Not mentioning the reference

I may be missing something, but no one I've read so far has mentioned the obvious when talking about the new release Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist; i.e., that the title is a reference to the characters played by William Powell and Myrna Loy in the Thin Man series of films in the 1930s, based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett.

Given that by all accounts (and The Knowledge really can't comment on this) it isn't actually any good, maybe critics are trying to avoid sullying the original by making the reference. But it seems to me a key part of what the newer film is trying to; take the easy, casual, (dare I say it) cool nature associated with Hammett's tale and transplant it. The Thin Man (1934) was influential, not so much in showing us a happily married, gently sparring, couple for the first time in movies, but for showing a couple so intellectually, emotionally and sexually on the same level. And the sex is the key thing here; given that this was made around the time of the Hay's code, makes the subtext of Powell's and Loy's attraction even more impressive.

Slumdog Millionaire

The Knowledge has been to see Slumdog Millionaire and believes the film deserves all the plaudits it's getting. It combines the verve and colour of Bollywood with the serious intent of neo-realism, although, as always with Danny Boyle, the more appropriate expression is hyper-realism. Without wishing to get into a habit of hyperbole or glib catchphrases, one of the best ways I can think of describing the effect is Satyajit Ray on acid; it has the same humanity, the same unblinkingness at character and situations, but instead of contemplation and reflection, there is constant movement. In that respect it has the same energy as early Godard.

The main thing about the film is just how much sheer fun it is. This might seem strange considering that the subject matter includes the blinding of children to make them more effective beggars, prostitution and the rise of Indian gangsterism. But more than any film I can think of recently, there are no longeurs and no sense of boredom. It has your attention all the time you are watching it.

John Landis

Director John Landis is reportedly suing Michael Jackson for not receiving his share of profits for the Thriller music video. You couldn't avoid this video during the 1980s; it was truly ubiquitous and so I can well believe it's still making money somewhere.

The surprise is that Landis has always come across in interviews as one of the most laid back men in the world, so he must have been pretty annoyed to take this action. He's also a reasonably underated director these days. Once upon a time The Blues Brothers (1980) would have been named as one of my top three favourite films and although it's nowhere near this status any more, there are still scenes I would happily watch again. An American Werewolf in London (1981) and Trading Places (1983) are two of the best films of the 1980s, while National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) and Three Amigos (1986) are perfectly fine comedies.

The rot set in later on, so that by the time we got to Beverly Hills Cop III (1994) and (even worse) Blues Brothers 2000 (1998) the taste in the mouth had well and truly gone sour.

Anticipation

There are some films you just can't wait to see.

The Rules

Film critic Roger Ebert from the Chicago Sun Times is always worth reading, although I don’t go to the site as often as I might. But his rules for wannabe film critics may prove to be essential.

Last Scenes

This is partially following on from another post which asks for memorable scenes from otherwise poor films. Crocodile Dundee (1986) is actually not bad at all, although it hasn't dated very well. What it does have is one of my favourite movie endings.

What is it about the sequence? Part of it is the score, the effectiveness of the insistent didgeridoo beat which sets the mood and pace of the scene combined with the occasional lift in the melody. I love the way that Linda Kozlowski's character takes off her shoes as she's running towards the subway through New York streets. Then there is the ludicrousness of the way her confession of love for Mick Dundee (Paul Hogan) has to be conveyed through a crowd on the subway by a Jamaican and an Italian builder, which is funny and somehow true at the same time. Finally there is Dundee climbing over the people on the platform and the way they help carry him towards Kozlowski. Yes, it's all very movie, but I can't help liking it for all that.

The Other Forde

The title of the post is wrong on a number of levels. There is just to start with, the extra ‘e’, although part of me enjoys the mischievousness of it. More of a problem is that, as much of a fan as I am of his work, Walter Forde’s career simply doesn’t compare to that of John Ford; his films aren’t as good and as a director he couldn’t be described as an auteur. There are no overriding themes, so sense of him building a picture of the British nation in the same way that John Forde did for America.

So what is there to be said? His 1932 Rome Express is the basis, the blueprint, for many of the films set on trains that followed; it's a fast moving comic thriller that compares well with and influenced Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes six years later (as an aside Sydney Gilliat wrote the scenario for the former and was co-screenwriter on the latter). Meanwhile Rome Express is, in my view, a superior work to Von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express made with Marlene Dietrich in the same year and exploring similar themes. The Ghost Train (1931) set a standard for British comedies, the storyline of a group of people trapped in a remote location and confronted with what at first glance seems to be a problem of the supernatural (Forde himself remade it ten years later). Then there is Saloon Bar, unknown, unheralded, but perhaps one of the finest murder mysteries of the 1940s.

Forde's was an art of the interior; he was at his best showing a group of people inside, in the confines of the train carriage, the station waiting room and the pub. The limitations of such settings stretched his imagination and stimulated his creativity, while a free reign was often disastrous (I hesitate, but try to watch Land Without Music (1936))

The Knowledge will write in more detail on Saloon Bar (1940), which is perhaps Forde's best work, at a later date. But all of it is worth seeing.

Late night TV

Some of the best films that I've seen lately have been ones recorded from late night television; Jules Dassin's Brute Force and The Naked City, John Boorman's Point Blank, Jean Renoir's The Diary of a Chambermaid, Mark Robson's The Seventh Victim and now Ida Lupino's The Bigamist. Which begs the question - why not show them earlier. Having criticised retailers for their bizarre DVD pricing policy, it seems only fair to do the same to TV schedulers. The worst offenders are Film 4, who not only endlessly repeat truly bad films, but when they do have something interesting, put it on at a time when very few are watching. Again, I accept I have certain specialist tastes, but since I'm pretty sure that no one wants to see Tommy O'Haver's Get Over It starring Kirsten Dunst ever again, they could at least try the experiment of giving a decent showing to the Ingmar Bergman films they've been so proudly trailing in recent months. This doesn't seem like rocket science or elitism gone mad.

Posthumous Oscar

One bookmaker has reportedly already paid out on Heath Ledger being awarded the best supporting actor oscar for The Dark Knight. Watching Ned Kelly (2004) last night, I realised again just what a loss of talent it is. The film has lots of flaws, not least that it romanticises the real Kelly and paints him out to be a victim of circumstance, forced into being an outlaw. There may be an element of truth in this, but having been to visit his suit of armour in Melbourne and seen the exhibition, I would suggest that he was a more brutal figure than we see here, who in all probability accepted the necessity of violence and more than likely revelled in it.

The pity is that Ledger was more than capable at hinting at this without taking away from the charismatic and popular nature of the man (which was undoubtedly true), that made him the most interesting of anti heroes. We know this because of The Dark Knight. Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain notwithstanding, his portrayal of the Joker is his outstanding performance and one of the best of the decade. Dangerous, compelling, it takes us inside madness and celebrates the abyss. One can only speculate (and The Knowledge wouldn't recommend it) about how much of a character an actor takes home with him, but did the darkness of the Joker add to Ledger's depression and help set him on a tailspin? We will never know for sure, only that the idea doesn't feel as wrong as it might.

America, Land of the Cinematic

I suppose, on today of all days, that a post should have an American theme. What struck me watching the inauguration and the crowds and the magnitude of it all is not only that it is a country influenced by cinematic moments, it was one that was built for them. From the language of its inception to the physical geography of the place, America just is cinema.

The most obvious location is of course New York, where it sometimes seems you could put a camera anywhere and the shot would be cinematic purely by virtue of where it is. It's a city soaked in the glamour of movies to such an extent that people who visit can pretend they're in one. Go to the top of the Empire State building and you’re in the company of Gene Kelly, Cary Grant and King Kong. Take a walk through Central Park and you could be Joseph Cotton searching for a strange ghostly young woman called Jennie. Drop by FAO Schwartz and play chopsticks on a giant piano like Tom Hanks. Go to Tiffany’s and….well, you get the idea.

Ah America...you have given us our dreams back!

Appaloosa

Sometimes as a filmgoer you’re struck by the synchronicity of things. I’m sure I would have had a different reaction to Appaloosa (2008) had I not also seen Warlock (1959) a couple of weeks ago. As it is, it seems to me that this is, at least at the start, essentially the same movie: a town tired of being plagued by a gang of cowboys employ a Marshall from, who works with a man who has been his friend for many years and who exists by his own set of laws. Later the film changes into something very different and we can see echoes from The Wild Bunch (1969) (a train which stops by a water cooler tower is subject to a raid, a gunfight happens in a Mexican town square). The film directed by and starring Ed Harris and also Vigo Mortensen, Renee Zellweger and Jeremy Irons is well acted and has an interesting theme. But the pace of it is wrong and the plot becomes too wandering and sporadic. A much better modern western is Kevin Costner’s Open Range (2003), which has an excellent performance by Robert Duvall and a surprising amount of tension for such a simple story.

Aesthetic Experience

A rather interesting debate has been taking place on the blog of Bryan Appleyard. This isn’t, strictly speaking, about film, because Appleyard generally has a wider remit (although he has done an interview with Catherine Deneuve in the Sunday Times today). Basically his theory is that the world is divided into those who have had a transcendental aesthetic experience - an intense engagement with art which takes you beyond what you have previously thought or realised - and those who haven’t. If you have, the argument goes; you are more likely to have an open mind about the existence of God, with the ultimate logic that a ‘militant atheist’ can not have one. Have I had such an experience? I realise I’ve quoted a lot from David Thomson recently (and so will give him a rest for awhile), but does this mean the same as his account in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film of first watching Blue Velvet:

‘The occasion stood as the last moment of transcendence I had felt at the movies – until The Piano. What I mean by that is a kind of passionate involvement with both the story and the making of a film, so that I was simultaneously moved by the enactment on screen and by discovering that a new director (David Lynch) had made the medium alive and dangerous again.’

If so, then the answer is yes - many times. The last one was seeing Max Ophul’s Le Plaisir (1952). In the film, a group of prostitutes travel from Paris to a small town in France for their Madam’s niece’s first communion. The villagers welcome them with open arms and generosity and kindness as if they were old friends. In the middle of the ceremony, as the congregation watch the girls go through the ritual and the church is filled with music, the prostitutes start to cry. In doing so, they start a ripple and everyone else sitting in the pews also starts to cry. It is a deeply moving moment; rich in its complexity, for the tears are not for any one thing. The prostitutes are crying out of regret for their choices in life, but also in gratitude for the way they have been treated. The rest cry with love for the young girls taking part, but also a sadness at what seems like the passing of childhood. Ophuls uses his famous camera movement to great effect in evoking the emotion of the scene.

The fact that this sequence takes place in a church is incidental and doesn’t seem to be proof of God one way or another. Indeed it occurs to me that you can feel this ‘transcendence’ and at the same time be pretty sure that he/she/it doesn’t. The reason why the scene is so affecting is that what Ophuls shows us feels like a truth about human beings; that we can be happy, sad, flawed, beautiful all at the same time. You don’t have to be religious or deny the value of science to acknowledge that.

Stromboli

When Ingrid Bergman left Hollywood to make Stromboli in 1949, the experience was a traumatic one in all senses. For Bergman, it meant being taken out of the comfort of the studio and shooting on location, using completely different methods. There was also her developing relationship with the director Roberto Rossellini and the subsequent breakdown of her marriage. RKO by all accounts were unhappy with the finished film, so different from their usual productions. Then there was the storyline of the film itself; a Czech woman who marries to escape the confines of an internment camp and finds herself in a new trap – a marriage to a man who doesn’t understand her and living on an island with a way of life that she hates. Like other neo-realist directors, Rossellini didn’t seek to praise or condemn the age old traditions of Italy, just to show them as they were. He could explore the contradictions of the community, how living by values so attached to the past could be reassuring and invigorating as well as suffocating. Stromboli is about old white stone houses, hidden coves where the water laps over rocks and watching the sun set over the sea, but it is also about the desolation of paths and fields left to grow wild and the constant tension created by a mountain which could explode at any moment (the volcano providing the film’s central metaphor, of course). Bergman as Karin Bjorsen is not easy to love; she complains all the time, flirts and manipulates and looks her nose down at those she perceives as less sophisticated. But it’s hard not to sympathise with her situation. Her husband Antonio (Mario Vitale) can be brutish and he is stubbornly resistant to change. But he also loves and he works harder than the other fisherman to give his wife a lifestyle he thinks she wants.

Outsiders have hardly been able to film Italy without turning it into a paradise: Roman Holiday(1953), Three Coins in a Fountain (1954), Summer Madness(1955), even another film about old traditions clashing with the new world, A Bell for Adano(1945), about an American major trying to run an Italian town during the war turns the villagers into affectionate, wily, characters. But the neo-realist directors could show the beauty and the cruelty, never better exemplified than by the sequence showing the actual Stromboli fishermen out at sea capturing huge tunny fish with the waves crashing around them. Visually compelling, we see these huge majestic creatures speared in a ritual that has gone on for hundreds of years. Rossellini believed in truth as far as it was possible; but I also love neo-realism for the social document elements of it, capturing a way of life which may well have vanished forever.

Leonardo DiCaprio

David Thomson sums up the angst of Leonardo DiCaprio very well in this piece in the Guardian. The only disagreement I have with what is said is that I think The Departed is actually Dicaprio's best role of late, a character who made you feel nervous and gave you sweaty palms just by watching him.

Travellers Tale

It was late, after one o’clock in the morning, in a youth hostel in Berlin. The bar in the lobby was packed full of people and there was a feverish excitement in the air. A bus- load of Australians, New Zealanders and English were on their way later that day for a weekend in Prague and the booze, it is fair, to say was free flowing. I was at a table with a young American film student. We had just been admitting that Titanic had some virtues and then he asked me who my favourite director was. I thought for a moment. On a different day I might have named someone like Howard Hawks or Michael Powell. But instead I said: ‘You know, I was watching The Thirty Nine Steps again the other night and I have to say I think Alfred Hitchcock takes some beating’. He shook me by the hand, offering a compliment on how one of the best of filmmakers was British. By much less have great friendships been born!

Claude Berri

The Knowledge can’t let the death of Claude Berri pass without some comment. The Guardian is asking if he was the most influential postwar French director. This seems a mite strange given the likes of Francois Truffaut, Jean Luc Godard, Robert Bresson, Alan Resnais and, well, countless others. But I take the point. Xan Brooks who wrote the piece means in terms of the way Jean de Florette and Manon des Source (both 1986) helped to define an image of Provence for thousands of Britains. More than, say, Eric Rohmer, Berri, alongside the likes of writer Peter Mayle (most famously A Year in Provence), inspired the dream of France as a lifestyle. His vision of a rural idyll – which lives on in the Stella Artois adverts, even using the theme by Jean-Claude Petit - has not always been looked kindly upon. Gilbert Adair, who edited Penguin’s wonderful anthology, Movies, compared Berri unfavourably with one of his influences, Marcel Pagnol, who made a series of films about the South of France, including Marius and Fanny in the 1930s.

‘What Berri trades in is ‘filmed cinema’ (as one refers to ‘filmed theatre’) and the sickly visuals of his pastiches remind one of nothing so much as the idiom adopted by the sort of spuriously authentic restaurants whose bread is invariably ‘oven-browned’ and whose tomatoes are obligatorily ‘sun dried’. Pagnol’s own wonderful films are just bread, plain loaves of unsliced bread; they are, equally, as juicy and refreshing as ordinary raw tomatoes. Without any smothering of Technicolor Sauce, they taste, like the simplest and best kinds of food, of nothing but themselves.’

Berri also wrote and directed, among others, Germinal (1993), Lucie Aubrac (1997) and Ensemble, c’est tout (2007) and acted in Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra (2002).

Mad Men

I've just seen Mad Men and now get what all the fuss is about. Apart from being a terrific revisionist look at the world of advertising in the early 1960s, it's one glorious reference to the movies and television shows of the time; all those Doris Day pictures (Pillow Talk, That Touch of Mink etc), The Apartment, Days of Wine and Roses, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, not to mention Bewitched. The makers even have the cheek to name check them all! And at the centre of it all is Jon Hamm as executive Don Draper, like a brooding Cary Grant from North By Northwest. No wonder they think he's going to be a star. Peyton Reed did something similar with Down with Love (2003), but his pastiche doesn't quite live up to the depths of Mad Men. Great stuff.

A word about Youtube

Youtube can be among the curses of the internet, allowing for a spew of anti social behaviour, yobbery and general disgustingness. But The Knowledge loves it for providing access to a wealth of material, some of which has hardly been seen by an audience at all. So far the best examples I have come across are Thom Anderson’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) and The Blue Bird (1940) starring Shirley Temple, both of which have been subsequently removed. Hopefully they’ll be uploaded again at some point, but there’s no doubt that these are films I would probably not have ever seen if it hadn’t been for Youtube.

Green and Pleasant Land

Something that AA Gill wrote in the Sunday Times today made me smile (Gill is always good value, even when you disagree with him). Here are his thoughts on the way England is portrayed in television documentaries like Nicholas Crane’s Britannia:

‘There is something rather distasteful about the lens’s lyrical licking of our country; the unquestioning, unremitting, unrequited lust for the twee, twinky, touristy bits of Blighty. All those series of elegiac rambles, with their moaning, breathless clichés, groping mountains and valleys, come one after the other like charabancs in the Lake District. There’s a sort of sentimental fascism about them, an overromanticised geological jingoism. While the presenters ramble, the cameras go by helicopter, soaring over National Trust properties, being chased by a sobbing orchestra. Their England doesn’t contain any suburbs or tower blocks; no motorways, airports, no industry, no trading estates, no you and me. It’s inhabited by an occasional dotty rustic, an endangered craftsman and simple lock-keepers. Why do they continue to try to sell us this ridiculous, bogus, thatched lie of a nation? I already live here, I want to shout.’

Just about every British television documentary using the countryside as a subject is guilty in some way of this: Countryfile, Coast, A Picture of Britain with David Dimbleby, Britain’s Favourite View. Of course there is nothing new in any of it; the British Transport Films unit, set up sixty years ago in May, made travelogues showing destinations like Cornwall, Norfolk, and the Highlands as places which people might go to on holiday, preferably by train. Many of them had a ‘lyrical’ quality; there was the use of poetic language, quotations from the likes of Shakespeare and the Romantics and classical music in the style of Benjamin Britten and Edward Elgar.

Ironically the man said to have founded the British documentary movement had very different aims in mind. John Grierson believed that the intentions behind film making should be ‘social and not aesthetic’. The idea of, say, Drifters and the later films of the 1930s by directors and producers like Harry Watts, Edgar Anstey, Basil Wright, Paul Rotha and Robert Flaherty was to have as realistic as possible a portrait of the way life was lived. Even so Grierson was not against the use of non professional actors or of constructing scenes and suggesting they were real. Arguably the blame behind the pictorialisation that lingers in modern British documentaries lies in Night Mail (1936). This famous film shows the post being delivered by a train going from London to Scotland and the workers who did it. But for all its attempt at realism, the part that everyone remembers is the sequence at the end of the journey with WH Auden’s poem narrated over music. The rhythm of the beat and the editing create a sense of excitement and anticipation which is, whatever Grierson wanted, due to the aesthetic of the piece. It is stirring, beautiful; Auden’s poem talks of thousands ‘still asleep, dreaming of monsters’ as the train arrives in Edinburgh and Aberdeen with the sun rising. The effect is unforgettable, both for the audience and, I think, the filmakers who have come after, wanting to create something similar. Sometimes this is beauty, often it is as Gill suggests ‘overromanticised geological jingoism’.

Warlock

I’ve just caught up with Warlock, a 1959 western starring Henry Fonda, Anthony Quinn and Richard Widmark (and DeForest Kelley who played Bones in Star Trek in an overtly camp performance – with that and the relationship between Fonda and Quinn, no wonder a Sunday Times critic was moved to reference Brokeback Mountain!). It was directed by Edward Dmytryk, who made some terrific film noirs during the 1940s including Farewell My Lovely, Crossfire and Cornered. Bar a couple of scenes, Warlock isn’t one of his finest moments. What’s interesting about it is the sheer number of western clichés it manages to pack into one film: a one street town, a gang of lawless cowboys, a saloon complete with a long bar, a gunman for hire brought to the town to be marshall, the Grand Canyon, a stage coach robbery and an endless number of fast draw style duels. Best of all, and hilariously, is the scene in which a lynch mob invades a jail where members of the gang are being held and you notice that they are carrying burning torches! Still, it’s worth a watch and The Knowledge will return to Dmytryk who is a constantly surprising director.

Critic Rivalries

Worth looking out for is a piece in the New Yorker looking at the history of the Village Voice. Surprisingly it only has a couple of lines on the critic Andrew Sarris, who was one of the mainstays during the 1960s and 70s. It's an interesting omission given that Sarris had probably the most famous of all film critic rivalries with the New Yorker's own Pauline Kael. He's generally considered to be the man who brought to the US and developed the French theory of authorship; the idea that the director was the main creative impulse in cinema, the 'auteur'. When it came to films, Sarris was a classicist: he loved the old masters - Ford, Hawks, Welles. Kael also believed in the supremacy of the director, but she was a more instinctive critic (famously she declared that she never watched a film more than once - with an odd exception like Altman's McCabe and Mrs Miller) and mocked theorists like Sarris. Their rows were played out in print and often very personal. His take on their relationship after she died is fascinating.

There probably isn't a feud amongst today's major critics which is quite the same, although Jonathan Rosenbaum seems determined to have one with David Thomson. Of these two heavyweights, Thomson is a stylist and purely in terms of writing the finest critic around at this moment in time. His view of cinema is a melancholic one; having loved the films of the Hollywood golden age and from the 1970s, Thomson has become disillusioned with the modern era and speculated often about whether the medium is in its death throes. Rosenbaum, on the other hand, may be the most knowledgeable man about films in the world; he absolutely refutes the idea that it is on its last legs, pointing to the variety and breadth of work coming out of places like Iran and China. There's no doubt that he despises what he sees as Thomson's narrow view of films and he also believes him to be a lazy researcher, particularly in the biography of Orson Welles, Rosebud.

What prevents this from being a proper feud is that while Rosenbaum's attacks have been many and widespread, Thomson has never really acknowledged his fellow critic's views. In fact in the comments to a Chicago Reader blog post from a year or so back, one person asks Rosenbaum if Thomson has ever responded to the criticism and it is admitted he never has. The only reference that I can find that Thomson has made about his 'rival' is in The New Biographical Dictionary of Cinema (the last edition published by Little, Brown in 2002 is pretty much an essential text on a film buff's shelf) in an entry on Raúl Ruiz: 'I was criticised a few years ago, very reasonably, by Jonathan Rosenbaum for important maverick and foreign figures left out of this book. But I refuse to include them all, and I am always happiest to find a new way of sizing up a person.'

It may be tit for tat stuff, but for The Knowledge the relationship between those who comment on films is as gripping as anything.

The Archive Collection

Lets get back to one of the key mission statements: 'spreading the wealth'. This collection of archive TV programmes from the BBC makes you remember what they can do.

Off Message

This post probably belongs in a blog entitled 'Faint Exasperation', but I never fail to be amused by so called DVD sales and the arbitrariness with which films are priced. I've just been to the music store HMV (apologies to non UK readers for the parochial reference, although there are probably equivalent examples abroad)where you can buy the latest Rambo film for seven pounds and I'm Not There, Todd Haynes's critically acclaimed look at Bob Dylan for six. Meanwhile you can get Sweeney Todd for five pounds (okay not to everyone's liking) and Forgetting Sarah Marshall for seven (?!) Admittedly my personal taste is involved here and I do appreciate the idea of pricing something higher which you think the public will want more. But I don't think that is happening here; there doesn't seem to be any logic or thought to any of it. Why not just set a price across the board? And oh while we're at it, if you are a store going into administration (yes Zavvi!), a clearout sale in which the products are still more expensive than they are in Fopp, should probably be rethought!

A Lot of Hokum

Has fantasy gone too far? In the 2008 adaptation of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (as opposed to the wondeful 1959 version with James Mason), the main characters fall through a hole when the floor collapses beneath them; all screaming in terror, they suddenly stop in unison to allow star Brendan Fraser to exclaim: ‘hey, we’re still falling!’ Or how about The Lord of the Rings where Orlando Bloom as elf Legolas climbs aboard a moving elephant, fights its passengers and slides down the trunk? Or there’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls in which Harrison Ford escapes the explosion of a nuclear bomb by shutting himself in a refrigerator, which is then exploded into the air during the blast and lands safely away from any chance of being incinerated. This is not to mention the latest additions to the Star Wars franchise and comic book adaptations such as Spider Man and Iron Man. The development of CGI special effects means that literally anything, no matter how fantastical or extreme, is possible. But are filmakers now ignoring the fact that a use of restraint in both plot and what we see on screen might work more effectively? Is it time, perversely in an age of so much technological advancement, to ask filmmakers to take a step back or should we just relax and enjoy the hokum?

Right from the start filmmakers recognised that part of what kept audiences coming to the movie was the promise of showing them something they had never seen before. The history of special effects is practically as old as the history of movies, with Georges Melie’s ‘stop trick’ (an object is filmed, the camera is turned off, the object is removed, the camera turned back on; it seems that the object has disappeared) developed as early as 1896. It is that promise of the combination of thriller, mystery and spectacle, which if got right, can make the adventure genre so irresistible. As Cecil B. DeMille once asked of his writers: ‘what would fascinate Eskimos in their igloos, harness harassed housewives, rivet restless children?’

So anything goes…right? Speaking about the BBC series Bonekickers, about a group of mystery solving crime fighting archaeologists, on Newsnight Review recently, academic and critic John Mullan made this point: ‘Hokum has to have its own logic, don’t you think?’ In other words, like any genre it has its own rules, its own set of narrative conventions. You can play with these rules by all means; subvert them as much as you wish. But if you break them, then realise that you run the risk that the project will fail. Mullan went on to say: ‘I think hokum can be fine, but they (ie, the programme makers) have to take it seriously while they’re doing it.’ I take this to mean that you give the subject - whatever the art form - the respect it deserves. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when Harrison Ford jumps from a horse on to a tank, falls of it, and hangs on to the side and is almost driven into a cliff wall, it may be ludicrous, but it is also somehow real. Spielberg and his team manage to make the audience feel the sense of danger inherent in the scene. In Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls, Ford’s heir apparent Shia LaBeouf catches up with a jeep chase by swinging through the jungle on vines in a sequence inspired by the Johnny Weismuller Tarzan films. The effect could not have been achieved in the former film, made twenty years before. But for all it’s CGI brilliance, it feels cartoonish; we may enjoy the moment, smile at it, but it’s closer to a parody of the genre and robbed of the tension greater realism might have given it. But, with the financial rewards of CGI so spectacular, if there is a lesson, it doesn't look like anyone will be learning it any time soon.

The Big...

There are an astonishing number of great films which start with the words 'The Big...'. They include The Big Country, The Big Combo, The Big City (also known as Mahanagar, ), The Big Red One, The Big Sky, The Big Steal (the 1949 version with Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer and the one and only William Bendix), The Big Heat, and The Big Lebowski. Towering over all of these is Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep, (1946), although of course this towers over most films.

Doctor Who

Having said that it may well be considered one of the masterpieces of the past decade, it seems inevitable to make some comment on the new Doctor Who. The first instinct on seeing the actor Matt Smith was a disappointment in the sense that a black actor playing the role – Patterson Joseph or Chiwetel Ejiofor – seemed an exciting possibility. The second was to speculate on how Smith’s name ended up on Betfair and I don’t think we’ve heard the last of that. But the third instinct is a growing excitement; the new Doctor’s youth (and he may be too young) does open up a whole raft of possible storylines, particularly that he will be misjudged and underestimated in the adventures to come. The theme of a character hundreds of years old in a young body isn’t a new one; Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell), an alien which could host many lives, was a major character in Star Trek: Deep Space and the writers continually played with this idea. The best response I’ve seen so far is from Matthew Sweet (whose excellent Shepperton Babylon, a revisionist look at the history of British cinema, is available from most good bookshops) on the Guardian website:

“Matt Smith has got a fascinating face. It's long and bony, with a commanding jaw. He looks like someone who could have been in Duran Duran. He has a quality of the old man trapped in the young man's body. I suspect he might be a more sensual character than David Tennant, who had no kind of dangerous sexuality about him. There's something Byronic about Matt Smith – he's got the lips for it."

Australia

The Knowledge has just seen Australia and thought it would add its own two pennoth worth. Much of the criticism of the film seems unduly harsh, especially this from Germaine Greer. Yes, its history is, shall we say, a bit dubious (but then it was in Gone With The Wind - and no this is not a comparison!). Yes, the film is overlong and overcooked. No, it isn't the film of a generation, some all defining epochful masterpiece.

Instead it is full of tearful partings, joyous reunions and over wrought death scenes, of near misses and getting there in the nick of time. It is bizarre, entertaining and curiously old fashioned and we are of course in the world of movie (which in this case is half Western, half love torn apart by the horrors of war story). As if to drive home the point there are the continual references to The Wizard of Ox and 'Somewhare Over The Rainbow' - even the homestead owned by Nicole Kidman's character, Faraway Downs, seems to be deliberately modelled after Dorothy's farm in Kansas. For those who know and love classical Hollywood this is all familiar territory.

The problem for the film is the weight of the hype - both in terms of its place as the latest work in Baz Luhurman's ouevre and in the way it is supposed to represent Australia as a country to the world. Whereas someone who has spent any time there will know that the stereotypes it offers - the fighting, drinking, laconic bushmen, the mysterious mystical aborigines, the Outback itself - don't begin to address the complexities of the place: the fragility and doubts beneath that veneer of extreme self confidence, the landscape, as much sea and sky and tropical paradise as desert backwater, and yes, the ambiguities of the relationship between the whites and the blacks.

This is what Greer is getting at. Yet Hollywood - and wherever it was set or made, that is what this is - has always set stories against controversial backdrops, sometimes shamefully distorting the history (Birth of a Nation anyone?). Australia belongs in a long and not quite noble tradition and I suspect Luhrman wouldn't have it any other way.

It Only Takes A Moment

Of all the many lovely things about Pixar’s WALL-E, one of the loveliest is the use of clips from the 1969 film, Hello Dolly. As the robot gathers surviving bits and pieces from an Earth deserted after an environmental disaster, he repeatedly watches two musical numbers: 'Put On Your Sunday Clothes' and 'It Only Takes A Moment'. The songs from the film relieve his deep loneliness and give him hope.

Having just watched a repeat of Hello Dolly on television, I'm struck by how WALL-E has given it added depths. The truth is that for the most part it’s a heavy handed, stuffy old film, overlong and self indulgent; the kind of picture that made Sunday afternoons with relatives even more interminable. But these two songs were the parts of the movie which lightened your heart and made you sit up (especially 'It Only Takes A Moment', which is right in every respect). What’s interesting, and what director Andrew Stanton and the Pixar team recognised, is that it’s because Hello Dolly isn’t up to much that the songs have such resonance. If the clip being watched was instead the Gene Kelly dance from Singing In The Rain, we would smile, nod in agreement and let it wash over us. But instead we raise an eyebrow and are made to think about how special moments and memories can be found in the most banal of places.

It’s a whole fascinating topic - truly outstanding scenes in otherwise dreadful movies! The Knowledge would like to nominate The Holiday (2006), directed by Nancy Meyers, where Iris (Kate Winslet) first meets Miles (Jack Black) and told that when the Santa Ana wind blows ‘all bets are off!’

‘D’oh!’

Sometimes it is the fragments, the small details, that provide the magic: Ginger and Fred dancing up close in a Venice which never existed, smoke from a steam train billowing through Carnforth Station, the opening credits from Les Quatre Cent Coups). Can I also have that most essential of all comedy sidekicks, James Finlayson and his famous slow burn ‘double take and fade away’, which appeared in every Laurel and Hardy film worth its salt? My favourite one is in their 1937 masterpiece Way Out West. Finlayson is the owner of a saloon bar, the apotheosis of all Western saloon bars with a noisy and raucous audience of cowboys and cabaret showgirls. He rings his cash register, then frowns and turns to one of his bar staff. ‘Hey’, he says, ‘this thing ain’t working right.’ ‘It’s working alright for me’ comes the response. Finlayson nods, as if to say ‘oh’, turns back to the till, realizes the undertone to what has just been said and darts his head back around. It all lasts about a second, yet it is pure cartoon, an inimitable physical movement that is the essence of slapstick. As an aside, actor Dan Castellaneta, who does the voice of Homer Simpson, says the character got his ‘D’oh!’ from Finlayson, which is a lovely tribute.