, and surprising we don't see more vampires afflicted by the sort of been-there-done-that _Weltschmerz_ endured by the 327-year-old heroine of Janacek's _The Makropulos Affair_ , who has learnt there is "no pleasure in being good, no pleasure in being bad."

We all like to think that, as vampires, we'd use that extra time allotted to learn languages, practice the cello and live in grand style. But in truth, we'd probably just end up frittering it away on the vampire version of Facebook. Or we'd end up rootless nomads, like the bloodsuckers in _Near Dark_ , who cover the windows of their RV with cooking foil to keep out the light, bunk down in seedy motels and stay only a few steps ahead of the law as they roam the mid-west, chowing down on the clientele of redneck bars. Or we'd find ourselves trapped in a decaying suburb of Pittsburgh, where George Romero's _Martin_ gets a job as a delivery boy and preys on the depressed housewives on his round, using razor-blades instead of fangs to make the blood flow.

The best vampire story never filmed is Marc Behm's _The Ice Maiden_. Jean-Jacques Beineix has been talking about adapting it for years, though given his latterday track record, one can only hope he doesn't. John Landis came close to Behm's breezy comic-horror tone in _Innocent Blood_ , where Anne Parillaud deals with the ethical impliations of her thirst by drinking the blood of gangsters. But Behm's story is even better: the primary concerns of his vampire heroine, Cora, are staying solvent and finding suitable digs, just like the rest of us. Cora decides to rob the casino where she works as a croupier so she can raise enough money to buy her dream house. It's classic caper movie material, with a twist - in order to pull off the heist, Cora and her partners-in-crime have to transform themselves into bats.

_ETA: I recycled and elaborated on the Private Lives of Vampires theme as part of a book I wrote on Tomas Alfredson's_ Let the Right One In _(Auteur Publishing, 2011)._

Chapter 9: The Mystery of the Missing Heroines

The only false step in Henry Selick's delightfully creepy _Coraline_ is the film-maker's decision to saddle our intrepid young heroine with an annoying male sidekick called Wybie, who didn't exist in Neil Gaiman's original novel. Wybie even gets to rescue Coraline at a crucial moment, whereas in the book she saved herself. It's hard to see the point of him, since Coraline already has a cat she can talk to, and everyone knows cats are better listeners than boys anyway. It's not as though there's an abundance of heroines in kiddy-films these days. Couldn't we have been allowed just this one testosterone-free zone?

What with _Coraline_ and the recent release of _Monsters vs Aliens_ , another 3-D animation (given an inexplicably lukewarm reception by much of the critical fraternity, which evidently finds it easier to warm to robots or bugs than to a 50-foot heroine) we girls should be feeling spoilt, because the 21st Century's new wave of computer animation has hitherto been curiously lacking in female protagonists. Since the 1990s, when Disney and its counterparts made strenuous efforts to upgrade the insipid fairytale princesses of yore into spunkier chicks like _Pocohontas_ or _Mulan_ , Hollywood animation has been pretty much a club for boys, albeit boys lightly disguised as ants, clown fish or three-toed sloths. Female critters, if they exist at all, are wheeled on as an afterthought to bat cartoon lashes, basically to show that the raccoons or mammoths or lion cubs aren't gay. Is it any wonder pre-teen girls are being driven into the arms of, heaven help us, Hannah Montana?

It's not as though young male audiences are alienated by female protagonists. I can see all too clearly why chaps might be put off by the shopping and wedding fixated nincompoops of _Sex and the City_ or _Bridget Jones_ , but surely fantasy and adventure are fields of equal opportunity. Men have never had problems rooting for Lieutenant Ripley or Buffy Summers, nor have I ever heard of anyone refusing to read _Alice in Wonderland_ because the main character wore a skirt and Mary Janes. Yet for every plucky Lyra in _The Golden Compass_ , there are innumerable digitally enhanced live-action kiddy fantasies like _Eragon_ , _Stardust_ , _The Spiderwick Chronicles_ or the _Harry Potter_ films, all cleaving to the _Star Wars_ formula in which girls are shunted to one side or dangled as rewards, while the boy discovers, aw shucks, that he's the Chosen One and embarks on that difficult and dangerous Hero's Journey to collect magical chotchkas or compare wand sizes with the bad guys. Ye Gods, has nothing changed since I was a wee girl and the only action heroine I could find was Lady Penelope?

It's left to European and Asian animators to show Hollywood how it should be done. In France, _Persepolis_ and _Belleville Rendez-vous_ put women centre-stage, but ironically, since the glass ceiling is still pretty much fixed at knee-level in Japan, it's in Japanese anime that the true femme-friendly pioneers are to be found. The films of Hayao Miyazaki, Satoshi Kon and Mamoru Hosoda are packed with feisty heroines engaged in difficult and dangerous undertakings, and they're regular gals rather than pneumatic Lara Croft types, though admittedly I was always a little distracted by the cheeky upskirt angles which kept you wondering whether _Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind_ was going commando or simply wearing skintight leggings as she hang-glided through the air.

Nor are Japanese anime heroines confined to fantasy; _Only Yesterday_ and _Whisper of the Heart_ , both directed by associates of Miyazaki, are two of the most sublime female coming-of-age stories I've ever come across in any medium, not that this is a category which is oversubscribed. _Only Yesterday_ even broaches the subject of menstruation - which, though it's treated delicately, was enough to stop Disney releasing the film in the United States.

Maybe it's simply that animated heroines are redundant in today's Hollywood, where even in live-action movies one is hard-pressed to find a three-dimensional female character. I mean, have you looked at Angelina Jolie or Nicole Kidman lately? Twiglet-skinny with disproportionately large heads, unfeasibly big breasts, unnaturally smooth faces and plumped-up lips. They could almost be cartoon women come to life.

Chapter 10: Place In Jeopardy

So there's a plot to blow up the Vatican? Bof, who cares. Cities are the woman-in-peril of the dumb action thriller and are forever being placed in jeopardy, but devout Catholics will already have crossed _Angels and Demons_ off their to-see list when the powers-that-be denounced it as the work of the devil, while I fear the world is full of people who wouldn't lose much sleep if the Holy See were to be vaporised, especially after some of the Pope's recent pronouncements. So go ahead, you evil Illuminati, do your worst!*

But at least _Angels and Demons_ , along with recent globe-trotters like like _The International_ and _Duplicity_ , makes a small dent in Hollywood's customary chronic parochialism, in which the known world rarely extends beyond Los Angeles or New York. As a reporter in _Monsters vs Aliens_ observes, "Once again, a UFO has landed in America, the only country UFOs ever seem to land in." Hollywood's tunnel vision is a West Coast version of Saul Steinberg's famous _New Yorker_ cover, "A View of the World from Ninth Avenue", in which Manhattan dominates the foreground, with states beyond the Hudson reduced to a couple of rocks, and the Pacific Ocean and Asia barely visible in the distance. The rest of us aren't even on the map.

As non-Americans, we have long since learned to embrace Los Angeles or New York as symbols of oh-the-humanity to be saved, but that doesn't excuse some of the cavalier treatment meted out to the rest of the world. The 1995 disease-a-thon _Outbreak_ , for example, kicks off with vast tracts of Zaire succumbing to an ebola-like virus, but in Hollywood terms this is merely an _amuse-gueule_. Africans are expendable, and it's Californians, and Rene Russo in particular, whose health we're supposed to worry about. Just as no-one was too concerned about swine flu killing Mexicans until it started spilling across the border.

The 1997 thriller _The Peacemaker_ opens with a nuclear explosion wiping out 1500 people in the Urals, presumably leading to fallout that, if Chernobyl is anything to go by, will contaminate European farming for decades to come, but we're not supposed to worry about that. We're supposed to worry about the Bosnian terrorist heading for Manhattan with a warhead in his backpack. To the screenwriter's credit, the Bosnian himself points out that Americans don't give a fig about atrocity until it's in their own backyard, an observation brutally drummed home a few years later when real life caught up with the movies and the destruction of the World Trade Center engendered a zillion times more media coverage than your average Third World massacre.

It's not as though the rest of world isn't just as parochial on those rare occasions when it's holding the film-making reins. The most refreshing aspect of _GoldenEye_ wasn't so much the reincarnation of James Bond in Brosnan form as the villain threatening to annihilate not Los Angeles or New York, but _Greater London_. Bless. And the original _Godzilla_ , as a symbol of atomic destruction, was chiefly interested in stomping all over Tokyo until the 1998 American remake fudged its subtext by having the giant lizard heading not to France (whose nukes had triggered its mutation) but swimming halfway around the world to randomly end up in Madison Square Garden. As you do.

The biggest stakes, of course, are when it's the entire planet in the firing line. Global disaster movies like _Independence Day_ and _Armageddon_ do sometimes acknowledge the existence of nations other than the US, it's true, usually in the form of brief shots of babbling foreigners fearfully clustering around the world's tourist landmarks, which is foolish of them since invading aliens or killer-asteroids invariably have the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal already lined up in their crosshairs.

At least _The Day After Tomorrow_ cast off its parochial blinkers just long enough to give us an update on the British royal family, frozen to death at Balmoral, before offering the ironic spectacle of American refugees fleeing the new Ice Age by heading south across the Rio Grande into Mexico. Where, one imagines, they'll all catch swine flu later on. Maybe a global pandemic is just the thing to broaden the Hollywood mind.

* _ETA: My editors had problems with the first paragraph of this piece and - perhaps wisely - trimmed it severely. So perhaps it needs to be emphasised here that I don't really want the Vatican to get blown up_.

Chapter 11: Tarantino and Me

I don't know about you, but I'm really looking forward to _Inglourious Basterds_. I expect it will be brimful of puerile in-jokes, pop culture references and gratuitous violence, while being entirely lacking in moral gravity and transcendental style. Indeed, I shall be terribly disappointed if it's not. This is what I have come to expect from Quentin Tarantino, and this is what I like.

My feelings about Tarantino seems to have followed the reverse trajectory to those of many of his erstwhile fans, who hailed _Reservoir Dogs_ and _Pulp Fiction_ as evidence of the Second Coming but with each new film have grown increasingly teed off, as though they were waiting for him to morph into Michael Haneke. I doubt Tarantino has the desire, the intellectual rigour or even the life experience to mature into the popular idea of a "serious" cineaste, and I say thank God for that. We've got enough films like _The Reader_ as it is.

I don't set out to be contrary, but you know how things are. One minute you're laughing your socks off at _Observe and Report_ , and then, when you scan the critical consensus in the confident expectation of that warm and fuzzy sensation of having your judgment corroborated, you get hit in the face by such a blast-wave of invective that you start questioning your own opinion. For about five minutes, anyway. If I've learned anything in all my years of filmgoing, it's that I'm right and everyone else is wrong. Odds are, they'll come round to my way of thinking in a few years' time, the way they finally saw the light about _Heaven's Gate_ , and _The Thing_ , and _Death Proof_. Well, maybe not that last one, but you get my drift.

One of the reasons I like Tarantino more than I used to is that his women's roles have been getting stronger. One can't expect adolescent fanboys to get excited about this - they prefer girls to be seen and not heard, preferably dressed in punk-stripper outfits - but it works for me. _Reservoir Dogs_ was notably oestrogen-free, and while there was a little more chick-activity in _Pulp Fiction_ , it was the boys who got all the best lines. But, surprisingly for a director whose early screenplays reduced women to walk-ons and prostitutes (yes, _True Romance_ , I'm looking at you) and whose imitators continue to plough that furrow (yes Guy Ritchie, I'm looking at you), Tarantino has since developed into one of those rare directors who film actresses so they appear like real people rather than airbrushed fantasy objects.

_Jackie Brown_ , of course, was a welcome showcase for the glory that is Pam Grier. I'm not a fan of Uma Thurman, but she's magnificent in _Kill Bill_ , where Tarantino encourages her to be ugly, at the unkempt extremes of physical endurance, in a way that only makes her seem more attractive. As for _Death Proof_ , if you haven't seen the version with Vanessa Ferlito's lapdance, you've missed out; it's the opposite of demeaning, and a celebration of the female physique with a proper belly and bottom. I swear, only a director who really likes women could film them like this.

Another reason I enjoy Tarantino's movies is that we're both partial to the same genres. As an addict of 1970s kung-fu, I can't say I felt let down when _Kill Bill_ cobbled together many of the clichés of my favourite Shaw Brothers canon, including simple vengeance-propelled plot, extreme bloodiness and extraordinary choreography. The elements themselves might not be original, but the way Tarantino tweaks them into a gung-ho cinematic pop-art collage is. The only other director who pulled off this trick with such panache is Jean-Luc Godard, who in the 1960s picked 'n' mixed his Hollywood bon-bons to create something derivative yet at the same time deeply personal; you could never mistake a Godard film for the movies he is referencing. The comparison may go some way towards explaining why _Death Proof_ flopped. It borrows elements from exploitation, yet it isn't in any respect an exploitation movie. It's not even commercial. It's an art film, dammit, but fun. You wait. One day you'll see it my way.

Chapter 12: Think of the Children

There's one thing puzzling me about _Terminator Salvation_ , and it's not the machines behaving like Bond villains by repeatedly placing the heroes in easily escapable situations instead of just nuking them. It's that silent child. Is it male or female? And what is the point of it? I was actually dreading the moment when it would get kidnapped by the machines and have to be rescued (it does get kidnapped, but so does nearly everyone else in the movie, so you barely notice) or utter words of childish wisdom at a crucial moment, or bond with the hero, or do something cute that saves the world. But it does none of these things. It doesn't even turn out to be a machine and have to be destroyed, like the kids in the Philip K Dick adaptation _Screamers_ , which might have been interesting. It's kind of just _there_.

This is all very odd, though it could well be the most realistic thing about the movie. For us non-parents, children in real life are frequently kind of just _there_ like that, buzzing around just below our radar, occasionally getting our attention by screaming, whereas children in science fiction or action movies tend to be vital narrative devices, not so much characters in their own right as MacGuffins. My heart sinks whenever an action-thriller hero is shown to have a daughter, because everyone knows daughters in thrillers exist purely so they can get kidnapped, enabling heroic dads to lose their rag and kill zillions of people while rescuing them - see _Commando_ , _Live Free and_ _Die Hard_ and practically everything Shane Black ever wrote. It would be nice to see the bad guy kidnapped by the daughter, for a change, and I'd take my hat off to any screenwriter who figured out how to make that work.

In thriller terms, children are shorthand for something to be preserved at all costs, and we're expected to take it on trust that one sprog is worth a hundred adults. Only rarely will a screenplay acknowledge this imbalance; in _Desperate Measures_ , Michael Keaton plays a psycho whose bone marrow is a rare match to that of Andy Garcia's nine-year-old son, who needs a transplant, which naturally results in such carnage that the police chief finally asks what we've all been thinking, "How many people have to die so that kid of yours can live?" I find the unfairness of the equation more disturbing than I probably should since I've now reached that point in my life where, if I were a character in a movie, I would be utterly expendable. I wouldn't even survive long enough to sacrifice myself nobly at the climax so the child may live; I would be disposed of at an insultingly early stage, like the middle-aged lady who falls off the bus in _Speed_.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of films in which children are reduced to collateral damage, usually along with its mother, the hero's wife, providing him with a pretext to go on a righteous rampage like the one in _The Punisher_. Film-makers know they can always get a rise out of audiences by killing off kiddies. They do it crassly, like the maternity ward sequence in _Aliens vs Predator - Requiem_. Or they do to devastating effect, like the original _Assault on Precinct 13_ : an infanticide so shocking the 2005 remake didn't dare risk alienating the public by repeating it.

But sometimes children save mankind just by being children, which at least made narrative sense in _Children of Men_ , where a pregnant woman was a big deal in a childless world, and was even more of a quasi-religious thing in _Knowing_ , where anyone with an age in double figures was doomed. But I'm still wondering what, exactly, Jaden Smith did to save the world in _The Day the Earth Stood Still_ other than be so bratty and obnoxious that the aliens gave up and went home. It's the ultimate example of lazy screenwriters assuming the mere presence of their MacPoppet will solve everything. Or perhaps we're required to accept that saving the world runs in the genes of Smith Jr, whose father has been doing it on a regular basis ever since _Independence Day_.

Chapter 13: Sister Sludge

You go ages without a movie about sisters, and then two come along at once. _My Sister's Keeper_ has a great horror premise: a little girl who's bred expressly to provide her ailing sibling with organs. Unfortunately the film opts to go down the weepy rather than the creepy road, but it does illustrate literally what this week's other sister movie, _Sunshine Cleaning_ , and a host of other such sorority-fests suggest only metaphorically - in the movies, one sister exists in order to supply the other with missing parts.

In other words, sisters are rarely standalone characters; they're two halves of a whole, like the two separate components of a Best Friend Necklace. We've seen this in movies like _The Other Boleyn Girl_ , _In Her Shoes_ , _27 Dresses_ and _Rachel Getting Married_. One sister is reliable, a bit frumpy and repressed. The other is selfish, irresponsible and willing to have sex with anything that moves. While sisters in the real world tend to be shifting, contradictory blends of all these attributes, their movie counterparts are more often defined by a single characteristic, like the seven dwarves. This usually boils down to Naughty versus Nicey, though if you're watching an adaptation of _Pride and Prejudice_ , you might find yourself wondering why Jane Austen didn't just call the Bennet sisters Witty, Pretty, Swotty, Giddy and Flighty, and have done with it.

But you can see how sisterhood can solve one of the perennial screenwriting conundrums. In female friendship movies like _Now and Then_ or _The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants_ you end up wondering how four such wildly disparate characters (generally some combination of Tomboy, Arty, Flirty and Fatty) ever hooked up in the first place, let alone stayed chummy through the years. But if the disparate characters are sisters, it makes sense they should stay in touch, though rather less sense that they should feel obliged to affirm the nature of their relationship by repeatedly announcing, "You're my sister!" I challenge you to think of a Hollywood sister movie which doesn't feature some variation on this line, though I can assure you my sister and I have never ever felt the need to address each other in this way.

In fact I've always been a little disappointed that our relationship has remained affectionate and entirely lacking in melodrama, not at all like the ones you see in films. Who wouldn't want to be one of the uptight lesbians or bitter harpies in Ingmar Bergman films like _The Silence_ or _Cries and Whispers_ (a pioneer in the increasingly fashionable genital mutilation subgenre, incidentally), which make sisterhood look so cool and Angst-ridden? And how come we never stole each other's boyfriends, or bitched at each other over the Thanksgiving turkey, like _Hannah and Her Sisters_? I feel I've missed out.

At least evil twin movies like _Dead Ringer_ (Bette Davis, not Cronenberg) latch on to that Naughty/Nicey dichotomy and run with it. In _The Dark Mirror_ , for example, Olivia De Havilland plays identical twins with a penchant for matching outfits accessorised with spell-your-name pendants. When one twin wants to impersonate the other, all she has to do is swap the bling around. One of the sisters is a murderer, of course, though not terribly clever, since when a psychologist asks them both to do an inkblot test, Nicey sees maypole dancers whereas Naughty sees "The Lamb of Death". You'd think she could have dissembled a little to throw him off.

What's best about Gothic horror siblings is they never end up tearfully reconciling in the kitchen, like Amy Adams and Emily Blunt in _Sunshine Cleaning_. You can be sure there are no such displays of emo nonsense in Brian DePalma's _Sisters_ , in which Margot Kidder is stalked by her own Siamese twin (no longer conjoined, alas). And modern Hollywood sisters can hug all they like, but they can't supplant _What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?_ as the ultimate sister movie. The all-stops-out celebrity smackdown between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford may be exaggerated to a grotesque degree, but everyone can relate to some part of it. For instance, the infantile mind-games and hysterical attention-seeking never fail to remind me of my last cat, who regularly served up dead rodents.

Chapter 14: Easy Writer

_Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters_ is one of those rare films about a literary figure in which the life and the work appear perfectly fused, though it must be admitted that Paul Schrader and his co-writers started off with an unfair advantage over your average literary biopic. It's not every novelist who forms a private army, attempts a military coup and commits seppuku.

Most writers' lives, in fact, are skull-numbingly solitary, uneventful affairs consisting of variations on staring at a blank screen, drinking gallons of industrial-strength coffee, writing half a page, footling around on facebook, scoffing entire packets of biscuits, erasing the half-page and rewriting it, and so on. None of which makes for thrilling cinema, though Percy Adlon manages to make Proust's bedridden routine seem pretty mesmerising in _Céleste_.

On the whole, though, cinema prefers its writers flamboyantly self-destructive, with suicide ( _The Hours_ , _Sylvia_ ), sex romps ( _Henry & June_) or alcholism ( _Barfly_ , _Factotum_ and everything else involving Charles Bukowski) taking precedence over an occasional montage of frantic scribbling or key-bashing. Such biopics intimate that writers' lives and deaths are more interesting than their work, even though the work is the reason they've been deemed worthy of having films made about them in the first place.

In the absence of suicide or murder ( _Prick Up Your Ears_ ) to jiff up the dramatic content, screenwriters can resort to the formative experience option, dropping hints of the oeuvre to come via in-jokes for complicit audiences, such as that pre-inspiration draft of _Romeo and Ethel_ in _Shakespeare in Love_ , or Jane Austen not getting married in _Becoming Jane_. In extreme cases, the writer's creations come to life, a tactic which backfires when Renee Zellweger starts talking to imaginary rabbits in _Miss Potter_ , since it makes her look mentally disturbed.

But if film-makers are primarily interested in the events of an author's life, you wonder why no-one has ever made _Joseph Conrad at Sea_ , or _Jack London: The Klondike Years_ , both of which would lend themselves to action aplenty. And we have yet to see the definitive Edgar Allan Poe movie; Sylvester Stallone and Michael Jackson both toyed with Poe projects, though it's one of my big regrets that no-one thought to cast Bill Murray in the role 20 years ago, when he was a dead ringer.

If the mystery of Poe's final days has never been properly explored on film (though there are several novels about it), the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce, whose _An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge_ provided the blueprint for an entire subgenre of horror movies culminating in the omigod-they've-been-dead-all-along twist, has inspired a couple of fill-in-the-blanks imaginings. The upmarket version is _Old Gringo_ , which provided ageing but still seductive Gregory Peck with his last great role, though admittedly you need to look past Jane Fonda's screen-hogging spinster to appreciate it. And if that's too genteel for you, there's always _Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter_ , in which Michael Parks plays the alcoholic scribe who gets embroiled in a three-way brawl between Mexican soldiers, outlaws and vampires.

The films that come closest to conveying the mindset of the writer are the ones that go a little bonkers, like _Naked Lunch_ , in which the William Burroughs surrogate becomes a character in his own drug-induced delirium, complete with talking-sphincter typewriter. No-one has yet made a biopic about Stephen King, though any such venture would probably be redundant since King himself has already recast his career in horror movie terms with novels such as _Misery_ , _The Dark Half_ and _The Shining_.

_The Shining_ , in particular, is a reminder that trying - and failing - to write is as much a part of the creative process as all that frenzied scribbling and key-bashing. Maybe the most telling films about authors are not the reverent biopics, but fantasies exploring the terrors of writer's block and the voyeuristic, almost vampiric nature of appropriating other people's experiences for fiction. Anyone who has ever faced a looming deadline can sympathise with John Turturro as the Clifford Odets-like _Barton Fink_ , whose bogus attempts at emotional truth are comprehensively trumped by John Goodman as the salesman-cum-serial-killer next door who points out, with some justification, "You're just a tourist with a typewriter, Barton. _I live here_."

Chapter 15: Body Talk

There's a distracting anachronism in _Coco Before Chanel_ , but luckily it crops up too late to be truly annoying. In a mood of bittersweet triumph, our heroine is putting the finishing touches to her first collection (and if you think that's a spoiler, you really need to get out more). What threw me for a loop is her mannequins look like teenage anorexics who have been bussed in from a 2009 catwalk. What were the film-makers thinking? How could they cast their walk-ons so sloppily?

Body shapes go in and out of fashion, and it's astonishing how so many film-makers overlook this while striving for authenticity elsewhere. They're not all like Matthew Weiner, who insists the cast of _Mad Men_ be free of any post-1960s cosmetic work or breast implants. My suspension of disbelief in _Cheri_ was scuppered from the outset by the miscasting of Michelle Pfeiffer, whose well-preserved but somewhat sinewy physique reminded me more of one of Tom Wolfe's Social X-Rays than of the sensual courtesan from Colette's novels. By _Belle Epoque_ standards, the lovely Pfeiffer would surely have been considered about as alluring as a malnourished washerwoman.

Each era regards its physical ideal as the standard by which other epochs must be judged. I feel a pang of sadness whenever I see the soft, round thighs of the hard-working hoofers in 1930s musicals like _42nd Street_ , and reflect that nowadays their photos would probably be posted on bitchy websites so people could jeer at them for being chubby. Compare these dancers with the ones in _Showgirls_ or _Chicago_ , whose hard bodies are gym-sculpted to within an inch of their lives.

Personally, I can't wait for the stick-insect look for starlets to fall out of favour. I'm prepared to make allowances for historical fantasy, but Keira Knightley's 21st century twiglet arms in _King Arthur_ barely looked capable of lifting a bow, let alone firing arrows from it. I'm looking forward to the day when the unfeasibly skinny limbs of Angelina Jolie and Kate Bosworth look as peculiar and as dated as did the va-va-voom curves of times gone by to a couple of would-be teenage models to whom I recently showed _Some Like It Hot_. Instead of laughing, they gazed in horror at Marilyn Monroe and gasped, "But she's so _big_."

Nor are men exempt from the dictates of body fashion. What's Kenneth Branagh doing with ripped abs in _Mary Shelley's Frankenstein_? He's supposed to be an 18th century science student, for heaven's sake. And why go to all the trouble of ensuring Matt Damon is pasty-white when he first arrives in Italy in _The Talented Mr Ripley_ if he's also got the sort of gym-honed torso that just wasn't to be seen on Mr Average in the 1950s? At the same time, a bona fide 1950s hunk like Robert Mitchum begins to look a little saggy after one has been exposed to too many Calvin Klein posters, and even five-times Olympic gold winner Johnny Weissmuller looks as though he's starting to run to flab when set next to the streamlined Vitruvian Man effect to which so many of today's actors aspire.

Of course, there are always stars willing to alter their shape for a role. They plump up, like Robert De Niro for _Raging Bull_ or Renee Zellweger for the Bridget Jones films. Or they downsize, like Meryl Streep on her lose-70lb Auschwitz diet for _Sophie's Choice_ , or Christian Bale gratutiously dropping 63lb for _The Machinist_. It must be tough for many jobbing film actors, trotting off to auditions all the time while knowing in advance they're more likely to be picked for their physique than for any thesping talent.

But soon, one imagines, they won't need to go to the gym or pig out on pasta-and-chips to acquire the appropriate build. They'll be whipped into shape with motion-capture, which morphed the not terribly athletic Ray Winstone into a muscled he-man for _Beowulf_ , or CGI, which turned the Spartans of _300_ into animated Tom of Finland drawings. And maybe Zellweger doesn't need to regain all that weight for the third Bridget Jones film. Maybe she could just strap on a fat-suit, like the one Gwyneth Paltrow wore for _Shallow Hal_?

Chapter 16: Spoiler Free

Contrary to what people think, the best thing about being a film critic isn't getting to see films for free - though that is pretty cool. No, it's getting to see films _first_. Film critics are the only people who can still sit down in front of a screen without knowing where the story will take them, or whether the journey will be thrilling or harrowing or dreary. They enjoy what the rest of us have been robbed of: the element of surprise.

Since I stopped being a critic, I've been in the same boat as everyone else. As a paying punter, I find myself having to negotiate a pre-release obstacle course of potential spoilers: critics offering blow-by-blow synopses in lieu of reviews, over-explicit trailers giving away all the best jokes or narrative twists, in-depth articles analysing socio-political subtext. If you're not careful, by the time you actually buy the ticket, all that's left to see is a dried-up husk from which all the juicy content has long since been sucked, chewed up and spat out by the lucky sods who have got there before you.

This was drummed home to me recently when I resolved to see _Moon_ with foreknowledge of it limited to three things: it's the directing debut of David Bowie's son, it's set on the moon, and it stars Sam Rockwell. For once, I wanted to watch a film the way I used to watch films in the 1970s - like a virgin, with my expectations unsullied. Is that too much to ask? But easier said than done. I was effectively obliged to enter into cultural purdah: no peeking at reviews or trailers or interviews, no talking to friends who might unwittingly spill the beans. It was like that episode of _Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?_ where Terry and Bob try to avoid hearing the results of the England match. Each time my mental receptors registered the word "moon", I would block my ears and sing la-la-la very loudly. I missed nearly everything to do with the anniversary of the moon landing, but that was a small price to pay.

The ironic thing is that, while there is a narrative twist in _Moon_ , it's not the sine qua non of the story, and easily guessable for anyone who feels like guessing it. But all I wanted was to embark on the journey with no idea of what the destination would be, and to experience that heady sense of discombobulation as my mind was thrown for a loop and forced to join up the dots: "Whaa...? You mean he...? Which means they...? Oh wow!" It's a small pleasure, but one that's sadly all too rare these days.

Conversely, my self-imposed segregation broke down badly over _Brüno_ ; by the time I saw it, all the funny or contentious bits had already been quoted or debated so thoroughly I felt overwhelmed by _déjà-vu_ ; the act of watching had become redundant. And I was fortunate to have caught _Antichrist_ in France, before the British media itemised all the atrocities in lurid detail; the only thing left for filmgoers was to find out whether or not they could endure them without flinching.

But maybe this info-overkill is not such a bad thing. Everyone agrees there are too many films out there - more than any one person can see in a single lifetime - so perhaps the role of the critic is no longer to evaluate in terms of genre or cultural context, but simply to act as a cine-eater, absolving us of the need to sit through _Terminator: Salvation_ or _Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince_. Films could be replaced by the cinematic equivalent of John Crace's _Digested Reads_ in _The_ _Guardian_ which could then be posted on youtube. No wait, this is already being done. Why waste 102 minutes watching Neil LaBute's remake of _The Wicker Man_ when you can enjoy the hilarious edited highlights? What we need now is for studios to realise life really is too short, and that all we really need to enjoy the complete _Transformers_ or _Public Enemies_ experience is a couple of weeks of intense hype and a comprehensively detailed review, followed by a five-minute gag reel.

Chapter 17: Road Kill

_Final Destination_ is the horror franchise that ditches all that unnecessary hokum about teens being stalked or chased by psychos, instead homing in on what we gorehounds really want to see - cruel and unusual death. The formula's simple - there's a dreadful catastrophe with much loss of life, after which death comes gunning for the survivors, with seemingly innocuous objects setting off Heath Robinson-esque chain reactions which invariably end in someone getting horribly squished or decapitated.

The latest in this series kicks off with carnage at a racetrack that might have been inspired, if that's the right word, by the 1955 Le Mans disaster, in which an exploding engine killed 82 spectators. But though the new film's in 3-D, it's unlikely to equal the excruciatingly well-choreographed freeway pile-up which sets in motion the plot of _Final Destination 2_. This is one of the most terrifying sequences I've ever seen, all the more effective for being grounded in reality; there can be few drivers who haven't felt that anxious twinge as the badly secured load on the lorry in front of them starts to wobble.

Motor cars and motion pictures grew up together, so it's little wonder car crashes have been a recurring cinematic motif, from the Keystone Kops onwards. Crashes used to be filmed with gurning actors flailing around in front of iffy back projection, like Elizabeth Taylor wrecking her red Sunbeam Roadster in _Butterfield 8_. But It wasn't until the 1970s that stuntmen and pyrotechnic crews went into overdrive; road movies like _Vanishing Point_ and _Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry_ (both name-checked by Quentin Tarantino in _Death Proof_ ) are feature-length car crashes waiting to happen. Other landmarks include John Landis' demolition derbys in _The Blues Brothers_ and _An American Werewolf in London_ , while more recently, Neil Marshall found a startling new way of filming a head-on collision in _The Descent_.

Auteurs, on the other hand, usually prefer a more impressionistic approach, perhaps not unconnected to budget restraints. Jean-Luc Godard opted for the apres-crash carnage in both _Le mepris_ ( _nature morte_ with Brigitte Bardot and petrol tanker) and _Weekend_ , probably the model for the wreckage-strewn highway scene in _Wild at Heart_ (with David Lynch giving it the personal touch by adding some exposed brain matter). Federico Fellini doesn't film Terence Stamp totalling his Ferrari in _Spirits of the Dead_ , but he does show blood dripping off a taut length of wire, which is somehow even more disturbing, while Krzysztof Kieslowski foreshadows the crash at the beginning of _Three Colours: Blue_ with repeated ominous close-ups of a wheel.

The symbolism of the car crash as sexual climax is so obvious it's a wonder more films haven't tackled it full-on, like David Cronenberg's _Crash_. A car chase which doesn't end in some sort of smash-up is like coitus interruptus, not very satisfying, and extreme vehicle abuse is now an obligatory part of action thrillers, with heroes like Jason Bourne emerging unscathed from smashes that would mangle lesser mortals. Trends in filmed crashes come and go. The most recent fad seems to be that of the unexpected side-swipe, as seen in _No Country for Old Men_ and _Broken Embraces_. This type of out-of-the-blue impact has become so popular with cineastes I now tend to get nervous during innocent-looking driving scenes when characters start fiddling with the radio or talking to passengers; I spent long stretches of _Sunshine Cleaning_ needlessly on tenterhooks, willing Amy Adams to keep her eyes on the road.

There's even a car crash subgenre. Auto-collisons are the lynchpins of the three-pronged narratives of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's first two features, _Amores perros_ and _21 Grams_ , as well as Tarantino's _Death Proof_ and Paul Haggis' _Crash_. My favourite car crash movie, though, is Claude Sautet's magnificent _Les choses de la vie_ (remade by Hollywood as _Intersection_ ) in which the entire film is structured around the moment when Michel Piccoli's speeding Alfa Romeo meets a truckful of pigs on a country road. With its flashbacks to banal detail made poignant by what we know will happen, Sautet's film drives home what few other movie car crashes do: that amid all that hurtling metal is a whole human life.

Chapter 18: Classical Gas

There's a music cue in _Mesrine: Public Enemy Number One_ which made me sit up and take notice, and it wasn't the montage set to _London Calling_ by The Clash, steadily becoming as clicheed a way of announcing, "We're in LONDON!" as a shot of Big Ben. It was a brief background snatch of _Poveri fiori_ from Cilea's _Adriana Lecouvreur_ , an opera in which the heroine dies from sniffing poisoned violets. I noticed it because I'm an avid collector of classical music in unexpected places.

Just about everything I know about classical music I learnt from the movies. In an era before imdb and google, it literally took me years to identify the Satanic-sounding chorus in Kenneth Anger's _Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome_ ; I kept humming the opening bars at my musicophile dad, and it wasn't his fault he failed to recognise Janacek's _Glagolitic Mass_. In 1974, Karlheinz Bohm denouncing _Lucia di Lammermoor_ as "slime!" in Fassbinder's _Martha_ (irony alert - Bohm is the son of conductor Karl) was enough to launch me into a Donizetti phase, so I had no trouble recognising the same opera's Mad Scene years later, when a tentacled blue alien mimed to a souped-up version of it in _The Fifth Element_.

You expect to find opera extracts in _Diva_ , _Aria_ , the films of Woody Allen or _Philadelphia_ , where Tom Hanks' big might-as-well-hand-me-that-Oscar-right-now speech involves him talking us through _La mamma morta_ from Giordano's _Andrea Chenier_. You _don't_ expect to find them in video nasties like _I Spit On Your Grave_ , where a castration is lovingly counterpointed by _Sola, perduta, abbandonata_ from Puccini's _Manon Lescaut_ , or in Dario Argento's _Inferno_ , where a couple of people get stabbed to death while the _Va, pensiero_ chorus from Verdi's _Nabucco_ is playing. Argento went on to direct a horror movie, appropriately called _Opera_ , in which Verdi, Puccini and Bellini are cunningly alternated with a heavy metal band called Steel Grave.

Movies have the power to pluck an operatic air out of relative obscurity and turn it into a popular hit. Surely only Delibes completists would have been familiar with the _Flower Duet_ from _Lakme_ before Tony Scott added it to a scene of Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon having hot lesbian sex in _The Hunger_. Tony and his brother Ridley subsequently launched into a sort of _Flower Duet_ rivalry; Ridley used it romantically in _Someone To Watch Over Me_ , then Tony one-upped him by re-using it when Christopher Walken was shooting Dennis Hopper in the head in _True Romance_. I like to imagine Mrs Scott playing _Lakme_ to her sons while they were growing up in South Shields, maybe even saying, "One day, boys, you'll grow up and have as much _Lakme_ in your movies as you like". In the meantime British Airways ads turned the duet into a fully-fledged cliche, since when it has cropped up in more movies than there's room to list, and was last heard, to ironic effect, in _Bronson_.

It was Adrian Lyne who got me humming at my dad again after I'd seen Lyne's 1976 short film _Mr Smith_ , in which Peter Barkworth blows his brains out on Primrose Hill. I _had_ to know: what _was_ that lachrymose morsel of earworm? But 33 years later, and I'm sick to death of Barber's _Adagio for Strings_ , another classical piece which has been devalued with overuse. In the early days it cropped up in Oscar-bait like _The Elephant Man_ to _Platoon_ ; nowadays you're more likely to hear it in _Kevin & Perry Go Large_.

With all the classical music out there, you wonder why film-makers recycle the same old pieces instead of branching out. It gave me a nice little thrill when Renny Harlin snuck his fellow countryman Sibelius' _Finlandia_ into _Die Hard 2_ , or when Faye Dunaway had an alcoholic breakdown to Scriabin's _Poem of Ecstasy_ in _Barfly_. Talking of Scriabin, it's a shame _Night of the Eagle_ , Sidney Hayers' otherwise excellent 1962 adaptation of Fritz Leiber's _Conjure Wife_ , skips the scene from the book where the hero has to procure a gramophone needle that has played nothing but Scriabin's 9th Piano Sonata, otherwise known as the "Black Mass". Everything I know about classical music I learnt from the movies - except for Scriabin, whom I first learnt about from a horror novel.

_ETA: Due to the unexpected last-minute arrive of a huge advertisement, this piece was piblished in a severely chopped-down version. I have to give the_ Guardian _sub-editors credit for managing to keep the results fairly coherent, but I'm pleased to be able to present it here in its original uncut form._

Chapter 19: Kombat Shock

_Gamer_ , from the people who brought you _Crank_ , is based on a puzzling premise. Gerard Butler is trapped in an ultra-violent live-action computer game in which he runs around shooting people and getting shot at, his every action controlled by a 17-year-old gamer wielding a wii-type gizmo from the comfort of his own home. But why would anyone want to play a game where their avatar is a real human being who could get killed, thus bringing their participation to an end? (And that's even before we get started on the moral objections, which tend not to be of account in your average dystopia.) Surely much of the appeal of computer games like _Call of Duty_ or _Halo_ is that even if you get fragged you can pick yourself up and start all over again. And again. Until you get it right, or find the cheat code.

The word "avatar" derives from the Sanskrit meaning "descent", though one might as well add "into silliness", since avatars in the movies are rarely the sort of incarnation you'd choose to associate yourself with. The avatars of Keanu Reeves and his chums in _The Matrix_ are like a 15-year-old's notion of cool, which involves dressing like an habituee of an S&M leather club. Wouldn't it be more fun to raid a virtual house of Chanel or Armani instead? And James Cameron's _Avatar_ , to judge from the trailer, looks suspiciously like a live action version of one of Roger Dean's 1970s prog rock album covers, populated by the results of unsavoury couplings between Smurfs and Houyhnhnms. If I wanted blue skin I'd join the Blue Man Group.

As someone whose acme of gaming pleasure was reached in the search for the ocarina in _The Legend of Zelda_ , and who enjoyed the quest part of _Mortal Kombat_ more than the kombat itself, I prefer the more leisurely game worlds of David Cronenberg's _eXistenZ_ , or of Mamoru Oshii's _Avalon_ and _Ghost in the Shell_ animations, which go beyond the standard shoot 'em up to offer cityscapes more intricate and intriguing than rubble-strewn battlefields, hidden treasures like the gun you could make out of Chinese food, or Basset Hounds so loveable it would be tempting to live in a virtual world just so you could own one. I did once get seized by an overwhelming yearning to have hair like Dr Aki Ross from _Final Fantasy_ ; after the obsessive purchase of many overpriced conditioning products, I was forced to admit the only way to get coiffed like that would be to undergo a motion-capture makeover.

William Gibson and Neal Stephenson are usually credited with the popularisation of the avatar concept, though Philip K Dick, typically, explored it before everyone else with the Perky Pat layouts by which bored planetary colonists in _The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch_ could insert themselves into Barbie doll worlds. They used hallucinogenic drugs rather than computers, but the idea's much the same. As for films, _The Sorcerors_ , made a couple of years before its whizzkid director, Michael Reeves, died of an overdose in 1969, was surely an avatar movie _avant le fait_ with its plot about two oldsters, played by Boris Karloff and Catherine Lacey, who control the mind of Ian Ogilvy and, through him, vicariously act out their increasingly lurid fantasies of sex and violence on Susan George.

But hasn't cinema itself always been a manifestation of our desire to act out our fantasies through avatars? It's just that in times gone by we called them movie stars. Surely any film worth its salt should tell a story efficiently enough to allow us to insert ourselves into the action and feel through the characters as they live and love, fight and die. Honestly, who wants to be Gerard Butler or an intergalactic Smurf when you could be Ava Gardner or Humphrey Bogart, strip off a glove in a Jean-Louis strapless gown, run the Miami underworld in a Hawaiian shirt while snorting humungous quantities of cocaine, or exchange saucy double entendres with Cary Grant on the train to Chicago? Maybe film-makers should leave the avatars to creators of computer games, and get back to the business of telling proper stories instead.

Chapter 20: Lunkhead Action

It's been a while since we last had a halfway decent action pic, and now we have _District 13: Ultimatum_ and _Ip Man_ arriving in the same week, followed by _Ong-Bak: The Beginning_ a fortnight later. That makes three films in which men (and in _District 13_ , a girl whose pigtail has blades attached to the end) beat the crap out of each other, and not one of them is American.

_GI Joe_ and _Gamer_ don't count, because their fight scenes are rubbish; Hollywood has forgotten the art of filming combat. I'm not interested in bravura displays of ultra-rapid editing and CGI. I want to see real people going at it mano-a-mano, or gamba-a-gamba or whatever, with minimal trickery and no "fucking the frame" as Michael Bay calls it. A bit of slo-mo is permissable, but not too much, and definitely no arty camera angles. I want to see the choreography, preferably filmed from a fixed camera position with minimal editing.

Serious film critics tend to scoff at lunkhead action movies, but I would respectfully contend that fight scenes offer nuggets of cinema in its purest form, though invariably submerged in a slurry of naffness. But it's missing the point to carp about daft plots and clunky dialogue. You might as well complain about the plot and dialogue in Fred Astaire musicals. You don't watch _Top Hat_ or _Swing Time_ for the plot or dialogue (and if you do, I feel sorry for you); you watch them for the dancing.

And the best fights are just like dancing, only with more bone-crunching and blood. It's no coincidence that modern Hollywood can't film musical numbers any better than it can film two guys duking it out. (Exhibit Number One: _Chicago_.) How can you marvel at the human body in motion if the rhythm and movement are created by the editor, not the dancer?

Part of the problem is that so few Hollywood actors are trained in martial arts, like Steven Seagal, though you'd never guess it to look at _Kill Switch_ (recommended if you enjoy yelling insults at the screen) where the fight scenes consist of a stuntman in a bad Seagal wig beating up another stuntman, interspersed with non-matching shots of Seagal's face. It's an extreme case, but symptomatic. The reason I enjoyed the fight scenes in the three films mentioned in the first paragraph is because in each case, it's clear these guys are doing it for real.

David Belle and Cyril Raffaelli do their own Parkour and French-fu in _District 13_ , written and produced by Luc Besson, who should have made them fight more and talk less. Donnie Yen does his own Wing Chun in _Ip Man_ , with trad 1970s-style fight choreography by Sammo Hung. And Tony Jaa does his own Muay Thai, Kenjutsu and elephant-fu in _Ong-Bak_ , which Jaa directed himself until inconveniently deciding to go AWOL for a couple of months during filming. Jaa may lack charm and a sense of humour (things that Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan had in spades) but when he starts to move, he's mesmerising.

So where are the lunkhead action heroes of yesteryear? Jean-Claude Van Damme's foray into serious drama with _JCVD_ appears to have been a momentary lapse; he and Dolph Lundgren have just finished _Universal Soldier: A New Beginning_. But they're both getting a bit long in the tooth, as is Chan. Even Jet Li is pretty much an elder statesman, plus he announced he was giving up martial arts movies, which is a shame, since there's one thing at which he's genius and it's not acting. Of the younger generation, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson has swapped action flicks for kiddy films and comedies, which leaves Jason Statham carrying the torch as God's lonely lunkhead action man.

But wait - what's this on the horizon? Fasten your seat belts for _The Expendables_ , due to hit cinemas next summer. Sylvester Stallone writes and directs himself, Statham, Li, Lundgren, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and Mickey Rourke in what looks set to be the manliest movie of the millennium, albeit one that's slightly creaky around the joints. If Stallone screws up the fight scenes, I'll never forgive him. But if he gets them right, it could be lunkhead nirvana.

Chapter 21: Getting Jiggy with Time

There's a line in the trailer for _Triangle_ which goes, "Everything that happened to you happened before." Setting aside the notion that, thanks to the superabundance of remakes and sequels, this is the sort of universally applicable comment you could slot into just about any old trailer these days, it points to an increasingly widespread phenomenon: movies getting jiggy with time.

Jean-Luc Godard famously said that a film should have a beginning, a middle and end, though not necessarily in that order. But I doubt even Jean-Luc envisaged a time when even mainstream films would be shuffling the sequential deck the way they are now, not just with flashbacks, but with flashforwards, time travelling and parallel universes. I tell you, it's chronological chopped liver out there.

You expect to find temporal quirks in sci-fi and horror films like _Star Trek_ or _Pandorum_ or _Final Destination_. But they're increasingly creeping into other genres as well. The romantic comedy _(500) Days of Summer_ jitterbugs from Day 31 to Day 282 and back to Day 34, and so on, while in _The Time Traveler's Wife_ , Rachel McAdams gets married to a guy who bops around like a cork in the space-time continuum. In the domestic drama _Premonition_ , Sandra Bullock experiences the days of the week in the wrong order. Simon Welsford's low-budget thriller _Jetsam_ juggles flashbacks with _Rashomon_ -like subjective points of view. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has virtually built a directing career out of dicing and slicing his narratives. And don't even get me started on the backwards trajectories of _Memento_ , _Irreversible_ and _The Curious Case of Benjamin Button_.

It might be fun to show one of these films to a cinema audience from, say, a hundred years ago (and in the time-jiggling world of today's films, this is precisely the sort of thing that _could_ happen) to see whether it left everyone scratching their heads in befuddlement. In 1962, the temporal conundrums of _La jetee_ were _le dernier cri_ in avant garde; 33 years later, _Twelve Monkeys_ was merrily recycling the same concept for a mass audience. We're all narrative sophisticates now; it's taken for granted we're capable of slotting the pieces into place to find the big picture, and it's not as though we're short of training exercise. TV series like _Lost_ , _Heroes_ , _Fringe_ and _FlashForward_ tie themselves in chronological knots in a quest to maintain viewing figures, like Scheherazade dreaming up ever more elaborate diversions to avoid getting her head lopped off by the networks.

It works, up to a point, since you're obliged to tune in every week or risk finding yourself at sea, though sometimes it's tempting to keep track like Guy Pearce in _Memento_ , with post-it notes and tattoos, maybe even a flow chart. But again, it's not only sci-fi. One of the jiggiest current shows is the _Friends_ -lite rom-com series _How I Met Your Mother_ , which is narrated from a future which hasn't yet happened and is forever inserting alternative scenarios or playing silly buggers with the timeline.

If you were to iron out most of these timeslip kinks, one suspects, you'd be left with bog-standard stories with no surprises, and probably not much rooting interest either. But giving audiences a mental Rubik's Cube to solve is a foolproof way to stop them tuning out, and can occasionally pay emotional dividends. For me, the most effective time-game in recent memory is the one in _Synecdoche, New York_ , which doesn't so much rearrange the chronology as skim over huge tracts of Philip Seymour Hoffman's story in a disconcerting evocation of the way that time seems to accelerate as we age.

Not so long ago, Paul Schrader wrote a piece in this paper about "the exhaustion of narrative". I would contend that narrative isn't so much exhausted as going into antic spasms in an effort to keep our jaded attention from straying. Look at me, it's saying, look at what I can do! I'm still interesting! I considered ramming home my point by chopping this article into random segments and rearranging them in a different order, like a Tristan Tzara poem. But then I thought nah, you already get enough of that sort of thing at the movies.

Chapter 22: Ho for Bat! Ho for Ball!

Blame it on too much early exposure to comics like _Bunty_ , but I'm excited about seeing _An Education_ , because parts of it are set in a girls' school which sounds an awful lot like the one I went to, except we did hockey instead of lacrosse. And yes, I realise the "education" is largely extra-curricular, but I'm a sucker for girls' school stories, and have to get my fix where I can find it. And I don't find it often, though it's true there's another girls' school story ( _Cracks_ ) coming up soon. Truly, 2009 is turning into a bountiful year for films about girls' education.

Sorry to be parochial, but I'm talking about bog-standard middle-class single-sex English schools, of the sort that I and thousands like me attended, not those hotbeds of nascent sexuality depicted in Euro-yarns such as _Mädchen in Uniform_ or _Innocence_. Heck, my school was nothing like that, nor was it like the ones in _Picnic at Hanging Rock_ or those Korean or Japanese movies where schoolkids are forever committing suicide and killing and haunting one another. And it wasn't like the one in _Suspiria_ either, though the Freiburg Dance Academy does gets extra points, in my book, for embracing two out of my three childhood obsessions: ballet and witches. If only Dario Argento had squeezed Red Indians into the mix, we would have had a Full House.

The first X-film I ever snuck in to see wasn't anything groovy like _Easy Rider_ or _Midnight Cowboy_. It was _The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie_ , which I can only assume was rated adults-only because of the glimpse of a nude Pamela Franklin (not, of course, in the classroom) on whom I had a girlcrush. But pace Maggie Smith's magnificent scenery-chewing and hilarious Scottish accent (recyled in the Harry Potter films), I wanted to see less Miss Brodie, and more of her pupils. I wanted to hang out with The Silent Three and The Four Marys.

But when was it, exactly, that school stories got hi-jacked by Hollywood? I'd never even _heard_ of a prom before _Carrie_ , but nowadays, thanks to Ferris Bueller and Jeff Spicoli and Buffy Summers, British film-goers feel pangs of vicarious nostalgia for a school system that has little in common with anything they actually experienced. High schools in Hollywood movies are always mixed (except in films set in the past, like _Mona Lisa Smile_ or _The Woods_ ). All but the most deprived urban schoolkids have cars and apparently unlimited allowances which enable them to live it up in cafes and at the mall; the best I ever managed in pre-Starbucks Greater London was an occasional Wimpy-burger.

The classroom cliques I remember were sporty types, swots, non-affiliates like me, and girls who'd seen Zeffirelli's _Romeo and Juliet_ one too many times and wore their hair like Olivia Hussey. But now we refer to "cheerleaders" and "jocks" and "nerds" as though we grew up surrounded by them. Where was the British John Hughes, to transform our own schooldays into celluloid myth? The nearest we got was _Gregory's Girl_ and _Grange Hill_ , though today's young Americans probably assume all British schools are like Hogwarts. But why did no-one ever film Malory Towers, or the Chalet School?

The only time I ever felt twinges of real recognition for a school on screen was during _Heavenly Creatures_ , where Peter Jackson gets it dead right, albeit with a New Zealand accent: the archaic rituals of the classroom, the squeaking of chalk on the blackboard (or "chalkboard" as we must call it now), the miming to hymns in assembly. I scowled in our school photo just like Melanie Lynskey, though should point out the resemblance stops there; I never bashed my mother's head in with a brick.

But I'm not proud - I'll even take the St Trinian's sequel coming out next month, though I fear that, like its predecessor, it will not be fit to kiss the hockey boots of 1954's _The Belles of St Trinian's_ , which was staffed by Beryl Reid, Irene Handl and Alastair Sim as headmistress. Now that's what I call a _real_ girls' school. Ho for bat Ho for ball Ho for hockey and lax and all.

Chapter 23: The Acid Test

Thirty-six years ago, I dropped a tab of LSD. It was OK, but I never felt the urge to do it again, and never thought much about it - till the other day, when I was watching _Taking Woodstock_. To the sound of Love's _The Red Telephone_ , Ang Lee serves up an acid trip so uncannily spot-on, I swear it gave me my first ever flashback.

It's not as though there's ever been a shortage of trippy scenes in films. It's just they always seemed to chime more with the experiences of the film-makers than with my own. Indeed, watching them sober, you often feel like the designated driver in a roomful of babbling drunks. In the aptly-named _The Trip_ , Peter Fonda has a psychedelic experience in which, among other things, he shows his bottom, listens to a washing-machine and says, "I can see right into my brain!" In _Easy Rider_ , he and Dennis Hopper stumble around a cemetery with a couple of hippy-chicks (Karen Black and Toni Basil), accompanied by the sort of lens flare and squiffy camerawork which have defined druggy sequences ever since.

Nowadays lazy film-makers are forever recycling signifiers from an over-familiar arsenal of sitar music, multiple image filters and faces distorted by CGI, without ever coming close to creating anything other than a baggieful of clichés. And surely it's time for a moratorium on Jefferson Airplane's _White Rabbit_ , trotted out as the definitive druggy anthem in everything from _Platoon_ to _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_ to _The Simpsons_?

In Terry Gilliam's film of Hunter S Thompson's book, I found myself empathising less with Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro than with the straight waitresses and receptionists being terrorised by their wild and crazy behaviour. Raoul and Dr Gonzo are surely only a hit or two away from Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis in _Natural Born Killers_ , one of those films which looks from the very first frames as though the entire cast and crew were up to their eyeballs on tequila and peyote (though of course I'm not suggesting they actually _were_ ) - so much so that when Mickey and Mallory eventually get bitten by rattlesnakes and start to hallucinate, you find yourself asking, "Yes, but how can you _tell_?"

In the 1970s, my friends and I used to laugh ourselves silly at the crazed marijuana smokers in _Reefer Madness_ , a favourite on the midnight movie circuit. "Hahaha, we're not _at all_ like that when we smoke," we would giggle hysterically as we passed the joint. Nowadays, I prefer the more benign strain of stoner comedy, where at least it's the stoners themselves rather than innocent bystanders who get terrorised, like Harold and Kumar, whose quest for a burger expands into epic proportions that will be familiar to anyone who ever set out to accomplish a simple task while out of their skulls, or Anna Faris in _Smiley Face_ , getting so paranoid on hash brownies she ends up inadvertently trashing a first edition of the Communist Manifesto.

I'm told that first generation hippies dug the psychedelic effects in _2001: a Space Odyssey_ or _Performance_ , even when they weren't stoned or on acid, and I concede that even non-druggy films like _Ghost in the Shell 2_ and _Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs_ have made me go, "Wow, maaan!". So maybe film has an important role to play in the so-called War on Drugs. _Taking Woodstock's_ acid flashback made me want to see how Ang Lee would capture other types of drug experience on film, preferably those triggered by the more dangerous substances on David Nutt's list, such as heroin or ketamine. No-one would ever need to snort, smoke or shoot up again; they would get their virtual high by watching a DVD. It would be movie methadone.

Of course, there's a risk that addictive personalities would simply get hooked on the film in lieu of the drug, and end up watching it so many times they'd start trying to insert the DVD into their stomach, like James Woods and his abdominal video cassette slot in _Videodrome_. Come to think of it, what with _Naked Lunch_ , _eXistenZ_ and _Spider_ , David Cronenberg's entire filmography is pretty much a cinematic Nutt's List. The bad trip version.

Chapter 24: Mad Femme Disease

In _Seraphine_ , Yolande Moreau gives one of those great female performances to be found more often in French films than in British or American ones. This is not an anorexic Barbie doll with a no-nudity clause in her contract, whose facial expressiveness has been Botoxed out of existence. This is the real deal, a stonking physical _tour de force_ which makes even De Niro or Keitel's greatest hits look mannered and actorly.

Martin Provost's film was inspired by the life of "primitive modernist" painter Seraphine de Senlis, whose story carries echoes of the Susan Boyle phenomenon, though let us hope Boyle doesn't end up like de Senlis, who from the outset is clearly a few sandwiches short, but ends up misplacing her entire picnic. It started me wondering why French cinema furnishes actresses with meatier characters than the British or American film industries, and why so many of these characters are off their rockers.

French actresses have long specialised in going gaga. Catherine Deneuve's international breakthrough was as a razor-wielding schizophrenic in _Repulsion_ , while Isabelle Huppert made hers going off the rails in _The Lacemaker_. More recently, Huppert launched a mini-trend in self-mutilation in _The Piano Teacher_ , followed by Marina de Van, who _In My Skin_ keeps slices of herself in her own wallet, and by Charlotte Gainsbourg hacking away at her ladyparts in _Antichrist_. Isabelle Adjani, bless her, has spun an entire career out of playing fruitcakes, from _L'histoire d'Adele H_ and _Possession_ (my friends and I used to do imitations of her bravura three-minute monster miscarriage in the subway), to Rodin's tormented muse in _Camille Claudel_ and last year's _Skirt Day_ , where she plays a schoolteacher who wigs out and forces her pupils to recite facts about Molière at gunpoint.

There was a period recently when I couldn't go near a cinema without being faced with yet another French actress going bonkers. At the start of _The Other One_ , Dominique Blanc looks into the mirror before hitting herself on the head with a hammer. (I've had mornings like that - I just don't act on them.) In _Mark of an Angel_ , Catherine Frot stalks a seven-year-old girl who she's convinced is her dead daughter. As for what Emanuelle Beart gets up to at the end of _Vinyan_ , let's say it's not pretty. Unless you like the idea of Beart naked and covered in mud. (Oh, all right, I grant you there are probably quite a few takers for that.)

I know lots of French women in real life, and they don't strike me as any madder than their Anglo-American counterparts, so how come they're always going bananas in films? Surely it can't be that French film-makers (and not all of them are male) think women are unbalanced as a gender? Apologies to mental health workers, by the way, for my insensitive use of words like "fruitcake". But the point about all these performances is they're a long way from the generic Hollywood psychokiller, who's about as emotionally complex as the shark from _Jaws_.

Nutty or not, Frenchwomen in films are still credible, well-rounded characters, just like you and me, except they go a bit further in their masochistic self-loathing and failure to grasp reality, and drama tends to favour the extreme. As Norman Bates said, "We all go a little mad sometimes." It's just that few of us go as far as sticking forks into people, like Beatrice Dalle in _Betty Blue_. (And we won't even mention what whacked-out behaviour Dalle gets up to in _Inside_ ; suffice to say, it's a film to avoid if you're pregnant.)

In their British and American films, Kristin Scott Thomas or Charlotte Rampling get typecast as brittle aristocrats or in bland supporting roles. In France they get to let rip in things like _I've Loved You So Long_ or _Under the Sand_ , where they're allowed not just moments of madness, but of humanity too. Evidently, if British or American actresses want juicy roles which run the gamut of emotions from mildly mental to clean round the bend, they should think about relocating to France. At least there they're less likely to find themselves stuck in chick-flicks about shopping and weddings.

Chapter 25: Horror Rules

_Carriers_ is the sort of B-movie that, back in the 1970s, would have attracted scant critical attention, though maybe a qualified thumbs-up from horror fans, who might have appreciated its low budget evocation of disease-ridden America and implicit criticism of selfish survivalism. But since it's coming out in 2009, it will almost certainly be written off as _Zombieland_ without the zombies or the jokes.

Both films are road movies which exploit contemporary paranoia about viruses, but the most intriguing point in common is that both sets of characters have drawn up rules to help them survive. In _Zombieland_ , these are flippant ("Beware of bathrooms") while the gospel according to _Carriers_ is more pragmatic, summed up by the uncompromising, "The sick are already dead."

Of course, characters in horror movies always do break the rules, otherwise we'd get a bunch of characters sticking together, not having sex and not getting killed off, and where's the fun in that?

No other genre is so predicated on stupid behaviour. How many times have you found yourself yelling at the screen, "For God's sake, why must you go skinny-dipping when there's a maniac on the loose?" or, "Are you insane? Any idiot knows you _never_ go into the cellar/attic/apparently abandoned house." Forty years after _Night of the Living Dead_ , a film which trashed all the conventions of 1960s horror, the folk in zombie movies continue to ignore the First Rule of Romero, which is to shoot the zombies in the head.

Slasher movies of the 1980s, in particular, were so formulaic I daresay every horror fan compiled a list of dos and don'ts, like me. I cobbled mine together after seeing Sam Raimi's _The Evil Dead_ , a film which wouldn't have existed if the characters had behaved sensibly ("Avoid isolated cottages in the woods", "Don't touch ancient artefacts"). But Raimi's own rules, which the Coen brothers quoted to me while I was interviewing them in 1985, were slightly different, and went as follows: 1) the innocent must suffer; 2) the guilty must be punished; and 3) you must taste blood to be a man.

As the genre became ever more parodic and cinema itself became increasingly self-referential throughout the 1980s, it's surprising it took until 1996 for a screenwriter to assimilate the idea that characters in horror movies might themselves watch the same horror movies as the rest of us and would act accordingly, though Kevin Williamson limits himself to just three rules in _Scream_ : don't have sex, don't drink or do drugs, and don't say, "I'll be right back".

Of course, film-makers must strike a balance between having their characters behaving as you or I might in similar circumstances, and sacrificing all sympathy by making them such numbskulls you end up coming perilously close to thinking they deserve what they get (and let me make this clear – NO-ONE, however stupid or obnoxious or fictional, deserves to be murdered). My problems with _Martyrs_ began long before we reached the torture-porn stage, when the main character, who has aready tried my patience by hanging around in a houseful of corpses, decides for no good reason to explore a basement which looks as though it's been refurbished by a Bond villain's interior decorator.

While everyone falls over themselves to remake horror movies from the 1970s and 1980s, it rarely occurs to film-makers to inject a soupçon of surprise into the mix by cutting and shuffling conventions that were established way back in the Reagan era. There have been odd exceptions, such as one or two Final Girls turning out to be the guilty party, while in Cherry _Falls_ , news that the psycho is carving up virgins has everyone scrambling to lose their cherries - though alas, both the film and its killer stop being picky as soon as the body count needs bumping up.

The only place you're likely to find the rules subverted these days is in the somewhat dodgy field of horror comedy. I'm looking forward to _Tucker & Dale vs Evil_, in which college kids mistake a couple of innocent rubes for _Deliverance_ -style psychobillies. With, one imagines, hilarious consequences. But how much more interesting had they dared to play it straight.

Chapter 26: Same Old Story

In a perfect world, we would all hit our sixties like Meryl Streep in _It's Complicated_ : having affairs, baking chocolate croissants and adding extensions to our lovely Santa Barbara homes. Sadly, our dotage is more likely to resemble that of the old couple in _Tokyo Story_ , repeatedly given the brush-off by grown-up children who see them as a nuisance, or of poor old _Umberto D_ , unable to pay his rent.

Statisticians are predicting that soon, a quarter of the UK population will be over 60 years old, but we're unlikely to see a similar proportion of senior citizens in significant movie roles. In 2009 I watched roughly 320 films; apart from the aforementioned Streepfest, only three could be said to feature oldish leading characters: Hirokazu Koreeda's _Still Walking_ , 71-year-old Dustin Hoffman getting it on with 49-year-old Emma Thompson in _Last Chance Harvey_ (funny how no-one noticed that particular age disparity) and Brad Pitt ageing backwards in _The Curious Case of Benjamin Button_ , which I probably shouldn't count any more than I'd count _Twilight_ 's Edward Cullen as a 100-year-old. In 2009, alas, the most memorable appearance by an actor of pensionable age was by 87-year-old Betty White, whose "Native American" dance in _The Proposal_ was both patronising and cringe-making.

Otherwise, Hollywood treats old people much as the kids treat their parents in _Tokyo Story_ \- it would rather not deal with them. Oldies, like small children, tend to be disposable plot devices (which usually means they propel the story forward by dying) or they're wheeled on as bless-their-cotton-socks phenomena whose every move and utterance, however witless, deserves a pat on the head. We're supposed to find it cute when they booze and chainsmoke, like 63-year-old Susan Sarandon in _The Lovely Bones_. Old people's aim in life, on those rare occasions when they're granted one, seems to be to resdiscover their sex drive and behave like frisky teenagers (see _Cocoon_ ), presumably because it's the only thing younger film-makers can conceive of older people wanting.

But do old people want to _see_ old people on screen? I ask this as someone who is galloping towards senescence at alarming speed, and already thinking of making a living will stipulating that when I'm stuck in a nursing home without the power of speech my wheelchair will not parked in front of endless reruns of _Driving Miss Daisy_. I'd rather go gently into that good night watching _Goodfellas_ and _The Thing_.

The answer, surely, is that age doesn't matter if story and characters are good enough. _The Straight Story_ , starring 79-year-old Richard Farnsworth, was a rare high-profile film which acknowledged that you're never too old to go on a road trip, and the critical and commercial success of _Up_ , with its curmudgeonly widowed protagonist, indicates golden agers aren't necessarily box-office anathema for filmgoers of all ages.

Meanwhile, Christopher Plummer (just turned 90) isn't showing any signs of slowing down, with recent voice roles in _Up_ and _9_ , and a barnstorming turn as Tolstoy in _The Last Station_. On the documentary front, _Buena Vista Social Club_ and _Ballets Russes_ , packed with lively octogenerians and nonagenarians, suggest the secret to mental and physical vigour isn't so much a swimming-pool filled with alien pods as a lifetime of artistic activity.

But I'd like to see more genre films with protagonists who are less twinkly old codgers than vicious old fogies. There's already a flourishing subgenre of thrillers about tough guys with Alzheimer's, the most recent being Johnnie To's _Vengeance_ , starring 66-year-old popster Johnny Hallyday (who stepped into the project when Alain Delon turned it down) as a French chef who keeps forgetting he's in Hong Kong to find the guys who murdered his grandchildren.

One of my own long-gestating projects is a hardboiled heist movie, a variation on _Reservoir Dogs_ in which a bunch of OAPs is driven by pension scams and the callousness of offspring to plot an armed robbery, the catch being that each of them suffers from an age-related ailment. One character would be in a wheelchair, another would have bladder control problems, while another would be recovering from a stroke. This would not be played for laughs, believe me. It would be deadly serious.

Afterword

These film columns were first published in the _Guardian_ newspaper from January to December of 2009. Thanks are due to Michael Hann and Andrew Pulver, for commissioning them and also for having given me freedom to write pretty much whatever I wanted, so long as it was vaguely topical **.**

Chapter 27: The Psycho Murders

A novella inspired by the 1973 film _Theatre of Blood_ , and first published in 2009, on Twitter, in increments of 140 (or so) characters.

_Episode 1_ : Famed film critic Waldo Fitzgerald has secret rendez-vous at Bateson Hotel, takes shower, is knifed to death. Blood.

_Episode 2_ : Morning screening, Iris Archer (the Miss Marple of film criticism) pleased no pompous Waldo tutting away behind her.

_Episode 3_ : Critics expecting latest Loach, instead watch shower murder, not of Janet Leigh but Waldo. Real blood. Consternation.

_Episode 4_ : Murder on film! Cops. Shocked critics cite shower scenes: Scarface Cat Chaser Dressed to Kill 7th Victim High Anxiety

_Episode 5_ : Iris & fellow critics parse murder film for cops. Flashy Hitchcock pastiche by maniac, apparently thinks he's auteur.

_Episode 6_ : Brash young critic Barry Crusher orders Gibson, is kidnapped from bar. Found dead in wrecked car, reeking of Bourbon.

_Episode 7_ : Sunday Citizen's Solomon Cooper says to Archer: Crusher's death reminding him of North by Northwest. Odd coincidence.

_Episode 8_ : Critics expecting Kiarostami pic get Crusher crashing, sneer at bad back projection. Stupid cops still say accident.

_Episode 9_ : Odious tabloid hack Sebastian Parrot lured to secret ceremony. Hoping for Critic of the Year award. But it's a trap!

_Episode 10_ : Critics enjoy pre-film tea & biscuits. But Resnais replaced by Parrot-strangling! Body still under tea-table! Panic.

_Episode 11_ : Archer and Cooper take stock. Waldo/ _Psycho_. Crusher/ _North by Northwest_. Parrot/ _Rope_. Critics killed Hitchcock style?

_Episode 12_ : Killer has grudge against film critics, says Archer. Could it be disgruntled director whose movie got awful reviews?

_Episode 13_ : Cooper cites Theatre of Blood, Hitchcock instead of Shakespeare. But so many negative reviews, and so many suspects.

_Episode 14_ : Cops dismiss killer-director theory as too farfetched. Rent-boy knifed Waldo. Crusher drunk. Parrot tragic accident.

_Episode 15_ : Archer answers phone after midnight. Unseen attacker. Choking. Fight! Killer flees. Like _Dial M for Murder_ , kind of.

_Episode 16_ : Cops call Archer menopausal attention-seeker, claiming attack to boost sales of collected film criticism. Bastards.

Episode 17: Archer & Cooper list Hitchcock locations; advise all critics to avoid high places, motels, British Museum, aviaries.

Episode 18: Callum Young, Archer's cool toyboy protege, offered dream job on hip new film website. Forgets warnings, meets ed...

Episode 19: Young found hung by necktie. Cops say masturbation gone wrong. Archer, in mourning, sees potatoes, says no. Frenzy!

_Episode 20_ : Four critics murdered! Archer polls panicked survivors. Who got nastiest reviews? Tarantino, von Trier, Bay, Beaks...

_Episode 21_ : Tarantino, Trier, Bay have alibis. Leo Beaks? Long dead! Suicide after critics eviscerated writing-directing debut.

_Episode 22_ : Archer & co, having seen _Bride Wore Black_ , _Punisher_ etc, ask if killer could be Beaks' avenging widow? brother? mum?

_Episode 23_ : Critics suffer Beaks pic again. Any clues? Artist's puerile search for self. Torture! Worse than _Battlefield Earth_.

_Episode 24_ : Only Will Pleasence (The Daily Post-It) gives thumbs-up to execrable Beaks flick. Typical upstart no-taste blogger.

_Episode 25_ : Pleasence vs Cooper altercation. Former claims critics too old, Beaks underrated genius. Cooper says no, he's s**t.

_Episode 26_ : Cooper upset at Death of Film Criticism, wonders out loud if murders real or metaphor. Archer thinks he's losing it.

_Episode 27_ : Beaks autopsy data. Anti-critic rant, blew self up in Piccadilly Circus. Death on film. Identity confirmed by teeth.

_Episode 28_ : Archer tells cops to check film cans for bombs. Critics jittery. Some can be heard weeping during latest _Saw_ movie.

_Episode 29_ : Cooper depressed, calls wife to play their favourite erotic game. She wears raincoat, stiletto heels & nothing else.

_Episode 30_ : Cooper follows wife around cemetery, museum, up church tower. Too late, he sees she's man in wig! Gasp. "You!" Push.

_Episode 31_ : New Pixar replaced by Cooper death-film. Sad Archer observes it's not so much Hitchcock as De Palma-esque pastiche.

_Episode 32_ : Cops belatedly issue killer-auteur alert. Archer, Pleasence, Clive Carver, Stu Gormley in safe house, watching DVDs.

_Episode 33_ : Archer going nuts in safe house with pompous fellow critics wittering about Kubrick, squabbling over remote control.

_Episode 34_ : Carver presenting award at Croydon Film Festival; gets police escort to Fairfield Halls. But fest bogus, cop is too.

_Episode 35_ : Carver stabbed, falls backwards down stairs. His dying words: _The 39 Steps_? No, it's _Psycho_ again, isn't it. Damn...

_Episode 36_ : Carver gone. Now it's just Gormley, Pleasence, Archer. No new film reviews written. Is this what the killer wanted?

_Episode 37_ : Archer watches suicide video again, spots digital tampering. Explosion's CGI. Beaks faked death! So where is he now?

_Episode 38_ : Archer studies _Spellbound_ , _Vertigo_ , _Psycho_. People posing as other people. Wonders about Gormley and Pleasence. Hmm.

_Episode 39_ : Archer sneakily searches fellow critics' rooms. Finds Donald Spoto's _The Dark Side of Genius_ under Gormley's pillow.

_Episode 40_ : Archer peruses Stu's reviews online. Hyperbolic gushing: brilliant, chef d'oeuvre etc. Invariably quoted on poster.

_Episode 41_ : Archer confronts Gormley, but notices his teeth are bad. Pleasence smiles: teeth are perfect. TOO perfect! Implants.

_Episode 42_ : Pleasence is Beaks! Faked own death, infiltrated Critics' Circle long ago. His blogging even crappier than his film.

_Episode 43_ : Cop guards have vanished. Beaks bores Archer & Gormley with traditional mad-killer rant, illustrated by flashbacks.

_Episode 44_ : Gormley tackles Beaks, but is pushed through window. Impaled on railings. Like _Spellbound_. Stupid cops blame Archer.

_Episode 45_ : Archer flees cops. Finds Beaks' house, hides in garden shed. But shed's full of crows! Trained to kill! Caw! Blimey.

_Episode 46_ : Nice birdy! Archer calms killer-crows with biscuits filched from last critics' screening. Birds eat crumbs, not her.

_Episode 47_ : Archer breaks into house, finds Beaks masturbating to own film. He zips up, points gun, demands a favourable review.

_Episode 48_ : Archer refuses to modify her opinion: film pretentious tosh, Beaks no-talent wanker. He loses cool, shoots, misses.

_Episode 49_ : Beaks chases Archer into kitchen. She bats gun away with spatula. He lunges with knife, she parries with frying-pan.

_Episode 50_ : Fight to the death a la _Torn Curtain_! Crash! Yeouch! Schwepp! Eek! Crunch! Urgh! Clunk! It's looking bad for Archer.

_Will Archer prevail? Tune in tomorrow for the next thrilling episode of_ The Psycho Murders _! Meanwhile, here's a preview: "boiling chip-fat"_

_Episode 51_ : Archer rallies, throws handy pan of boiling chip-fat in Beaks' face. Argh! Then shoves his head into microwave oven.

_Episode 52_ : Archer yells: F**k Hitchcock! Get a load of _Last House on the Left_ , the remake! More your level. She presses START.

_Episode 53_ : oven goes PING! Killer's head explodes. House burns. _Sabotage_ or _Saboteur_? Archer doesn't give a fig. Runs for it.

_Episode 54_ : Archer watches all Beaks' snuff footage, shakes head sadly. Hitchcock? No way. Not even DePalma. More like youtube.

_Episode 55_ : Beaks hailed as cult hero by new generation of bloggers and online critics. His film voted No 1 on imdb.com. THE END

Read the first six chapters of Spoilers: Selected Film Reviews Part 1 1989-1995 by Anne Billson:
Chapter 1: Dangerous Liaisons

Letter 176: The Baroness de Billson to the Marquise de Merteuil.

Madame, having long been one of your most devoted followers, it falls to me to be the bearer of tidings that will make you gnash your teeth. On the other hand, you may well bust a gut laughing, since we know your sense of humour is amusingly warped. How delightful to recall the smallpox scar make-up you wore on your last visit to Paris! How we chortled when that mischievous Choderlos de Laclos fellow put it about that this hideous disfigurement was divine punishment for your outrageous behaviour!

This is the gist of what I have learned. Do you remember persuading the Vicomte de Valmont to deflower the Volanges girl before the little slut could be married off to that ungrateful ex-lover of yours? Well, shortly after you retired from the public eye in order to compose your memoirs, many of the letters pertaining to this intrigue fell into the hands of a bounder named Christopher Hampton who, since he was a playwright, made a play out of them. His attempts at capturing your inimitable essence were surprisingly effective, though a natural bias towards his own gender resulted in the wretched Valmont being elevated perilously close to the status of hero. Instead of his well deserved demise being the consequence of sheer ineptitude with the epee, it was made to appear that he was a romantic suicide. His deathbed confession was presented as a moral triumph, instead of an act of cowardice and reprehensible betrayal of those sterner ideals to which he professed adherence whenever it suited his purposes.

Had it been left at that, my dear Marquise, you would have had little cause for complaint, especially as you yourself were portrayed on the stage by a certain Miss Lindsay Duncan as a charming creature of great beauty and amorality. But alas, the play proved such a success that it has now been made into a motion picture, and it is here that I fear you have been sorely misrepresented. Firstly, and in my opinion disastrously, you are played by Miss Glenn Close, who formerly achieved notoriety as the psychotic harpy in _Fatal Attraction_. Miss Close is, of course, lumbered with the baggage from this role, so that there will no doubt be many filmgoers who see you as nothing more than a frustrated matron, a pitiable bitch to be booed and hissed like a music-hall villain.

Miss Close, moreover, though she might conceivably be considered handsome in an impoverished backwoods community that prizes sun-darkened skin and freckle-faced candour above aristocratic elegance, is singularly lacking in sex appeal. Indeed, she looks positively _plain_ when placed alongside Miss Michelle Pfeiffer, the actress cast as your chief rival and object of Valmont's absurd puppy-crush - the nauseating Madame de Tourvel. What with her bruised lips and moist eyes and voice all a-tremble, my dear, it is no contest; no man in his right mind, not even the ridiculous Valmont, would ever _dream_ of casting such a cupcake aside as a favour to that imposter being passed off as yourself. To those of us who have had the honour of knowing you, Madame, this ludicrous deception stretches credulity too far.

As for Valmont, he is portrayed by Mr John Malkovich as a leering satyr, launching himself at women with a vulgar abandon that would get him banned from every respectable drawing-room in the land. Valmont had his faults, certainly, but lack of _savoir faire_ was not one of them. Nor was lack of subtlety. Whenever Mr Malkovich and Miss Close tell untruths or utter _double entendres_ in the presence of those not privy to their schemes, they smirk and twitch as if in the grip of Tourette's Syndrome, to alert us to their duplicity.

I could go on. I could mention the American accents that, although one is not averse to this New World way of speaking _per se_ , are more redolent of _thirtysomething_ -style let-it-all-hang-out than of sexual intrigue _a la_ eighteenth century French aristocracy. I could tell you of the strangely underdressed _chateaux_ , or of the perambulations that everyone takes in the gardens whenever Mr Stephen Frears gets bored with the great indoors and feels he should demonstrate that he is directing a _film_ and not a _stage play_. Walk? In the _garden_? And run the risk of sullying one's pale skin with a plebian suntan?

I could complain about the lack of social or economic context which makes your boast of avenging your sex seem no more than a half-hearted nod towards late twentieth century Feminism, or about the film-makers' yellow-bellied concessions to popular sentiment, or about the inattentiveness to appearance in a story which is _all about_ appearances. Instead, cast and crew have gone on record (and critics have backed them up) as saying it is somehow a good thing that the gorgeous, elaborate costumes are barely given the time of day. I know, and I know that _you_ know, Madame, that to be a successful _poseuse_ , one must always be acutely aware of the discrepancy between appearance and actuality.

Madame, I urge you to take action. If necessary, we could retrieve your letters and promote our own version of events, this time with a more suitable actress in the leading role. Some fifteen years ago, Faye Dunaway might have done you justice. Today, we might have... who? Genevieve Bujold? Catherine Deneuve? As the director, we might hire Ridley Scott, who I am told can be pretty nifty with the matching accessories.

Or how does Milos Forman grab you? Madame, I fear I bring more bad tidings. Even as I write, Mr Forman is preparing to unveil his own interpretation of your story. His title, alas, does not bode well. He plans to call it - brace yourself, madame - _Valmont_.

(First published in The Virgin Film Yearbook, 1989)

_2008 addendum: Obliged to read Choderlos de Laclos's book at an impressionable age, I promptly concluded 'La Marquise de Merteuil, c'est moi,' and went on to develop that obsessive possessiveness reserved for one's favourite works of fiction. None shall touch! And if they do, they'd better bloody well get it right. In the end I much preferred Forman's_ Valmont _,which presented itself as a cynical costume romp, starring the (then) little-known Annette Bening as Merteuil and Colin Firth as Valmont, though once again I was irritated by the latter character being presented as a romantic hero rather than the lily-livered snitch he'd always seemed to me. I also have a soft spot for Roger Vadim's 1959 modern-dress adaptation, starring Jeanne Moreau and Gerard Philippe (and featuring Boris Vian, object of one of my lifelong crushes, in a minor role), as well as for Roger Kumble's delightfully trashy_ Cruel Intentions _, a teen update starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Philippe. I even like the 2003 Korean version,_ Untold Scandal _. And I still think the Stephen Frears film is the worst of the lot._

_But_ Ridley Scott _? I must have been mad, or, more likely, still enraptured by the memory of Mimi Rogers's walk-in perfume cabinet in_ Someone To Watch Over Me _._

Chapter 2: Casualties of War

American movies set in Vietnam have not been noticeably packed with parts for Vietnamese actors. Nor have they offered a great many rewarding roles for women; it is unusual to be presented with a female role as substantial as the one in _Casualties of War_. But wait - the director is none other than Brian De Palma, whose CV includes _Dressed to Kill_ (in which Angie Dickinson is slashed to death), _Blow Out_ (in which Nancy Allen is choked to death) and _Body Double_ (in which Deborah Shelton is drilled to death). Brian has a history of upsetting women's groups, and he doesn't let them down here. Thuy Thu Le makes her film acting debut as a Vietnamese girl whose forty minutes of screen time consist of being abducted, raped and murdered, and I for one wouldn't care to have a Method actor like Sean Penn looming over me with his pants down.

De Palma is keen to demonstrate his awareness that what happens is a Bad Thing, but doesn't seem confident that his audience will be similarly enlightened, and so bombards us with the girl's tear-streaked features to prove she's not enjoying her ordeal. Alas, this proves counterproductive, for when she is finally dispatched, it's not so much an outrage as a relief - for _us_ to be put out of _our_ misery. Lest anyone should still be in doubt about her status as innocent victim, her Big Death Scene (along with every other fatality and meaningful monologue) is swamped with emotional music from Ennio Morricone; the credits reveal the composer worked through a translator, which perhaps goes some way towards explaining why a film about Vietnam should be accompanied by a score for Peruvian nose-flutes.

Michael J. Fox, as the 'cherry' who tries in vain to help the girl, is the latest in a long line of De Palma protagonists who are helpless witnesses to murder, though the director has always lacked the Hitchcock knack of implicating the voyeur, and has eliminated all potential for ambiguous dilemma with his casting; not for one second do we believe that Marty McFly from _Back to the Future_ could ever do to a woman what America did to Vietnam. Meanwhile, Sean Penn's offscreen reputation as an obnoxious pugilist saves screenwriter David Rabe an awful lot of hackwork.

But all this Nam-bam-and-thank-you-mam throws everything out of kilter; it forms the protracted centrepiece of the film when it should have been swept out of the way in the first ten minutes. The cover-up and consequences are crammed in almost as an afterthought; instead of a gritty court martial, we get a mere few minutes of the accused soldiers trying to justify their actions. The film flirts with, but is never allowed to embrace, the dilemma of how to uphold moral values when your country is actively encouraging you to turn the enemy into chopped liver.

The screenplay is based on a real incident, and there is a provocative tale in there somewhere. But it has lost out to DePalma's insistence of painting in black and white when the dodgy grey tones would have been more interesting.

(First published in the Sunday Correspondent, 1990)

Chapter 3: Steel Magnolias

There are movies which move you, and there are movies which try so hard to move you they give you emotion-sickness. In other words, you feel like throwing up. It's not as if my heart is hardened against sentiment; you're talking to a girl who gets a lump in her throat every time Fred Astaire lifts a foot off the floor, who gets the sniffles five minutes into your average Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy sobfest, who has been known to weep uncontrollably all the way through _The Curse of the Cat People_. So what is it about films like _Steel Magnolias_ that leaves me dry-eyed and gasping for slop-free air?

Robert Harling based his original play, so we are told, on 'his mother and sister's courageous acts of caring.' Now he has adapted it into a screenplay, and - following in the footsteps of David Hare and Willie Russell - has given us yet another less-than-galvanising version of how men reckon women think and behave. I'm not saying that women _don't_ think and behave in this way; I'm just saying that life's too short to spend two hours of it in the company of the kind of women who do.

Or maybe it's the way all six above-the-title actresses play characters with names - M'Lynn, Clairee, Truvy - that sound as though they've been dictated by a dyslexic down a long-distance telephone line, or the way they talk with exaggerated Southern Belle accents; it's like watching an extended screen-test in search of the Scarlett O'Hara of the1990s. Or maybe it's the combination of - brace yourselves - Shirley MacLaine _and_ Sally Field, _starring together in a single picture_. Let me know when you've stopped screaming and we can go on.

Sally is cast in the Shirley role, as the mother half of a mother-daughter relationship. Meanwhile Shirley, having already won a mother-daughter Oscar for _Terminal Endearment_ , graciously cedes centre-stage in favour of a subsidiary role. But eek! she remembers - too late - Sally already has _two_ Oscars, so Shirley must fight back by flaunting the signs of a serious actress - ankle socks, mussed hair and smeary make-up. Who's it going to be this time, boys and girls? Best or Best Supporting? Sally or Shirley? Shirley or Sally?

As if this duo weren't enough, we also have Olympia Dukakis, who gets the best lines ('The only thing that separates us from the animals is our ability to accessorise'); Daryl Hannah challenging Shirley's serious act by wearing spectacles and a cardigan; Julia Roberts, sister of Eric and the lucky owner of a protracted sickbed scene ('It's no big thing; I'll just have a kidney transplant; I'll be fine...'); and Dolly Parton, who injects an extra syllable into every word ('Annelle honey, whaddaya sa-yay wee-ya toy-alk so-yum tra-yash?') and is the only one who doesn't act like she's slumming. Dolly, as the owner of the beauty parlour where much of the action takes place, can talk about frosting and streaking as if she really means it, and (bless her) she probably does.

What am I saying? Action? What action? The director is Herbert Ross, often described as being a Director of Actresses, which means he's OK at filming ballet but not so hot on exciting car chases, gory murders and the meaning of life. For action, read ponderous exchanges of dialogue arranged in theatrical format: Act Three, Scene Four - the saline drip gets wheeled out from the wings. Each scene takes place on or around a ceremony or festival: wedding, Halloween, Christmas, funeral... Waiting for each of the six actresses to trot out her ha'pennyworth in each of the scenes can get a tad wearisome; when years have passed, and we're stuck in the middle of an Easter Egg hunt and they're still trotting out their ha'pennyworths, one realises with a sinking feeling there is no real reason why this film should ever end. Why not Hogmanay? Whitsun? St Cecilia's Day? And then another wedding, and then Halloween again...

(First published in Tatler, 1990)

Chapter 4: Pretty Woman

What do women want? You may well ask. Screenwriters are every bit as flummoxed as Freud, and it shows. It shows especially in old-fashioned films that are masquerading as flashy new modish ones. The male characters grab life by the throat; they stockpile commodities, they rob banks, they have meaningful buddy relationships and heavy obsessions and they get metaphysical. But the female ones are just kind of there; occasionally they have babies or get leukaemia, but mostly they buy clothes and things.

Take _Pretty Woman_. This is not the sort of story that knocks you sideways with its originality. You know the score right from the kick-off. He is a top-bracket shark whose business is gobbling up companies, peeling off their assets and then spitting out the pulp. He stops his car on Hollywood Boulevard and asks her the way to Beverly Hills. She is a two-bit hooker, and by hook or by crook (but mostly hook) she ends up ensconced in his posh hotel suite, flexing his plastic whenever she feels like it, building up a colour coordinated wardrobe and tagging along to swanky power dinners as his decorative accessory. It's a business arrangement.

Naturally, they fall in love, though you have to take that bit for granted. On paper, neither is a particularly loveable character, but he is lucky enough to be played by the eminently attractive Richard Gere, who has got over his faded-matinee-idol phase and sprouted enough grey hairs and interesting wrinkles for people to start taking him seriously as an actor. And she has the advantage of being played by Julia Roberts, who thanks to crucial kidney failure in _Steel Magnolias_ is the hottest dish on this season's menu.

Every successful film actress needs one outstanding feature, and Julia's is her mouth - it has such a life of its own that it practically goes walkies around the block, and it contains an enormous number of interesting teeth. I described these to my dentist last week, and he informed me that it is now common practice for go-ahead dental surgeons to equip their clients with laughing tackle that is a touch irregular, just enough to make it look like the real thing. One is not suggesting for a second that Julia's teeth are capped, but one can't help wondering what brand of toothpaste she uses to make them sparkle so.

Anyway, it's a fairytale swap; she gives him spontaneity and a joyous new desire to be nice to the companies he asset strips, while he showers her with strawberries and champagne, a trip in a private jet to see _La Traviata_ in San Francisco and unlimited shopping opportunities on Rodeo Drive. _Cinderella_ meets _Pygmalion_ , even if the nearest she gets to culture is learning that a salad fork has three tines while a dinner fork has four. (Did you know that? I didn't.)

Director Garry _Beaches_ Marshall (brother of Penny _Big_ Marshall) is a veteran of the TV sitcom scene, and he doesn't have a whole lot of cinematic savvy. Within the first ten minutes, he and his writer are breaking every rule in the How To Write a Screenplay book; vital chat takes place on the telephone, acres of talky drama unfold in hotel suites or at restaurants or on the sidelines of a polo match. Do they think they're doing Noel Coward, or what? If so, it's Noel Coward without the nervously brilliant dialogue. Nobody ever got round to explaining a few basics, such as why Gere needs a bimbo to sit in on his power dinners in the first place.

And no amount of romantic banter can disguise the fact that this is a film about prostitution. Both of these characters are mercenary sluts, which is maybe why they get on so famously. She gives him scruples and he gives her good taste; Roberts pre-Gere is foul-mouthed and graceless, decked out in an unbecoming platinum wig and hideous peek-a-boob frock. But shazzam! Post-Gere, plus cash, she is instantly transformed into the incarnation of _Vogue_ -ish chic, and we haven't seen her taking any Lucie Clayton lessons in the interim. The message is that money equals taste and this, as we know, is a whopper; the cheapest, tackiest chain store rags cannot hope to rival the costliest designer furbelows for unremitting naffness.

And then, the crux of the matter \- what _do_ women want? In a sudden access of squeamishness, the _fille de joie_ gets the shock-horrors when Gere offers to put her up in a nice pad. But what does she want, then? To take pottery lessons? To minister to starving children in the Third World? To become Mrs Gere? The film-makers back off at this point, perhaps realising that marriage in this context means little more than legalised, respectable prostitution with fridge-freezers, designer frocks, unlimited supplies of champagne, a private plane, tickets to _La Traviata_ and a complete set of Solti's _Ring_ on CD.

But this is basically a showcase for La Roberts - she laughs, she cries, she takes her clothes off and she puts them back on again. And she's easy on the eye and ear (though the nudge-nudge close-up of Carole Lombard's star on the sidewalk of Hollywood Boulevard is pushing it) and she gives good teeth. Keep an eye on Gere, though - he's solid gold support.

(First published in Tatler, 1990)

Chapter 5: Wild at Heart

There is nothing PR companies like better than film reviews that provide them with easily extractable cliches to reprint on their posters. If you have ever studied these critical puffs, you may have noticed that they, like everything else, are subject to the vagaries of fashion. For many years _An Absolute Gem!_ or variations thereon, was the unassailable league-topper, with _Riveting!_ and _Razor-sharp dialogue!_ jostling each other for second position.

But the rest of the field has recently been outstripped by an exciting new challenger: _Reminiscent of the world of David Lynch!_ I blush to admit that I too have been guilty of this one. What it generally means is that the film in question is arty and strange and packed with non-sequiturs. It also indicates that Lynch is now considered _le dernier cri_ in cinematic weirdness.

After the debacle of _Dune_ , he pulled off a career coup that, had it been planned, would have been hailed as a triumph of tactical diplomacy. Women like Isabella Rossellini are the reason men become film directors in the first place, and Lynch didn't just sleep with her, he also cast her in _Blue Velvet_. And she is not just the most beautiful woman in the universe; she is also the consequence of _Casablanca_ being twinned with _Rome, Open City_. Thus, in one dazzling masterstroke, Lynch one-upped Woody Allen's alliance with Mia Farrow, daughter of a Hollywood actress and director, by securing himself an entree into one of the western world's major film-making dynasties: not just any old Hollywood actress but _Ingrid Bergman_ , not just any European director but _Roberto Rossellini_. David is home and dry.

Any doubts that the film industry is run on dynastic lines can be dispelled by a glance at the cast list of Lynch's latest, _Wild at Heart_ , which stars Nicolas Cage, nephew of Francis Coppola, and Laura Dern, daughter of Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, who appears in the film as her daughter's mother.

This is crazy love on the run with a pounding rock soundtrack, super-saturated colour (the lipstick is _very_ red,and so is the blood) and a constant trickle of self-parodying pronouncements - 'This is a snakeskin jacket,' says Cage, 'and for me it is a symbol of individuality and belief in personal freedom.' (One wishes Dern had something similarly grand to say about the saucy undies she keeps flaunting.)

These two are in love - no, they're in _lurve_ \- and nothing can stand in their way, not even a succession of hitpeople hired by Dern's dotty mom; these include Willem Dafoe with a pimp moustache and Rossellini in blonde wig and Frida Kahlo eyebrows. As the director Christopher Petit pointed out in these pages not so long ago, directors such as Lynch are the means by which America has usurped the European art movie. Godard and Truffaut pinched Hollywood genre conventions for their Nouvelle Vague; directors like Lynch have swiped them back again and slapped yet another layer of movie-buff self-consciousness on top. _Wild at Heart_ is _Pierrot le fou_ and _Weekend_ filtered through one of John Waters's recent teenpics, but with enough sex and violence to make the arthouse audience gasp. There is a notable lift from _Yojimbo_ \- a dog trotting by with a severed hand in its mouth - and there are a half-dozen direct references to _The Wizard of Oz_.

The director is playing to the gallery, and the _Palme d'Or_ awarded to the film at Cannes earlier this year looks suspiciously like a retrospective prize for the superior _Blue Velvet_ , which can't have been an easy act to follow. Thanks to advance publicity for the forthcoming TV soap _Twin Peaks_ , public expectation for _Wild at Heart_ has been whipped into a frenzy, but the media blitz has backed him into a corner; this man has only to show someone drinking from a polystyrene cup and everyone hails it as a triumph of surrealism, a quirky commentary on smalltown America's seething underbelly and consumerist tendencies.

Clocking in at more than two hours, _Wild at Heart_ struggles to maintain the reckless pace of a road movie, and the world it portrays is so hyper-psycho from the outset that each grotesque new character or lunatic plot development is simply absorbed without a ripple; it passes painlessly, even pleasantly (though obviously not for anyone unable to tolerate the sight of exposed brain matter), but it's oddly disposable, sustained by flashy style and tongue-in-chic humour, but not particularly reminiscent of anyone's world, let alone that of Lynch.

(First published in the Sunday Correspondent, 1990)

_2008 addendum: Was I_ really _suggesting that David Lynch owes the latter part of his career to his relationship to Isabella Rossellini? Surely not, but I now find this clumsy attempt to shoehorn film-making dynasties into the argument rather endearing. And I still think it's his weakest film,_ Palme d'Or _or no_ Palme d'Or.

Chapter 6: Goodfellas

I have fainted only twice in my film-going career, and luckily no-one noticed. The first time was during _Grave of the Vampire_ at the Holloway Odeon, and the second was towards the end of _Taxi Driver_ at the Leicester Square Theatre. When Martin Scorsese is firing on all cylinders it can sometimes get a bit too intense for those of us with frail constitutions.

And now, just when I thought I could watch a Scorsese film without flinching, here he is back on the home turf of _Mean Streets_ , ploughing that same old furrow as if he'd never been away, except perhaps for an extended course of advanced flashy directing techniques. _Goodfellas_ , adapted from Nicholas Pileggi's book _Wiseguy_ , is based on the recollections of Henry Hill, who supergrassed on his fellow mobsters in exchange for immunity from a narcotics rap and a safe new anonymity in suburbia.

It's like _Cinema Paradiso_ with a corpse-count; a nostalgic voice-over ('As far back as I could remember I always wanted to be a gangster') relating an everyday story of robbery, extortion and murder. Years pass, shirt collars expand and contract, and Phil Spector gives way to Eric Clapton; three decades of remorseless atrocity, and just because these guys don't want to wait in line like everybody else. Ray Liotta plays Henry with what one assumes is a deliberate lack of warmth, while Robert De Niro, Scorsese's actor-in-residence, takes the more shadowy role of his mentor. The flashy stuff is left to Joe Pesci, who makes such a strong impression as the local loose cannon that the film almost runs out of ammunition after his exit.

Whereas Coppola's incursions into mobdom play like _I Vespri Siciliani_ , Scorsese's are bleeding chunks of rock 'n' roll ripped from the juke box. But mostly this is a movie about guys. Guys whose idea of side-splitting repartee is, 'Go fuck your mother.' Guys who marry girls with bad skin and too much mascara. Guys who murder the guys who insult them. Guys with execrable taste in decor, whose sole saving grace is that they know how to make a mean spaghetti sauce.

This is black comedy with a fearsome edge; innocuous banter can erupt without warning into lethal rage. No-one is glamorised, no-one sees the light. When Henry Hill turns snitch, it is not because he repents; it's to save his own skin. These are ugly people with ugly thoughts, and Scorsese piles it on like a latterday Hieronymous Bosch, whose crucifixion he 'quoted' in _The Last Temptation of Christ_. These guys make Travis Bickle and Jake La Motta look like men you wouldn't mind getting married to. Strange, isn't it, how a director of such integrity is always making films about people with no redeeming qualities.

Two hours and 20 minutes spent in the company of such creatures gets to be brain-numbing. But if there is one character more engaging than all the others, it's Marty's camera, manned by Michael Ballhaus. It swoops and glides and stop-starts; it goes walkies where no camera has gone before - along passageways, through kitchens, up and down and around. Boy, is it ever clever, but the cleverest thing is it's not just for show. Scorsese is one of the few film-makers who can convey a person's thoughts with a camera movement, and it's the unblinking lens that provides Goodfellas with a heart and soul.

(First published in the Sunday Correspondent, 1990)

Click here to buy Spoilers: Selected Film Reviews Part 1 1989-1995 by Anne Billson

About the Author

Anne Billson, who was born in Southport in 1954, is a film critic, novelist and photographer whose work has been widely published.

Her books include studies of John Carpenter's _The Thing_ and Tomas Alfredson's _Let the Right One In_ , as well as horror novels _Suckers_ , _Stiff Lips_ and _The Ex_. In 1993 she was named one of Granta's "Best Young British Novelists".

She has lived in London, Cambridge, Tokyo, Paris and Croydon, and now lives in Brussels.

Anne Billson on Smashwords

also available:

Suckers _\- a novel_

The Ex _\- a novel_

Stiff Lips _\- a novel_

The Secret World of the Sex Witches _\- an erotic novella_

Anne Billson on Film: collected columns from The Guardian 2010

Anne Billson on Film: collected columns from The Guardian 2011

Spoilers: Selected Film Reviews Part 1 1989-1995

Spoilers: Selected Film Reviews Part 2 1995-2001

Coming Soon to Smashwords

The Coming Thing

Vampire City

Connect with Anne Billson online

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**Multiglom :** The Billson Blog.

**Cats on Film :** Anne Billson's blog about cats. On film.

**Minicrix :** Anne Billson's film review database, compiled from short reviews written for the TV pages of the _Sunday Telegraph_.

