 
Anne Billson on Film 2011

collected columns from the Guardian, 2011

Copyright 2012 Anne Billson

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Foreword

The following pieces were originally published in the _Guardian_ 's Film & Music section from January 2011 to January 2012. The cleverer ones among you may have already worked out that you could probably read them for free on the _Guardian_ 's own website, if you were dogged enough to run each one to ground, 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 gleaming nugget of my accumulated wisdom. Then there's the knowledge that the pieces are you are about to read are the raw unadulterated texts, unmodified by well-meaning subeditors and untrimmed by the necessity to accommodate last-minute advertising on the printed page.

And then - I'd like to think - you will have the satisfaction of knowing you are helping, in some small way, to sustain the career of a struggling writer. It could well be that, in the very near future, the job of arts journalist or film critic will cease to exist as a paid profession, and will instead become the stamping ground of people with lots of time on their hands or private income to sustain them, or who are just out of school or university and are willing or able to work for nothing. I'm not suggesting this change will necessarily a Bad Thing, just reflecting that it may now be too late for me to sign up to learn a more useful trade, such as plumbing or dentistry.

But as an extra sweetener, I have added to the end of this collection _The Accessory Theory of Film Criticism_ , the second article I ever had published (the first article was a piece on inflatable sex dolls for a short-lived magazine called _Event_ ), as well as free samples of two of my other books.

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 Francois, Francoise and Melanie, and of course to readers who may find themselves momentarily flummoxed by references to "fiancees" or to trends being "passe".

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: Storyville

Who was it who said that story is just a trick to keep you watching? I was reminded of this as I stared at _Amer_ , trying in vain to get a handle on the stream of beautiful and startling imagery. But even beautiful and startling can wear thin after a while. If I'd been a civilian as opposed to someone trying to write for a living, I would have run up the white flag long before those 87 minutes were up, having already suffered through too much narrative-free pain (Jean-Luc Godard's _Numero Deux_!) in the 1970s, when I vowed never again to venture into plotless territory unless the ordeal could be softened by sexual or financial reward.

_Amer_ , co-directed by Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani, is a Franco-Belgian homage to the Italian "giallo" thriller, and runs the gamut of that subgenre's visual tropes, from split-screen to extreme close-up to colour filters, then overlays it with amped-up sound effects and music originally composed for genuine _gialli_ with titles like _The Black Belly of the Tarantula_ or _The Case of the Scorpion's Tail_. The very fact that Cattet and Forzani haven't called their film something like _The Curse of the Crimson Death Poodle_ suggests they didn't fully enter into the spirit of things.

You could reproach _gialli_ for many things - violence, misogyny, preposterousness - but you could never accuse them of not having plots. Admittedly, most of these consist of psychopaths running around murdering women, but at least the narrative poses a couple of questions to keep an audience hooked, such as whodunnit, who's next and why must there always be someone who announces, "I'll tell you who the murderer is! But not right now. Let's meet tomorrow, preferably in a dark and lonely place."

As Cattet and Forzani told bloody-disgusting.com, "Amer is an enigma and only the spectator has the key". I'm sorry, but if I wanted a DIY plot I would have written my own. You can get away with this if you're Luis Bunuel, or if you're making a short (Cattet and Forzani's 10-minute _La Fin de Notre Amour_ is perfectly watchable) but feature-length is pushing it. Eighty-seven minutes of _giallo_ imagery without a coherent narrative adds up to nothing more than an exercise in style - and not even original, envelope-pushing style, but a pastiche of one already pumped to the max by Mario Bava, Dario Argento or Sergio Martino.

Story is simultaneously the most and the least important element in a movie. Most important because it provides the viewer with a guide-rope; least because, in the best movies, it doesn't actually matter that much, which is why we can watch them repeatedly, even when the ending no longer packs the element of surprise. Alfred Hitchcock understood this, which is why he didn't blink at giving the game away well before the climaxes of _Vertigo_ or _North by Northwest_. And he it was who perfected the art of the MacGuffin \- the secret formula or _tchotchke_ which sets the plot into motion. As he told Francois Truffaut, the best MacGuffin is, "the emptiest, the most non-existent and the most absurd..."

Hollywood movies never shy away from exploiting a narrative hook, though since so many of their screenwriters suckled at the same teats (UCLA, Syd Field, Robert McKee) it leads to endless regurgitation. Most of last year's action flicks, for example, shared a scenario in which special ops agents are framed or targeted by their own people - as seen in _The Expendables_ , _The A-Team_ , _The Losers_ , _Red_ , _Salt_ , _Knight and Day_ , _Machete_ et cetera. But hey, at least these films _had_ a plot. Even if it was the same one.

But story is scorned by self-consciously serious artists, who, with breathtaking arrogance or blinkered stupidity, reckon they're above all that populist nonsense. There's a feeling in some quarters that if a film is easy to watch, then it can't possibly be worth watching, and that if artists suffer for their art, then their audiences should jolly well suffer for it even more. But we all need some sort of MacGuffin when we watch a movie. And the story is the emptiest, most absurd MacGuffin of them all.

Chapter 2: Body Double

Much as I enjoyed _Black Swan_ (tutus, blood, evil ids - what's not to like?) I thought it was a shame Natalie Portman couldn't do all her own dancing. Don't get me wrong - the girl done good. She nailed the bun, achieved a creditable facsimile of the neurotic thoroughbred physique, and managed OK with the expressive arm-flapping.

But anyone can dance with her arms. What I would call the proper dancing had to be performed by a professional with Portman's face CGI-ed in. It's not her fault she didn't have the technique; she's an actress, not a ballerina. To pull off the highlight of the Odette/Odile double-role - the 32 _fouettes en tournant_ \- you would need to have practised 25 hours a day, from birth, on a diet of Silk Cut, and with no time to do fun things like go to Harvard or make _The Phantom Menace_.

I suppose if you're going to have a stand-in, it might as well be in a movie set during a production of a ballet which hinges on a doppelganger. But Portman's arm-flailing stirred memories of Anne Bancroft posing her way through Anna Karenina in _The Turning Point_ , and Jessica Harper as a ballet student whose one big dance scene in _Suspiria_ requires her to stagger around and fall over.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were indeed fortunate when they were able to cast professional dancer Moira Shearer as their lead in _The Red Shoes_ , since Shearer could both act and dance, unlike poor Leslie Browne, whose Oscar nomination for _The Turning Point_ must have been for her dancing, since there's no way on earth it could have been for her acting. It's a pity Mikhail Baryshnikov didn't find his own Powell and Pressburger and had to make do with the likes of Herbert Ross and Taylor Hackford, since there are moments in both _The Turning Point_ and _White Nights_ when his gravity-defying _jetes_ or mufti _pirouettes_ take your breath away.

When did stars stop doing their own dancing? I first started getting distracted by stand-ins during 1980s bopsicals such as _Flashdance_ , in which Jennifer Beals clearly wasn't doing her own spinning-on-her-bum (in fact it was uncredited Marine Jahan, who finally got a credit of her own in Walter Hill's _Streets of Fire_ ) or _Footloose_ , when Kevin Bacon clearly wasn't turning his own mid-air somersaults, or _Girls Just Wanna Have Fun_ , in which Sarah Jessica Parker clearly wasn't... you get the picture. Instead of surrendering to the spectacle of the dance, I became obsessed with pinpointing the precise moment when the actor was replaced by the substitute, whose features would be obscured by tricksy lighting and camera angles.

There's something to be said for movie stars earning their spurs in vaudeville, where they were obliged to dance and sing as well as crack jokes. Not long ago a friend showed me a marvellous clip of Bob Hope and James Cagney tapdancing on a table in _The Seven Little Foys_ ; neither was chiefly known for his dancing (though Cagney's Best Actor Oscar was for the musical biopic _Yankee Doodle-Dandy_ rather than one of his more famous gangster roles) and they wouldn't measure up to Fred Astaire, yet both display a skill and panache that wipes the floor with, say, Richard Gere's effortful hoofing in _Chicago_.

Nowadays we have Neve Campbell and Julia Stiles, who draw on their own early dance training for _The Company_ and _Save the Last Dance_ , but with results that are respectable rather than soul-stirring. The true heirs to Hope and Cagney are probably multi-taskers like Christopher Walken and Hugh Jackman, whose terpsichorean skills have been displayed on stage, in Fat Boy Slim videos and ice tea commercials more than in cinema, though Walken fans have long treasured his pimp striptease in the film version of _Pennies from Heaven_. But why has no-one yet built an entire movie around Jackman's dancing? Or better yet, why not scan the ranks of bona fide ballet dancers for one who, like Shearer, might turn out to have screen presence as well as flawless technique? Then maybe next time a movie like _Black Swan_ comes along, the leading lady will be able to do her own _fouettes_.

Chapter 3: Call of the West

_True Grit_ is going great guns at the American box office, making it the Coen brothers' highest-grossing movie ever. Some might see this as a sign that the Western is making a comeback. But, honestly, I don't think it ever really went away.

Observers have been predicting the genre's demise for a hundred years; Edward Buscombe, in _The BFI Companion to the Western_ , quotes a trade reviewer who in 1911 dismissed it as "a gold mine that had been worked to the limit". But by 1953 Westerns were making up more than a quarter of Hollywood's output, and much of television's too; my generation was weaned on _The Lone Ranger_ , _Gunsmoke_ and _Rawhide_.

In the 1960s, that figure went into a slump from which it never recovered, though of course there were still landmark oaters such as _The Wild Bunch_ or _Unforgiven_. But the emphasis changed from righteous armed struggles against lawlessness, might is right and the triumph of civilisation over savagery, to psychological portraits of outlaws or gunslingers, revisionist studies of the hero's role in the modern world, acknowledgements that Native Americans were people too, and allegories of Vietnam.

But if the number of Westerns fell, the genre never really disappeared - it just went underground. Just as Westerns were a peculiarly American variation on old world tales of mythological heroes or wandering knights, so, from the 1970s onwards, the cowboys, gunslingers and bounty hunters of yore passed the baton to cops and detectives, hitmen and cosmonauts. Henceforth the Western disguised itself as road movies, action films or science fiction. Clint Eastwood and Don Siegel bridged the gap with _Coogan's Bluff_ , while John Carpenter's _Assault on Precinct 13_ was a modern urban reworking of _Rio Bravo_. Many of Carpenter's other films, like those of Walter Hill, are Westerns in all but name.

Sci-fi films such as _Westworld_ , _Outland_ or _Battle Beyond the Stars_ barely bother to disguise their Western roots but, essentially, any movie in which the characters pass through hostile territory or rid the community of its bad guys is cleaving to the Western tradition, whether it's Sylvester Stallone in South East Asia, Arnold Schwarzenegger in Central America, Bruce Willis or Eddie Murphy in LA, or Mel Gibson and Danny Glover skipping the sort of paperwork that real cops would need to tackle in favour of the latterday equivalent of galloping around on horseback, yelling "Yeehaw!" and brandishing Smith & Wessons.

This sort of genre slippage allowed Westerns to move with the times. In science fiction, for example, Native Americans could be replaced by unstoppable killer robots or invading extra-terrestrials, with no need to worry about political correctness (unless we're talking about Jar-Jar Binks, or deliberate allegories such as _District 9_ ). Critics are less likely to question the ethics of vivisection or bang on about the Geneva Convention or the need to respect alien culture when the enemy is an evil monster from outer space in _Independence Day_.

These days, you can spot the influence of the Western in everything from _The Expendables_ to _There Will Be Blood_ to _Predators_. _Avatar_ is pure Cowboys and Indians. Even Lotso, the strawberry-scented bear in Toy Story 3, is a successor to Burl Ives in _The Big Country_ or one of Anthony Mann's monstrous patriarchs. But if there's one genre that hews to Western convention more than any other, it's movies about superheroes.

The superhero, like cowboys and gunslingers, has a distinctive costume and behavioural code. His weaponry and mode of transport are fetishised. He often has a sidekick (Kato = Tonto). His stories climax in an OK Corral-type showdown against the villain. And the female characters are as marginal as in any Western; the function of Mary-Jane Watson or Rachel Dawes is essentially to be kidnapped and rescued.

The one big difference is that superhero stories are almost always urban, with gothic cityscapes taking the place of Monument Valley or the Tabernas Desert, but their topography is just as recognisable as that of John Ford's wide open spaces. And superhero movies are already following the Western pattern of moving from popular escapism into the darker, more introspective territory of _The Dark Knight_ or _Watchmen_.

The Western never went away. Now it's everywhere you look.

Chapter 4: A Bigger Bang

Towards the end of Tetsuya Nakashima's stunning revenge psychodrama _Confessions_ , there's an explosion filmed in a way I can't recall seeing before. No mean feat, because explosions (like car crashes, which often serve as preludes to even more explosions) are now such an integral part of the film-maker's "electric train-set" that it's hard to think of a modern action movie which doesn't feature at least one orgasmic detonation with cool guys strolling away from the blast zone with nary a singed eyebrow or ruptured eardrum, not even, as the song goes, bothering to look back.

It wasn't always thus. Explosions in movies used to be memorable. Their natural-born bailiwick was the war film, but they also cropped up in gangster movies ("Made it Ma! Top of the world!") and thrillers. Hitchcock, who famously blew up a small boy on a bus in _Sabotage_ (and afterwards told Truffaut he regretted it, because it had made the public "resentful") used the "bomb under the table" example to illustrate the difference between surprise and suspense.

Surprise is a bomb going off without the audience having prior knowledge of it; suspense means them knowing in advance that it's there. Powell and Pressburger's _The Small Back Room_ , in which David Farrar (looking, from certain angles, remarkably like _Mad Men_ 's Don Draper) plays a wartime bomb disposal expert, dispenses with onscreen explosions altogether, which doesn't stop a 20 minute sequence on Chesil Bank from being a mini-masterclass in knuckle-gnawing suspense.

Two of the films that marked my childhood dangled the threat of explosive detonation for an agonisingly long time before finally delivering it. The entire build-up of _Kiss Me Deadly_ hinges on the significance of the words, "Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, Trinity," which unsettles the audience more than it seems to worry ignorant anti-hero Mike Hammer, who continues to bulldoze his way through the mystery until that extraordinary apocalyptic ending. And the trucks laden with nitroglycerin in _The Wages of Fear_ are just a big bang waiting to happen - though when something does go off, Henri-Georges Clouzot films it in a simple but off-kilter way (later copied in _Vertical Limit_ ) which is more shocking than any amount of fancy slo-mo or bullet time.

The landmark movie explosions can be counted on your fingers - _Zabriskie Point_ , _Scanners_ , _The Fury_ \- whereas you could barely squeeze their imitators into a stadium. But somewhere around _Die Hard_ , I think, movie explosion fatigue started to set in. In _Armageddon_ , Michael Bay blows up space stations, asteroids the size of Texas, Paris, Bruce Willis - basically, everything he can think of. It used to take cojones to destroy the world, like Stanley Kubrick in _Dr Strangelove_ , or Steve De Jarnatt in _Miracle Mile_ (which begins as a perky rom-com but builds, astonishingly, to all-out MAD) but nowadays Roland Emmerich trashes the planet practically every time he makes a film. We will, however, give a free pass to Takashi Miike, who clearly was taking the miike when he came over all Emmerich in the cop-versus-Yakuza showdown at the end of _Dead or Alive_.

But one can't help feeling directors like Emmerich and Bay are missing the point, treating us to climax after climax when many of us would prefer some decent foreplay and deep-core satisfaction. "I hear you control your explosions," Sharon Stone purrs to Sylvester Stallone in the absurd but irresistible _The Specialist_ , and you only wish more film directors would control theirs. For example, there's only one explosion in _La scorta_ , a film which has you on the edge of your seat waiting for the Mafia to plant a bomb to kill off the eponymous bodyguards or the judge they're assigned to protect - but director Ricky Tognazzi makes it count.

As does Katherine Bigelow in _The Hurt Locker_ , where the booby-trapped beginning establishes the stakes, shows that _everyone_ is expendable and leaves you on tenterhooks for the rest of the film, even when nothing much is going on. But most of today's action movie directors would rather blow something up every two seconds. Isn't that typical of men? The more they go off, the less ammo they have left. It's not even surprising any more, let alone suspenseful.

Chapter 5: Fair Game

"In every city, thousands of women live by themselves..." intones the ominous voice-over in the trailer for _The Resident_. Oh look, here comes Hilary Swank, and she's renting a swish Brooklyn apartment for a suspiciously low sum. I haven't seen it yet, and I don't suppose you have either, but I think we can guess what happens: there will be running, and screaming, and disposable supporting characters will duly be disposed of in a rehash of _Crawlspace_ meets _Sliver_. But I'm sure at some point Ms Swank will strip down to her vest, like Bruce Willis, and fight back feistily.

Yes, _The Resident_ is a film about a woman being terrorised. Bof, this is such old hat. I'd rather see a film about a woman terrorising the people trying to terrorise her. Someone recently suggested to me that the history of the horror genre has been the very opposite of feminist, and she had a point. Dario Argento once said of beautiful women, "If they have a good face or figure I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man."

Horror movies like to place their characters in peril, and their almost exclusively male directors ( _pace_ the lopped-off drillbit in Slumber Party Massacre, which otherwise fails to exploit its soi-disant feminist angle) invariably view women as more vulnerable, more easily terrorised than their male counterparts, fair game. "You fear more for her than you would for a husky man," said Brian De Palma.

But, as far as the slasher movie goes, Jason or Michael or Leatherface seem to me to be equal opportunity psychokillers, happy to eviscerate victims of either gender, and while it's the women who do most of the the screaming - and as far back as Peeping Tom, the subjective camera has preferred to stalk the female of the species - I don't think the slasher subgenre is misogynist _per se_. Indeed, Carol J Clover famously made a case for the opposite in _Men, Women and Chainsaws_ , suggesting male viewers identify with the female victims rather than with the sadistic killers, and defining the convention of "The Final Girl", the Jamie Lee Curtis character who ultimately defeats the bogeyman.

I would go further, and contend that horror, at its best, IS a feminist genre, having the capacity to express more about the female condition than all the rom-coms and family dramas commonly referred to as "chick-flicks". _Carrie_ and _Ginger Snaps_ , for example, deal with the onset of menstruation with a directness few mainstream movies dare emulate, while _Black Swan_ is a virtual treatise on female body image. This is not to say films like _Martyrs_ , _Captivity_ or _I Saw the Devil_ don't make me uncomfortable in the way they seem to revel in female suffering, but in my favourite kind of horror movies, dark fairytales like _A Nightmare on Elm Street_ or _Pan's Labyrinth_ or _The Orphanage_ , heroines embark on quests as protagonists rather than passive victims.

The films of Wes Craven, George Romero, even David Cronenberg, are rich in strong, resourceful female characters who aren't simply butt-kicking male surrogates like (terrific though she is) Sigourney Weaver in the first _Alien_ movie. And while Argento may get his kicks out of killing beautiful women, _Suspiria_ and _Phenomena_ feature heroines as plucky as they come; even _The Bird with the Crystal Plumage_ , _Profondo Rosso_ or _The Stendhal Syndrome_ subvert traditional female roles.

Unlike some feminists, I don't require all my horror heroines to be positive role models, so I'm not discombobulated when the protagonists of _Repulsion_ or _The Others_ display neurosis, psychosis or turn to the dark side. I even enjoy psychothrillers in which the ostensible heroine is unmasked as the murderer, though the only example of that I'm prepared to cite here is Halle Berry in _Perfect Stranger_ , a movie too stupid to spoil.

But perhaps I'm being unfair, and _The Resident_ will turn my preconceptions on their head after all. I hope so. Perhaps Swank's character will turn out to be a man in drag, or a former boxer who fells her tormentor with a left-hook, or a techie who's spying on her own voyeur. Anything than just another terrorised female, please.

Chapter 6: The Laffia

Is there anything British comedians can't do? Not content with dominating the airwaves with their comedy shows, chat shows and quiz shows, they've been branching out into journalism, novels and, increasingly, the movies. And I'm not just talking about performing, though nowadays it's hard to escape Russell Brand, who popped up in _The Tempest_ and will shortly be heard as voice of the Easter Bunny in _Hop_ and seen as Arthur (looking curiously like Lon Chaney in _London After Midnight_ , if photos are any indication) in the remake of a film starring Dudley Moore, another British TV comedian who was (briefly) clutched to the bosom of Hollywood.

No, because here comes Richard Ayoade, hitherto best known for roles in _Garth Marenghi's Darkplace_ , _Nathan Barley_ and _The IT Crowd_ , making his feature writing and directing debut with _Submarine_. Also coming soon to a multiplex near you is _Attack the Block_ , writing-directing debut of Joe Cornish, hitherto best known as half of _The Adam and Joe Show_. My jury is still out on these films (in other words, I haven't yet had a chance to see them) but Ayoade and Cornish are only the latest in a burgeoning trend of British TV funnymen trying their hand behind as well as in front of the camera.

Of course, British TV comedians have been making the leap from small screen to big ever since the gogglebox was invented, with mixed results. _The Rebel_ , Tony Hancock's first foray into cinema (penned, like his radio and TV series, by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson) was judged a failure, though is now recognised (by me, anyway) as a minor masterpiece, while the Monty Python team is responsible for at least three big screen classics. There's a long history of TV-to-movie slippage in the ranks of sitcom writers, the _eminences grises_ being Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, who have been pursuing parallel careers in film and telly since the 1960s, and, more recently, Richard Curtis. Clement and La Frenais, though, appear to understand the difference between the two media, whereas Curtis apparently does not; _Four Weddings_ , _Notting Hill_ and _Love Actually_ feel more like collections of loosely connected sketches than coherent stories.

Today's comic mafia (or _laffia_ , if you will) seems as interested in writing and directing as in performing, though rare are those TV-reared Britcom stars who have managed to cross over to an international audience as film-makers rather than just clowns. Ricky Gervais has somehow managed the transatlantic leap, though _The Invention of Lying_ , which he co-wrote and directed with Matthew Robinson, still labours under the influence of a TV mentality, coming across like an undernourished sketch padded out to (interminable) feature length.

Few of the TV comedy graduates seem familiar with William Goldman's maxim that "screenplay is structure". Chris Morris's _Four Lions_ has an audacious premise and brilliant moments, but still feels like a series of disconnected skits. Paul King's _Bunny and the Bull_ is more like four overlapping episodes of _The Mighty Boosh_ than a film, while Armando Iannuci's _In the Loop_ works more as a treat for fans of the original series than as standalone satire for _The Thick of It_ virgins like me. Mark Gatiss, as prolific with his teleplays as with his TV appearances, has yet to attempt the transition (though will surely one day do so) while Andy Nyman, to judge by his and Jeremy Dyson's tightly constructed _Ghost Stories_ , is certainly capable of better than his story credit for the lame Mitchell and Webb vehicle _Magicians_ , Britcom's embarrassingly inadequate answer to _The Prestige_.

But if these guys want to get taken seriously as film-makers rather than as small screen celebs with big screen aspirations, they need to pay more attention to the nuts and bolts of narrative and character development. Almost alone among his confreres, Simon Pegg seems at home in the cinema, with _Shaun of the Dead_ and _Hot Fuzz_ showing an innate understanding of genre and structure. But then Pegg was working in tandem with Edgar Wright, who even before their collaboration on _Spaced_ was making no-budget spaghetti westerns in Somerset. Let's hope Ayoade and Cornish are following in their footsteps, rather than those of Morris or King.

Chapter 7: Female Fetishwear

I often have fantasies about kicking ass, but only now, with _Sucker Punch_ , do I see I've been getting it wrong. For a genuine sense of empowerment, I should have been daydreaming about dancing in a brothel dressed in bustier and stay-up stockings. Or maybe imagining myself in a customised Japanese schoolgirl outfit with my navel showing. Which of course would frighten the horses. But thank you, Zack Snyder, for helping to set the standard by which women's fashion choices are judged.

_Sucker Punch_ isn't based on a comic-strip or a computer game, though it might as well have been, since it peddles that male adolescent vision of female fetishwear now displayed in everything from rock videos to the catwalk to Taylor Momsen gigs. You'd have thought Snyder, at the age of 45, would have learnt by now to get turned on by clothing that doesn't look as though it came from a junior branch of Frederick's of Hollywood, but evidently not. Admittedly, the Silk Spectre's sluttish outfit in _Watchmen_ originated with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, but it's as though Snyder couldn't quite get to grips with the intent of the graphic novel, and simply thought, "Phwoar, I want ALL the girls in my next-but-one movie to wear costumes like that."

And what is it about stockings? As someone who was obliged to wear the wretched things as part of my school uniform, back in prehistoric times, I swear anyone who claims suspender-belts are comfortable are either lying or so accustomed to trussing themselves up like Christmas turkeys they've lost sight of what comfort means. Stockings are erotic fancy-dress. Men - and yes, some women - get excited by them. Nothing wrong with that, and there are few moments in cinema more loin-stirring than Jean Desailly peeling off Francoise Dorleac's nylon stocking in Francois Truffaut's _La Peau Douce_. But there are limits.

For example, Milla Jovovich in _Resident Evil: Extinction_ teams her duster coat with post-apocalyptic stockings and suspender belt, which is perplexing. Likewise, she and Sienna Guillory run around in micro-skirts and string vests in _Resident Evil: Apocalypse_ , though with so many flesh-ripping zombies in the vicinity a padded bodysuit would surely be more appropriate than serving up parts of your anatomy like an all-you-can-eat buffet. But no, Milla and Sienna aren't permitted to cover themselves up like their male counterparts - they're only allowed to be in an action movie in the first place if they expose themselves to the public gaze.

Accepted wear for superheroines, meanwhile, still seems based on Frank Frazetta drawings, like Jennifer Garner busting out of her tacky corset ensemble in _Elektra_. I'm not saying action heroines should all be clad in boiler-suits, like Ripley in _Alien_ , or hoodies, like Connie Nielsen in _DemonLover_ , but there must be a happy medium which is practical without being drab, so chicks can kick butt without having to wear S & M stripper gear like the female cast of _Sin City_. Did _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ die (at least twice) in vain?

At least when Michelle Pfeiffer runs up her black PVC bodysuit in _Batman Returns_ it's made clear she's suffering from brain damage, but in any case she has more sense of style than _Catwoman_ 's Halle Berry, who gets her feline genes scrambled with those of a cheap circus hooker. The girls in _Scott Pilgrim vs the World_ look adorable in their windcheaters, but personally, I reckon the answer is the catsuit. It was good enough for Musidora and Diana Rigg without being spray-painted on like the unforgiving versions modelled by Angelina Jolie in _Lara Croft: The Cradle of Life_ or Uma Thurman in _The Avengers_. Uma's yellow Bruce Lee tracksuit in _Kill Bill_ was more fetching, and less likely to trigger an attack of cystitis.

But I'm all for gender equality, so perhaps Snyder should make fewer films like _Sucker Punch_ and more like _300_ , in which he raises the bar for action heroes by dressing them in black leather Speedos. We need to see more Roman legionaries clad in baldrics and peplums. Maybe it's time to revive the prominent cod-pieces of Batman and Robin for new-model _Superman_ and _Spider-Man_. If we _must_ have absurd fetishwear, let's see it on men too.

Chapter 8: Yo Fomo

I was halfway through _Nightmare Movies_ , Kim Newman's astonishingly perceptive and entertaining book about horror cinema since the 1960s, when I had my first anxiety attack. _Spawn of the Slithis_? _Trail of the Screaming Forehead_? All those horror movies, 95% of which the author (by his own estimate) has actually watched! He and I are of the same generation, and started reviewing films around the same time, in the early 1980s. So how come he's seen so many more than me?

Ideally, one would be able to explain the discrepancy by dismissing Newman as the sort of _otaku_ who never shifts from the sofa in front of his DVD player, but that just isn't true; all the signs are he leads a full and active social life, certainly fuller and more active than mine. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention I'm thanked in the credits at the back of the book - but then so is everyone else that Newman has ever talked to, just another indication that in between watching every horror movie ever made, he somehow finds time to go out and meet people.

Meanwhile, I'm left wondering how I can possibly write about horror films again when I've seen so few of them. And that's just one genre! Think of all those unseen films out there. Even if you were to exercise strict quality control and leave out straight-to-DVD titles starring Jeff Fahey, how could you possibly find the time to see all the new thrillers and rom-coms and action movies, let alone the classics and arthouse fare that sit glaring at you from your must-see pile, demanding to be watched?

There must be an official term for the anxiety this engenders, probably something along the lines of _Kinosterblichkeitangst_ or _Kinomangelschmerz_. But if there isn't a specific word, there jolly well should be. After idly tweeting on the subject a few days ago, I was swamped by replies from people assuring me they too were suffering from the very same neurosis. I think we're all aware it's a trivial concern compared to, say, worrying about where your next sip of uncontaminated water is coming from, but it's clear this is a malaise increasingly common in the modern age.

Alvin Toffler was already writing about "information overload" in the late 1960s. But the burden, if you can call it that, has been exacerbated by new media and technology that not only make films more accessible but encourage film-makers to make more of them. When I started reviewing films for the _Sunday Correspondent_ in 1989, there were around three or four new releases per week; nowadays it's a rare Friday when the number dips below a dozen, and that's even before you factor in the DVDs.

It all used to be so simple in the pre-video, pre-multiplex, pre-download days, when the only movies on offer were the ones showing at your local Odeon or ABC or repertory cinema. Now the entire back catalogue is jumping up and down, vying for your attention. Unless you're Newman (who I sometimes suspect has equipped himself with an army of workhorse clones, like Michael Keaton in _Multiplicity_ ) or Bradley Cooper (whose enhanced brain activity in _Limitless_ would presumably enable him to speed-watch a hundred films per day) the rest of us need to redraw the battle-lines. We're like demented twitchers, ticking off titles, but how many of these films do we actually need to see?

Caterina Fake, co-founder of _Flickr_ , recently blogged about FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) with regard to the grip social software exercises on its users, but I think what she wrote applies to culture too: "To be always filled with craving and desire... is one of the Three Poisons of Buddhism." So maybe the solution is to develop a zen approach to cinema: the greatest action is not _watching_ the film, but knowing the film is _there_. Or we could follow the example of RM Koske, who replied to my tweet with the rather lovely suggestion that all we need to do is adjust our attitude and greet the superabundance of movies, old and new, with the thought, "I'll never run out of wonderful things to see."

Chapter 9: Short Cuts

All the way through _Scre4m_ , I was itching for a freeze-frame of Hayden Panettiere's hair-do so I could give it an in-depth examination. What the hell WAS that? Some kind of demi-pompadour with the curlicues glued flat? I suspect that if you were to poke at it, it would be rock-solid, like a Ken doll coiffure. I think it's great they gave her short hair. But did it have to be so weird?

Then again, short hair invariably seems weird in a Hollywood where flowing locks are the norm. Even Demi Moore, who rocked the pixie cut in _Ghost_ , now sports a poker-straight curtain. Hilary Swank grows hers long between androgyny trims for _Boys Don't Cry_ or _Amelia_. Who's known for their short hair nowadays? Halle Berry? Shannyn Sossamon? We're edging into C-list territory here. When Emma Watson and Carey Mulligan chopped theirs off, it was considered news; archive photos of Jean Seberg and Twiggy were duly trotted out for comparison, as if to underline the novelty value.

For the record - I love long hair. If mine weren't so baby-fine ("comme la soie!" cooed one hairdresser not long ago) I would definitely grow it so I could have a big plait, like the damsels in a King Arthur book I had as a girl. But, being saddled with the wrong sort of piliferous gene, I'm always on the lookout for short crops similar to mine on screen. They are, of course, rare, because long lustrous tresses are one of the major signifiers of femininity. One of the first things a girl does when disguising her gender is cut her hair, like Katharine Hepburn in _Sylvia Scarlett_ (one of the loveliest short crops in movies) or Barbara Streisand ("Forgive me, papa!") in _Yentl_.

Short hair on female characters is rarely permitted to exist in its own right - it's a statement, a sign of playing men at their own game for Keira Knightley when she swaps modelling for bounty hunting in _Domino_ , or Moore with her military buzz-cut in _GI Jane_. Getting chopped is seldom something female characters do of their own volition; it deprives them of a formidable weapon and, instead of giving them masculine strength, only emphasises their helplessness. Even when Mia Farrow announces, "I've been to Vidal Sassoon," in _Rosemary's Baby_ (her husband's sarky reply is, "Don't tell me you paid for that") she's unwittingly adding the finishing touch to her own martyrdom.

For the close crop is a Station of the Coiffe en route to immolation. Falconetti looks suitably gamine at the start of _The Passion of Joan of Arc_ , but it's still not sufficiently martyrish for her inquisitors, who insist on further shearing. Seventy years and many Saint Joans later, Milla Jovovich's years of modelling for L'Oreal stand her in good stead in _The Messenger_ when she takes a sword to her braid, yet miraculously ends up with the chic-est of mediaeval pudding-bowls, with God-given highlights.

When women have their hair cropped off onscreen it's usually because they're under some sort of compulsion or duress. The short haircut is humiliating punishment, meted out to women's prison inmate Eleanor Parker in _Caged_ , or to Monica Bellucci, condemned for being the village slut in _Malena_. Or it's a religious gesture; Audrey Hepburn has hers ritually snipped away in _The Nun's Story_ (though, like the other Hepburn, she always did look cuter with short hair), while Julie Andrews's sensible ex-convent pageboy renders _The Sound of Music_ sexless.

It's a small step from boyish crop to baldness, which may in real life signify Britney-style breakdown, but in the movies more often means alien ( _Star Trek: The Motion Picture_ ), monster ( _Splice_ ) or homicidal maniac ( _Blue Sunshine_ ). It's seen as martyrdom to their art when female actors go the whole hairless hog, like Meryl Streep in _Sophie's Choice_ , Samantha Morton in _Minority Report_ or Natalie Portman in _V for Vendetta_.

The consensus is that long hair is prettier, and prettiness is a prerequisite for female actors and the characters they play in all but a handful of movies. So however weird Panettiere's haircut, the fact that she's neither a nun, nor a prisoner, nor pretending to be a man, almost makes _Scre4m_ worthwhile, all on its own.

Chapter 10: It's Only a Movie

Back in 1976, when _Taxi Driver_ first opened, I trotted off to see it with no idea what I was in for. Imagine that. I'd never heard of Martin Scorsese or Robert De Niro, and I hadn't read the reviews. It was my date's choice of movie; I was more of a _Night of the Living Dead_ kind of girl. So I sat in the front row of the Leicester Square Theatre, feeling slightly underwhelmed by the absence of zombies, until near the end. And then, suddenly, everything turned yellow, Bernard Herrmann's music was drilling into my skull, blood was dripping off De Niro's finger and I had to lean forward to stop myself fainting.

Incredibly, my date didn't notice anything amiss and I was too embarrassed to tell him what had happened. It's true the scene in _Theatre of Blood_ in which Robert Morley is force-fed with his own poodles had put me off Chicken Supreme for life, but I had always been able to sit through films like _Death Line_ or _The Devils_ without flinching. I assumed my nerves had simply been caught unawares by an unexpected explosion of splatter in a non-genre movie - until, not long afterwards, the exact same thing happened during a vampire film at the Holloway Odeon.

In _Grave of the Vampire_ (screenplay by David Chase, no less), the vampire rapes a girl who gives birth to a vampire baby which refuses to drink milk, so the mother has a lightbulb moment, picks up a knife and... What actually happened was considerably less gruesome than I'd feared, but too late, because it was head-between-knees again. Only now I was starting to feel a little anxious. How could I call myself a horror fan if I didn't have the stomach for horror movies? Would I henceforth have to keep muttering the tagline of _The Last House on the Left_? "To avoid fainting, keep repeating 'It's only a movie... It's only a movie...'"

Not long afterwards, I had to walk out of _Blue Sunshine_ at the NFT when the first psychopath shoved a screaming girl into an open fireplace, because I was afraid I might vomit. Even more dramatically, I ended up spending most of Francesco Rosi's gangster movie _Lucky Luciano_ slumped on the floor of the ladies' toilet because I'd suddenly became convinced my head was going to fall off.

Oddly enough, the film that restored equilibrium to my world was arguably the most gruesome of them all - David Cronenberg's _Shivers_. The opening credits had barely finished before one of the characters had strangled his mistress, sliced open her torso and poured acid into the wound, at which my nervous system sighed, "aw, fuckit" and allowed me to settle back to enjoy the show. As Alexander DeLarge might have said, I was cured all right.

But if the days of horror making me feel queasy are over, and I can sit through the _Saw_ movies or _The Human Centipede_ without my pulse missing a beat, it just means the tipping points have shifted. I used to laugh in the face of sentimentality, but now I have only to look at the opening credits of _Tokyo Story_ or _My Neighbour Totoro_ and I'm welling up; _A Serbian Film_ is a piece of cake next to _Hachiko: A Dog's Story_ , which reduces me to quivering jelly.

Unlike many of my peers, I can negotiate the whip-pans of _Husbands and Wives_ or _Breaking the Waves_ without feeling seasick, yet the strain of trying to make sense out of cackhanded chase scenes like the ones in _Quantum of Solace_ leaves me with a splitting headache. Even more extreme was my reaction to the boring British film _Among Giants_ , when the dreary predictability of the relationship between Rachel Griffiths and Pete Postlethwaite triggered a full-blown panic attack, obliging me to rush out in mid-screening to do a series of breathing exercises in Soho Square.

But alas, the strongest physical reaction I experience in the cinema these days has less to do with what's on screen; it's the sweaty-palmed homicidal fury brought on by spectators who insist on chattering or texting during the film. Where's Travis Bickle when you really need him?

Chapter 11: Top Line

It didn't take long for _Apocalypse Now_ to add a bunch of one-liners to the movie quote lexicon. Even before the mixed critical reception had coalesced into an iron-clad verdict, phrases from the screenplay by Francis Coppola, John Milius and Michael Herr (with a little help from Joseph Conrad) were already reverberating above and beyond their context in the film: "Saigon. Shit.", "Terminate... with extreme prejudice", "Charlie don't surf!", "I love the smell of napalm in the morning", "Never get out of the boat", "The horror, the horror". And so on.

Screenplays are more than just dialogue, of course, yet a well-turned phrase can go a long way towards cementing a movie's cult status. Watching _Casablanca_ nowadays is to experience a little thrill of recognition at every other line, and only partly because, "Play it, Sam" or, "Round up the usual suspects" have been commandeered into service as titles for other movies. Ideally, a good quote is not only specific to its dramatic context, but has universal application. "We'll always have Paris" and, "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" are the gifts that keep on giving.

You could say the same about _The Wizard of Oz_ , or _Some Like It Hot_ , or _Sunset Boulevard_ \- they're treasure troves for quote collectors. But _Apocalypse Now_ , for me, marks the point at which film quotes became self-conscious and lost their innocence, divorcing themselves from their dramatic source to become part of the currency of film buffery, a badge of cinematic taste enabling the quoters to trade references with like-minded pilgrims while baffling the uninitiated.

There's a minor character in _Diner_ who does nothing but quote dialogue from _Sweet Smell of Success_ \- and not just JJ Hunsecker's catchphrase, "Match me, Sidney". But that always struck me as an idea more in tune with the film geek spirit of the 1980s, when the film was made, rather than 1959, when it was set. Because, surely not coincidentally, _Apocalypse Now_ 's release in 1979 coincided with the arrival in non-specialist households of the video recorder, which for the first time in cinema history enabled fans to hunt for verbal truffles, watch their favourite scenes repeatedly and commit scads of dialogue to memory without having to sit in a cinema to do it.

The 1980s also saw a trend towards the vernacular, spearheaded by Bill Lancaster's dialogue for _The Thing_ , in which characters reacted not with philosophical musings about hills of beans or, "We'll always have Antarctica", but by uttering the sort of banalities you or I might say if we'd just glimpsed a head sprouting spider legs and scuttling across the floor: "You've got to be fucking kidding." It seemed fresh and witty in 1982, but that was before a zillion other sci-fi, horror and action movies got in on the act. There are only so many ways you can say (to quote Arnold Schwarzenegger in _The Terminator_ ), "Fuck you, asshole".

We're lucky if a new movie can rustle up a single memorable one-liner, such as _There Will Be Blood_ 's "I drink your milkshake" (which though a colourful metaphor for capitalism seems out of character for Daniel Plainview, who never struck me as a milkshake-drinker) or the deceptively mild, "That is all" from _The Devil Wears Prada_. But can you think of any films from the noughties that are as chockful of quotable dialogue as _Casablanca_ or _The Shining_? You're more likely to stumble across _bon mots_ "borrowed" from other films, such as _The Wizard of Oz_. If I hear, "I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more" one more time ( _Avatar_ and _Sex and the City 2_ are just two recent offenders) I'll scream.

And, regardless of these films' other merits, I can't see buffs quoting the dialogue _The King's Speech_ or _The Social Network_ in 30 years' time. Indeed, after perusing a list of this year's titles, the only phrase from any of them that has actually stuck in my brain is _Rango_ 's, "I found a human spinal chord in my fecal matter once." Which may not match, "We'll always have Paris" for universal applicability, but I'm going to try and shoehorn it into my cocktail party chit-chat anyway.

_ETA: It has been since been brought to my attention that "A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion dollars." and "I'm CEO, bitch." are fairly memorable lines from_ The Social Network _. But I'm not entirely convinced. Come back to me in twenty years times, and_ then _we'll see._

Chapter 12: Embrace the Horror

By now, you're probably aware that _The Beaver_ is about a depressed family man, played by Mel Gibson, who communicates via a glove puppet. What you might not be aware of is that it's not funny but creepy. And you're not alone in that; Jodie Foster, who directed, doesn't seem aware that it's creepy either, and approaches the material as if it were a sensitive family drama about mental illness, when all the time you're thinking, no! This is a movie about a man whose hand takes on a life of its own! This should be _a horror movie!_

Just think - what other movies have we seen about men whose hands take on lives of their own? I give you Oliver Stone's _The Hand_ , in which Michael Caine wrist-wrestles his severed hand, which then scuttles up his trouser-leg to attack his private parts. And of course there's Sam Raimi's _Evil Dead II_ , in which Bruce Campbell's demon-possessed hand smashes crockery over his head before he hacks it off with a chainsaw. Both of these are unabashedly horror films, and both scenes are hilarious (though admittedly only one is intentionally funny, unless I've wildly underestimated Stone's sense of humour) but you get the impression that Foster's film has been hamstrung by her striving to stop it tipping over into genre. Don't shun the horror, Jodie - embrace it!

_The Beaver_ isn't the only recent movie in which I found myself wishing the film-makers had taken the horror route. _The Hangover Part II_ kicks off with a classic horror movie set-up of obnoxious Americans treating a foreign country like a rumpus room where they can disrespect the locals and behave as revoltingly as they please. And where have we seen this set-up before? Oh yes, in films like _Hostel_ and _Turistas_ , where things turn out very badly, if not in full-on torture-porn mode. By all means let Bradley Cooper, Zac Galifianakis and Ed Helms live happily ever after, but at least let them lose a few body parts before the closing credits. I'm pretty certain this would result in increased viewer satisfaction, as well as adding a touch of Old Testament justice.

But then, so many comedies are only a sliver away from being terrifying psychothrillers; I remember getting sweaty-palmed in _Clockwise_ while all around me roared with laughter as John Cleese's attempts to reach a conference went horribly wrong, resulting in escalating humiliation and madness; this was like one of my worst nightmares. In _Housesitter_ , architect Steve Martin has a one-night stand with Goldie Hawn, only to find her installed in the house he's just built and telling everyone she's his wife; this was played for laughs, but it's only a twitch away from _Fatal Attraction_. After all, screwball comedy and film noir are just different sides of the same genre coin, as many a re-edited YouTube trailer has demonstrated.

I bet I'm not the only one whose favourite part of _Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides_ was the vampire mermaids, when the frantic action slows down a little to give us a few moments of genuine creepiness. Looking back on it, the best part of the first _Pirates_ movie was the undead pirates turning to skeletons in the moonlight. Big budget blockbusters tend to flirt with horror - think of the supernatural climax to _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ \- without ever fully embracing it. Of course they don't - they don't want to scare away their target audience. But imagine how much more fun the _Pirates_ franchise would have been if they'd played down the merciless fun-for-all-the-family remit and pumped up that spooky streak. Or maybe they should have just got Sam Raimi to direct.

But I wonder if I'm alone in always feeling just a teensy bit disappointed when, after all the ominous music and camera creeping up the fence to reveal a misty mansion with gothic turrets, _Citizen Kane_ turns out _not_ to be a horror movie. All you'd need is a narrator intoning, "Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Xanadu, and whatever walked there... walked alone," and bingo! A haunted house movie, instead of just a film about a haunted man.

Chapter 13: Singular Vision

Now that everyone has woken up to the genius that is Jeff Bridges, perhaps it's time to give John Heard his due. By the mid-1980s, after starring in a brace of Joan Micklin Silvers, Paul Schrader's _Cat People_ remake and pulp horror _C.H.U.D_ , he looked all set for leading man status. But it never happened; instead he turned into one of those character actors whose presence never fails to cheer you up. It didn't help that the release of _Cutter's Way_ , which gave him the role of his career, was bungled by United Artists, which saw it as a failed thriller instead of the noirish character study it was. It faded into obscurity, trailing a few rave reviews and fond film-buff memories behind it.

But one-eyed, one-legged, alcoholic Vietnam veteran Alex Cutter is the sort of avenging obsessive who, by rights, belongs up there in the pantheon alongside Travis Bickle, Sam Quint or Khan Noonien Singh. In fact, I'd argue that Cutter outcools them all because he has something the rest of them don't - an eyepatch. Not to be outdone, Bridges recently sported one too, as Rooster Cogburn in the Coen brothers' _True Grit._ Cutter lost his eye in Nam, Cogburn in the American Civil War. Both men are shambolic boozers. But, as the eyepatches indicate, they're also extreme bad-asses.

Eyepatches are a handy symbol of tunnel vision, of the kind that's necessary if you're going to consecrate your life to a heroic yet ultimately futile quest for vengeance. But strangely, while they're often associated with pirates, they're scarcely to be glimpsed in the four _Pirates of the Caribbean_ films, and the only patch-wearing movie pirate I can think of offhand is One-Eyed Willie from _The Goonies_. It's said that sailors wore a patch even when they had two good eyes, so that when they went below deck they could switch from one eye to the other and immediately see in the dark, but that sounds like bollocks to me; I think it's more likely patch-wearing pirates simply had their eyes taken out when they drank too much rum and walked into a bowsprit.

But it's true an patch does bestow a buccaneering air on, for example, Snake Plissken, or Bond villain Emilio Largo, or _Les amants du Pont-Neuf_ 's Michele (Juliet Binoche) who goes one-eyed water-skiing down the Seine. What's the betting the main attraction for Tom Cruise in playing Colonel Klaus Von Stauffenberg was that he got to wear an eyepatch which made him look a bit roguish? Watching him in _Valkyrie_ , it's hard not to be reminded of Tom DeCillo's indie satire _Living in Oblivion_ , in which doofus actor Chad Palamino (James LeGros playing a character NOT AT ALL based on Brad Pitt, whom DiCillo had directed in _Johnny Suede_ ) steals the cameraman's eyepatch to wear with his tuxedo. "It just feels right! I've GOT this guy now!"

Traditionally, an eyepatch signifies wisdom - Odin sacrificed an eye at the Well of Mimir in exchange for knowledge, though not in _Thor_ , where he's played by Anthony Hopkins, who loses his in an argy-bargy with the Frost Giants. Of course, an eyepatch also indicates the wearer has been in the wars, like Cutter, or at the very least has had his eye pecked out by a hawk, like Kirk Douglas in _The Vikings_ , who wears a patch the size of Sumatra to a Viking wassail but doesn't allow it to curtail his axe-hurling.

The one-eyed have no depth perception, though Andre de Toth, director of one the first 3-D movies, the 1953 _House of Wax_ , was famously monocular, and he wasn't the only only one-eyed director; Samuel Fuller, Nicolas Ray, Raoul Walsh and John Ford all sported patches at one time or another - all of them (pace the screamingly camp _Johnny Guitar_ ) the sort of heavy-drinking he-men you don't often see coming out of film schools these days.

Novelty eyepatches include Darryl Hannah's Red Cross-themed dressing in _Kill Bill_ and Brendan Gleeson's magic eyeball strap-on in the Harry Potter films. But top hardman honours go to Christopher Plummer, as General Chang in _Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country_ , who evidently decided elastic is for pussies, and instead nails his eyepatch directly on to his skull.

Chapter 14: Love It or Loathe It

So. _Last Year at Marienbad_. Sublime meditation on the nature of time and memory or, in Albert Steptoe's words, a "load of old boots"? I think it belongs with _The Shining_ as one of the scariest haunted hotel movies ever made. But that's just me, seeing ghosts where there probably aren't any, and I'm aware some people find it boring. We all bring different things to a film, but the schism between Love It and Loathe It seems to be getting wider with every year that passes - and not just for Alain Resnais's classic.

"I doubt," wrote Kenneth Tynan some 55 years ago, "if I could love anyone who did not wish to see _Look Back in Anger_." Most of us will have experienced that pang of disappointment when someone we care about dismisses our _film fetiche_ as drivel, or declares a piece of dross we've always despised to be their sainted talisman. There was a time when we filed this sort of misalignment away under "difference of opinion" but these days we seem to be increasingly intolerant of views diverging from our own. The more forums there are for us to express our opinions in public, the more we turn into Beavis and Butthead decreeing that something "sucks" or is "cool".

Since when did liking or not liking become the standard by which a film should be judged? Many's the time I've shared my feelings about a movie with friends, only for them to come back with, "Yes, but did you LIKE it?" As though that were the only criteria! I've probably learnt more about film-making from incompetent, badly written rom-coms than from any amount of perfectly constructed masterpieces. I've glimpsed extraordinary visions in otherwise awful films (one of my all-time favourite scenes is the upside-down severed head used as a slide projector in _Wild Wild West_ ), and cringe-making missteps in otherwise wonderful movies. But the signs are that we increasingly prefer criticism reduced to thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Star ratings, I'm told, are massively popular, though I can only goggle with disbelief as internauts throw tantrums because some reviewer on a film website has awarded _Thor_ three stars instead of four.

And with the polarisation comes the invective. It reminds me of one of my old boyfriends, who would never be content with saying that he didn't much care for, shall we say, _Black Book_. No, he had to ensure that I knew he considered _Black Book_ unfit to wipe his bottom on. It's as though holding a viewpoint is no longer enough - a film's detractors need to pour scorn on its admirers and belittle their taste and intelligence as well. Winning the argument is no longer enough - the opposition must be annihilated!

On the other hand, you just try making a critical comment about someone's pet movie and see what happens. When I blogged about _Avatar_ with, among other things, some mildly disrespectful apercus about the plug-in plait of power and Roger Dean, one visitor chose to ignore my more positive observations and chided me with, "People who don't like something should just be quiet." I have no beef with this commentator in particular, who is obviously welcome to write what he thinks, but I wonder if he sincerely meant that with regard to every film ever released - or just the one that happened to be his favourite.

I'm steeling myself for another round of Molesworth versus Peason argument ("am not am not etc") with _The Tree of Life_ (personally, I think it sucks AND is cool - simultaneously!) and then the new Harry Potter film. Maybe it's because cinema has become the New Religion, with its own sacraments and doctrines, and high-profile hits such as _The King's Speech_ or _Inception_ inspire followings so devoted that disparaging remarks are seen as heresy. To criticise is to cast aspersions on someone's fundamental beliefs, the very core of their existence; it's like a religious war in which neither side will tolerate the other's gods, or lack of them. As Samuel Fuller once observed in another context, "Film is a battlefield." I know it is - I've seen the corpses. But hey, can't we all just get along?

Chapter 15: Identity Theft

In _The Big Picture_ , Romain Duris plays a prosperous Parisian lawyer who accidentally kills his wife's lover. And then, because he has always yearned to be an artist, he swaps identities with the dead man and starts a new life as a boho photographer. Taking the place of a dead person (as opposed to _posing_ as a dead person, like _Shaun of the Dead_ and friends) is a recurring motif of the noir-ish thriller, most memorably in Patricia Highsmith's _The Talented Mr Ripley_ , filmed by both Rene Clement (as _Plein soleil_ , starring Alain Delon at the peak of his male pulchritude) and Anthony Minghella.

Ripley murders the man whose identity he appropriates, but impersonators more often drift passively into imposture because circumstances enable or even demand it. The Cornell Woolrich novel _I Married a Dead Man_ (published under the writerly imposture of William Irish) was filmed by Robin Davis as _J'ai epouse une ombre_ , with Nathalie Baye as an abused pregnant wife who, without really intending to, ends up leading the much comfier life of another pregnant woman when the latter and her husband are killed in a train crash. For once, the French adaptation of an American hardboiled novel makes the story sunnier instead of darker, though the idea of concealing horrible secrets from one's past with a spot of judiciously applied murder is still present.

Then there's Robert Wise's _The House on Telegraph Hill_ , in which Valentina Cortese plays a Nazi concentration camp survivor who assumes the identity of a dead friend and seeks refuge in San Francisco, only to find herself in mortal peril of another kind, at risk from a scheming husband even more skilled at wearing a mask than she is, and whose every line becomes loaded with sinister significance. "Don't forget your juice dear, it will help you sleep." Mwah hah hah.

Acting itself, of course, is a form of imposture, and when a skilled actor pulls off the double whammy of playing a character who's pretending to be another character, like Jeremy Irons passing himself off as his own twin in David Cronenberg's _Dead Ringers_ , it's thrilling to be complicit in the deception. But it's not as though imposture started with the movies. There's barely a Shakespeare comedy that doesn't dabble in stand-ins, or women disguising themselves as men; Alexandre Dumas, Wilkie Collins, Mark Twain, Anthony Hope all famously exploited it in their stories, and it remains a favourite storytelling device. This year alone, prime examples of cinematic imposture have cropped up in films as diverse as _Black Swan_ , _X-Men: First Class_ , _Cell 211_ and _Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2_.

And it's that diversity that makes it noteworthy. The films of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch are rife with imposture, but it doesn't confine itself to any single genre; it can inform comedies ( _To Be Or Not To Be_ , _Some Like It Hot_ ) as well as thrillers ( _Body Heat_ ), war films ( _Went the Day Well?_ , _Where Eagles Dare_ ), caper movies ( _Ocean's Eleven_ ), musicals ( _My Fair Lady_ ), westerns ( _Rancho Notorious_ ), rom-coms ( _Working Girl_ , _Never Been Kissed_ ), sci-fi ( _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_ , _The Thing_ ), horror ( _Psycho_ , _The Stepfather_ ), historical drama ( _Anastasia_ , _Kagemusha_ ), documentaries ( _Catfish_ , _Exit Through the Gift Shop_ ) and arthouse ( _The Passenger_ ), not to mention just about every spy movie ever made.

The only genre in which I can't think of an example is the socio-realist drama, perhaps because as a narrative device imposture is viewed as artificial and melodramatic, like the evil twin trick so beloved of soap opera. You're unlikely to find it in a Ken Loach movie, for example. But is it as artificial as all that? On the contrary, I think we're all imposture experts, so adept at convincing ourselves we are what we're not, we no longer even notice we're doing it, whether it's pretending to be self-confident, or letting people think we studied at the Sorbonne when we didn't.

Admittedly, few of us have gone as far as Frank Abagnale Jr, whose life was filmed by Steve Spielberg in _Catch Me If You Can_. But we all carry a metaphorical stash of peel-off faces in our pockets, one for every occasion, just like Tom Cruise in _Mission: Impossible_.

Chapter 16: Bad Timing

Much as I wanted to enjoy _Super 8_ , I kept getting distracted by anachronisms. The film is set, specifically, in a small Ohio town at the start of the summer holidays in 1979, yet one of the kids compares an alien gizmo to a Rubik's Cube, which didn't go on sale till 1980. (I knew this because I'd already checked the date when writing about _Let the Right One In_.) The gas station attendant must have been going out with someone whose uncle worked at Sony, because he has a Walkman, yet I didn't even glimpse Walkmans till late 1979 - and I was living in Tokyo at the time.

Most distracting of all, the kids in Abrams's film are making a zombie movie. But why? Yes, I know they might conceivably have caught _Night of the Living Dead_ on TV, or sneaked into _Dawn of the Dead_ , which opened in New York in April 1979 (though, since it didn't have a certificate, wasn't likely to have been showing at family cinemas). And I know, because Phelim O'Neill reminded me, that young Sam Raimi and his mates had already made a zombie movie called _Within the Woods_ in the boondocks of Michigan.

But in 1979, zombies had yet to take their place in the pantheon of everyone's favourite movie monsters. Wouldn't those kids have been more likely to be making a movie about vampires, or Frankenstein's monster, or (since they would almost certainly have seen _Close Encounters of the Third Kind_ ) extra-terrestrials?

Yes, I know. I can hear you saying, "But what does it matter? It's only a movie." I do try to suspend my disbelief, and normally don't mind modern slang cropping up in Roman times or Marie Antoinette wearing Manolo Blahniks, but either I'm growing less tolerant or screenwriters are getting lazier, because I swear needless anachronism is on the increase. One of my pet hates is period characters complaining about bad breath for a cheap laugh, which happens in both _Plunkett & Macleane_ and _Burke and Hare_. But it doesn't take a giant leap of imagination to conclude that, in the 18th or 19th centuries, in an era before modern periodontology and Oral-B 40, non-stinky breath would have been the exception rather than the rule.

And don't get me started on vernacular. Again, I'm not a purist on this, but I do think screenwriters ought to try a bit harder, maybe even glance at _Green's Dictionary of Slang_ now and again. It really does take me out of the moment when I hear, for example, the Pevensie children from _The Chronicles of Narnia_ saying, "Sorted!" during the London Blitz, or Susie Salmon from _The Lovely Bones_ talking about "mega-blue eyeshadow" in 1973, or Tim Burton's _Alice in Wonderland_ using terms like, "bonkers" or "round the bend".

Anachronism was the least of the problems of _The Boat That Rocked_ , but I do think Richard Curtis, born only two years after me, should have got the details right. I'm sorry, but no-one listened to pirate radio over breakfast, and certainly not _en famille_. And when you did listen to Radio Caroline, you spent most of the time turning your transistor around in a fruitless effort to get halfway decent reception.

I spent most of _X-Men: First Class_ distracted by Rose Byrne and January Jones's anachronistic thigh-skimming mini-skirts (I'm sure others were distracted by them too, though probably for different reasons) and most of _Changeling_ shaking my head at Angelina Jolie's mouth; believe it or not, there was a time - even as recently as the 1970s - when big squishy lips were considered ugly, and no woman would have dreamt of drawing attention to them by wearing bright red lipstick.

But it's the sloppiness in films set during my lifetime which annoys me the most. I count it as yet another example of the disrespect shown by film-makers to anyone over the age of legal drinking. Hey, we're still here! You could have asked us! I'm equally aware that writers and directors don't give a fig. After all, what's the point of wasting energy on research when your movies are targeted at 15 year olds who won't even notice?

_ETA: several hundred arguments later, and I still stand by what I said here. I'm not saying it would have been_ impossible _for smalltown kids to have seen George Romero's_ Dawn of the Dead _in April of 1979. I'm just saying it's_ unlikely _\- check those opening dates! And wouldn't they have been more likely to have been obsessed with, say, aliens?_ Close Encounters of the First Kind _came out in 1977, after all._

_Take it from a horror fan who was not just alive but actively reading about and going to horror movies in the 1970s - in 1979 zombies had yet to become part of the horror movie pantheon. You have only to look at, say,_ The Monster Squad _(1987) to get an idea of which movie monsters appealed to kids back then - Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the Mummy, the Wolf Man. In other words, the old Universal crew, and not a zombie in sight._

Chapter 17: Here's Looking at You

Anne Hathaway's iffy English accent is the least of _One Day_ 's problems. It's not the way she speaks so much as the way she looks; even in specs and with dull, lifeless hair (you wonder why they didn't call it _One Bad Hair Day_ ) she can't help but radiate movie star glamour. I still don't understand why the role of Emma Morley went to her when Carey Mulligan has already demonstrated in _An Education_ \- and with the very same director, Lone Scherfig - that she can run the gamut from swot to swan, _con brio_.

Beyond the gimmicky structure, one of the most intriguing things about the idea of David Nicholls's novel being adapted for the screen was its potential to subvert a tiresome movie cliche of our times - that of the geeky bloke who gets off with a sexy stunner, as seen in everything from _Knocked Up_ to _Pineapple Express_ to _She's Out of My League_ to anything featuring Shia La Beouf. Because in the book, it's _Dexter_ who is the sexy stunner. He's richer, better-looking, physically and socially more at ease than Emma; in movie terms, way out of her league.

The narrative viewpoint in the novel is split evenly between the two characters, but the author (and by extension, the reader) empathises more with Emma. It's she who seems more the protagonist, while he is the object of desire, to be gazed upon and appreciated for his beauty. Of course, this plain Jane/hot guy combo is often to be found in novels, presumably because they're bought and read by more women than men.

For all their faults, the movie adaptations of the Bridget Jones and _Twilight_ books managed to preserve this mismatch all the way to the screen, with plump, pink Renee Zellweger getting to choose between Colin Firth and Hugh Grant, and spiky, interesting-rather-than-conventionally-beautiful Kristen Stewart wooed by Robert Pattinson as the sparkly vampire with, as Stephenie Meyer puts it, "the most beautiful soul, more beautiful than his brilliant mind or his incomparable face or his glorious body." And there's a new version of the prototype of this sort of relationship coming up next month; yes, Mia Wasikowska can be pretty, but no, we won't be paying much attention to her _Jane Eyre_ so long as Michael Fassbender is on screen as Mr Rochester.

Alas, the makers of _One Day_ have bottled out, and instead of giving us a geeky young heroine in thrall to male pulchritude, they've plumped for Hathaway, which throws the dynamic out of whack. The actress may be capable of looking homely, but I've yet to see it; she was already improbably cast as the frump in the jumper in _The Devil Wears Prada_ , but even in her big stabs at non-glam credibility, _Rachel Getting Married_ and _Love and Other Drugs_ , she looked like a knockout.

Someone needs to stick up for the girl geek, a social group so underrepresented in movies it teeters on the verge of extinction, continually at risk of being supplanted by a brave new race of fembot perfection. Her male counterpart is ubiquitous, because movies are now made by grown-up male geeks for adolescent male geek audiences, neither of which can conceive of girls having any other purpose than to look decorative. Actresses like Mulligan (who can be a sexy stunner when she needs to be) accordingly baffle the young male demographic, which thinks girl geeks should look like Kristen Bell ( _You Again_ , _Fanboys_ ) or Hayden Panettiere ( _Scream 4_ ) or Jessica Alba ( _Good Luck Chuck_ ). Show them a normal-looking Maggie Gyllenhaal as an assistant DA in _The Dark Knight_ and they'll start whingeing she isn't hot enough.

I have nothing against beautiful actresses - I love to drink in the fabulousness of Francoise Dorleac or Kim Novak or Ava Gardner - and I don't even mind looking at Anne Hathaway. And I'm not saying girl geeks can't be beautiful too; it's just that giving them movie star looks tends to muddy the waters. It's putting women in their place again - ensuring they're less the subjects - the observers, doers, protagonists - than the objects, whose primary function is not to be and to do, but to be looked at.

Chapter 18: Fitwomen

_Colombiana_ is the sort of film in which a caring dad yells, "Hurry! Men are coming to kill us!" before dallying for 10 minutes to tell his daughter he named her after an orchid. Nine-year-old Cataleya gives her parents' murderers the slip via the now obligatory parkour tour of the favela, and grows into a sexy contract killer whose boyfriend who doesn't know what business she's in. Meanwhile, on the sly, she's wreaking revenge on the sort of guy whose idea of interior decor is a glass floor over a shark tank.

It's a film that, officially, is neither remake nor sequel - and yet, in a way (and not just because every beat of it is familiar as old socks) it's both. The director may be Olivier Megaton, but co-writer and producer is Luc Besson, and they're relating, essentially, the grown-up adventures of the little girl played by 12-year-old Natalie Portman in _Leon_. Besson planned a sequel called _Mathilda_ (not to be confused, of course, with Roald Dahl's _Matilda_ ) but it fell by the wayside due to rights issues. Now Mathilda has undergone an ethnic makeover and re-emerges as Cataleya, played by Zoe Saldana.

_Leon_ was already a sequel of sorts, developing the intriguing minor character played by Jean Reno in an even earlier Besson film, _Nikita_ \- another film about a female assassin whose boyfriend doesn't have a clue what business she's in, and whose character arc travels along pretty much the same trajectory as Cataleya's. Mind you, there's a shortage of character arcs for hitpeople; it's either carry on killing, or develop a conscience, usually after meeting a child or blind person.

Hitmen are such a fixture of modern movies that I'm waiting for contract killer to be touted in schools as a viable career option, but it's the hitwoman films, adding a hint of ovarian spice to the action formula, that attract most of the attention. Isn't that always the way? Jason Statham and company can juggle with A-K 47s and no-one blinks, but give a girl a teeny-tiny handgun and the media erupt into debates about whether this is female empowerment, or simply entertainment for guys who like watching _Chicks Who Love Guns_ videos.

The latest wrinkle is to lower the age so the hitwoman is more of a hitgirl, as in _Kick-Ass_ and _Hanna_ , which since we're told criminals are getting younger, seems fair enough. At this rate, we'll soon be having films about hitbabies packing Glocks in their nappies, which I reckon is no more unfeasible than Saldana or Angelina Jolie (in _Mr & Mrs Smith_) or Melanie Laurent (in _Requiem Pour une Tueuse_ ) playing stone-cold killers, even though their arms are so skinny they look as if they'd snap if they tried to squeeze the trigger on a Sig-Sauer P229. It's for this reason I'm looking forward to Steven Soderbergh's _Haywire_ , starring a real-life Muay Thai expert (Gina Carano) who actually looks chunky enough to be capable of giving the likes of Statham a proper going-over.

But then, let's face it, hitwomen need to be hotwomen, or even fitwomen in the latterday sense of the word "fit"; we're never going to be treated to the character arcs of Rosa Klebb or Irma Bunt, which is a shame. If a female contract killer isn't prepared to go braless in skinny vests and micro-minis and Laboutins, or smuggle herself into the villain's lair disguised as a scantily-clad hooker, the movie world isn't interested.

So whither the hitwoman? Is she stuck in a _Colombiana_ / _Nikita_ character arc forever? Maybe she should dispense with the lip service to women's lib, and look east to the sort of exploitation that can be enjoyed by both sexes. I'm thinking of Japan's _Lady Snowblood_ , one of Tarantino's inspirations for _Kill Bill_ , which features levels of gushing blood that wouldn't look out of place in, say, Sam Peckinpah's _Salad Days_. Or Hong Kong's _Naked Killer_ films, in which the assassins aren't technically naked, but wear sexy romper suits, keep rapists chained up in their basements for killing practice, and have plenty of hot lesbian action and catfights in the swimming-pool. As _The Warriors_ learnt to their cost, the chicks are packed.

Chapter 19: The Long and the Short of It

One of the many pleasures of Tomas Alfredson's _Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy_ is its willingness to linger, though never simply for the sake of lingering; every frame has narrative purpose. As he already showed in _Let the Right One In_ , Alfredson is a master of what, by today's commercial standards, are long takes. In both films, Dino Jonsater's cutting is exemplary, but it's part of the package, not punching you in the face. Unlike too much of Hollywood's output nowadays, Alfredson's are not films that have been made in the editing suite.

It's only recently that I've become a fan of the long take, and then almost entirely as a reaction to the vogue for jitterbug editing that has taken all the fun out of the action genre - effective when done purposefully by Paul Greengrass, but maddening when it's done in _Conan the Barbarian_ by Marcus Nispel, a director who can't even film a catfight between Rose McGowan and Rachel Nichols properly.

When I made my first short film last year (the title is _Alouette_ , by the way, it was largely filmed on mobile phones, is around eight minutes long and can be found on my blog, _Multiglom_ ), I found the less planning I'd done prior to shooting a sequence, the more I would later be obliged to chop it up to make it work. Filming a long take obviously takes more work: you have to rehearse actors, coordinate timing and plan camera movements. In short, you have to know what you're doing and - perhaps more importantly - why you're doing it, which is perhaps why so many directors can't be bothered.

As the rhythm of commercial movies has speeded up, long takes have increasingly become associated with slow art movies, and for many years tended to bring out the worst in me. During a shot of townsfolk tramping down the street in Bela Tarr's _The Werckmeister Harmonies_ (a film famously composed of only 37 shots) I nodded off, had a little dream and woke up again - only to find the townsfolk still tramping. Bruno Dumont's _L'humanite_ opens with a widescreen shot of a horizon, bare but for a couple of trees; a man appears on the extreme left hand side, and you realise with a sinking feeling the camera is going to stick with him till he has toiled all the way over to the right. I started giggling before he was even halfway across.

But rewatching Omar Sharif's slow approach on camel through the desert in _Lawrence of Arabia,_ I'm struck now by David Lean's timidity \- how much more involving it would have been if he hadn't cut that long shot up into bite-sized pieces, and instead had let it play out in real time. No such restraint from Gaspard Noe, who in _Irreversible_ refuses to cut away from Albert Dupontel smashing a man's face in with a fire extinguisher, or from Monica Bellucci being raped in a pedestrian tunnel, a take that goes on for so long the viewer passes through shock into boredom and thence into annoyance - always a risk with ultra-long takes, though, judging by the rest of Noe's oeuvre, it could be precisely the reaction he was setting out to provoke.

I daresay we're now so accustomed to machine gun editing that the "subliminal" shock image of the demon face in _The Exorcist_ doesn't seem seem so subliminal any more. But it's in horror movies that I really enjoy seeing long takes, especially the sort of dread-inducing camerawork of John Carpenter or Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Long takes make the viewer an active participant rather than a passive sponge, encouraged to scour the frame, or worry about what might intrude into it. Like Smiley's spies, you're constantly scrutinising facial expressions or on the lookout for movement that shouldn't be there.

Sudden flurries of violent cutting obscure rather than delineate the action; the effect is impressionistic, which obviously has its uses, but is now so prevalent I sometimes fear that generations of filmgoers will soon be incapable of tolerating longer takes, the same way high heel wearers can no longer walk in flat shoes because their tendons have shrunk. Maybe, pace Theodore Roszak (scholar and author of the cult novel _Flicker_ ) they've become so addicted to the flicker of film passing through a projector that the fix on its own is no longer potent enough. They need hyper-rapid editing as well.

ETA: or perhaps, because traditional projectors have now been replaced by digital ones and because film no longer flickers, flicker addicts now have to get their fix from fast editing? I like this theory.

Chapter 20: Films That Spoil Themselves

There has been much recent discussion about spoilers, but I have yet to see any mention of Films That Spoil Themselves. Lars Von Trier's _Melancholia_ begins with the ultimate in spoileresque prologues - the end of the world - before the story backpedals to an earlier date. The foreknowledge changes the way we watch the film - we already know Bruce Willis or Robert Duvall aren't going to step in and save the day - and got me thinking about the reasons some films begin with their very own preview of coming attractions.

Screenwriter Stephen Volk (co-writer of supernatural chiller _The Awakening_ ) says of films that begin with flash-forwards, "It is basically to address a change in tone. If the tone of the ending is completely unlike the beginning, you can give a tantalising foretaste of what is to come, a kind of little appetiser so to speak. But then again it can't be the exact ending. The ending, when it comes, has to add something or put another spin on it."

I'm not thinking of backwards narratives like _Memento_ , nor about Roman Polanski's vicious circles, or Moebius striplike stories like _Dead of Night_ or _La jetee_. But there's a whole raft of biopics or fictional biographies that begin, like _Lawrence of Arabia_ , with the main character's death before flashing back to tell us who these people were before they died, sometimes with an added who-is-Rosebud teaser.

Writer Joseph L Mankiewicz evidently liked the _Citizen Kane_ flashback structure, because he recycled it in _The Barefoot Contessa_ , which begins with the funeral of Ava Gardner's character before backtracking to show her rise to stardom and ill-fated marriage. But it's not so much about the destination as the journey; _Citizen Kane_ is less about the identity of Rosebud than what Rosebud represents to him, and to us.

Film noirs ( _Double Indemnity_ , _Sunset Boulevard_ ) often begin at the end, sometimes with the anti-hero already dead or dying, as if to emphasise the inexorability of fate. A similar structure can be found in noir's screwball flipside, with an absurd situation that needs explaining via flashback as the opening gambit of comedies such as _The Hangover_ or _Pardon Mon Affaire_. Where is the groom, and where did the tiger come from? And why is Jean Rochefort perched in his dressing-gown on a high ledge overlooking the Arc de Triomphe?

As for horror films, "Right now, it has become a cliche to start with a chunk of climax - screaming, bloody people - then run that 'two weeks earlier' caption and show the same folks being happy and en route to danger to establish characters and story," says Kim Newman, author of _Nightmare Movies_. Judging by such recent examples as _Rogue River_ or _Don't Let Him In_ , a remake of _The Exorcist_ would now be obliged to give us a helping of pea-soup-vomiting and head-swivelling right off the bat so ADD-afflicted audiences (ie anyone under 40) don't get bored and wander off, while I'll be amazed if the forthcoming _The Thing_ prequel manages to hold its horrors back for half an hour, like John Carpenter's 1983 film.

But as Volk suggests, such foretastes must invariably withhold vital information. Al Pacino gets shot at the start of _Carlito's Way_ , but we have to wait for the end to find out if he'll survive. Opening credits for _The Innocents_ roll out against images of hands clasped in prayer, but we don't yet know who's praying, or why. Or the climax we thought we've already witnessed - the exploding boat at the start of _The Usual Suspects_ , Edward Norton threatened with a gun at the beginning of _Fight Club_ \- turns out to be sly misdirection.

Our foreknowledge of where _Melancholia_ is headed ensures we won't be distracted by worrying about whether or not Bruce will find a way to save the planet. The spin is the way in which the film obliges us to confront our own feelings in the face of impending annihilation. Whether we respond with equanimity or sorrow, panic or boredom, the result will be the same. We already know what the ending will be, and there's not a damn thing we can do to change it.

Chapter 21: The Fight Stuff

Another year, another musketeers movie. What a shame no-one thought of rereleasing Richard Lester's two-parter, or even the MGM version starring Gene Kelly. But no, swashbuckling on its own is no longer deemed enough to hold the attention of today's fidgety kids, so Paul WS Anderson gussies up his _The Three Musketeers_ with 3-D, slo-mo and ninja skills. Phew! No danger of us getting bored there, then!

Except I love swordfights and want to see more of them, and preferably not obscured by bells and whistles. Lester's Musketeer films have some cracking examples, mostly lighthearted, though slapstick finally gives way to the deadly serious duel towards the end, which goes on for so long that Michael York and Christopher Lee end up tottering with exhaustion, barely able to lift their swords.

That fight choreographer, William Hobbs, was also behind one of the best screen swordfights: the end of the otherwise humdrum _Rob Roy_ pits heroic but lumbering Liam Neeson, in big blouse and kilt, against Tim Roth as a psychopathic fop called Archie, a master swordsman. The match is unequal, but the action is a terrific display of character, and only ends when one man breaks the rules - or at least the rules as I remember them quoted, prior to the male-bonding duel between Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook in _The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp_.

Swords are sexier than guns, and not just because they're longer phallic symbols. Any idiot can fire a gun, but it takes character and training to wield a rapier correctly. The best duels are like games of chess with extra helpings of sadism - why dispatch opponents quickly when you can humiliate them with your fancy footwork, or inflict death by thousand painful cuts? Duelling can be a substitute for sex - and I'm not just talking about the seductive fence-off between Banderas and Zeta-Jones in _The Mask of Zorro_ ; check out Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone smiling at each other during their duel on the beach in _Captain Blood_. It's enough to make you feel sorry for Olivia de Havilland, stranded on the sidelines.

No-one cries _"_ Ha _-haah!"_ during a swordfight quite like Rathbone, reportedly the best fencer in Hollywood, though due to story demands he won only one of his onscreen duels. But he provided consistently brilliant opposition for Flynn ( _The Adventures of Robin Hood_ ), Tyrone Power ( _The Mark Of Zorro_ ) and Danny Kaye ( _The Court Jester_ ). The other man all these fights had in common was fencing master Fred Cavens, also responsible for the seven-minute thriller in _Scaramouche_ in which Stewart Granger (wearing slightly distracting Bridget Riley-esque stripey tights) and Mel Ferrer swipe at each other all over a theatre.

_Scaramouche_ is particularly pleasing from a sword-lover's point of view since Granger has to train hard to match the skill level of his arch-enemy. The training process is also featured in _Le bossu_ , Philippe de Broca's 1997 version of the oft-filmed Paul Feval novel, with Vincent Perez enjoying his finest hour as the Duc de Nevers, whose family's trademark attack, "la botte de Nevers", entails sticking your blade into a spot between your opponent's eyes.

Like other martial arts, swordplay is as much about restraint as brute force. While the duelling in Japanese _chambara_ is of a different order to Hollywood swashbuckling, it illustrates perfectly how apparent inaction is as important as action when swordsman Seiji Miyaguchi (coolest of _The Seven Samurai_ ) fells his blustering challenger with one movement. Or when the showdown between Toshiro Mifune and Tatsuya Nakadai in _Sanjuro_ involves half a minute of intense staring before a single thrust unleashes a geyser of blood.

I'd like to see action films regressing to an epoch when swords were as prevalent as guns, or maybe hopping forward to a time where firearms, for whatever reason, don't work. (And no, I'm sorry, but light sabres don't cut it.) Maybe it's time actors were taught how to fence again, so their prowess doesn't have to be cobbled together in the editing room. It doesn't hurt that fencing can also be as graceful as dancing.

As Rathbone said, "I would not put it under the category of sport; I would put it under the category of the arts."

Chapter 22: Fine Art

Ah yes, _An American in Paris_. Kelly's character is a heel, but audiences are so busy ooh-la-la-ing over MGM's soundstage mock-up of Montmartre they don't care, and neither, really, does the film, which finally gives way to a barely relevant sixteen minute ballet inspired by the work of painters such as Dufy, Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec. The results, as so often with director Vincente Minnelli, pass all the way through kitsch to emerge somewhere on the far side of sublime.

Minnelli once again dodges the kitsch bullet in _Lust for Life_ , which ends up a moving study of Van Gogh, though artist biopics that aim to be tasteful, like _The Girl with the Pearl Earring_ (Colin Firth as a big-bloused Vermeer, painting a Dutch-capped Scarlett Johansson) usually end up as upmarket ersatz, best appreciated by folk who think film is naturally inferior to more venerable artforms as painting. But I do enjoy a good game of Spot the Famous Painting, which enables those of us who studied History of Art at school to feel smug, if not vindicated.

Pedro Almodovar shoehorns a ruddy great reproduction of Titian's _Venus d'Urbino_ into _The Skin I Live In_. (I realise this could have been a whim of his production designer, but like to think Pedro is hands-on when it comes to mad surgeon symbolic wallpaper.) Lars Von Trier's _Melancholia_ is a trove of references to Bruegel ( _Hunters in the Snow_ and, even more pertinently, _The Land of Cockaigne_ ), Millais ( _Ophelia_ ) and Caravaggio ( _David and Goliath_ ), while his landscapes reek of Friedrich. (If anyone recognises the reindeer drawing, I'd love to know its provenance.)

Bruegel crops up again in _The Man Who Fell to Earth_ , with Nicolas Roeg's cross-cutting establishing a link between extra-terrestrial David Bowie and the nemesis he has yet to meet (Rip Torn), who's looking at the picture of Icarus plunging unnoticed into the sea. Asia Argento physically enters this very same painting at the start of her father Dario's psychothriller _The Stendhal Syndrome_ , named after a condition in which sufferers are overwhelmed by great works of art - rather inconvenient if, like Asia, you're a detective hunting a serial killer through Florence - though the director sidelines this inspired idea to concentrate on some rather less inspired sexual sadism.

_The Da Vinci Code_ is, as you'd expect, choc-a-bloc with Leonardo, though I prefer my _Last Supper_ posed by beggars _a la_ Bunuel in _Viridiana_ , or even by dead mice in Steve Carell's _Dinner for Schmucks_ dioramas, which I consider preferable to scribbling invisible graffiti all over the _Mona Lisa_ and _Virgin of the Rocks_. I don't care if there is a crazy albino priest trying to kill you; if you're curator of the Louvre you should know better.

The _Mona Lisa_ , being the most famous painting in the world, is recognisable even to audiences who think it was painted by a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, so is often used as shorthand for Western culture. It's packed away prior to the cataclysm of _2012_ ; burned by footsoldiers of Christian Bale (shortly before his humanity is restored by an adorable puppy) in the emotion-free future of _Equilibrium_ ; wrapped around the umbrella of masterthief John Barrymore in _Arsene Lupin_ (an unlikely feat since it's painted on wood, not canvas). The makers of _Bean_ , on the other hand, opted to have the lesser known (but, crucially, American) _Whistler's Mother_ sneezed on and defaced by Rowan Atkinson.

In _I Am Legend_ , Will Smith decorates his apartment with Van Gogh's _Starry Night_ and Rousseau's _Sleeping Gypsy_ , though if I'd been the last person in Manhattan with the whole of MOMA to choose from I would have gone for Malevich's more soothing (but, crucially, Russian) _White on White_. But my favourite famous painting in films is in Fassbinder's _Despair_ , adapted from the Nabokov's novel, in which Dirk Bogarde wears pyjamas patterned with _The Raft of the Medusa_. Gericault's painting, which hangs around the corner from the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, was inspired by an incident in which 147 shipwreck survivors, set adrift on a makeshift raft off the coast of Mauritania, ended up going mad and eating each other. It makes for a lovely recurring motif.

_ETA: famous painting fans (and mediaeval history buffs) should check out Lech Majewski's_ The Mill and the Cross _(2011) which is entirely about Pieter Bruegel the Elder's_ The Way to Calvary _. Watching it is pretty much like living inside the painting,_ Stendhal Syndrome _-style, for 92 minutes._

Chapter 23: Giving Up the Ghost

Bet I'm not the only horror fan who's fed up with watching people tied to chairs and tortured, or couples terrorised by home invaders, or characters dying in grisly ways you can't see properly because their camcorder got dropped on its side. Horror films, which don't require stars or lavish spectacle, remain one of the cheapest and easiest routes for first-timers to break into movie-making, but I wish more of them would realise there are creatures even cheaper and easier than zombies - ghosts!

Perhaps it's wishful thinking on my part, but there seem to have been a few more things going bump in the night lately. For a while, it was Hispanic film-makers carrying the torch with films like _The Others_ , _The Devil's Backbone_ and _The Orphanage_. But Nick Murphy's _The Awakening_ , co-written with Stephen Volk, brings the haunted house back to Britain. It's set just after the Great War; professional debunker Rebecca Hall is summoned to a boys' school to disprove the existence of a restless spirit, leading to (give or take the odd bit of CGI) a full complement of minimalist movie haunting - strange noises, barely glimpsed figures, and the "Lewton bus", the sort of fake scare named after a moment in the Val Lewton-produced _Cat People_ (1942) in which an already nervous heroine is startled by a bus suddenly drawing up in front of her.

The problem with ghosts is that cinema is often thought of (understandably but erroneously) as a purely visual medium, leading to film-makers assuming they have no choice but to pile on the special effects. But ghosts, unlike other movie monsters, are arguably more frightening when they're unseen or, at most, only briefly glimpsed. Exhibits One and Two in this thesis are the contrasting adaptations of Shirley Jackson's _The Haunting of Hill House_. Robert Wise's 1963 _The Haunting_ is an exemplary study in the deployment of noise, shadow and camera angle to reduce even the most sceptical spectator (that would be me) to a state of whimpering terror. Jan de Bont's 1999 "remake", on the other hand, piles on revolving rooms, collapsing staircases, possessed bedlinen, haunted hair-dos and doughy CGI apparitions to tiresome and ultimately somniferous effect. There's a time and place for the carnival funhouse, and I'm sorry, but Jackson's story isn't it.

Jim Sheridan's _Dream House_ promises to be another haunted house story but screws the pooch with the reveal (it's in the trailer, for heaven's sake!) that the phantoms are all in Daniel Craig's mind. (A pity no-one involved watched, say, _The Innocents_ to see how one can strike a balance between supernatural and psychological explanations and still be scary as hell.) I prefer the unapologetically supernatural shenanigans of _Insidious_ , which (like _Dead Silence_ ) suggests James Wan and Leigh Whannell might be more at home with spooky noises, faces at the window and ghostly _tableaux vivants_ than with the explicit tortures of the _Saw_ franchise they created seven years ago.

Perhaps the most interesting tendency in Twenty-First Century Hauntings is the FFFF (Faux Found Footage Film), assumed to have been launched with _The Blair Witch Project_ , though I would contend the real kicking-off point came seven years earlier, with _Ghostwatch_. Penned by _The Awakening_ 's Volk, the BBC's controversial 1992 Halloween offering was aired prior to the Camcorder boom, but its then-innovative format, chatshow-cum-documentary rather than obvious fiction, convinced some viewers the ghostly events were actually happening. One wonders if anyone would still fall for it now, when a surfeit of Reality TV has left everyone sceptical as to how much of what they're watching is staged.

But _Ghostwatch_ 's lo-tech but effective scares are still regularly recycled in today's FFFF. A few weeks ago I was lamenting the dearth of long takes in today's commercial cinema, yet only the other day found myself watching _Paranormal Activity 3_ , directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (co-directors of the faux-or-not doc _Catfish_ ) and marvelling at how a packed cinemaful of rowdy popcorn munchers were somehow tricked into staring for long minutes at CCTV footage of nothing happening in someone's living-room. They'd never tolerate this sort of thing in a Bela Tarr movie. But - film-makers please take note - they'll do it for a ghost story.

Chapter 24: Girl Tosh

Reviews for _Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1_ have been so gleeful in their derision it reminds you that critics love nothing better than a chance to sneer. Why try to say something useful when you can exercise your coruscating wit? And that's fine - I can do it too. Edward looks like a marble statue covered in talc, only now he's wearing shorts! The wolves argue with each other in English, not even wolf-talk, which is just silly! And let's face it, if you're going to have a Caesarean, it's probably not a good idea to have vampires in the room.

But if _Twilight_ is so awful, why do we invest so much effort into slagging it off? Especially since everything that needs to be said about teen chastity, female passivity and mormonism-on-the-sly has already been trotted out in response to previous entries in the franchise. God knows I'm Team Buffy, not Team Bella, and I prefer my vampires evil - but it seems to me that _Twilight_ attracts a lot more vitriol than any equivalent nonsense aimed at the young male demographic. I gave up looking for sample quotes, because the same adjectives keep cropping up. Ludicrous, ridiculous and risible are favourite verdicts, along with cheesy and sappy, but words like these could equally be applied to, say, _Green Lantern_ , _Cowboys and Aliens_ or the remake of _Conan the Barbarian_.

Except they aren't; reviews of such boy-tosh may be predominantly negative, but the tone is not so much derisive as regretful at opportunities wasted. No matter that movies aimed at boys feature superpowers or super-robots or saving the world with super-ninja skills. Those sorts of fantasies are permissible, even cool, even when the films promoting them are awful. And I must confess that, ever since a brain transplant left me with the cultural tastes of a 15-year-old boy, I too prefer them to the 100-year-old-vampire-falling-in-love-with-little-old-me.

But Twilight caters to the sexual fantasies of teenage girls. I'm not saying in a good way. But at least it caters to them, and there's not a lot else at the cinema that does, certainly not in a Young Adult fantasy genre that invariably reduces females to also-rans or decorative sidekicks while the Harry Potters and Lightning Thieves and Sorcerer's Apprentices get on with their questing. In fact, I wish there were MORE films like _Twilight_ , not fewer. There, I've said it. Because so long as supernatural fantasies aimed at teenage girls are raking in money, we're likely to see more of them produced.

Indeed, the _Twilight_ effect is already discernible, surely, in the New Wave of Fairy Tale movies - not quite Angela Carter-esque revisionist as seen in _The Company of Wolves_ (rather too much subtext and not enough story for my liking) but all featuring heroines spunkier than your traditional Disney princess-passive. We've already had Catherine Hardwicke's _Red Riding Hood_ (too much in thrall to the _Twilight_ films that Hardwicke inaugurated) and there are two new Snow Whites to set alongside the 1997 telefilm _Snow White: A Tale of Terror_ (Sigourney Weaver as a wicked stepmom!). Pixar has its first female protagonist coming up in _Brave_ , and Disney already came up trumps with the unexpectedly wonderful _Tangled_ , which put a lovely new spin on the Rapunzel story.

I bet I'm not the only one impatient to see how 18-year-old Emily Hagins will follow _My Sucky Teen Romance_ , her endearing vampire love story which is everything _Breaking Dawn_ is not. And, while it's more sci-fi than supernatural fantasy, next spring we have _The Hunger Games_ , adapted from the first of Suzanne Collins's trilogy, which plunges a resourceful heroine into a dystopian life-or-death situation; I started reading it expecting _Battle Royale Lite_ , but ended up thrilled and impressed. Here's hoping it's successful enough for a greenlight on the other two books, which introduce a romantic triangle far more interesting than Nella-Edward-Jacob. But would even the first _Hunger Games_ have been made without _Twilight_?

Who knows? One of these days we may get a young adult fantasy which cracks the genre wide open, a teenage romance to rank with, say, the sublime _The Ghost and Mrs Muir._ It could happen! _Breaking Dawn_ is a small price to pay.

Chapter 25: Genre Slippage

Holy looming planets, Batman! It has already been observed that Mike Cahill's _Another Earth_ and Lars Von Trier's _Melancholia_ share the evocative image of another heavenly body in close proximity to our Earth. For me, though, the most significant thing about this coincidence is that neither film would normally be classified as Science Fiction. And it's not as if either director is deliberately distancing himself from the term, the way Margaret Atwood seems to have been going through increasingly baroque contortions in her efforts to explain that what she writes is "speculative fiction" and not SF. (Though surely the very term "speculative fiction" is tautological. Isn't all fiction speculative by definition?)

There has long been a tendency for SF themes to bleed into the mainstream and non-SF genres. What is _It's a Wonderful Life_ if not a story set in a parallel universe? And we've come to expect a touch of SF in our action pics; as far back as the 1960s James Bond and assorted other spy movies flirted with technology so farfetched it tipped over into futuristic, and it's rare for a Hollywood thriller nowadays to pay much heed to the laws of physics. But more and more high-concept big-budget action flicks - _Limitless_ , _The Adjustment Bureau_ , _In Time_ are just three recent examples - are coming out of the closet as unabashedly SF, even though not one of them features what Atwood refers to as "talking squids in outer space".

These films are aimed at audiences who probably wouldn't object to talking squids anyway, but I've written before about the way chronological jiggling, time warps and parallel universes have infiltrated mainstream drama, rom-coms and sitcoms. And SF creep into the mainstream and arthouse is on the increase, even if the term "science fiction" is only ever mentioned by critics disparagingly, as if the very fact that the film under question refuses to classify itself as that makes it automatically superior to the usual genre nonsense.

Take three other high-profile releases from 2011. _Never Let Me Go_ was sold as Brit Lit (tagline: "Based on the best selling novel") whereas it was really _The Island_ for people who don't like chases and explosions, with Keira Knightley instead of Scarlett Johansson. Hanna was sold as a junior _Bourne Identity_ ("Adapt or Die"), whereas it was essentially a junior _Universal Soldier_ ("Robots Run Amok"), with Saoirse Ronan and Cate Blanchett instead of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren (and OK, so Ronan is not technically a robot. But you know what I mean). _Midnight in Paris_ was basically a time travel yarn, but marketed as a Woody Allen film, which is permissible since he's a genre unto himself and has already flirted with SF in _Sleeper_ , _Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex..._ and - in the most memorable bit of _Stardust Memories_ \- aliens. ("We enjoy your movies. Particularly the early, funny ones.")

It's tempting to dismiss such films as Science Fiction for People Who Don't Like Science Fiction, since mainstream pontification on the genre still yields astonishingly blinkered pronouncements from folk who wouldn't be caught dead at a _Star Trek_ movie. Conversely, a lot of people who might have enjoyed _Monsters_ were probably put off by it's having been marketed as a variation on _District 9_ ("After Six Years, They're No Longer Aliens. They're Residents.") when it was really the sort of thing that plays better at Sundance than at BIFFF - a low-budget relationship movie that just happened to have a couple of tentacled aliens as walk-on extras.

But it's more likely a symptom of the way boundaries between traditional genres are dissolving. So maybe it's time to redefine those genres, or even nominate some new ones. Since barely a week goes by without another set of actors doing give-me-my-Oscar-now acting in yet another overwrought drama triggered by a car accident ( _Another Earth_ , _Margaret_ , _Rabbit Hole_ etc) I'd like to propose _Roadkill_ as a genre in its own right. Remakes, sequels or prequels can be lumped together under _Recycling_. Then there's the _Girls in Fetishwear_ genre typified by _Sucker Punch_ and _Colombiana_. _This Year's Leslie Mann Movie_ would take care of all those bromances involving her husband, Judd Apatow. And we mustn't forget _The Tom Cruise Running Very Fast Film_.

Chapter 26: Caught in the Act

_Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol_ is yet another sad example of a once punchy title getting saddled with needless punctuation and verbiage. As for the film itself - the first act's a blast, the second is gripping, the third is... meh, proving it's not just the title which suffers from an anticlimactic tail-off. But would you look at me, talking in "acts" like that. Anyone would think I was an action movie screenwriter!

At one point Ethan Hunt (if only they'd called him Derek) and his buddies are accused of blowing up the Kremlin. (Not a spoiler since it's in the trailer.) I started thinking _heh heh_ , how on earth are those scallywags going to get out of Russia now? But then, suddenly, they're in Dubai! The film skips from one act to the next other without even bothering to join up the dots and tell us how they got there!

I'm not saying this is necessarily a Bad Thing; there's only so much amusement to be had from watching people trying to sneak through airport lounges or past border control. But if that's the case, why bother paying lip service to plot at all? Why not just serve up three action set pieces with chapter headings, the way Quentin Tarantino sidestepped the pesky narrative flow problem in _Inglourious Basterds_? Why not just give us Act I: Moscow; Act II: Dubai; Act III: Mumbai?

You could probably extend this policy to all the other action movies ever made. For example, you'd have Act I: Trapped in an Elevator! Act II: Trapped on a Bus! Act III: Trapped on a Runaway Tube Train! ( _Speed_ being an exemplary title which had no need of pesky punctuation.) You wouldn't even need to go through the motions of developing your characters since they're all archetypes anyway - Hero, Villain, Girl, a Disposable Sidekick or two. If there were problems telling them apart, you could give Villain a big moustache.

It's true that the three-pronged narrative seems natural, since what all stories have in common is a beginning, middle and end (if not necessarily in that order). But I'm not sure Syd Field had this _reductio ad absurdum_ in mind when he first outlined the setup-confrontation-resolution paradigm in screenwriting guides that have convinced generations of would-be William Goldmans that the three act structure is the only way to go.

But after _Ghost Protocol_ I got to thinking, why not junk the third act altogether? Action films would end on a high and we'd go home feeling satisfied, instead of underwhelmed and slightly fractious, like children fed on too many E numbers. Do we really need to see the narrative resolved? Don't make me laugh; there _is_ no narrative, just a series of action set-pieces strung together with sundry MacGuffins and wisps of back story. Just as there are no characters, only Cruise and a bunch of stooges handpicked to make him look good.

Come to think of it, many 2011 blockbusters would have worked better if they'd had their third acts lopped off: _X-Men: First Class_ , _Captain America: The First Avenger_ , _In Time,_ _Contagion_ , _Source Code_ are just some that spring to mind. Losing the third act would not only prevent films from overstaying their welcome, it would also bypass that inevitable post-action tristesse when the third act fails to live up to its predecessors by delivering a _coup de grace_ which is bigger and better than anything we've seen in the film so far, and by extension anything we've seen in the cinema, ever. You'd go home thinking, "Wow, I wish I could get more of that," instead of, "That would have been good, if only it had been 20 minutes shorter."

The makers of action movie seem to think what we want is more spectacular action and faster running and bigger explosions, whereas no, those are things we know we'll be getting anyway. What we'd really like is for them to work a bit harder on the nuts and bolts that are supposed to be holding the action and running and explosions in place - character, motivation, plot.

Or I guess I could just learn to walk out before the film has ended.

Chapter 27: Hurrah for Anti-heroines

I have no intention of going to see _The Iron Lady_. This is not for political reasons (though there is that) but because it's by the same director as _Mamma Mia!,_ which was like a drunken Club Med hoedown shot through a sock. Worse, I hear they've softened Margaret Thatcher in an effort to make her seem human and vulnerable. Again, I don't object to this for political reasons (though there is that) but because it's not what I want from a movie about one of the most powerful women of our time.

No, what I really want is for screenwriters to go Shakespearean on Mrs Thatcher's ass. I don't care if we're tricked into empathising, even sympathising with her, just so long as we get hamartia, hubris and anagnorisis as well. I want the whole anti-hero package, and all they're giving me is a bit of pathos. What a waste! But this is not the first time we've seen Great Women of History watered down in the cockamamie belief it'll turn them into feminist role models. It's not long since both _Bathory_ and _The Countess_ attempted to depict Erzsebert Bathory, history's most notorious female serial killer, as misunderstood. I'm sorry, but we already have quite enough female victims in the movies. Give me wallowing in the blood of virgins any day.

This week we have another historical bad girl whose most interesting attributes have been glossed over in a misguided bid to stop us hating her. The Wallis Simpson of Madonna's _W.E_. survives a kicking from her first husband to become a Social X-ray with such fabulous taste in frocks and earrings that Edward VIII renounces his throne for her, while her 1988 namesake finds in her a posthumous pillar of sisterly solidarity and sartorial inspiration. _Hello?_ Did Bette Davis live and die in vain? I don't give two hoots about this vapid clothes horse, even if she can rustle up a mean Dry Martini; I want to see Wallis in all her domineering, adulterous, twice-divorced, Nazi-loving glory - especially if it makes her seem like a total bitch. I want to see the Wallis who declared, upon hearing in 1940 that the British were getting the crap bombed out of them, "I can't say I feel sorry for them."

If it's female paragons you're after, you can always trot along to share a couple of hours of house arrest with _The Lady_ , and welcome to it, but I'm saving myself for Charlize Theron in _Young Adult_ , who with screenwriter Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman pulls off with a fictional character what these yellow-bellied biopics cannot. Theron plays Mavis Gary, a deluded, alcohol-addled, self-centred career girl who sets about winning back her high-school sweetheart, and doesn't give a fig that he's a happily married man with a new-born baby. As a big city girl in a small town, Theron pulls off the sort of deliciously misanthropic reaction shots we haven't seen since those friendly rubes kept chirping "Good morning!" to Linda Fiorentino in _The Last Seduction_.

Mavis is the kind of badly behaved woman you're more likely to find in French cinema than in Hollywood, where they've got a tedious fixation on redemption. In particular, she reminds me of Karin Viard in _La Nouvelle Eve_ \- a scatty singleton who regularly gets roaring drunk, has casual sex, and tries to seduce happily married men, all without ever being punished for her sins, and is so badly behaved she even manages to start a catfight at a lesbian birthday party.

But Mavis comes across as more human and vulnerable and credible a character than the subject of those half-baked biopics, and is bags more fun to watch into the bargain. Some commentators think that unless female characters are irreproachable icons of empowerment, they're sexist stereotypes, but they're wrong - it's our flaws that make us real. If you really want to show Margaret Thatcher or Wallis Simpson as human and vulnerable, you don't do it by making them frail, or giving them a puppy, or retro-fitting them as feminist role models. You make them more like Mavis Gary. Pretend they're fictional, if need be, but never, ever soft-pedal their vices.

Afterword

These film columns were first published in the Guardian newspaper from January 2011 to January 2012. Heartfelt 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.

All You Need is Glove: The Accessory Theory of Film Criticism

The Auteur Theory as a method of film criticism has had its day. We may well ask if it was ever relevant anyway. Are filmgoers really aware of who directed _Tootsie_ or _Return of the Jedi_? And do they give a toss? So what _is_ it about a movie that makes its mark on our minds? If not the direction, then the editing? Cinematography? Screenplay? No, it's the little things that stick in the memory cells: the hats, the shoes, the handbags. In other words, the accessories.

On practical application of The Accessory Theory, we may find that a bad film which features a fair number of eye-catching accessories (for example, _The Hunger_ , which almost entirely consists of them) is often more worthy of attention than a good film which lacks any. Perhaps this is why Bresson and Rohmer and films with a lot of nudity are often so boring. What is it, after all, that people remember most from _His Girl Friday_? Not Howard Hawks' direction, but that outrageous chimney-shaped growth which was Rosalind Russell's hat. In the words of the famous French philosopher, 'Il n'y a pas des oeuvres; il n'y a que Gucci.' (Or, if you'd prefer, 'There is no Godard, only Gucci.')

This would suggest that a film like _Raging Bull_ , in which gloves figure prominently, has less in common with other films by the same director ( _Taxi Driver_ , _Mean Streets_ and so on) than with _La Belle et la Bete_ . Beauty is transported through time and space by her magic glove, much in the same way as Jake La Motta biffs his way through an entire celluloid montage sequence. Let us then consider the glove in cinema history as an illustration of the wide-ranging implications of accessories.

Despite their connotations of civilised formality, gloves in films are usually an indication of the id turned loose; a method of smothering the normal boring human being and giving the super ego carte blanche to indulge in licentious behaviour. Think of Rita Hayworth in _Gilda_. No need for her to remove her strapless black satin gown; she does something far naughtier - she strips off her glove.

Think of assassin Alain Delon in _Le Samourai_ , hands hidden beneath immaculate white gloves as he executes his contracts like a man disposing of so much surplus footage. Or Robert Vaughn's gunfighting fingers cased in black leather, a mark of the most professional if not the most magnificent of _The Magnificent Seven_. Criminals in caper movies always wear gloves. Fingerprints are the seat of the soul, and truly successful felons must keep their souls under wraps.

Gloves can also denote assumption of duty or position. They are a part of uniform, specialised sportswear or protective gear. Or all three at once for the _Maitresse_ , suppressing her individual personality beneath the role's responsibility for its own unspeakably sadistic acts. Gloves preserve anonymity and detachment while wielding the scalpel of authority. Once he gets his rubber gloves on, the surgeon in _Les yeux sans visage_ can carve slices off women's faces with impunity. With his crisp white gloves, Ryuichi Sakamoto in _Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence_ can run an entire wartime prison camp without dirtying his hands.

The glove conceals even as it reveals. It is not just a symbol, but also a mask. Garbo's _Queen Christina_ wears macho gauntlets when she disguises herself as a man. In _Fedora_ , Marthe Keller wears gloves to conceal her identity - her hands cannot lie about her real age - while Claude Rains in _The Invisible Man_ can hide _nothing_ with his gloves. (One of the beauties of the Accessory Theory is its flexibility - it's the theory equivalent of the Little Black Dress.)

In _Yellow Submarine_ the glove is a malignant force. Freed from every last vestige of the human hand and its restraining wrist, gloves are liable to run riot and act nasty. This is the glove at its most primal, in its most terrifying incarnation, abandoning the veneer of sophistication and going straight for the jugular. When the werewolf's hands sprout hair, it's not just a sign of bestial metamorphosis; it is also the autogeneration of a furry glove, a means of submerging the human identity beneath a carnal, carnivorous one.

Rarely, if ever, have films knowingly been constructed on the basis of accessory alone. Titles are often misleading. _The Gauntlet_ , though it may well feature a glove or two in passing, turns out to be not about gloves _per se_ at all, though that five-fingered shadow still looms large over the action. But although gloves may not be central to a theme, they can be instrumental in developing it. Indeed they often hold the key to meaningful interpretation. Shoes, socks and scarves all have their parts to play upon the twin screens of Life and Art.

So if directors are to be taken at all seriously, they must henceforth be judged on their use of accessories to further the plot and clarify concept. A mere hat-brim may be all that distinguishes a masterpiece from the rest of the common dross. A pair of elbow-length white kid gloves, as worn by femme fatale Jane Greer when she first steps into Robert Mitchum's life in _Out of the Past_ , can mean the difference between triumph and disaster.

(First published in _Time Out_ , 1984)

Read a sample from **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 plebeian 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 De Palma'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 the 1990s. 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 Hieronymus 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

Read a sample from **Suckers** , a vampire novel by Anne Billson:

Chapter 1

It wasn't murder, in my opinion. Some people might have had trouble understanding that. I might have had trouble myself if I hadn't been there when it happened. Afterwards, Duncan sank into a depression and stayed depressed for the next five years. By the time he managed to snap out of it, he had almost succeeded in convincing himself the whole thing had been a dark trick of his imagination. Almost, but not quite. Each time he noticed my left hand, he couldn't help remembering what had happened to the top joint of the little finger. I caught him looking sometimes, but we never talked about what he was thinking. We didn't have to. I just knew.

After thirteen years we were different people, leading different lives. Duncan had turned into a non-smoking teetotal vegetarian. And he had gone right off horror movies; he would turn the television off as soon as it threatened to broadcast anything with old dark houses, or women in black, or ooh-whee-ooh music, and no-one though this odd, least of all Lulu. She was squeamish too, and naturally assumed he was switching off on her account.

But the main difference was that we were both making money now, and lots of it. Duncan made more than me, but then he worked harder than I did. I'd gone for the soft option, starting out as a Stylist, then altering my job description to Creative Consultant, which sounded more impressive and pretentious - more in tune with the times.

There was no shortage of work, because there was a flash new magazine title on the newsstands every couple of weeks - all style and no content, packed with features dealing with 'image' and 'lifestyle'. It was down to people like me to keep publishers informed about their target market of upwardly mobile young adults with disposable incomes. I took the 'Creative' part of my job description literally. Most of the information I provided was completely fictitious.

Duncan and I weren't the only ones on a roll. Pubs and clubs were jam-packed full of people with too much money to spend, all standing elbow to elbow and jogging each other's drinks. You had to queue to get to the bar, and you had to queue to get to the Ladies Room as well. If you strained your ears to hear beyond the sound of flushing cisterns you could sometimes pick up the discreet chip-chop of credit cards against porcelain, followed by gentle snuffling as fine white lines were hoovered up into hovering nostrils.

These people took their pleasures seriously. In pubs, clubs, or restaurants, they talked about money and work, work and money, all the time. And they dressed like guests at a funeral. It made me uneasy sometimes, so it must have made Duncan uneasy too. Everywhere you looked, there would be women dressed in black - white faces, black hair, mouths painted scarlet. It was The Look. You saw it on the street. You saw it on the covers of magazines. You saw it presenting arts programmes on TV.

And some of us saw it in our nightmares. I made sure I didn't look like that. It was thirteen years since I had gone out dressed in nothing but black. And I made sure there was more to my life than money and work, work and money. I had a wide range of interesting hobbies. Gardening, for instance. I didn't do much digging - you could only dig so far on a balcony - but there was plenty of honeysuckle, most of it covered in aphids. Aphid-hunting was another of my hobbies. The black ones were easiest to spot, but the green ones were juicier, more fun to pop. At the end of a serious aphid-squishing session my fingers would be stained the colour of lime juice.

I collected plastic construction kits as well, though not the aeroplane ones. I had a pterodactyl with a battle-scarred wing, a life-size skull which glowed in the dark, and a Visible Woman with a detachable foetus. I watched videos, and I did crosswords, and sometimes, just to keep my hand in, I dressed up and went out and socialized, like everyone else.

But my favourite hobby was persecuting Patricia Rice. I knew her name because she had written it on a small piece of card and slid it into the little slot next to her doorbell. She had no idea who I was, of course, but I knew her. She lived in a ground-floor flat in a Victorian terrace just south of Waterloo Station. She was a lucky girl; she had gas-fired central heating, new wiring, and a freshly-injected damp-proof course. I knew all this because I had seen it for myself. The estate agents had shown me round. They had even given me a set of keys and later, when my offer had been accepted, I had gone back on my own to wander from room to room, deciding where to put the furniture. I had paid my surveyors. I had run up a tab with my lawyers. I was all set to exchange contracts when Patricia Rice came along out of nowhere and gazumped me.

It wasn't as though I'd had trouble finding somewhere else. I took out a mortgage on a first-floor flat across town. The main drawback was the lack of soundproofing; it was a cowboy conversion, and the people upstairs drove me nuts with their noise. Besides, one of them was German. Up until then, I had properly encountered only one German in my life, but he had been more than enough to leave me with a distinct anti-German bias.

Even so, I liked my flat, because it was only a brisk ten-minute walk away from Duncan's. So in a way, Patricia Rice had done me a favour. But that didn't mean I was going to let her get away with it. For three years after the gazumping, I was too busy to care, but then I found myself with time on my hands. I thought about Patricia and how she had made a fool of me, and every so often I would nip down to SE1 to see how she was getting on. The lifts at Lambeth North tube station always seemed to be out of order, and it warmed my heart just to think of her toiling up and down that grimy staircase every day. I thought long and hard about how I could make things worse. As soon as the Channel Tunnel opened, I'd decided, I would send her address to a selection of Belgian youth groups, with the message _Cheap rates, towels provided, backpacks welcome._

I also liked to dial her telephone number and, once she'd answered, leave my handset lying on the table; that way, her phone was all tied up so that no-one could call her, nor could she ring out until I hung up again. I couldn't be bothered with any of that heavy breathing nonsense, though I would occasionally pipe Def Leppard down the line. I didn't particularly care for Def Leppard; I'd bought the tape especially for Patricia.

But the most rewarding part of this particular hobby was the correspondence. It was one-way, but I didn't mind. I had hours of fun cutting up magazines, and Cow-gumming letters on to blank sheets of Basildon Bond. Having to wear rubber gloves made it even more of a challenge. Once or twice, I got up early so I could loiter outside Patty's flat and watch her mail being delivered bang on eight, just before she left for her boring job in an employment agency - I knew where she worked because I'd followed her there. Opposite her front door was a small construction site; the workmen never showed up before ten, and the cement mixers provided excellent cover. That way I could enjoy the spectacle as Patricia emerged, tense and nervous after opening the latest in the YOU ARE A SLUT AND YOU WILL DIE HORRIBLY series, or the slightly more colourful variations on BURN IN HELL YOU VILE NAZI BITCH.

The subject of Patricia Rice came up one afternoon while I was hanging around in Duncan and Lulu's kitchen. Lulu had been making it obvious she didn't want me there. She was fussing over her chickpeas, never passing up an opportunity to remind me that she and Duncan were expecting people for dinner, and that I wasn't on the guest list. Everyone else I knew bought their hummus ready-made from the supermarket, but Lulu liked to make things difficult for herself.

She kept asking, 'What do you think, Dora? Do you reckon this'll be enough?' until I felt like ramming the ruddy chickpeas down her throat. 'You know Jack's a real Bunter,' she said in that little-girl way of speaking which got on my nerves. 'If he doesn't get enough, he'll just start scoffing everyone else's.'

'Crumbs,' I said, rocking back on my chair. 'You'd jolly well better make lashings of it, then.' Even Jack, I thought, might lose his appetite once confronted by this khaki-coloured mush, but I stopped myself from saying so out loud. Lulu might have been a pain in the neck, but Duncan, for some reason best known to himself, was fond of her. And I didn't want to upset Duncan.

As usual when Lulu was being obnoxious he was keeping a low profile. He was sitting at the far end of the kitchen table, retouching a print he'd promised Jack as a belated birthday present. It was a photo of Alicia draped in a black veil, standing among the tombstones in Kensal Rise cemetery. Duncan might have gone off horror movies, but he had never quite managed to kick the cemetery habit. It was a striking photograph - made even more striking by his signature, which automatically added a bob or two to its market value.

Duncan had once stepped out with Alicia, and he had the photos to prove it. He made a habit of keeping in touch with his ex-girlfriends, even when they insisted on marrying jerk-offs like Jack. Duncan and Jack seemed to get on quite well - they were always discussing manly topics such as fast cars and football. You had to know Duncan as well as I did to realize that fast cars and football didn't interest him at all. He was just trying to keep up appearances.

Alicia was usefully photogenic, so long as you overlooked her weak chin, and Duncan still used her as a model in some of the arty, non-commercial work he liked to turn out occasionally. He had photographed her in the nude when she'd been pregnant, and then he'd done some more nude studies of her with the new baby; the baby had been nude, as well. Alicia had framed one of the pictures and hung it over her dining table. Jack and Alicia were a thoroughly modern couple, and to look at them you would never have guessed that he had bribed her to give up her career so she could concentrate on breeding.

Lulu started chopping up parsley with a wicked-looking knife - rather closer to me than was necessary. 'Watch out, Dora,' she said. 'Better move back, or you'll lose another finger.' Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Duncan glance up sharply. Lulu was being spiteful, but he refrained from giving her the ticking off she deserved. Once again, it was left to me to show her up.

'It's only the last joint,' I said. 'All the best villains have the top joint of their little finger missing.'

Lulu paused in her chopping and said 'Huh?' I adored making her look stupid in front of Duncan. Every so often, he had to be reminded that he had more in common with me than with her.

' _The 39 Steps_ ,' he said without bothering to look up again. 'Or is it _The Yakuza_?'

Lulu repeated 'Huh?' and, pretending not to care, went back to her parsley. When she'd reduced it to a sloppy green mulch, she forced me to move even further away from the table so she could reach the blender. I'd been rocking my chair so much that one of the legs had worked itself loose. Now when I scraped it back across the floor, there was a faint but ominous splintering sound. The chair didn't give way, not quite, but I sat quietly for a while, not wanting to push my luck.

To my face, and especially in front of Duncan, Lulu was all intimacy, but I knew she disliked me almost as much as I despised her. On her side, at least, it was nothing personal; she was the sort of woman who regards all other women as rivals. She hated leaving me alone with Duncan, even for a short while, imagining I was ready to jump on him the minute her back was turned. If she'd been at all perceptive, she would have realized it wasn't his body that interested me. He was too thin and pale and neurotic-looking to qualify as beefcake. But she sensed there was something between us, and she was envious of that. Duncan and I had been through something she could never be a part of.

Like Duncan, Lulu didn't talk much about her past. Unlike Duncan, this was not because she had something to hide, nor was it because she wanted to forget - it was because she realized her past just wasn't terribly interesting. Her real name was Lorraine. Once, as a joke - because I knew she wouldn't have the faintest idea what I was talking about \- I asked her if she'd called herself Lulu after the heroine of the Frank Wedekind plays. She looked blank and said no, as a little girl she'd been rather partial to a pop song called 'I'm a Tiger', and had named herself after the singer.

It had been easy for her to get modelling work, but she had never had the luck or drive to make it into the top ranks - only as far as one or two of the middlebrow women's magazines, the sort you find on sale next to supermarket checkouts. I always reckoned she could have had a successful career posing topless for some of the cheesier tabloids, but she was too much of a snob. She had masses of streaky blonde hair and enormous breasts, and liked to pretend she was even more dimwitted than she really was. She was convinced that all men fancied her, and equally convinced that all women hated her because they were jealous of her face and figure. She was right about women not liking her, but wrong about the reasons. Women didn't like her because she was a complete bonehead.

She'd latched on to Duncan because he was famous. Not a household name, exactly, but he was getting there; he'd already appeared on one or two TV chat shows, moaning about how tedious it was to be constantly jetting off to the Seychelles to take pictures of fifteen-year-old cuties in string bikinis. At twenty-five, Lulu was too old for this sort of lark, but she was still offered work when occasion demanded the sort of dollybird who could fill out a bodice. I suspected it wouldn't be long now before she decided to pack in the career altogether in order to concentrate on family life. She was already pouncing on the flimsiest of pretexts to steer the conversation round to babies. Come to think of it, this was probably why Jack and Alicia had been invited over. Lulu would be able to display her maternal tendencies by cooing over Abigail.

When I had first caught up with Duncan again, eight years or so after all the unpleasantness, I found him living in the same building, but the place had been transformed. Previously, it had been a gloomy warren of rooms painted in bright peeling colours left over from the sixties: red and black, or purple, with gold stars stencilled on to the bathroom ceiling. The communal hallway, with its crumbling cornices and soggy carpet, had always been packed with bicycles and stacks of junk mail. Than an uncle had died and Duncan had inherited the leasehold, and he had started to do the place up. It was partly the physical effort of that which had hauled him up out of the slough of self-pity.

One by one the tenants had moved out, mostly because they were fed up with the constant hammering and drilling. Duncan sold the other flats at a vast profit and used the money to refit his own. Some of the interior walls had been removed to make one enormous living room with floor-to-ceiling windows and stripped-pine floorboards. When I first saw the changes, the place was barely recognizable. Which was probably the whole idea; he was trying to obliterate all trace of what had happened there.

Lulu didn't bring much with her when she moved in - just a couple of Swiss Cheese plants and a trunkful of clothes and make-up. She insisted that Duncan sell two-thirds of his book collection so the remainder fitted neatly into a couple of alcoves instead of cluttering up the entire room. Each month she bought Vogue and the rest of the glossies and arranged them in neat stacks on the coffee table. She also bought a lot of imported Italian fashion magazines, though her knowledge of the language was limited to words such as _l'uomo, donna_ and _lei_.

Now she was bustling round the kitchen, dressed in her customary leisure wear of pink Lycra leggings, oversized pink T-shirt, and pink towelling headband. There wasn't much in Lulu's wardrobe that wasn't pink or red. She never wore black. As far as I was concerned, this was her one redeeming feature. She thought it made her look sallow.

She finished messing with the blender and started peeling the paper from a big slab of ricotta. I told her about Patricia Rice because I knew it would upset her. To my delight, she made little tutting noises of disapproval. 'Dora, that's _awful_ ,' she said. 'I'm not sure that you realize how awful that is. It's really mean. You wouldn't like it if I did that sort of thing to you.'

'But you wouldn't _do_ that sort of thing,' I said. 'You're much too nice. Besides, you and I know each other, and the whole point is that Patricia and I have never met. This way, even if she called the police in - even if they could be bothered to launch an investigation into a couple of harmless anonymous notes - they'd never know where to start looking.'

'Not unless someone tipped them off,' Lulu muttered, just loud enough for me to hear.

Duncan looked up from his retouching. 'Dora, you're wicked,' he said. 'We'd better ask her to dinner, Lu, or we'll start getting poison-pen letters.'

Lulu shot him a look of exasperation. 'Duncan! I'm not sure there's enough food as it is.'

'That's OK,' I said brightly. 'I don't eat much.'

Lulu gritted her teeth and pretended not to sulk.

'That's settled, then,' said Duncan, like a referee.

'Yes,' she said. 'That seems to be _that_.' She ploughed her fork through the cheese so vehemently that a large clod of it flew out of the bowl and landed on the table, just missing the edge of his photograph.

'Jesus, Lu!' he snapped. 'For Christ's sake watch what you're doing. That was nearly half a day's work down the tubes.' His expression was thunderous, and for a minute I thought he was going to scrunch up the photo and chuck it at her. On the whole, he managed to keep his temper, like a lot of other things, under wraps, but sometimes it got away from him. These days, though, he was better at controlling it, and now I could see him taking a deep breath and staring hard into the middle distance until the storm clouds dispersed. He wiped the cheese up with his finger and ate it, then looked pointedly in my direction, as if to punish Lulu by deliberately excluding her from the conversation. I tried not to smile as I saw her lower lip quivering.

'Dora,' he said, 'I really need your advice.'

'About what?'

For a moment, he was lost for words, as though my response had thrown him off balance. 'Work,' he said at last. 'Photos and stuff.'

I hadn't expected this. I'd done a short stint in the photographic department at college, but Duncan was aware I didn't know anything like as much about photography as he did.

Lulu muscled in. 'Maybe I could help.'

'I doubt it, love,' Duncan said. He only called her 'love' when he was being patronizing. 'It's technical.'

'What do you want to know?' I asked, hoping for another chance to get Lulu to demonstrate her stupidity.

'Show you later,' he said.

Lulu turned to face the stove, still looking as though she was about to burst into tears. As soon as she'd turned her back he gave me a look, a glance so naked in its desperation that it knocked me for six. It was just for a moment, and then it was gone. Then he bent his head back down over the print and continued to dab away at the shadows with his fine-pointed brush, filling in all the flaws with tiny black dots. Years of point-blank brushwork had taken their toll on his eyesight. Sometimes, for watching television and so on, he was having to wear spectacles.

For a while there was silence. Lulu continued to pout, and Duncan continued to dab. I sat without moving, trying to resist the temptation to start rocking my chair again. I had a feeling deep inside which at first I had trouble identifying, because it had been years since I'd last felt it - thirteen years, to be exact. It took me some time to recognize it as excitement.

Chapter 2

Lulu had swapped her pink leisure wear for pink formal wear. She swayed from side to side to the music, if you could call it music.

'What _is_ this noise?' I asked.

'It's New Vague music, Dora. Recommended by my yoga teacher. It's supposed to relax you.'

'Sounds like whales,' said Alicia.

'I think it's got whales in it somewhere,' Lulu said.

I picked up the cassette case and scanned the notes. 'Nope, no whales here. Ethereal flutes, yes. Haunting pan-pipes. yes, not to mention the gentle ebb and flow of celestial oceans. Oh, and we mustn't forget the cosmic tinkle of intergalactic glockenspiels.'

Lulu snatched the cassette case from me and read out loud, 'This music creates the perfect ambience for those precious contemplative moments.'

I yawned, which probably convinced Lulu the New Vague was working. I'd already had my fill of precious contemplative moments. Over on the other side of the room Duncan was listening intently to Jack. I wished he would get to the point and tell me what was on his mind.

Alicia was flicking through magazines. You couldn't blame her; the repartee, so far, had not been sparkling. Over pre-dinner drinks, Jack and Duncan had talked about Ferraris and Grand Prix racing, while Alicia had listed the pros and cons of Pampers versus Peau Douce. Then, while Lulu was slopping out the hummus, Jack launched into a monologue about office politics on the weekly magazine where he was Features Editor. He worked with a load of degenerates who seemed to do nothing but snort cocaine and misspell the names of world-famous celebrities: Stephen Speilberg, Eddy Murphy, Arnold Shwarzenegger. Everyone listened politely as he fulminated about his co-workers' habit of using up all the office biros - throwing away the ink-tubes and leaving the outer cases crusty with a mixture of white powder and snot. I noticed he scrupulously avoided mentioning Roxy, his _zaftig_ personal assistant. I'd seen them in Gnashers together, but they'd been too busy snogging to see me back.

At this point I started to cast despairing glances in Duncan's direction, but Jack was getting into his stride. He surrendered the floor only when he came up against someone even more self-centred than himself. The first we heard was a faint spluttering from the bedroom, like water gurgling through an ancient plumbing system. Then came an ear-splitting wail which persisted all the way through the pasta course. Eventually, Alicia noticed I had dropped my fork and jammed fingers in both ears, so she brought the baby to the table and rocked it into semi-silence.

Once everyone's attention had been drawn to Abigail, the rest of the evening disappeared swiftly down the plughole. After the tagliatelle Lulu related in meretricious detail the plot of a film which none of us had seen nor even wanted to see; she herself had watched no more than a TV trailer in which the three leading actors made comical attempts to change a baby's nappy. Lulu interpreted this as a challenge for her to demonstrate that she could do what highly paid Hollywood actors pretended the could not. We were duly treated to a round of nappy-changing between the pasta and the pudding. We were also treated to a round of full-frontal breast-feeding from Alicia. I almost expected Lulu to have a go at that as well, just to prove she had what it took.

And now it was decaffeinated coffee table time. Alicia was cradling the baby with one arm and using her free hand to leaf through the magazines. Abigail's tiny fingers made a grab for the nearest page and scrunched it into a rudimentary origami design. 'Abigail, _no_. Mummy's _reading_.' There was a sound of glossy paper rending as Alicia prised the chubby little fist away.

Lulu brandished another magazine. 'The second issue of _Bellini_ ,' she chirruped. 'I'm going in to see them. Amanda says they pay really well.'

Alicia glanced at the cover. I caught a glimpse of it too, and wished I hadn't; it was a larger-than-life close-up of a heavily made-up model winking at the camera. It gave me the heebie-jeebies whenever I saw anyone winking; it never failed to remind me of things I preferred to forget. I looked away and counted slowly to ten - my well-tested method for wiping unwanted images from my mind. When I looked back, the magazine lay open on Alicia's lap and the picture was no longer visible. She was studying the masthead on the contents page. 'Bellini,' she cooed, rocking the baby gently. ' _Bellini_... Never heard of it.'

'It's a champagne cocktail,' Lulu said helpfully.

Alicia looked as though she were biting back a sharp comment. 'Up to a point, Lu,' she said, in that tone she sometimes used, the one which periodically reminded me why I quite liked her. She flicked through the pages, eventually coming across something which made her stop and flick back. 'But these girls are all topless,' she said.

'So?' I said. 'It's no worse than _The Sun_. Or _Vogue_.'

'No, no,' she said. 'When I say topless, I mean they _don't have any heads_.'

I was about to lean over and see what she was talking about when Lulu snatched the magazine away from her and riffled through it. 'It's all very surreal,' she said grandly. 'Surreal' was one of her favourite words. 'Look at this,' she said, flattening the pages at what appeared to be a fashion feature about lingerie. From where I was sitting it didn't look very surreal at all. She and Alicia bent their heads down over it and started to make bitchy remarks about the models.

I was dying for a cigarette, but I was stuck in a room with four non-smokers. My thoughts turned to alcohol instead. I had drained my glass of wine, and no-one was breaking their neck to offer me a refill, but there was a bottle of cheap brandy sitting untouched on the table. Duncan had bought it some months before, duty free from Barcelona airport, but he never went near alcohol these days, and Lulu drank spirits only when she was trying to impress somebody. Alicia didn't want her milk contaminated with noxious substances, and Jack was sticking to moderate quantities of white wine so that later on he would be able to point the car in the direction of their flat, which was all of two hundred yards away.

No-one was paying me any attention, so I poured myself a large measure and gulped it, slooshing the liquid around my mouth so it wouldn't inflict third-degree burns on my palate. Jack and Duncan were talking about Ferraris again. I began to wish I hadn't stayed.

The New Vague warbling stopped. Lulu was sifting distractedly through her pile of magazines and didn't notice. She was looking for something. 'Duncan?' she asked. 'Where's the first issue?' She raised her voice. 'Duncan?'

Duncan broke off his conversation.

' _Bellini_ ,' Lulu insisted. 'Where did you put the first one?'

'It's somewhere around.'

'I want to show Alicia.'

Duncan paused, and then he said, 'You can show her another time.' There was a note in his voice which hadn't been there before. Oh-oh, I thought. Watch out, Lulu.

' _Duncan_ ,' she said.

Usually he did whatever she asked - anything for a quiet life. But now he was glowering. I hadn't seen him so edgy and bad-tempered in ages, but I really didn't mind, not if it was directed at Lulu. She was pouting again, but with her chin thrust out, determined to stand her ground in front of Jack and Alicia, who were both looking slightly embarrassed.

'Please, Dunc,' she said in her whiniest voice. 'Duncan _Doughnut_.' This was her pet name for him. He had never actually _said_ that he hated it, but you could sometimes see the muscle in his jaw twitching.

For one glorious second I thought he was going to gouge her eyes out, but instead he sighed, and got to his feet. 'I think it's somewhere in the darkroom,' he said.

Lulu laughed triumphantly and clapped her hands together. 'Alicia, wait till you see this,' she said. 'It's really gross.'

As he went past my chair, Duncan spun on his heel and looked me straight in the eye. The effect was like a mild electric shock to the base of my spine. I got the message immediately and leapt to my feet. 'Now?'

He nodded, all of a sudden looking ten years older. 'Might as well get it over with,' he muttered, more to himself than to anyone else. Then he raised his voice. 'We've just got to go over this stuff. It won't take long. A couple of minutes.'

'Can't it wait?' asked Lulu.

'No,' he said. 'No, it can't.'

Jack and Alicia exchanged glances. They thought I was a pest, hanging around Duncan all the time. Lulu was acting like an abandoned puppy. I permitted myself to flash a quick grin in her direction as I followed Duncan into the office. Once the door was shut behind us, I toyed with the idea of making loud and interesting party noises, but he didn't seem to be in the mood for japes.

The office was cramped, with no windows; there was barely enough room for a desk and filing cabinet. One of the walls was taken up by a sliding door; Duncan pulled this open and we went through into the darkroom, which was only slightly bigger than the office and stank of stale chemicals. He tugged a cord and the light came on, and somewhere an extractor fan whirred into life. He dragged a stool away from the bench and insisted I sit down. While he was rummaging through the contents of a filing tray, I twisted round to peer into the sink behind me; it was full of black-and-white twelve-by-tens which eddied slowly as the water level repeatedly rose and fell. The topmost picture was of a nude girl wearing a hat shaped like a dead seagull.

I asked, 'So what's all this about?' but Duncan ignored me and went on rummaging. After a minute or so, he found what he was looking for. I just had time to clock the _Bellini_ logo before he turned to a page somewhere in the middle, smoothing it flat on the bench in front of me.

I looked, and my blood pressure leapt a few notches. The words _Night People!_ were printed in dripping crimson across the top of the page. It was some sort of fashion spread, glistening with saturated colour. The model, of course, was wearing black. It was a dress cut low at the neck, made out of that clinging fabric you could only wear if you were prepared to spend half your waking life in the gym. But the dress itself wasn't so extraordinary; Lulu had a dozen or so like it in various shades of pink. What was extraordinary was the rest of the picture.

The model's face was dead white, and it appeared frozen with shock, which wasn't so surprising since somebody, not entirely in frame, was ramming a sharp stick through her chest. The dark fabric of the dress was gleaming even darker where the stick went in. A trickle of blood ran from one corner of her immaculately painted mouth. Her brilliant teeth were bared in a snarl, and there was no doubt that two of them were fangs.

I read the accompanying column of text out loud. 'Smart vamps only come out at night in the slinkiest of fabrics, but stakes are high when the claret begins to flow and the chips are down.' Beneath this was a list of labels and prices.

I could hardly believe my eyes. But I calmed down and studied the photograph objectively. 'Decadent chic,' I sneered. 'So passe.'

'Go on,' Duncan urged. I flipped the page. The next picture was even more tasteless: the same model in a different dress, black with sequin trimming around the neckline. The same faceless co-star was applying a hacksaw to the dotted line which had been drawn round her neck. There was even more blood than on the previous page. I read, ' _Toothsome cuties dress in black, and keep their heads down when all around them are losing theirs_.'

I tried to summon up another sneer, but my heart wasn't in it. I looked through the rest of the feature. It was the same story in each picture: a white-faced, raven-haired, scarlet-lipped woman, clad in an assortment of little black dresses, being subjected to violent and potentially lethal indignities. I wondered how much it had cost to have the fake bloodstains removed from the clothes after the photo session, though not all the pictures had blood in them. In one, the model's mouth was being stuffed full of lettuce and radicchio. ' _Le dernier cri de French Dressing_ ,' said the text, ' _but remember to go easy on the garlic_.' Another shot depicted the unfortunate girl being dunked in a bath: her eyes were bulging and her long hair swirled like seaweed around her head beneath the force of the water cascading from the taps. ' _Still waters run deep_ ,' intoned the text. ' _Careless dress codes can lead to an early bath_.'

The last photograph in the series was relatively restrained, but somehow that made it all the nastier. The model was bound to a chair, directly in the path of a beam of sunlight which was slicing through a gap between the curtains. She was snarling again, straining at the ropes which held her fast. Where the shaft of light fell on her bare arm, the make-up artists had applied an unpleasant-looking weal, and the blackened flesh appeared to be smouldering. ' _Sunburn can be fatal_ ,' said the text. ' _Smart vamps prize their pale skin and use barrier cream to shield their features from the ultraviolet_.'

A dreadful idea occurred to me. This was Duncan's work, his idea of a public confession. He had finally gone and flipped. 'Don't tell me these are _yours_ ,' I said, not wanting to hear the answer.

'God Lord, no.' He shook his head rather more violently than was necessary, jabbing his finger at the small print at the bottom of the page. 'Dino, it was Dino.'

'Sick-o,' I said. I'd seen Dino's byline before, but had never met him. I didn't have to, I'd seen enough of his work to know he was a pretentious, obnoxious git - he liked to photograph naked women in compromising positions, adorned with lots of tasteful bondage and tight leather corsets. The prints were usually hand-tinted.

Duncan was now looking down at me with a faint smile, but I could see he was smiling only from a misplaced sense of bravado. The sight of the blood, fake though it was, had turned him pale and sweaty-looking. It was hot and stuffy in the tiny room, but not _that_ hot and stuffy.

'Duncan?' I whispered. 'Duncan? Are you all right?'

He wasn't listening. He was staring past my head, at the wall.

He said, 'I think she's back.'

Chapter 3

The occasion demanded a cigarette, so I pulled one out and lit up. There was no ashtray, so I used the floor. Duncan didn't object. I wasn't sure he'd even noticed. He was too busy staring at that last picture, looking as though he'd seen a ghost.

I inhaled, exhaled, and coughed. 'Not her,' I said at last. 'Doesn't look anything like her.'

'Of course it's not her.' He sounded peevish. 'What do you expect? But _look_ at them.'

I looked again. 'Just some people in a studio. Just a way of showing the clothes. Some stupid fashion editor had what she thought was a bright idea.'

'You know there's more to it than that,' he said, adding - quite unnecessarily - 'You were there.'

I protested. 'You did most of it.'

'You helped.'

'Only because you _asked_ me to.'

'Christ, I wish...' His voice trailed away.

'These are just photographs,' I said. 'Stupid ones. These people think they're being deliciously witty, but they've got it wrong. 'I mean, _we_ could cook up something much heavier if we put our minds to it. This is much too restrained. I can't see any limbs being hacked off. What about the chiffon scarf? The body bags? The burial at the crossroads?'

At each word, Duncan flinched as though white-hot needles were being inserted into his flesh. He had to prop himself up against the edge of the bench. I offered my seat, but he shook his head and instead helped himself to a cigarette. It was a long time since I'd seen him smoking. That, as much as anything, brought home the seriousness of the situation.

When he spoke at last, it was slowly and carefully. 'I don't believe this is a coincidence. These photographs are here for a purpose. She's back, and she wants me to know it.'

I told him he was reading too much into the pictures. There was no need to panic. There had never been any need to panic. We had always covered our tracks. But he wasn't listening to a word I said. 'It was the worst day of my life,' he muttered, staring bleakly at the fashion spread. 'I don't know what went wrong.'

Neither did I.

'I blew it,' he went on. 'I don't know what got into me.'

It occurred to me he might _welcome_ the chance to feel guilty all over again. It was high time to nip _that_ in the bud. 'Don't be silly. You did what you had to do. So did I.' I closed the magazine with finality and stared at the cover. A big white baby-soft face winked back at me. 'Jesus Christ! Do they do that every month?'

Duncan nodded sympathetically, though I'm not sure he grasped the precise nature of my phobia; I'm not sure I even grasped it myself. 'Gives you the willies, doesn't it?' he said, smiling sadly. I forced myself to take another look. Wink or no wink, the cover shot was not particularly unusual, neither was the _Bellini_ logo. On the face of it, the magazine was interchangeable with any of the other new publications cluttering our newsstands: _Eva, Riva, Diva, Bella, Nella_ and _Stella_ , and so on.

I turned to the contents page and checked the masthead. The publisher was Multiglom, a name I recognized as one of the first big companies to plant its headquarters in the Docklands area. None of the other names were familiar. The editor was either Japanese, part-Japanese, or pretending to be one or the other. It figured; Japan was still deeply trendy in media circles.

I flicked through the pages. Faint perfume wafted up from scratch 'n' sniff advertising inserts which Lulu had already peeled open and rubbed against her wrists. There was a report on the Milan fashion shows, and an interview with a famous film director who had been commissioned to shoot a cosmetics commercial with a budget exceeding those of all his feature films combined. There were pictures in which debutantes in white satin ballgowns stuck their tongues out at the camera or hoisted their skirts up to expose their legs, and an amusing photo-feature in which the fashion editors had lured some of the Have Nots off the street and into the studio where they'd been decked out in designer clothes. After the shoot, I assumed, they'd had their smelly old rags restored to them and been thrown back into the gutter.

The _Night People!_ fashion feature seemed an aberration, as though it had been thought up by a different editorial team. I was surprised the publishers hadn't demanded it be toned down; those centre pages were not the sort of thing normally considered suitable for the shelves of a family newsagents.

'OK,' I allowed grudgingly. 'It might not be a coincidence.'

Duncan said nothing. He was fiddling with his thumbnail, doing something unbelievably vicious to the cuticle.

'I said, 'If you're _really_ worried, I could check it out.'

He looked up at last. 'How?'

I dropped the end of my cigarette on to the floor and ground it out with my heel. 'I could go and see them. They look as though they could do with some creative consultancy. Lulu says they pay well.'

' _Lulu_ says? How in hell would she know?'

'She said she was going to see them.'

'Like _hell_ she is. She'd better keep out of this.'

I didn't think this was entirely fair, and said so. Lulu might have had half her brain missing, but she was still entitled to make her own decisions.

'Lulu knows nothing,' Duncan said, perhaps more truthfully than he intended, 'and I want it to stay that way.'

'Look,' I said, 'I'm sure there's nothing to worry about, but I'll go in and talk to whoever thought up those photos. Or maybe I can talk to the editor.'

'The editor,' he echoed. All of a sudden there was a faraway look in his eyes. 'That name. Did you see?'

'See what?' I turned back to the masthead. 'Rose Murasaki? Never heard of her.'

'Murasaki Shikibu was a Japanese writer of the Fujiwara era. Eleventh century. She wrote _The Tale of Genji_.' I'd almost forgotten Duncan had once been an avid Japanophile. He'd had a big thing about martial arts movies, had seen Sanjuro ten times or more, trying to work out how Toshiro Mifune had managed to draw his sword and plunge it into Tatsuya Nakadai's heart, all in a single movement so the blood spurted out like a geyser. I wondered whether he'd been able to watch it again at any point over the last thirteen years, what with his latterday aversion to gore. Maybe he still found it bearable; the film was in black and white, after all, and he'd told me the gushing blood was nothing but chocolate sauce.

'So this is a distant relative,' I suggested. 'Or more likely someone's idea of a hip literary reference.'

'That name,' said Duncan. ' _Murasaki_.'

'So?'

'It's the Japanese word for purple.'

This was so rich I started to laugh, but I forced myself to stop before I got carried away. Even in my own ears, the laughter sounded too loud in that cramped space.

Duncan was beginning to ramble. 'Pink and purple. Did you know the Japanese don't have blue movies, they have _pink_ ones? And did you know the French title for _Pretty in Pink_ was _Rose Bonbon_? And did you know _Rose Bonbon_ was the name of a striptease at the Crazy Horse?'

'No,' I said.

'Isabella Rossellini told me that.'

'Really?'

'And she also said that - ' He stopped in mid-sentence and picked up whichever thread it was he had lost. 'It's the ultra _violet_ ,' he said, jabbing the magazine with his finger. 'Sunburn and ultra _violet_. Purple. Violet. Murasaki. That's why she picked the name.'

'Do you really think so?' I asked doubtfully.

'I _know_ so.'

'Duncan, you don't _know_ anything.'

He looked wounded. 'I knew _her_. You didn't know her at all. To you, she was less than human.' I bit my tongue to stop myself blurting out that it wasn't just my verdict - she was less than human whichever way you looked at it.

'Be careful, Dora,' he said, so solemnly that I almost started laughing again. It was the first time anyone had ever told me to be careful of... what? A magazine? The colour purple? Someone who had been dead for thirteen years?

'You're probably right,' he went on in a rush. 'It's probably just coincidence. But of all the things I've done in my life, that was the most evil, the most awful, the most unforgivable, and someone, somewhere, is wanting to make me suffer for it, and - do you know - I think we _deserve_ to suffer, because I don't feel good about what we did at all...'

'I know I'm right,' I said in what I hoped was a reassuring tone. 'I know there's nothing to worry about. You're getting worked up over nothing. Look, I'll go and see these people and find out what's going on, but I promise you: it will be nothing. _Nothing_.'

I didn't believe what I was saying for an instant, I was just saying what I thought would shut him up, but he took a deep breath and was back to his normal charming self. 'What on earth would I do without you, Dora?' He smiled and dipped forward and pecked me on the forehead. 'You don't mind? I never wanted to drag you into any of this. I wasn't thinking straight. I'm still not thinking straight...'

I tried to make my face glow with sincerity. 'You'd better get back to your guests. Lulu's imagination will be running riot.' I felt like kissing him properly, none of that pecking, but he would have been shocked. Not because he was afraid of being unfaithful to Lulu, more because it wasn't the sort of thing he expected from me.

'Oh yes,' he said. 'Lulu.' He picked up the magazine and rolled it into a thick tube and held it up to his eye, like a telescope. 'She wanted Alicia to have a look at this, didn't she.' He hovered uncertainly, as if waiting to be told what to do next.

'If I were you,' I said, "I wouldn't show Alicia. Too tasteless. It might upset her.' I eased the magazine from his grasp. 'Tell Lulu you've lost it. Tell her you'll buy another one tomorrow.'

'Oh yes. Of course.' As he was moving towards the door, I added, 'And don't forget to tell everyone we just had great sex.'

He smiled warily, unsure whether this was supposed to be a joke. 'You shouldn't be nasty to Lulu. She really likes you.'

'Oh, I bet she does.'

'She does,' he insisted. 'Only the other day she was saying how much she admires how you always get what you want.'

'She does all right for herself.'

'She's been having a hard time of it lately, only you'd never know it. She keeps things bottled up.'

I was fed up with all this talk about Lulu. She didn't interest me in the slightest. 'Why don't you go back into the other room,' I said. 'I'm going to stay here and have another cigarette.' I couldn't have one outside; Alicia would have killed me for contaminating the baby's airspace.

'Right,' he said, backing through the door into the office. He paused again. 'Dora...'

'It's OK, Duncan. Really it is. It's not her. She hasn't come back. There is no way on earth that she _could_ come back. Not after everything we did.'

'You're right,' he said. He seemed relieved, as though my word was law. 'And you won't mention any of this to Lu?'

'Don't be daft. She'd get us locked up.'

He forced a smile. 'See you,' he said. He went out, and I heard Lulu saying something as the office door opened. Then it closed again, and the sounds of the outside world were cut off, and I was left alone with my thoughts. I finished that second cigarette, and promptly lit another one. I reckoned I had every right to chain-smoke. My cigarette hand was shaking. The more I tried to hold it steady, the more it shook. I stared at it detachedly. It belonged to someone else.

It was all so obvious. I hadn't been convinced, not to begin with, but that was because I hadn't _wanted_ to be convinced. Duncan was paranoid, but then he had every reason to be, because there was no doubt about it, none at all. The fashion spread was a joke, a ridiculous gesture, but it was also as good as a calling-card. She was back. She thought she could waltz right back into his life, after all these years.

I didn't know what she wanted. I just knew I was going to stop her from getting it.

It was one of those nights. The Krankzeits had visitors. They were on good form, twisting the night away until well past three. I needed to blot out the day's events to make a fresh start in the morning, but I couldn't even get to sleep. I tried to think instead, but I couldn't concentrate on my thoughts. The noise from upstairs got me stuck in a mental groove which flickered pink, purple, violet, pink, purple, violet, until the colours took on a life of their own and started dancing the can-can in my head. I knew from experience it was no good banging on the ceiling with the end of a broom; the Krankzeits were making so much noise it would have taken a bomb to attract their attention. Many times I'd toyed with the idea of sending them one.

After an hour spent trying to stuff the corners of the duvet into my ears, I gave up and sat down at my desk, donned my rubber gloves, and cut up some magazines to compose a letter to Patricia Rice. It wasn't a particularly inspired letter; I was too bleary-eyed to summon up much creativity at that time in the morning. But I called her a CoMmIE LEsBiAN CoW, even though I knew perfectly well she was neither commie nor lesbian, and I informed her that her every move was being watched by mR BoNes and his BoDy ROt CReW, members of a Californian killer-hippy cult which was plotting to take over the whole world, starting with Lambeth.

Gripping the fibre-tip pen in my left fist, I laboriously printed Patty's name and address on one of the plain brown envelopes I'd bought from Woolworths. The Krankzeits' visitors yelled goodbye and clomped laughing and weeping into the night, but Gunter and Christine continued to drop concrete blocks on their floor at regular intervals, so I took the opportunity to compose an angry letter to the council about the recent proliferation of rubbish on the street. From force of habit, I withheld my identity but listed the names and addresses of my next-door neighbours who had once held an all-night party and told me to fuck off when I'd complained about the noise, followed by the name and address of the drug dealer who owned the four Alsatians which sometimes howled all night because they were kept in a tiny backyard which was never cleaned, followed by a postscript in which I hinted that the noisy community centre down the road was allowing drugs to be sold on the premises. As an afterthought, I signed myself Gunter Krankzeit.

By this time, the noise had subsided into the to-and-fro-ing I recognised as normal bedtime routine, so I thankfully sealed the envelopes and crawled back into my bed. The last thing I remembered thinking about was Alicia, and the way she'd sniffed the air as I'd come out of the darkroom, and asked if anyone had been smoking. That had got me so mad I'd almost told her about Jack and Roxy.

I fell asleep watching the light fitting sway in time to the last dwindling thuds from upstairs.

Chapter 4

I dreamt about a boardroom where a dozen or so people were sitting round a table. They looked like regular executive types, but I knew they were not.

'She can't handle it,' said one of the men. He looked familiar. In my capacity as dream director, I zoomed in for a close-up and saw it was Burt Reynolds. 'She could easily lose control.'

'Give her a chance,' said someone else. It was Robert Redford - I had evidently assembled an all-star line-up.

'But she'll lose her head,' Burt said. 'And it'll be a disaster, like before.

'I think you're wrong,' said a woman with startled eyes. Good grief, I thought, what was Liza Minnelli doing here? 'She's learned her lesson.'

'I wouldn't be too sure.' Burt coughed, as though embarrassed by what he had to say next. 'I don't know whether any of you are aware of this, but she still thinks she's in love.'

There was some snickering at this. 'Love?' sneered Liza, and I saw now her eyes were not just startled, but glittering cruelly in a way I'd never seen before. 'She doesn't know the meaning of the word. She's interested in nothing but power, and the wielding of it.'

I wanted to chip in and tell them no, they'd got it wrong, I really did love Duncan, I'd loved him for years. Perhaps not in the accepted sense, but my feelings for him were stronger than they appeared. But the role of dream director was limited to lining up the shots. I wasn't really there, I could do no more than watch and listen as they went on discussing my case.

'Nevertheless,' said Burt, 'she maintains he is still important to her, especially after Paris. We should keep her under surveillance. She might still do something rash that would jeopardize the entire project.'

'In that case,' said Robert, 'may I suggest we contact the Hatman? Andreas Grauman has reasons of his own for wanting to keep an eye on her, which in my view makes him all the more trustworthy.'

There was a ripple of approval. 'An excellent idea,' said Liza.

Mention of Grauman made me feel uneasy. I hoped he wasn't going to turn up in my dream. But then the debate took a weird turn, and they all started talking about Israelis and Palestinians. There was a time and a place for politics, I thought, and it wasn't in my dreams. I listened for a while, tried in vain to vary the camera angle or cut to another scene, but succeeded only in waking myself up.

Next day my instincts were telling me things. I needed a holiday. I always needed a holiday, but, unfortunately for me, I was the conscientious sort. There were half a dozen deadlines looming - one of them for Jack's magazine - and I prided myself on being reliable. Unreliability would lead to no work, would lead to no money, and we couldn't have that, not while the Have Nots were roaming the streets as a reminder of what it would be like.

But most of all, I didn't want to leave Duncan. Especially not now, when he was paying me more attention than he'd paid me in years. So I did what I'd promised; I headed for Multiglom Tower.

It was a long haul. To get there, I had to go to Tower Hill and transfer to the Docklands Light Railway. It was years since I'd been anywhere east of Aldgate, and the city had changed. The railway was fun, like a slow-moving roller-coaster trundling through a half-finished theme park. Sticking up from the otherwise uniform acres of gutted warehouse were the developers' party pieces: toy town halls made from primary-coloured building blocks, Lego pyramids covered in shocking pink scaffolding, and Nissen huts decorated with Egyptian murals. Viewed from the comfort of the train it was amusing, but as soon as I emerged from Molasses Wharf Station I found myself trapped in a pedestrian's nightmare. Progress was thwarted at every turn by fenced-off building sites or gloomy basins of stagnant water. Concrete mixers blocked the pavements. The ground was coated with a layer of pale mud, and every so often a truck would thunder past and splash the backs of my legs. The only other people I saw were distant figures in yellow helmets. My A-Z of street maps was obsolete; streets that were supposed to be there no longer existed, and new ones had sprung up in different configurations. I buried the book in my bag and tried to dust off the instincts that were still sulking from having been dismissed earlier on.

Fortunately, I could see where I wanted to go. It would have been impossible to miss it. Had it been a sunny day, the shadow would have fallen across my path. Multiglom Tower loomed up out of the drizzle like a gigantic monolith, its summit swathed in wheeling seagulls and wisps of grey cloud. The building was controversial, less for its design than its height; it had buggered up half of east London's TV reception. I had seen photos, but now I had to admit they didn't do it justice. It reminded me of a sound system: a stack of tape-decks, amplifier, and CD player in black glass, opaque except for odd little pinpoints of red and white glinting deep within the walls. But who could tell what kind of music it would be playing? I steered towards it, or tried to.

After about half an hour of dodging traffic and sneaking through gateways marked with signs of men being struck in the chest by lightning bolts, I found myself within spitting distance of my destination. I circled it warily, craning my neck to stare upwards, feeling like a lost tourist trying to get her bearings in the middle of Manhattan. There were two entrances. There was a service door big enough to swallow a fleet of trucks, but while I was there I saw only one vehicle emerge - a navy blue Bedford van with a tinted windscreen and the words DOUBLE IMAGE stencilled (twice) on to the side.

At the main entrance the word MULTIGLOM was chiselled into marble over three sets of revolving doors. Each door was flanked by uniformed security guards who looked as though they might have cut their teeth on Treblinka. I tried to peer past them, but all I could see in the. black glass was my own distorted reflection. The guards watched me with hard, unblinking eyes. They made me nervous. It was getting on for lunchtime, so I decided to postpone my investigations and seek out some Dutch courage.

Over the street was something which had once been a warehouse, but which was now a brasserie-cum-art-gallery called the Bar Nouveau. From what I had seen of the area, it was the only watering-hole for miles. I assumed it would be doing a roaring trade in Multiglom workers, but it turned out I was the sole customer. There was a sign saying _Barsnacks_. I bought a half of lager and a Gruyere bagel, and asked the barman how he managed to stay open. 'You'd be surprised,' he said, polishing a glass with his tea-towel. 'Evenings, we're packed out.'

'Don't they eat lunch? Where are they now?'

'How should I know?' Now he was looking vexed, as though I were distracting him from his polishing manoeuvres. I left him to it and wandered away with my drink and bagel to examine the small collection of oils hanging on the far wall. They were primitive in concept and execution, but there was one painting I liked: a picture of a tower-block, not in the Multiglom mould, but the chunky type to be seen on any sixties-built housing estate. Halfway up the building a big white ghost was leaning over a balcony, howling and flapping its sheeted arms in the air. I didn't know why, but the picture made me laugh.

I settled down at a table near the window and watched people going in and out of Multiglom. I sat there for half an hour, dipping my lager and smoking cigarettes, and all in all, only two people went in, and only one came out. The one who came out was one of the two who had gone in, and he came out again pretty smartly, as though he'd been turned away at reception. I wasn't sure I could get much further, but it was time to give it my best shot. A last cigarette for luck, and I was strolling, ever so casually, across the street.

One of the guards looked me up and down as I approached, but concluded I wasn't an interesting enough specimen to be dragged off to the nearest death camp and watched impassively as I wrestled with the heavy revolving doors. I plunged through them into a different world. The daylight was blotted out and replaced by flat white lighting which bounced off the white marble and made me pull up, dazzled. It was like being in an empty cathedral. The floor was as vast and as slippery as an ice-rink, and the walls stretched upward for fifty feet or more, branching out as they rose into a high-vaulted ceiling. There were no chairs, no potted plants, no ashtrays on stems, and no magazines to flick through. Visitors, like diners in McDonald's, were not encouraged to linger.

It took me about fifteen seconds to walk from the doors to the reception desk, but it felt like five minutes. So white and shiny was the floor, I found myself sneaking backward glances to check I wasn't leaving a trail of dirty footprints. The reception desk itself was built on a sort of dais, designed so the receptionists could look down their noses at me as I approached. Both of them were dressed in black. I felt like kicking myself; I should have gone back to black, just this once, to blend in. But it was too late: here I was in Prince of Wales check, and it was obviously a serious infringement of the dress code.

I found myself gazing up at the nearer of the women. There was something unnatural about her skin. It was too smooth, as though the foundation beneath the powder had been a thin layer of liquid latex. Or perhaps it was the lighting, which made everything look flat and white and dead. Her facial expression would have made her a fortune at poker. She arched an eyebrow, no more than a fraction of a millimetre. 'Yes?'

'Uh,' I said. 'Which floor is _Bellini_?' As the words came out of my mouth I realized the acoustics made my voice sound high-pitched and squeaky, like Mickey Mouse. The receptionist's reply, on the other hand, bore all the hallmarks of one who had majored in voice projection.

'Do you have an appointment?' she boomed.

'I didn't know I needed one.'

'You have to have an appointment.'

'I want to see Rose Murasaki. I knew her back in '75.'

Poker-Face barely cracked. She turned and punched out some numbers on a telephone. 'There is a person here,' she said into the receiver, 'who says she used to know the Editor.' She spoke as though she didn't believe a word of it.

There was a faint buzzing. Poker-Face turned back to me. 'What do you do?'

I explained. 'Creative consultant, freelance,' she echoed into the phone as though the words were descriptive of some unpleasant disease of the digestive tract. Then she hung up and said, 'Thirty-second floor. Lifts over there.'

I smiled weakly, and went off to summon a lift. While I was waiting for it, I scanned the small print on the floor guide. Micromart, Superdish, Pharmatex, Hi-Vista, Deforest, Double Image... and there, up against numbers thirty-two and thirty-three - _Bellini_.

The lift arrived and I stepped inside. The walls were stainless-steel inlaid with strips of solid black Perspex. It was a bit like a hi-tech microwave. I pushed the button for the thirty-second floor, half expecting my head to explode, but instead the doors closed. I didn't normally feel nervous in lifts, but this one made me feel as though a troupe of flamenco dancers were stomping all over my grave. The upward movement was as quick and smooth as the speed of light, but it was accompanied by an unpleasant clanking sound which set me thinking about all the movies I'd seen in which elevators plummeted down shafts so fast their occupants were plastered against the ceiling or sliced in half by steel cables snapped free from their moorings.

Not before time, the doors slid open. I stumbled out on to thick green carpet, into another reception area, though this was cosier than the one downstairs. Here there were no right-angles, only curves, but the same flat white light as below. And the receptionist looked as though she had graduated from the same charm school, except she was blonde, like Eva Peron. She was perched over some kind of Starship Enterprise console fitted with monitors and a couple of keyboards. From somewhere beyond a doorway to her left came a faint flutter of electronic sound. The place wasn't exactly bustling.

She looked up as I approached. 'You want to make an appointment.'

'I'd like to see the Editor.'

'That's right. You want to make an appointment.'

'Is she in?'

'She can't see you today. You need an appointment.'

'Oh, all right.' There didn't seem any other way of getting to meet Rose Murasaki. 'I'll make an appointment.'

Eva Peron was checking one of her screens. 'When?'

'Tomorrow?' I said hopefully.

She laughed derisively. _'Impossible_. I can't fit you in until next week, at least.'

So why ask, I thought. Out loud I said, 'That'll have to do.'

She tip-tapped at the keyboard and inspected something which came up on her monitor. I leant forward and tried to inspect it too, but she flashed me such a look of fury that I shrank back, grinning fatuously and pretending my action had been part of a neck-flexing exercise.

'Next week. The 14th,' she said finally.

'Nothing before that?'

'The 14th. Take it or leave it.'

'OK, OK. The 14th. What time?'

'Nine.'

I winced. Nine was pushing it. I wasn't used to doing business until well after ten, with my brain kick-started by at least two jugs of strong black coffee. 'Can't you make it a bit later?'

She sighed as though I was putting her to enormous trouble. 'Ten o'clock? Midnight?'

_'Midnight_?' It took a while for this to sink in. 'You mean nine o'clock _in the evening?_ '

She blinked. Once. Twice. 'Our Editor has a very full schedule. She often takes meetings at night.'

'In that case, nine o'clock will be just fine.'

She sighed again. 'Name?'

I missed a beat, but not so as she noticed. Something inside me suggested it would be prudent to keep a low profile. On the other hand, I might just have been fibbing out of habit. 'Patricia Rice,' I said.

'Address?'

I gave her Patricia's address and telephone number, and she punched them into the computer. As I watched her fingers on the keys, I had what seemed like a smart idea. 'Any chance of some back issues?'

She stared at me as though I'd asked her to remove her clothes. 'There have only ever been two issues of the magazine.'

'Well, perhaps you could spare a couple.'

Her mouth twitched. I thought she was going to tell me to get lost, but she didn't. 'Please wait,' she said, and disappeared through the door to her left. I could hear her talking, but I couldn't hear what was being said.

I have never been computer literate. I could operate simple word-processing software, but the finer points of bytes, pips, and programs left me at the starting-point. Still, Eva Peron didn't appear to be in the Albert Einstein class, and she was coping. I hovered long enough to check she wasn't coming straight back, and then I leant across the reception desk and examined the monitor - just in time to see Patricia Rice's name and address flicker on the screen, and vanish.

I thought I'd stopped being the sort of person who takes risks. I'd taken a few back in the early days, when I'd been younger, with an imagination which had not yet expanded to encompass the full range of unpleasant things that can happen to a person. But once again I was experiencing the weird sensation of the world shifting beneath my feet. Rocky times called for reckless behaviour. I slapped the EXIT key and the screen ticked over until we were back in the basic launchpad system. Quickly, I scrolled through the databank to see if I recognized any of the names. ARTEMIS. ARTISTIC AGENCIES. ARTISTS INC. ARTO. ASTRA. ASTROPOLOUS. They unfurled on the screen at a rate of knots. I zapped through the Bs and Cs. One or two companies I'd heard of, but nothing of interest. I had the vague intention of getting as far as M for MURASAKI. But then I saw DINO.

I could still hear the murmur of voices beyond the door, so I punched into what I thought was inspection mode. A load of indecipherable rubbish came up. I pressed exit and enter and return and I ended up with an address: Studio E, 174 London Bridge Road. I tried punching my way back into the main file, but I must have pressed the wrong key. The screen went blank except for a single word in the top left-hand corner: ROTNACHT. I pressed what I thought was the correct key (but hadn't 1 pressed that one before?) and the word disappeared, but then it was back again: ROTNACHT. Now it was flashing on and off. ROTNACHT. ROTNACHT. ROTNACHT. I panicked, pressed EXIT and ENTER and CANCEL and STOP and the word disappeared again and I was just wondering whether I'd erased all the other data in the process when I realized the murmur of voices in the next room had died away.

I straightened up with a sinking feeling. Eva Peron was leaning against the doorframe, watching me with her arms folded. She smiled, but I wished she hadn't. 'Seen anything you like?' she asked, sauntering over, holding out my two back issues. I took them, even though I didn't particularly want them any more.

'Not really,' I said. 'I was just trying your computer, but I don't think I'll buy one like this. It's much too complicated.'

She sat down and scrolled back through the files, trying to work out how much I'd seen. 'This is a specialist machine,' she said frostily.

'I thought as much,' I said, shuffling towards the lifts.

'Thank you...' she said, looking directly at me. _'Miss Rice,_ ' she said, as though she'd always known it wasn't my real name, and smiled again.

'Bye,' I said, pressing the down button. The microwave door slid open. I remember thinking how odd it was, in a building that size, with that capacity, that the lift I had come up in was exactly where I'd left it - ready and waiting to take me down again.

Click here to buy Suckers.

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 2009

Anne Billson on Film: collected columns from The Guardian 2010

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:

Anne Billson is on Twitter as AnneBillson

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_.

