Andy Gray

I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about what I think about the recent Andy Gray / Richard Keys sexism thing. My initial reaction was that I shouldn't be surprised to discover that someone in football is a sexist. After all, I recall a time at Vicarage Road when during the half time presentations a man proposed to his girlfriend on the field. The West Ham fans' immediate reaction was to start chanting "Does she take it up the arse?".

Against this background it is hard to be shocked by Andy Gray's comments. Spend any amount of time hanging around with many football fans and you'll discover that a certain level of sexism and racism is the norm. Therefore my reaction to Gray's comments were to shake my head and hope that the incident would be used to highlight sexism amongst fans to change attitudes. Instead we have had a media witch-hunt in which Gray and Keys have been targeted as a culprits responsible for a wider culture. With their sacking the story vanishes out of the media and football fans can carry on as normal.

It was, however, difficult to disagree with the sacking of such a self-righteous idiot as Gray. So I had until now been happy to go along with the media consensus. That was until I read Charlie Brooker's fantastic piece in the Guardian this morning in which he casts the debate in terms of freedom of speech.

Brooker has chiselled himself out a niche as the most ascerbic - and generally funniest - media commentator of the last few years. I'm beginning to agree with almost everything he says as he points out the contradictions, illusions and lies of the modern print and broadcast news. His recent TV series "How TV ruined your life" started well last week by focussing on how television uses fear to generate news and make the world seem scarier than it really is. His appearances on "Ten O'clock live" have been something of a highlight of a show that has had a bit of trouble finding its feet but shows promise.

So in conclusion, watch anything with Charlie Brooker on it as it's probably great. And if people want to have private conversations in which they're arseholes then they should probably be allowed to, it's when they convince others of their bilge that we should be worried.

The King's Speech - Oscar Bait

After Colin Firth's fantastic performance in 'A Single Man' last year, I changed my mind about the actor who until then had appeared in quite a lot of forgettable puff. Despite being a housewife favourite, starring in films like 'Love Actually', 'Bridget Jones' and 'Mamma Mia' aren't going to do a lot for your career from an awards point of view. As such I had seen him as an actor who was still living on the coat tails of being in the BBC television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice some 15 years ago, in which he became something of a sex symbol. In 'A Single Man' though he was extraordinary. He played a complex and tense character in a film entirely driven by his own performance. So when the acclaim for 'A Kings Speech' started to roll in before its release I hadn't much doubt that Firth was well able to give a performance worthy of Oscar consideration.

'The King's Speech' is on the surface a period drama about the recently-deceased royals of Great Britain. It is so much more than this. Colin Firth plays the soon-to-be George the 6th (aka Bertie), a man with a stammer that impedes his ability to publically speak. His father - George the 5th - sits on the throne and his brother is next in line, but soon circumstances conspire to make it clear that he will be the next king. With war against Hitler looming, Bertie's wife (Helena Bonham Carter) seeks help for him in the form of Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue - Geoffrey Rush.

This film could easily have turned into a lot of things that would have turned me off. We could have had a film that lovingly portrayed the royal family and fawned over their lives in a Hello! magazine style - at no point did I feel like it pandered to the "Aren't they lovely" crowd. We could have had a film where the relationship between the Australian and the King-to-be had been portrayed as a conflict of extremes, yet never did the story reduce itself to a stereotypical depiction of Australians as a people with a base wit and in-your-face confrontational 'charm'. Instead of any of this, the film tells a charming story about a man who is forced to confront his personal demons and rise to a role that neither he nor anyone around him ever wanted him to have. As far as I can gather it is very true to historical events, basing its depiction of the relationship between Bertie and Lionel on the speech therapist's memoirs.

Colin Firth's performance is outstanding, I have no idea how an actor manages to make himself stammer while at the same time emoting and getting through his lines. I'd just start laughing at myself if it was me. He plays the role of George the 6th as a man who is deeply insecure, but one who is prone to outbursts revealing his ease in his position within the British establishment. Firth is not the only actor worthy of praise here, Derek Jacobi plays the Archbishop of Canterbury and represents the dark side of the British establishment conspiring in the background while putting on a face of deference to the monarch. He's brilliantly two-faced. The inclusion of such a blatantly evil character who appears to manipulate the otherwise 'good' king and his wife was the only part of the film that made me question its portrayal of the royals. It seemed as if the film was going out of its way to try depict the royals as ordinary people while the 'establishment' is in fact the Archbishop, politicians and their other hangers on. This was a very minor point though, as everything else was brilliant.

I'm going to put on my Conspiracy Theory hat for a very short time now. Recently the director of 'Made in Dagenham' was vocal over the rating of his film as a 15 certificate. He claimed that thousands of kids who might otherwise get something out of the film have been denied the chance to see it. He claimed that the decision could well have been rooted in the subject matter of his film, and that the BBFC were motivated to deny a film about workplace rebellion a mass audience at a time of economic crisis. The BBFC responded that the film was classified a 15 as a result of frequent use of the word 'fuck'. In the case of 'The King's Speech' though, the BBFC argue that a similar level of usage of the word 'fuck' is in fact permissible at the '12a' certificate. They argue that the language is used in isolated bursts, not in anger and in an "unusual and very specific speech therapy context,". I contend perhaps that the BBFC felt a film about the royal family, in the year of a royal wedding and hotly tipped for Oscar success, couldn't possibly be doomed to the restricted audience that a 15 certificate would give it. Whereas a film about the oiks rebelling against their masters doesn't need to be seen by anyone in their formative years. Class war anyone?

Part coming of age tale, part period drama, part comedy, part bromance, part historical biography - there's a lot in this film for a lot of different people. In fact, when I saw it the cinema appeared to be populated with people who probably haven't been to see a film since George 6th was actually king - people who insisted on 'tutting' for some reason when an old newsreel of Hitler was shown. Be you royalist or republican, fan of Firth's or not - you will enjoy 'The King's Speech'. You need to see this film.

The Blind Side

Being a huge fan of American Football and heavily involved in the game in Britain I was a little surprised with myself that I never managed to see this adaptation of the excellent Michael Lewis book while it was in the cinema. After all, Sandra Bullock won an Oscar and my interest had been perked by the fact that the central character had recently been drafted into the NFL. Perhaps I was worried that in the process of going through Hollywood scriptwriters the story would have become unrecognisable from the original? Whatever the excuse, I only last week did I get around to watching 'The Blind Side'.

Some background on the plot then. Michael Oher is a street kid whose guardian gets him enlisted in a middle class Christian school in Memphis after the school sports coach notices Oher's sporting potential. Oher cannot cope with his surrounds until a local wealthy family - the Tuohys - notice him walking thestreets and give him a home. They nurture Oher's creative, educational and sports-playing side until he gets noticed by the coaches in the big leagues, and is wooed by every university in the southern US states. It's a fuzzy and warm story in which an underdog comes good and rich people are nice and philanthropic. The ideal Holywood yarn.

This is a true story, and one which is portrayed faithfully to the book. Sandra Bullock is ideally cast as Leigh Anne Tuohy, the rich matriarch of a family who have benefitted from everything that can work about the American dream but still carry the baggage of a world that will label them rednecks. She's a woman who is used to being able to get what she wants, isn't afraid to tell people some home truths when it suits her, admits to knowing no Democrats and is a card-carrying member of the NRA. Yet despite all the stereotypes, she is the driving force behind Oher's schooling and subsequent enrolment to play football at the University of Mississippi.

The film has no qualms about referring to the controversy that Michael Oher caused when he entered the NCAA system. A large black kid was plucked off the streets by a wealthy white family who happen to be fanatical fans of their Alma Mater's football team. He also happens to be the nation's hottest prospect at Offensive Tackle and - surprise surprise - ends up playing for exactly whom his rich benefactors support. No shock then that his case was investigated in detail by the NCAA. The film stays true to the book's portrayal of events, and shows the Tuohys as rich do-gooders who accidentally stumbled across a kid of extra-ordinary talent whom they nurtured. For me though, I find their story to be ever so slightly convenient. Although the book and film both imply that the Tuohys had no prior knowledge of Oher's sporting potential when they first offered him a bed for the night, it is only the word of Leigh Anne Tuohy whom we have to believe on the matter. Who is to say what the true course of events were?

This is a film that I enjoyed hugely. Firstly for Sandra Bullock’s excellent performance and secondly because it's a film that showcases just how passionate many in the southern US states are about American Football. All of this is done without ramming Gridiron down the audience's throat. Save for a brief introduction at the start of the film, there isn't any American Football until we're almost an hour in. It's a story that anyone should be able to enjoy regardless of what they think of a sport that many in Britain see as a poor man's Rugby League.

Tron - the old one

You've probably seen the posters and the adverts. There's a new Tron film out - Tron Legacy. Quite a few people I know are very excited by this and were off to the cinema last night to watch it. I didn't go as I had something miles less cool to do, but to keep in the spirit I watched the original Tron on Monday. Now I'd never seen Tron before, but even I was aware of the light bike racing sequence. It's a scene that has carved itself out a niche in science fiction film lore. Other than that I was aware that it was about computers, basically I was coming to this fresh.

The 'plot' in Tron is that some kind of big bad computer program written by a big bad corporation is slowly taking over the world - pretty imaginative eh? No one is aware of this until our hero Flynn (Jeff Bridges) is somehow digitised and sucked into the computer world in a scene that defies numerous physical laws. The computer world is one in which errant programs are sent to 'the games' by the big evil program and have to fight to the death. So clearly Flynn is sent to fight (hence the light bikes); but his superior skills as a 'user' see him through all his challenges and help him to throw the chains of oppression off the programs yearning to breathe free.

It's obviously utter tosh - tosh probably dreamed up by early computer fanboys sitting around smoking weed and chatting about what it would be like to be inside a computer. The plot is linear, full of convenient devices and the acting just about passable. The one saving grace is that the 3D computer imagery in the film - though genuinely laughable by any modern standard - was ground-breaking at the time. So in that sense the film is a slice of movie history. But that is literally the only saving grace. Seriously though, the film's so cliché that the only female character has to wear glasses when she's being all geeky (cos that's how female scientists are defined - by wearing glasses) and takes them off as soon as she's out of the lab so she can look hotter. Oh dear.

By all means watch Tron if you're into this kind of thing or remember it fondly as a kid; but it's properly bad, count me out of the new one thanks.

The Lovely Bones

Roll up roll up, come one and all to see 'The Lovely Bones'; have your preconceptions confirmed and stereotypes re-enforced, your fears eased and your demons exorcised. That's right ladies and gentlemen, Peter Jackson directs the film adaptation of the well-known book in which a young innocent girl - Susie Salmon - is murdered but lives on in the 'in-between' before going to heaven. While there she experiences wondrous light and colours and has an ethereal presence on earth - in which her bereaved father finds comfort.

This is a story that's all about finding catharsis after a loss. Susie's parents experience the numbing terror of her going missing, then the inevitable dawning that she's never coming home. Murdered before she had the chance to experience so much of life, the pain is felt much more keenly by them as her father (Mark Walberg) obsessively hunts through newspaper clippings looking for suspects in her murder. There's nothing wrong with a story that tries to make sense of senseless acts and to comfort people who have suffered a loss I cannot contemplate. Anything that helps someone impacted by such tragedy is probably a worthwhile thing. But if you look at 'The Lovely Bones' more closely I think it comes across as a rose-tinted picture of loss in a world that's hopelessly unrealistic - and so ultimately fails in what it wants to do.

The film is littered with stereotypes (observe the paedophile killer who looks exactly as the Daily Mail would have us believe, the suburban family with 2.4 children, the sweet innocent girl looking for her first kiss with a mysteriously exotic older boy) which do nothing help the world of the film feel like the real world. If you want to write a story that's trying to help people with loss, I don't see how it's possible to litter your story with unrealistically shiny-happy ideas and still be taken seriously. Of course it would be great if everyone we knew who ever died in fact lived on in a technicoloured fantasy land where they could look over their loved ones; but this film gives me no reason to think that anything it's telling me could ever be true.

Added to this, 'The Lovely Bones' has one of the weakest denouements I’ve seen for some time, as Susie has one last chance to interact with the world before going on to heaven she can either choose revenge or love. She chooses love and everything's all cuddly and warm. But then the baddie gets his comeuppance anyway in a scene that looks like it was added after test screenings (although I am informed this is in the book). It's an ending that had me making a face of confusion at my television and even more bemused about why I should take the film seriously.

It's actually a film that looks pretty good and is very well-acted. The depiction of 'the in-between' is bright, full of colourful and a joy to watch; also I was happy to see Michael Imperioli in something that doesn't cast him as a Mafioso. But all that can't save 'The Lovely Bones' from its own rose-tinted view of death and loss. A big disappointment.

The Tourist - slow, dull and stupid

Proof finally that Holywood thinks all it needs to make a good film is 2 A-list stars, 'The Tourist' could have been a passable 30 minute episode of Columbo if it were made for television. The premise is thus, a man named Alexander Pierce is wanted by Interpol. They apparently have no photos of him and have no idea what he looks like (as if). So he could be literally anyone. LITERALLY ANYONE! I'm not even going to give this film the honour of not spoiling it, so in this review I'm going to give away who Alexander Pierce is. Stop reading if you really don't want to know, but believe me your life will be better off this way.

Angelina Jolie is Pierce's lover, she meets Johnny Depp on a train with the intention of convincing Interpol that he is in fact Pierce. So obviously either Jolie or Depp is Pierce. For a time in the film I was sure that Jolie would turn out to be Pierce, having cleverly disguised himself as his former lover. But then there was quite a lot of sexual tension between the leads and - this being a mainstream Holywood film - it seemed unlikely the big reveal would be that Johnny Depp had been lusting over a guy all film. So was it going to turn out that Depp is Pierce then? Surely not, cos that would make no sense for a huge number of reasons - most of which I was able to come up during the film given the time afforded to me by its never-ending laboured and unnecessary dialogue.

An outline of some of these reasons follow. Since Pierce is on the run from the cops for tax evasion it would make no sense for Depp's character to deliberately get them on his trail by luring Jolie into his life with the police on her tail. If Jolie is really as madly in love with Pierce as she claims surely she would have realised Depp was Pierce at any of the numerous intimate moments the spend together? Indeed, to reveal Depp as Pierce would make the whole plot stupid, and its resolutions a ridiculous sham of a twist that fails to stand up to a millisecond of thought.

Johnny Depp turns out to be Pierce. Not only does this not make sense for the reasons stated, but before running off into the sunset with Jolie he kindly leaves the cops a cheque for the money they're after him for! Which kinds of negates the point of him running away in the first place doesn't it?

One wonders why actors like Depp and Jolie - who are very good and deserve their status on the A-list - take roles like this. Surely they don't need the money and surely they're rolling in offers to star in all kinds of better things all the time. Even the inclusion of Paul Bettany as the halfway Keystone cops interpol guy doesn't raise the standard, the plot is simply too bland and nonsensical, the film is simply without any style or direction. A disappointing way to kick off 2011 at the cinema.

Never Let Me Go

Last of my Jet Airlines film experiences was 'Never Let Me Go'. I return to the UK to discover that it hasn't been released here yet, so I guess this is something of an exclusive preview for Friedgold - my first!

Never Let Me Go is an adaptation of a novel that re-imagines recent history as a world in which genetic science has advanced to a point that many terminal diseases can be cured, but only at a terrible ethical price. The film's three main protagonists are people bred specifically for the purpose of providing replacement parts for rich and unknown people somewhere else in society. We start the film in a private school where the children are being bred for this purpose, being indoctrinated to know their purpose and believe that what they're doing is part of the natural order. They act and behave like normal children, but under this polished veneer is a constant tension that they and their teachers are aware of their future as mere replacement parts.

Whereas Hollywood might have turned this into a slick action thriller, director Mark Romanek has used the setting of 1970s UK to generate a depressing, dark and grey feel. It's a feeling that permeates everything in the film; the dull clothing and retro appliances give the feel of a society that's slowly falling apart under the weight of scientific development gone awry. While a minority of the rich can afford to grow replacement human parts and live forever, the rest of the world stays grey and slips slowly back into Victorian times.

The three main actors are Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightly - all people who have felt the pull of the Hollywood pay cheque and so it's nice to see them tackle something a little more thoughtful. It's fashionable to bash Keira Knightly's acting I know, but there are moments in the film when I thought she was pushing her talents a little too far. One scene stands out to me - when she walks through some woods with Carey Mulligan and talks about her pain after a recent operation, I thought you could actually see her acting in that scene. Not a good sign. The child actors used to play the young versions for Mulligan, Garfield and Knightly are all very good - especially Izzy Meikle-Small, who is a dead ringer for Carey Mulligan.

As ever I do enjoy seeing a science fiction film in which the subject matter is tackled from the dystopian point of view that it demands. 'Never Let Me Go' is one such film. Always understated and firmly about characters and people, it's a story of rampant scientific advancement and its negative impact upon ordinary peoples' lives. And Carey Mulligan is awesome. Definitely my new favourite actress.

It's released here in Feb 2011 by the way.

Easy A

I do enjoy a well-told teen angst story, here is a film in that mould with a bit of a difference. Emma Stone plays Olive, an ordinary high school girl who apparently makes no impact on the social map and has never been noticed by the boys. Let's get out of the way how ridiculous a premise this is early on in the review. If Emma Stone was a student at my high school she would have been the hottest of the hotties hands down. I guess that teenage boys in California are spoilt for choice.

We can brush over this fairly easily, after all it's not as if the Californian film industry doesn't have a history of casting attractive people as 'nerds' (Buffy the Vampire Slayer anyone?), and enjoy what is a film that displays its message in big neon letters over its head. Olive narrates the film from the future and seems to play the part of the film's writers, overtly pining for the golden age of 1980s teen cinema where Judd Nelson was a rebel, Ferris Beuler had musical numbers and John Hughes was in charge. Olive has amazingly liberal parents and is reasonably happy with her teen high school existence, but to make herself seem cool she pretends to have had sex on a weekend away. Rumours of her promiscuity travel around the school like wildfire, which she then fans when she realises she can pretend to have had sex with guys for money. Having made her bed she now has to lie in it when she turns into a hate figure for almost everyone at the school, but a hate figure whom people want to be seen with none-the-less.

The film heavily references 'The Scarlet Letter', in which an adulterous woman is hounded by her own community, and is eager to comment on the hypocrisy between how teenage girls and boys are perceived throughout school and the rest of their lives. It is emphatically not another 'teen movie' or a series of bawdy gags about teenage promiscuity. It's much closer to something like Juno, in that the main character is a confident young girl with supportive parents trying to work out what her own boundaries are in the modern world (also she has excellent and witty scriptwriters helping her out by feeding her lines).

We get a couple of strong supporting performances (especially from Thomas Haden Church and Patricia Clarkson), a song and dance number, a bit of God-Squad bashing and an ending that's nothing less than all fuzzy and warm - in a good way. It's a film that I think quite a lot of people could enjoy if they're willing to think of it as a throwback to 1980s teen movies as opposed to a lot of the modern flesh-fests that seem to be out there.

3 Idiots

This is a Bolywood film that our guide in Nepal (Kiron) insisted I should watch as an example of how Bolywood can be good and isn't all just about song-and-dance numbers and star-crossed lovers. Although I probably shouldn't have taken him seriously after he showed as an 'excellent political drama' on Indian TV that was literally laughably edited. Anyway, entirely randomly the film was available on the plane back, so even though I initially baulked at the 170 minutes run time I quickly realised I was due to be on a plane for 10 hours and pressed play.

"3 Idiots" is a film in which a bunch of university students get together 5 years after leaving university to work out which of them has done the best. Most of the film is told as a flashback to their university days at engineering college in which each of the characters fulfills a ready-made standard role. There's the studious but failing one with lots of heart, the religious one, the teacher's pet and their friend / nemesis - the naturally brilliant Rancho who defies the impossibly arch faculty head's rules and aces every test thrown at him with his endless talent.

Obviously the brilliant Rancho wins at everything, including wooing the faculty head's daughter and teaching his nerdier mates that they should live their own lives rather than struggling to be the sons that their fathers want them to be. It actually gets quite emotional towards the end as the main characters come to terms with their own dreams and face up to their overwhelming parental expectations.

I'm a little sad to admit it, but there was definitely a tear forming in my eye at this point. Bloody Boeing 777 air conditioning.

It's simple, obviously-plotted and melodramatic to the extreme with a couple of expertly-choreographed dance numbers - in other words, exactly what I would have expected from a Bolywood film. None of this is necessarily a bad thing though. Despite the long running time, hackneyed sight gags, fart jokes and made-for-the-masses love interest I mostly enjoyed it. Certainly not film of the year, but when you're next stuck in an aluminium tube for 10 hours you could do a lot worse.

Jet Airlines present...

There will now follow some reviews of films brought to me by Jet Airlines. I was on holiday in Nepal over the Xmas period and flew Jet Airlines from Heathrow to Kathmandu. This included multiple delays of all kinds - basically, Kathmandu airport is the most inefficiently run on the planet and snow doesn't like Heathrow. On the way back from Delhi (10 hours in a plane) I had a chance to watch three films. On the way out I was too worried about missing our connection to Kathmandu in Delhi and just tried to sleep, on the way back I was in a much more chilled out mindset and so checked out my 6 inch screen for entertainment options.

If this was one of those lifestyle blogs I'm sure I'd post loads of photos and have loads of exciting stories about all the interesting things I saw and did and ate in Nepal. But it's not and I'm going to stay on mission. If you want a description of the insane chaos that is Kathmandu traffic then ask me. I'll also happily tell you about trekking in the Himalayas, Nepalese food, Buddhism, Hindu cremations, icy waterfalls, Yaks & Naks, altitude sickness, Chinese whisky, Apple Raski and Lukla Airport. Buy me a pint why not?

What I'm going to give you here are reviews of a selection of films that you too could watch if you fly Heathrow - Delhi with Jet airlines this month. 3 Idiots, Easy A and Never Let Me Go. See below (or technically above or in your RSS feed, since blogs work like that).

Films of the Year - 2010

It's that time of year again. The end of the year. And with the end of the year every blogger and amateur film critic out there is telling anyone who'll listen which films were their favourites. Given that I lack the imagination to do anything different, I present my top 5 films of 2010:

5 - Paranormal Activity

I guess this is technically a 2009 release, but I didn't see it in a cinema until 2010 so I'm claiming it. Absolutely bloody terrifying, the most effective horror film I've seen in some time.

4 - Toy Story 3

Disarming in its approach but undoubtedly tear-jerking, Toy Story 3 encourages us to lament our long lost childhood and re-enforces Pixar's position at the top of the animation charts. This is also probably the best 'part 3' of any film series of all time (well, Goldfinger is clearly better - but that doesn't count).

3 - Inception

The best Science Fiction film of the year by quite a distance. It wasn't quite as confusing or as mind-bending as the reviews had made out, but it took visual and sound effects to a new level. With a plot straight of a Sci-Fi masterwork book it's an achievement to make it into multiplex cinemas. Mainstream science fiction will never be the same again.

2 - Kick Ass

First class entertainment, stupid outfits and underage potty-mouths all in the comforting guise of a comic book adaptation. And also a bit of an allegory for heroism in real life too. Definitely the most fun I had at the cinema this year.

1 - Made In Dagenham

Anyone who knows me well will be dramatically unsurprised that a story about workers taking on one of the world's largest motor manufacturers is my film of the year. Released at exactly the right time to have as much of an impact as possible, 'Made in Dagenham' is as much a rallying call to the modern disposed as it is a touching drama about ordinary people making history.