Finally A Post About Batman

It's no secret that Batman is kind of the unofficial mascot of this blog.  It was described to me today by a friend as "Shakespeare surrounded by Batman".  And yet I've never actually done a post exclusively about everyone's favourite winged vigilante.  I'm seeing The Dark Knight Rises tomorrow, so there'll be plenty to come on that but before we plunge into - let's face it - the end of a Batman epoch (because seriously, who is going to touch it for the next ten years after Nolan?) I want to address the "original" Batman film franchise and what went so badly, badly wrong.

I say "original" because, as any good nerd knows, Batman has been around in various guises since 1939. (Mostly bat-shaped guises, though there was that one comic where he was a pirate.  No seriously, google it.)  Pretty much all of my Batman knowledge comes from screen adaptations.  Despite my penchant for all things geek-shaped, I've never picked up/illegally downloaded a comic from the D.C. universe, nor will I because a) too much continuity and b) I hear they recently rebooted the D.C. universe for the seventeen billionth time and apparently it - to borrow a vulgarism - sucks ass.  Also, beyond Batman, the characters of the D.C. universe/Justice League have never really appealed to me as much as Marvel for whatever reason.  Maybe because Marvel keeps being so obliging with the abundance of cheekbones in their films.

Tons has been written about Batman in various cultural studies journals, so I'm not going to pretend that I can add anything new to the pot here but I know why I like him: he's mortal.  Batman is the most direct descendent of the heroic archetype that we have today. Beowulf, Odysseus, Spring-Heeled Jack - all of them went into making this guy who doesn't have any superhuman powers, just a gym membership and a large disposable income.  He's also hugely adaptable.  As far as I can discern, Batman has three main modes: gothy, campy and gritty.  All of them have their pros and cons but the character is always unfailingly Batman.  Not just in essentials (Batmobile, Batbelt, Batarangs, Batsignal, any other noun you can add 'Bat' to) but in motivation: "you fucked with my parents and now I'm going to dress up like a large rodent instead of visiting a psychiatrist like I probably should."  For great justice.

So let's take a look at Batman B.N. (Before Nolan).

Batman (1989)
This is a classic for so many reasons, but it has some flaws.  The main reason to watch it is Jack Nicholson's Joker.  We credit Heath Ledger with turning in an Oscar-worthy performance as a comic book villain, and rightly so, but let's not forget that this guy did it first.  Nicholson's Joker is more affable than Ledger's and (often literally for those onscreen) rib-crackingly funny.  He has the volatility of the character down perfectly post-chemical dip and even before 'Jack Napier' becomes the Clown Prince of Crime, Nicholson pulls no punches letting you know that this guy is a psycho with a nasty sense of humour.  Also, I defy anyone not to enjoy the sequence where the Joker and his goons burst into the art gallery to deface famous works of art accompanied by a huge 80s style boom box playing Prince's 'Partyman', written specifically for the film (oh yeah, loads of the songs are by Prince because that's not at all bizarre).

It's maybe not surprising that the Joker is the main draw of this film, given that it was directed by permanent-outsider-teen Tim Burton.  I unapologetically love Tim Burton, up to about 2007 when the formula started to wear thin (but it took some people much less time, so no-one can say I'm not faithful). But in 1989 Burton was at the beginning of his glory days.  His only major film before that was Beetlejuice, which ranks as my favourite Burton film of his oeuvre, and being such a comparative rookie has its good points and bad points.  On the one hand, Burton is gloriously unafraid to break the mould, which is what his Batman does in the same way that Batman Begins did sixteen years later.  Like Nolan, he wanted to make something that would open up the potential of this universe to more than just comic book fans.  The focus is on the Joker because what Burton does best is freakish outsiders, and it's hugely successful here.  Also remember when Burton was a great satirist, and not just someone who made things look cool by adding spirals?  That's hugely in evidence here, with Gotham's middle-class elite taking a battering for their narrow-minded concerns, picking up from the 80s yuppies in Beetlejuice and paving the way for the candy-coloured houses of Edward Scissorhands.

On the other hand, he doesn't really know what to do with the man himself.  Michael Keaton is great, and remains a lot of people's favourite Batman, but his Bruce Wayne - nervy, awkward, bespectacled and, now I think about it, oddly reminiscent of Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner in The Avengers - is more successful than his Batman.  There's no origin story here (well, it sort of comes into the plot later but in quite a half-arsed way), no explanation of why he does what he does.  The nearest we get is "Because I'm the only one who can", which is profoundly unsatisfying.  You get the feeling that Burton already had his hands full with one costumed weirdo and didn't really know how to balance the two against each other.  There's a nice thematic parallel between the two throughout, as it is gradually revealed that each are responsible for the other's transformation, but really there could be a lot more angst is all I'm saying.  Never thought I'd say that about a Tim Burton film.  As a whole, the film feels vaguely unformed: it's not quite a blockbuster, not quite a Burton film.

For all that, it's so worth watching if you haven't seen it.  All due respect to Nolan, but he wasn't the first to make Batman mainstream acceptable.  And also Billy Dee Williams is Harvey Dent in an aborted sequel hook that never quite enters Two-Face territory.  For shame.

Batman Returns (1992)
This is hands down my favourite Batman film, Nolan trilogy included.  With one film under the belt, Burton is much more sure-footed here and it's an out-and-out gothic Burton-gold-standard freak-fest.  Once again, the focus is on the villains and once again they're classics: Danny DeVito's genuinely disturbing Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer's iconic Catwoman.  The Penguin is a villain straight out of Burton's own imagination - in fact, there's even a character in Burton's 'The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy', a strange and excellent little book of poems and drawings concerning various deformed children, called That Hideous Penguin Boy.  And hideous he is too.  On my 153rd rewatch, I still find it distressingly hard to look at the Penguin full on so I guess bravo to the make-up department there, and also kindly go fuck yourselves for igniting a metric fuckton of Nightmare Fuel in my tender developing imagination.  Christopher Walken is also on good eerie form as Max Schrek, the shady industrialist who pulls the strings and, despite lack of animal-themed costume/deformity, is implied to be the real monster in Gotham.

Also remember what I was saying about Burton being a great satirist?  Pfeiffer's Catwoman is my favourite part of the whole film because of the way she gloriously deconstructs the idea of the sexy whip-toting dominatrix who just needs the love of a good man.  Don't get me wrong, she's still guilty of launching an entire generation of boyish masturbatory fantasies and I'd be lying if I said she wasn't objectified even a little bit (vinyl catsuit) but Burton and Pfeiffer make it gloriously clear that Selina Kyle is, y'know, brain-damaged.  In close up, she twitches, smears her lipstick across her face, her eyes lose focus and she occasionally tries to eat live birds.  She should probably be in a hospital ward but, like Bruce, she's decided to work out her problems by dressing as a furry mammal and capering across some rooftops.  Accordingly, the Batman/Catwoman/Bruce Wayne/Selina Kyle romance is done brilliantly and is actually integral to the plot too, unlike poor Kim Basinger's tacked-on romance in the first film.  The sequence where they turn up to a masquerade ball (as Wayne and Kyle) and are the only two not wearing masks is a great touch, as is Pfeiffer's deadpan delivery upon their mutual realisation of each other's alter-ego in the middle of the crowded dance floor: "Do we have to start fighting now?" Just two damaged, combative, highly secretive individuals taking turns to kick the shit out of each other and make out.  Move along now, nothing to see here.  In conclusion, Catwoman manages to be empowered and deconstruct the idea of empowerment-through-male-gaze at the same time.  And that was in 1992.  What happened?

Batman Returns is much tighter than its predecessor, and darker too - something which led to Burton's polite removal from the director's chair for the next one.  The design is superb, Gotham City re-imagined as an art deco nightmare with shades of film noir.  At the time, a reviewer called the film "the first blockbuster art film" (that's some great citation there), a trick which Nolan again repeated with The Dark Knight, and I think that's the perfect description for it.  The action is a little meagre and there's no fine delineation of heroes and villains, but that's not the point - it's a murky, gruesome, beautiful world in which it isn't hard to believe that deformed children are cast into the river to grow up in sewers beneath your feet and secretaries are pushed out of top-floor windows.  Not our own world by a long shot, but with enough resonances to make it uncomfortable viewing.

Batman Forever (1995)
And here's where the rot starts to set it.  Making good on their pledge that no bad decision go unmade, Hollywood decided that Batman Returns was a just a little too controversial and there was a whole audience of families whose wallets were going unemptied.  Enter stage right: Joel Schumaker and a sudden cold wind blowing through everyone's hearts.  Burton stayed on to produce, which is apparent in the final mix of the film: the universe is cartoonish and silly, but the tone is weirdly gloomy.  It's like the opposite of one of those kids who dresses in stripy tights and black eyeliner but then smiles all the time and says things like "I'm kooky!"  It's like Eeyore in drag.  (You're welcome.)  It's also famous for being the film in which Schumaker decided that subtlety was for pussies and rubber nipples were for men.

I won't lie, it's been a while since I watched it.  I do know, however, that as great as Tommy Lee Jones generally is (and he's an okay-ish Two Face here), I feel robbed of not seeing Billy Dee Williams in the role.  Robbed.  Val Kilmer is also an okay-ish sort of Batman but to me he will never ever not be the gay detective from Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which is a) awesome and you should see it it now, b) not in any way an insult because Kilmer is great in it and c) this is the film where we get Robin for the first time so the homoeroticism is already dialled up to eleven.  Speaking of: ugh, Robin.  Chris O'Donnell is the kind of charmless charisma-vacuum that studios loved casting in the mid-nineties because for a very short space of time, that is apparently what women wanted.  On that note, let's bear in mind that they also apparently wanted Mel Gibson at that point too, so let's just write the whole decade off as a loss for relations between the sexes.  I would actually have loved to see Nolan's attempt at a gritty reboot of Robin, given that this is something that has actually been attempted in the comics, with the second (?) Robin, Jason Todd, becoming Nightwing when he was fired from being Robin on reaching adulthood (also I think he died or something).  Let's not dwell on the fact that Batman stops employing his sidekicks when they reach the age of consent.  I still have a secret hope that Joseph Gordon Levitt's role in The Dark Knight Rises actually is Robin in some way, given that my theory is that he's there to take over when Christian Bale breaks his spine or dies or generally stops being able to go Batmanning of an evening.

Shamefully, there is one thing that I like about this film a lot, which is Jim Carey as The Riddler.  That makes no sense to me even as I type it, but there it is.  He fits with the timbre of the new universe, being kind of a walking cartoon as he is, and The Riddler is a pretty classic villain (again, I was hoping he would make an appearance in the Nolan-verse but I can well imagine the Internet's ringing cries of "Joker knock-off!", only with more swearing and casual misogyny).  That is it though.  It's maybe worth watching because it's so bizarre, but on the whole you should just pretend the franchise died with Burton's directorial involvement.

Batman and Robin (1997)
There's little I can say about how bad this film is that you won't have heard before but do you want the truth?  You'll probably quite enjoy it.  It reaches levels of so-bad-it's-good so quickly that you almost suspect Schumaker of trying to make a cult film.  And then Arnie turns up with another ice pun and you realise that if anyone willingly put themselves through the making of this for art, then that person is a hero.  It's scraping the barrel so hard on the villain front, it's practically through to the floor.  As well as the inventively named Mr Freeze (he freezes things), we get an unnervingly dead-eyed Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy and some other bloke as her henchman Bane (man, I am so looking forward to The Dark Knight Rises).  In the first three films, we had a psychotic clown, a hideous deformed penguin-man, and a man with half his face burned away by acid.  The weapons threatening Gotham this time are frozen water, and plants.  Also Bane, who is supposed to be one of the smartest and strongest of the Batman Rogue's Gallery - he actually broke Batman's spine leaving him paraplegic in one story arc (oh my god, is it time for Dark Knight Rises yet?) - is reduced to an inarticulate luchador.  Also Alicia Silverstone is Batgirl and loads of people called her fat, which is really uncalled for when her performance is so horrible, you could just focus on that. (Also, she's not fat.)

So yeah, I could go through all the puns, all the nonsensical plot points, all the bizarre unintentional homoeroticism, all the torturous adolescent flirting, all the fucking BAT CREDIT CARDS, but I won't because you should just watch it with some strong drink and then a) you can say you've watched it and survived and b) you might even enjoy it a little bit.  Or just look at George Clooney's calming, symmetrical face.  Don't you feel better now?

But in the end, it's not enough to say that's it's a bad film, you have to ask why it's bad - because no-one sets out to make a bad film.  The answer is quite simple: money, dear boy.  Batman and Robin is a purely cynical money-spinning exercise from beginning to end.  It could have taken Burton's quasi-cartoon universe and pushed it into something more trippy and disturbing but no - Batman and Robin is the way it is because the producers wanted to sell more Happy Meal toys.  That's right, McDonald's did what the Joker never could.  It killed Batman.


And then along came Nolan in 2005 to resurrect our Bat-shaped hopes and dreams with a trilogy that has not only redefined Batman (again) but redefined what we're allowed to do with blockbusters.  It's the film that everyone will see this summer - they might not have seen The Avengers, they might not see The Amazing Spider-man, but they'll sure as hell see The Dark Knight Rises, and they'll enjoy it.  Unless, as I predict, Christian Bale ends the film shattered into a million tiny pieces and even then, it'll happen in an awesome way.  Just please, please, please, Christopher Nolan - don't fuck up Catwoman.

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE (IN MY PANTS) (NO PLOT SPOILERS BUT MANY FEELINGS)

HERE, THESE ARE ALL MY FEELINGS ABOUT THE AVENGERS, WHICH I HAVE JUST SEEN THIS VERY NIGHT:

1) PEW PEW PEW GUNS AND EXPLOSIONS AND WHEEEEE THINGS BLOW UP GOOD TIMES YES NOW. OW, I HAVE A HEADACHE.

2) SCARLETT JOHANSSON IS HOT.  BLACK WIDOW IS ALSO HOT BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY MORE BADASS THAN CAN BE REASONABLY SUMMARISED IN A SHORT AMOUNT OF TIME.

3) TOM HIDDLESTON'S VOICE GOES STRAIGHT TO THE KNICKER AREA.  THIS IS SCIENTIFIC FACT, PROVED BY ALL THE SCIENCE RESEARCH I DID.  TOM.  TOM.  SAY "ON YOUR KNEES" AGAIN.

4) HULK CAN BE DONE SUCCESSFULLY ON FILM BUT FIRST JOSS WHEDON MUST POINT OUT HOW INTRINSICALLY RIDICULOUS HE IS.

5) NOOOOOOOOOOOO, DAMN YOU WHEDON.  OF FUCKING COURSE THAT IS WHO YOU WOULD TARGET FOR YOUR DEMONIC WHEDONISH PURPOSES.

6) THERE MUST BE A HAWKEYE/BLACK WIDOW FILM NOW PLEASE PLEASE NOW I MUST SEE MORE OF THEIR PAIRED AND SHARED AWESOME, AND I MUST KNOW MORE ABOUT THEIR MYSTERIOUS AND SEXY PAST.

7) HAWKEYE HAWKEYE HAWKEYE.  RENNER, YOU SQUISHY-FACED PART-ELF ANGEL.

8) IRON MAN CALLS HAWKEYE 'LEGOLAS'.  THIS IS NOT EVEN THE MOST AWESOME THING THAT HAPPENS IN THE FILM.

9) SAMUEL L JACKSON HOLDS A BAZOOKA AT ONE POINT.  REPORTS INDICATE THAT THIS IS TOO MUCH BADASS FOR THE UNIVERSE TO CONTAIN AND IT WILL BE IMPLODING SHORTLY.

10) JOSS WHEDON AND LOKI VALIDATE THE COMPULSORY MIDDLE ENGLISH COMPONENT OF MY COURSE WITH TWO WORDS: "MEWLING QUIM".

11) LOKI IS SO FUCKING PIMP.  EVEN IN THAT FUCKING STUPID HELMET.  NAY, ESPECIALLY IN THAT FUCKING STUPID HELMET.

12) CAPTAIN AMERICA UNDERSTANDS ONE POP CULTURE REFERENCE AND WE ARE ALL VERY PROUD OF HIM.

13) TONY STARK'S EGO CAN ONLY BE SATED BY A PHALLIC SYMBOL THAT TOWERS ABOVE THE NEW YORK SKYLINE AND BY GOD, I WOULD NOT HAVE IT ANY OTHER WAY.

14) STILL NO-ONE HAS MADE ANY GIANT HAMMER JOKES ABOUT THOR.

15) LOKI JUST NEEDS A HUG.  I WILL GIVE IT TO HIM.  SERIOUSLY, I WILL MAKE THAT SACRIFICE.  FOR THE TEAM.

16) THERE WAS ACTUALLY QUITE A LOT OF HOMOEROTICISM AND I REALLY THOUGHT THOR AND LOKI WERE GOING TO KISS AT SEVERAL POINTS, AND ALSO CAPTAIN AMERICA AND IRON MAN.  I, FOR ONE, WELCOME THIS MORE FLUID APPROACH TO SEXUALITY IN MAINSTREAM MEDIA.

17) NOW THAT THE RAINBOW BRIDGE HAS BEEN DESTROYED, THOR TRAVELS BY THE POWER OF PLOT CONTRIVANCE.

18) I CANNOT REALLY SAY MUCH MORE WITHOUT SPOILING THE PLOT.

19) WAIT, WAIT, ONE MORE FOR LUCK.

20)  LOKI. GOD OF ARMANI.


I'm seeing it again on Tuesday.  I'll probably do a proper review then.  Don't hold your breath though, it's probably just going to be the word "awesome" copy-pasted 500 hundred times.

A Pop-Cultural Confession

I love bad TV. And bad films. And bad books. And bad songs. And bad sandwiches. No, wait.

Actually, I love a certain type of bad TV/film/literature/music. When you say "bad TV", you probably think of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding or Take Me Out or my sister's latest favourite, some show with an awfully punning name that I can't remember where gay man have to sprint back into the closet for money by fooling a heterosexual woman into having feelings for them. I think it's called "Where Taste Goes to Die".* But these are artlessly bad telly. They know what they are. They make no pretensions to greatness, and thus are curiously humourless - despite their abundance of ribaldry and 70s era Brighton postcard naughtiness. I'm talking about the programmes that are preposterous. Absurd. Almost surreally bad. So much so that you're sure someone is wiping away tears of mirth behind the camera at the expense of the poor saps who actually pay the licence fee. If this was America, I'd say these are the programmes knocked out between the hours of the 11am cocaine break and 11.38am when it's time to take an early lunch and also more cocaine. Being Britain, it's more likely that these are the shows knocked out between a nice cup of tea and a biccy at 4.30 in the afternoon and weeping over your BA in Arts History at 5.15.

My criteria for detecting such shows (and films and books) is simple. If, at any point, I lean back in my chair, pull my (sometimes real, sometimes imaginary) glasses down my nose, chortle and say firmly "SILLY", it's a winner. Sometimes good shows have "SILLY" moments. Sometimes they have entire episodes of "SILLY". Being Human falls prey to this more than I'd like. Doctor Who too, especially in the Russell T Davies era. That episode with Agatha Christie and the giant wasp. I'd say that on paper they thought it sounded charming and off-beat but I've just typed it out here and it sounds like a parody of a Doctor Who episode. And a better parody than that Lenny Henry one with the Margaret Thatcher dalek. Saying that Maggie Thatcher is a life-destroying emotionless ooze encased inside a metal outer shell constructed by supremacist masters isn't satire, it's just fact.

Sorry, think I got some politics in your pop culture, there.

As I said, there's a difference between SILLY television/film/etc and downright bad stuff. There's the bad stuff like Take Me Out (upon my first viewing, I was reminded of a line from Jane Austen**: "Man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal." If the premise of your show aligns with the sexual politics of the late 18th century, you need to take a long hard look in the mirror). It's joyless. It's crass. It's (incoming snob alert) Lowest Common Denominator television. I'm aware that many watch Take Me Out et al because they find it hideously compelling, sort of like driving past a car crash on the motorway. I get this. I'm on board with this. And the game show format means you can catch the occasional episode here and there and not feel hideously guilty.

I differ in that I watch whole series that I think are badly written, acted and filmed. I follow the plot. I root for the characters. I decide it would be better if x happened to y instead of z. People are - understandably - puzzled by this. I don't advocate this relationship with the gogglebox: it's terribly unhealthy and please let us remember I am a terrible freak of nature and my mother should probably never have let me out of the attic. "But why?" People ask me. (In my head. Nobody actually cares about what I watch on TV.) "Why spend so much energy on shows you don't even like?"

Oh-ho, I say. Shows that are bad, yes. Shows I don't like? No, no, no. Merlin. The Tudors. Whitechapel. These are my crack. Silly, silly shows full of ridiculous dialogue, flimsy premises, unbelievable plot twists (yes, even in Merlin where they can explain things away with magic). And I love them. I love kicking back with a bottle of something cheap, a gal pal and iPlayer (or whatever) and roaring sniggery, joyful commentary at Rupert Penry-Jones pretending to have OCD because someone thought it would give his character on Whitechapel depth.

Whitechapel is especially dear to my heart, actually, because it started out pretty well. The first series operated on the premise that someone was imitating the Jack the Ripper murders with such exact detail and unstoppability that people started to think he'd come back to life. This worked. Jack the Ripper stands pretty tall in the Murderer's Hall of Fame. He's scary because he was never caught. There's a ton of theories about him. And the slight suggestion of the supernatural gave it a nice edge and saved it from being too...Red Riding-y, I guess. Then it got a second series. About the Krays. Yes, the Krays were famous people who did bad things who lived in Whitechapel. That's about as far as anything made sense. Copycat Krays...don't. The Krays did naughty murders because they were building a criminal empire. It was to a purpose. A bad purpose that we at Jane Shakespeare do not in any way condone, no matter how much I might casually drop into conversation my family's spurious connections with the Mafia, but a purpose nonetheless. So they spent an entire series avoiding asking the huge, glaring, obvious question:WHY? Why in heaven's name mimic the not-at-all-famous individual killings of two gangsters? As serial killers go, that's one spending a lot of time in the library. The third series is airing right now and they've basically run up against the wall that most of us saw coming a way back: there are no more crimes in Whitechapel to imitate. Instead, they've opted for a 'crime archive', run by Steve Pemberton, wherein is contained a record of crimes from the world over, many of which bear shocking and convenient resemblances to the crimes being committed in modern day Whitechapel. Hey. Psst. Rupert Penry-Jones. I'd start investigating the guy from The League of Gentlemen, if I were you.

They even have to spell this out in the first episode. "Are you saying it's another copycat?" asks RPJ handsomely (he does everything handsomely, he can't help it). "No," says Steve Pemberton, making sure the audience are paying attention, "but we can use reports of crimes that happened centuries ago or abroad in different social and cultural contexts to help solve ones happening specifically in a very small area of London today." Except that's preposterous and you're ridiculous and god I love this show. Every innovation they make is hilarious: they try and find RPJ a love interest and his initial (handsome) reaction is always along the lines of "Good God, a woman! Get it away! It might use its pheromones or wiles or breasts on me. I hear they have those." Whitechapel (as I said) is also a pretty small area of London, these days mostly populated by upper-middle-class hipsters who consider themselves daring for moving to East London and a handful of belligerent actual East End natives. Whitechapel on TV is a shadowy world of outrageous murders every week or so, Kensington Gore being slung around like it's going out of style, and a "community" of "locals" who are apparently something akin to the villagers in The Wicker Man as every week Salt-of-the-Earth Lady-Policeman reports back that "the word on the street" is that hapless innocents are being stalked by fell agents of darkness for Lucifer's own infernal damned purposes. And they always seem to remember murders that happened in the Victorian era. "It were a dark time," they shake their heads and say, staring traumatised into their builder's tea. Whitechapel: gotta love it.

It's not just crappy telly though. Films are not exempt. Again, I'm not talking obviously shite romantic-comedy-by-numbers bilge like New Year's Eve or whatever Jennifer Aniston is in now. I mean films that have ideas, dangerous ideas, that they wish to achieve. Take Thor. Since posting my review of it (here), where I was fairly "eh", if I recall, I have since watched it more times than any other superhero film I own. Including Iron Man, including The Dark Knight, including X-Men: First Class, all of which are legitimately good movies, which Thor is not. But it has Asgard! Shiny, shiny, camp Asgard! It has a rainbow bridge and a giant hammer and frost giants and I'm already laughing because it is so goddam gloriously ridiculously brilliantly SILLY that I enjoy it with a level of unholy glee good movies can't quite match. I even got over the whole Thor-isn't-really-my-type thing when I decided that Loki was really the main character but Kenneth Branagh didn't want to make Chris Hemsworth jealous. What? What?

The point is, you should try it. I'm not against crap TV, far from it. But there are degrees of crapness. Instead of watching My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding paint an entire culture in what can be generously described as broad brushstrokes, watch Primeval. It may be tosh of the highest order, but it's not exploiting anybody (except you, probably). Instead of popping on Twilight (which, by the way, doesn't count as enjoyably bad because the SILLY moments are outweighed by the THAT'S NOT OKAY moments), why not dig out Heart and Souls, a painfully 80s (despite being produced in 1993) comedy wherein Robert Downey Jr must help four dead people complete their unfinished business before his girlfriend dumps him? What I'm saying is that crap TV can be an innocent guilty pleasure. You too can sit for hours in front of Merlin's uncomfortable shirtless scenes, stuffing your mouth with popcorn and roaring indistinctly "SILLY". Live the dream, people. Live the dream.

*Apparently actually called Playing It Straight. I prefer my title.

** Yes, I'm aware of how pretentious that sounds. Come at me, bro.

5 Reasons Why You Should Be Really Fucking Psyched About The Avengers Film: Video Blog

And now for something completely different.

Just for a change (and because even typing is apparently too much effort now), I've decided to try something new and do a video blog. Possibly this is because I've been watching too much Nostalgia Critic and fallen into the dangerous trap of going "Pshaw! How hard can it be?", possibly because I am simply a dangerous egomaniac with far too many opinions. Who can say?

Either way, I apologise for the crappy picture quality, crappy sound quality and crappy editing. It's my first day.

Enjoy.

Clanger of the Gods: Review of 'Thor'

So yeah, it came out months ago. My instincts were that I was never going to pay money to see this Kenneth Branagh-helmed festival of the overblown and ridiculous. Having now viewed it by other (entirely legal, I swear) means, I can say I was right. Warning: contains spoilers.

Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad film. Well, it is, but it's so stupid as to be really quite entertaining. It's big, dumb, spectacular-looking and really pretty funny. In fact, it's the comedic moments that probably work best, which is not a regular feature of comic book films (let none of us forget that whole lift scene fiasco in Spiderman 2). Branagh has a history of directing films that are so grandiose you forget that they're bad, bad movies. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a prime example: Helena Bonham Carter's Elizabeth dies at the monster's hand (so far, so good) and then gets her head reattached to the body of her former maid, decides she doesn't like it and then sets herself on fire. Utterly ridiculous, completely overblown but so audacious you just sit there and go "Oh. Ok, then."

Thor is kind of like that. I mean, the whole concept is silly in the first place; I don't know who had the idea of making the Norse god of thunder into a comic hero but they sure as hell didn't help by slapping a red cape and a stupid helmet on him (though speaking of stupid helmets, nothing quite beats Loki's goat horns, or whatever the hell that is). This is one scenario in which Branagh's ridiculousness actually sort of works - we want to be distracted from the sheer insanity of what's going on in front of us by kabooms and silly hats and rainbow bridges. If you can swallow that, you can swallow anything this movie throws at you, even the idea of Natalie Portman as a respected academic. Oh, hush, she's a crazy bitch.

A basic run-down of the plot: the backstory goes that King of the Gods Antony Hopkins/Odin has a shiny kingdom called Asgard somewhere...in space? I'm not too sure. He fights the villains (ish) of the piece, the Frost Giants. No, I'm not kidding. He wins, he creates lasting peace, he ensures that his two sons, Thor (golden-haired trigger-happy thug-in-training played by Chris Hemsworth's abs) and Loki (small, pale, dark-haired, soulful - gee, wonder which turns out to be evil in a Hollywood film? - played by Tom Hiddleston) are in constant competition with each other by telling them only one can be king and it'll pretty much be Thor. Cut to some years later (Twenty? A thousand? They're not too clear on this either.) and Thor is being crowned king while Loki raises the first of many raised eyebrows. Unfortunately the ceremony is rudely interrupted by a few rogue Frost Giants breaking into Asgard to steal back the mystical source of their power, defeating the guards and then promptly dying. In retaliation, Thor (who, we must remember, is the good guy) decides to go and do a little avengin', rounding up a pack of...Norse gods? Higher beings? Other superheroes? (Again, not clear, but hey.) to help him. To cut a long story short, shit goes down and Odin decides Thor needs to take a little time out and banishes him to earth, where he's promptly run over by Natalie Portman in an SUV. Cue what is basically a fish-out-of-water comedy for the next hour, which is actually quite fun. Thor goes into a pet shop and demands a horse. That's funny, right? Come on, that's funny. From there, it ping-pongs back and forth between earth where Thor is learning humility and falling in love with Natalie Portman and Asgard where Loki is scheming away, lurking in more shadows, raising more eyebrows and managing to become king. There's also this whole scene where Hopkins/Odin makes a spectacularly unadvised move and tells Loki he's not really his son and he's actually a Frost Giant baby that he rescued or something. Anyway, apparently this is all that's needed to tip him over the edge from 'Misunderstood Anti-Hero' into 'Full-blown Psychopath' and he gets this worrying manic gleam in his eye. To be honest, after the first half hour, the plot isn't terribly memorable, but Loki sends a big metal robot thing to kill humanThor, humanThor dies and has his little Jesus moment by being resurrected as godThor, complete with giant hammer (two things: a) this hammer may be called Molly, I'm not quite sure, and b) giant hammer. lol.) GodThor snogs Natalie Portman goodbye, flies off to Asgard and much angsty 'I-don't-want-to-kill-you-but-I-will' battling with his brother ensues. At this point Loki decides the only thing that'll make Daddy love him now is genocide and he tries to kill all the Frost Giants (yes, despite being one), and Thor is all "absolutely not" (which is odd, considering it's the exact same thing he was advocating earlier but I guess that's character development, folks) and Thor stops him. Basically. It's kind of an underwhelming climax. Also, the bridge by which Thor gets to earth is broken, meaning he can't see Natalie Portman again, except he totally will because he's in The Avengers film, and Loki throws himself off the bridge in shame meaning he's dead, except he's totally not because he's also in the The Avengers film and the post-credits teaser sequence. And that's it, really. There's a ton of stuff I left out but none of it adds up anyway so let's not mourn too hard, eh?

Structurally, the beginning is better than the middle and the middle is better than the end, which isn't great storytelling. Nothing really happens at the climax and you don't even have the "woah" factor of seeing Asgard in all its camp, glittery glory for the first time. The middle section is, as I said, a fairly decent fish-out-of-water comedy but in terms of dramatic conflict, the stakes are surprisingly low. There's nothing threatening the earth, no nemesis that must be stopped (the Frost Giants are barely in it and they're more a threat to Asgard than earth): our main source of tension is whether this guy will get home or not. I'm pretty certain only one thing's ever managed to pull that off, and that was called The Odyssey. Actually, therein lies my personal problem with the film: Thor is no Odysseus. He's just so not my kind of superhero: he's brawny, he's dumb-but-charming, his aesthetic is poorly thought through...he's Superman, basically. He even has the whole Jesus allegory thing going on for him. And we all know how I feel about Superman. After being spoiled recently with a spate of classy, intelligent superhero flicks (and classy, intelligent superheroes), I can't really love Thor. At the end of the day, it's too dumb. I enjoyed the ride, but won't be buying the DVD.

The whole thing is much more palatable if you think of the Thor-Loki storyline as a really stupidly costumed version of King Lear. Thor is legitimate golden boy Edgar while sneaky, pale, loitering-in-the-shadows-smirking Loki is pure Edmund, right down to the unorthodox parentage. This was another problem for me actually: the first half hour of the film made Thor out to be such a douche that I couldn't help automatically siding with Loki and his wobbly-lipped rage. Well, up until he started advocating genocide instead of explaining to daddy why exactly it hurt him very much that he wasn't informed of his adoption earlier and that blatant favouritism is not a great way to rear children who have the power to kill each other, and then just hugging it out. In fact, I'm not convinced that Branagh didn't actually want to make a movie about Loki instead, what with the way his degree of evil was hopping all over the place. One minute it's 'bit of a trickster, just wants to be loved', next it's 'wait, this movie needs a villain, KILL EVERYONE'. And before you ask, yes, of course I fancied him a bit. Snarky, dark-haired, pale-skinned, big-eyed, Not-Evil-Just-Misunderstood anti-hero with daddy issues by the bucketload. It's predictable as Joss Whedon killing off a much-loved character in The Avengers.

To sum up: Thor is (mercifully) never going to win any awards. But it's fun. And some aspects are very well done: it looks great (even if Branagh does have a penchant for tilted camera angles), it's funny and the foreshadowing, like Loki's ability to create multiple versions of himself and make me think unladylike thoughts was relatively subtle (well, I didn't notice it anyway). At the end of the day, it's not clever enough for my liking - not the hero, not the story, not the dialogue, and I apologise for my superhero-snobbery. I'll tell you one thing though - I am so looking forward to The Avengers.

P.S. I think another reason I was so tickled by Tom Hiddleston's performance is that it means I can tick him off a list of actors who I spotted doing minor or obscure things and mentally noted down for future greatness. I saw him as Cassio in a production of Othello at the Donmar Warehouse a few years ago and, as I recall, despite starring Ewan McGregor as Iago, the conversation on the way home was all about that charming young man who played Cassio. Cassio? More like CassiYO.

I'll get my coat. Bye.

My Super Ex-Boyfriends

I've been watching a lot of superhero films lately. The context to this is that I'm also revising for Finals, the exams that determine what degree I get (except not really because I do English and you have to actively try to get less than a 2:1, so...yeah) and it does my heart good to indulge in a little escapism now and again.

Contrary to what you might expect of me given that this blog has thus far been largely dominated by Doctor Who, I never really read comics when I was a kid, or even watched Saturday morning cartoons. Okay, I read the Beano, but the Beano is great. And I watched The Simpsons but so did my whole family. In fact, the heroes of my formative years were the three greatest grubby little antiheroes of all time: Dennis the Menace, Bart Simpson and Just William. You can imagine how much I wanted a catapult and pea-shooter, but apparently those are Actually Quite Dangerous or some such thing. Factor in Woody from Toy Story (who I guess is kind of like a version of the first three but older and on the right side of the law) and I think the reason I was never really into superheroes as a kid is because I already had enough role models (of sorts). Besides, superheroes were for boys. Superman and Batman and Spiderman were good for nothing but adorning the lunchboxes of all those icky males I condescended to interact with occasionally.

I think it's also the fact that superheroes were supposed to do good and fight crime and uphold ideals and that was kind of boring to me. Dennis, Bart and William were the cool kids that I was never really going to be because, despite running my mouth off at every opportunity and getting in more than a few playground scuffles, I basically cared too much about school and liked learning and shiny Well Done stickers. Those boys didn't care about authority and they let us know it. They were rebels and outsiders and, now I think about it, in many ways responsible for a series of crushes on fictional and historical characters that include, at last count, Edmund from King Lear, Robin Hood (in certain incarnations) (okay, the Disney fox but it's not weird, I swear), Byron, Han Solo and Prince Hal from the Henry IV plays. With the possible exception of Edmund, these are mostly snarky rebels living on the wrong side of the law but without any real malice to them. Bad boy with a heart of gold, you know the drill. Hey, even William Brown fell in love with the girl next door. Superheroes, on the other hand, beat up people much weaker than them and we were supposed to applaud them for it. I had little to say about these grown men parading around in Halloween costumes.

This all changed, of course, with the advent of Spiderman 2. I was just a bit too young for the first one, which came out in 2002, but I was 14 when the sequel hit our screens and ready to be converted. Admittedly, a great deal of the way was paved by the previous year's Pirates of the Caribbean but pirates, superheroes, it's all a rich tapestry. The point is, I started liking action flicks around the age of 14 - unlike lots of my friends, I didn't grow up on Star Wars and Indiana Jones because no-one showed them to me. I was the oldest child and my parents were probably reading me Greek myths or something. My new found love of thrills and spills was probably greatly aided by the kind of action movies that developed in the 2000s. The 90s saw an upsurge in gritty antiheroes, often with dark, tortured pasts, who didn't mind getting their hands dirty to get the job done - cf. all the tortured navel-gazing of Tim Burton's Batman films (the first two obviously, I'll get onto the other two monstrosities in a bit). I think the 2000s gave us a happy medium between that and the Superman/Disney black and white morality, as demonstrated by the 'Pirates' model: better CGI meant better, more thrilling, action sequences, which in turn ups the dialogue stakes because you need a whole raft of quips that are actually funny to stop the film being just one big firework. I'm not pretending Pirates of the Caribbean is great cinema but it (the first one anyway) entertained the hell out of me.

Let's get back to the point. We have me, 14, all hyped up and pleasantly surprised by POTC (seriously, I was forced into watching it at a sleepover and then bitched and moaned about it right up until Johnny Depp dives off that cliff to save Keira Knightley) and looking for another action fix. Cue Spiderman 2. Didn't see the first one, oh well, it's been referenced enough in pop culture by now, I'm sure I've seen all the important bits (by which I mean the upside-down kiss). I toddle along, check it out, and BAM. A new love is born. Suddenly, superhero films are great. I'd clearly been missing out. So what happened?

Well, two things, I suspect.

1) Comic book films had always been mainstream, but usually they were marketed towards kids and the dark underbelly of adult fans. (You know, the ones who dressed up to go to conventions and things. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I was socially inept enough when I was 14, there was no need to add fuel to the flames.) In the last decade or so, filmmakers have started making more of a conscious effort to present superhero films as something that could be enjoyed by the whole family - explosions for the kids, serious adult dilemmas for the parents. This developed to the point where the films weren't really for kids at all any more. Slap a 12A rating on it and you can get 'em in so you don't lose money but when the little brats either start whining because they don't understand why Batman keeps talking and shit instead of punching somebody, or crying because Heath Ledger's Joker is haunting their dreams like Freddy Krueger with a pencil, it's totally the parents' fault for letting them watch in the first place.

2) On a personal level, I think I just had to grow up a bit to appreciate that being the good guy could be just as interesting and cool as being the bad guy. It's odd that this happened in my mid-teens, when we're usually busy fetishising bad behaviour (usually in a very lame way - the number of girls I knew who proclaimed they'd "totally be Slytherin"...) but it sort of makes sense: I was a good girl, a bit of a social outsider and a sarcastic witch with far too many black and purple clothes. Morally good, outside the norm and prone to dressing up. That's pretty much what a superhero is.

The thing I do find strange is that it was Spiderman that got me into it. If you think about it, Spiderman is the least adult-friendly superhero. Spiderman is just kind of silly. He's called Spiderman. His costume is red and blue spandex. He doesn't even have a cape. His alter ego is squeaky-clean Peter Parker, the most stereotypical of high school science nerds lusting after the pretty popular girl from afar. I strongly suspect my adoration had something to do with the intense blue of Tobey Maguire's eyes, but 14-year-old me just wanted to hug him and tell him it would all be ok. Plus, he managed to convey that sense of wonderment that I think is/should be Spiderman's trademark - where Superman is born with his powers and Batman doesn't have them at all, Spiderman/Peter Parker never quite gets over the random gifting of these nigh-godlike abilities. And (sometimes) he really enjoys being a superhero. So the effects in the first film were ropey, to say the least, but the swinging through New York sequences in the second and third were fantastic and greatly enhanced by the joyous whooping and shrieking of the eponymous hero. If New York was my giant jungle gym, I'd certainly make some noise about it.

But in latter years, I have turned away from that particular franchise somewhat. On re-watching them, the films are far more plot-hole-ridden than I remember, with some truly terrible lines of dialogue and a lot more general silliness, a lot of which (I suspect) was unintentional. And while Tobey Maguire is very cute, he does pull some ridiculous faces. And for the life of me, I'll never understand how I failed to notice James Franco standing right next to him for the whole thing, brooding and snarling and having daddy issues. But maybe you just can't make a gritty film out of Spiderman. Maybe it's just too comic book-y. Well, we're getting a reboot soon, so we'll see.

Batman, on the other hand, has proved itself resoundingly adept at 'gritty', largely thanks to Christopher Nolan resurrecting Batman Begins from the ashes of the franchise caused by the car crash that was Batman Forever. Now there's a film that makes a mockery of the idea that adults can enjoy superhero films. But the epic fail of both Batman Forever (although, shamefacedly, I will admit to quite enjoying Jim Carrey's Riddler) and Batman and Robin has been well documented. Let other keyboards dwell on guilt and misery, etc. Nolan's films have been a resounding success, a triumphant example of a franchise that is both money-making and not totally stupid. I'm not going to say they're perfect movies but I really do like the things he did with the Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy providing the Baby Blues this time around) and the Joker, plus Christian Bale's BatVoice has provided me with endless amusement while revising. Seriously, just imagine Batman is reading your notes to you. Bet they're memorable now.

Plus, Batman is different from all those other spandex-clad show-offs. He wasn't bitten by a spider or sent here from another planet. He just goes to the gym a lot and has a trust fund. He's one of us just, like, super buff. So is Iron Man, sort of, but he's also a jerk and not nearly conflicted enough which makes him very fun to watch but he'll never be my favourite. Though I don't think I've ever not enjoyed anything Robert Downey Junior was in, and that includes Ally McBeal. Fun fact: did you know RDJ was originally up for Duckie in Pretty in Pink and if he'd done it, Molly Ringwald's character probably would have ended up with him instead of Blandy McDreamBoy? I might have actually liked that movie. Plus, what the hell was her prom dress supposed to be? I get she was meant to be 'different' and 'kooky' but I don't think either of those things are synonymous with 'hideous'. Anyway.

So at the moment, Batman is the hero for me. Sadly, I don't fancy Christian Bale but I hear the third film's going to have Joseph Gordon Levitt in it, so there's hope yet. Spidey, you'll always have a special place in my heart (you never forget your first), but Batman just makes a better movie. By the way, if you're wondering why I haven't really talked about Superman, it's because Superman is very boring. Objectively. "Truth, justice and the American way"? I'm sorry, I fell asleep while you were posing front of those stars and stripes.

It's not just the wholesome, all-American farm boy thing either. Or even that I can't quite get over the phenomenal stupidity of everyone in that universe who doesn't realise that Clark Kent and Superman are identical (at least say you're cousins or something). It's the fact that he can do just about anything, unless there's kryptonite around. Gee, what do you think's going to feature in the plot this week? Ding ding ding, we have a winner, it's kryptonite. Put it like this: the ancient Greeks didn't write epics about the gods. They were gods. Everyone would saunter off on quests for the gorgon's head if they knew they could just smite her or something. Greek heroes had to be human, they had to struggle to perform their incredible feats. My favourite was Odysseus, who I think is kind of the Batman of the ancient world. No superhuman physical strength or the ability to fly or anything, just really fucking clever. (I've been trying to find other equivalents and while Spiderman is definitely Perseus - young, whiny, has ability to descend from high places - Superman could be either Achilles for the nigh-invulnerability and one inconvenient weakness or Hercules for the mad strength but both are way too human and angry and tortured.)

Plus, Batman and Spiderman kind of have metaphors going for them. Spiderman is clearly a metaphor for puberty: your body changes (waking up to find your bedsheets covered in white, sticky stuff, hair growing in strange places) and you become acquainted with a new set of grown-up problems (negotiating the work/life balance). Batman is...fear, I suppose, and how you can conquer it and use it against people, and taking charge of your destiny, and all that but it's a bit more nebulous. Superman is a metaphor for what, exactly? You can have the powers of a god but it doesn't mean you'll know how to dress well? I don't know.

Anyway, while I have to yet to see Thor (and boy, am I looking forward to that, as I would look forward to anything that combined the dubious directorial talents of Kenneth Branagh, Chris Hemsworth's not insubstantial abs and NORSE GODS), I continue to enjoy my superhero movies. The whole Marvel comics universe multi-hero films sequence coming out over the next few years? Yeah, bring it. Why have one hero when you can have Robert Downey Jnr, Mark Ruffalo (as the Hulk, WHAT?) and Samuel L Jackson all in one Avenger-y package? I kind of like the steps towards integrating the concept of superheros more 'plausibly' into our own universe, mainly because it won't work so long as Thor is popping down from Asgard for a cup of tea, and I fully expect the results to be hilarious. And, hey, there's only one Nolan Batman left to come, so you got to work with what you're given.

I'm going to back to my revision now. I'm reading Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur, which is basically a prototype comic book adventure crossed with a parody of Monty Python, crossed with the Carry On films, lurching wildly from high romance lists of who laid low who in various jousts to Lancelot getting shot in the "buttok" by the arrow of a lady hunter (now we complain about women and parallel parking, back then it was shooting straight). I'm not kidding.

And I will take very great pleasure in reading King Arthur's lines in a Batman voice.

A Day of Complaints

A/N: This was written on the day of the Royal Wedding but, alas, has not been exposed to public scorn until today. I am still a bit ill though, so forgive me.

...

As I write this, I'm lying in bed suffering from stomach flu, which is what the doctor called it, or A Hideous Wasting Disease, which is what I am calling it. Literally, I am pretty sure it would be no exaggeration to say that I am sicker than anyone has ever been, ever, in the world. Literally.

In addition to the stomach pains and head that feels like it's been run over at least three times, there is really very little to do in my bed of pain other than watch Batman Begins, write embittered Facebook statuses and spill milky tea on my bedsheets. So, in a bid to distract myself from the circumstances, I'd like to address two things that seem to be dominating my consciousness over the last 24 hours: the Royal Wedding and the last Harry Potter film.

The level of vocal anticipation and support for both of these things genuinely astounds me. Yes, I sound like a culture snob, and that's probably because I am one. A rather arbitrary snob, it's true, one who intellectualises Doctor Who and analyses what went wrong with the original Batman film franchise with as much attention as one might pay to the oeuvre of Akira Kurosawa, but a snob nonetheless. And why not, I say. It's not like the general public are worth listening to. I firmly believe that the general public should never be allowed to decide anything. The general public watches Top Gear. Or, in the immortal words of Peep Show's Super Hans, “People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can't trust people.”*

Because people (many people) spent hours today standing outside for a glimpse of the wedding of people they didn't know and probably, if they really think about it, don't care about. I hear Bob and Sue in Taunton Heath are getting married. Aw, good for them. Now back to my life, I have stuff to do. In a sane world it would be the same thing when we hear that Will and Kate in Westminster are getting married too. In fact, it would be worse because Will and Kate in Westminster are getting married and we've given them thousands and thousands of pounds of our money to do it with. In the end, that's the only reason for me saying anything at all about this wedding. If I was really apathetic, I just wouldn't bother, other than to make sure everyone else knew how apathetic I was maybe. But we're a country in economic crisis and we're giving money to people already several hundred times richer than most of us ever hope to be, all so they can make a nice day of it. They say it raises morale and all that but really, I know my morale would be raised considerably more by the news that Will and Kate had decided on a small, private ceremony with family and friends and donated the extra cash to buy a new fleet of ambulances. By the way, this is no condemnation of the couple personally – I'm sure they're perfectly nice and I wish them every happiness in their marriage – but I just don't see a need for their special day to be conducted with such excessive pomp, other than tradition. And tradition alone is never a good enough reason for doing something.

And then there's the personal irritation that my Facebook page has been turned into a roiling mass of gooey approbation, even from usually sensible types and suddenly everyone's future happiness depends upon knowing what Kate Middleton's dress looks like. (I will say though, it is bloody beautiful and my thought pattern after seeing it went something like this: ooh, want it, sigh, can't afford it, eh, probably won't get married anyway). Sitting at home sick, I have seen today every possible permutation of a Royal Wedding related Facebook status that there is, from the “OH MY GEEE she looks BOOTIFUL, WillnKate 4eva!” and “fingers crossed for McQueen!” gushing to “wahey Pippa Middleton's pips”, “still one prince left” ribaldry. My favourite thing about today was the video clip of the verger cartwheeling down the aisle in Westminster Abbey after everyone else had gone home. At least he looked like he was having proper fun.

And so onto my second gripe of the day: Harry Potter. The trailer for the final film instalment has just been released and the internet/Facebook seems to be busy wetting itself in delight. It really surprises me how many people like these films – how many fans like these films. And believe me, I'm a fan. I queued up at midnight to get my hands on the sixth and seventh instalments of the series. I made a t-shirt. I can tell you the ingredients of a Polyjuice Potion and name at least three Quidditch teams. I am a fully paid up Harry Potter geek. Possibly this may account for my antipathy towards the films but I'm usually pretty rational about the feasibility of making adaptations live up to their source material (that they seldom do is hardly breaking news). But the books are so...English. And the films are so...American. I don't care that you've got the cream of the British acting crop plainly struggling not to roll their eyes and cry “I trained at RADA, you know!” every time they have to have say “Yes, he's plainly been struck by the Fidgety Widgety Curse”, those films have no soul.

The books are not pretty books. There are few Tolkien-esque passages of dramatic description. What we are offered is something very humble, in its essence: the adolescence of a typically emotionally stunted teenage boy, going through school as an average achiever, and the school just happens to be one for wizards. And the boy just happens to be the saviour of the society he exists in. If it sounds like I'm being facetious, I'm really not. The books are largely written from Harry's point of view and Harry is a humble person. Every time he defeats evil, he shrugs and goes “Well, I dunno, it just sort of did it and I had help anyway.” Hogwarts is not a majestic fantasy world, it is an eccentric one, in the best tradition of British eccentricity. It's all about rubbing along together and overcoming differences to give the baddies a jolly good seeing to. (There were far more double entendres in that sentence than I intended.) It's also sort of about how anyone can be a hero: Harry was marked out as a child for a role he doesn't seem to have any special abilities for, he just rises to the challenge and that makes him admirable. It is this ordinariness and this humbleness that the films can't quite get their collective celluloid heads around and this understated teenage heroism doesn't sit well with the Dark And Edgy tone the films try to paste onto it.

Again, it should be no surprise that a huge, money spinning franchise is more interested in blowing things up and dramatic spectacle than finely crafted character development, it's just that when they do attempt the whole characterisation thing it seems (in my opinion) to go so horribly, horribly wrong. Oh, I do try not to rant about Emma Watson. I do try. And really, I think I've made a breakthrough in recent times because I've freely admitted that she is very beautiful and probably a very nice person if you know her. I've conceded that the woeful characterisation is probably not her fault. But the combination of her record-breakingly weak acting and that horrible, horrible mutant version of my eleven-year-old self's heroine is frankly unforgivable. I and dozens of others like me (including J.K. Rowling herself, she's said) were mini-Hermiones: dowdy, know-it-all social misfits who managed to find a few good friends if we were lucky. We weren't feisty or cool and we weren't girly or giggly. Here, at last, was our patron saint. So it pained me greatly to watch the films slowly turn that delightful bushy-haired little prig into both a feisty girl and a girly girl with little evidence of the fierce, library-devouring intellect that supposedly burned beneath. There are other, less glaring offenders. The entirety of Harry's parents' generation has been cast with actors in their sixties, rather than their thirties – very good actors but actors who were probably too old to read the books to their kids, had minimal contact with the source material and so are just doing whatever the hell comes into their heads, *cough*Gary Oldman*cough cough*David Thewlis. But now we're getting into the realm of “But it's not like that!” arguments, which are never enough on their own, so I'll wrap things up.

Ultimately, I just don't think the spirit of the books can ever be represented well on film. The fact is, film is a visual medium and there is something remarkably non-visual about those books. They're told from Harry's POV and Harry is not the most observant creature: in seven years, we never once get descriptions of his best friends beyond their basic hair colour/height/one other defining feature. He does not look at the world around him and record it in fine detail, so finding an aesthetic to fit to the Harry Potter universe is a riddle without an answer, and I like it like that. Every kid who grew up loving those books did so because it was incredibly vivid and inventive on its terms, yet possible to fit inside your own imagination and do wonderful things with. That's why I never warmed to the films anyway, and it surprises me that more fans don't feel the same way.

And to put the cherry on the fluey, weddingy, Pottery cake, Temple of Doom is on the television, possibly the least good (we do not speak of Crystal Skull) of the Indiana Jones films, a film that can be summarised as Look, Look, Sexy Indiana Jones, Sexy Harrison Ford, So Sweaty, Mmm Yeah, Work It Doctor, RACIST INDIANS, Sexy, Shirtless, Brainwashed, Homicidal Indy, RACIST INDIANS, eyes-o'-madness blonde lady screams. Again. (And to cap it all, I just switched over to the other side and Keira Knightley pout-vehicle and general atrocity 2005 Pride and Prejudice is on. Oh yes, I'm a fan of the 1995 one.) Not my day, really.

Actually, just seen on the news that Prince William chose what was, essentially, a posh version of fridge cake to go alongside the proper wedding cake. Suddenly find him much more endearing. Fridge cake is great.

Also just seen pictures of Beatrice and Eugenie. Shine on, you crazy diamonds, shine on.

*If you can't tell, all that was written with tongue firmly in cheek. Well, a bit.