Carrie Fisher: *points to my mental state* You came in that thing? You're braver than I thought.

There is a tendency among Star Wars fans to assume that you came to it as a child, sitting wide eyed in front of worn out VHS tapes, soaring plastic x-wings through the air in chubby fingers. It didn’t happen like that for me. I watched Star Wars for the first time at the age of seventeen - my immediate family thought sci-fi and fantasy was a bit silly, a bit weird, and the nerd renaissance hadn’t happened yet so if you could reel off too many facts about lightsabers it was still a sign that you were dangerously unsocialised. But Star Wars saturated my consciousness. How could it not? It was Darth Vader advertising sinus-clearing gum, it was references in Spaced, it was a kind of proto-meme. It was too big to ignore, and so many people I liked seemed to like it, so it was time to do something about it. Accompanied by two of my best mates, I rented the trilogy from Blockbusters.

I can’t remember how exactly that instant love felt - I think I remember (though isn’t this how I feel ever time?) the swooping of my stomach at the crawl text, the first triumphant blast of the overture, the satisfaction of finally being part of this massive, culture-consuming thing. I think we watched all three films in one sitting, spurred on at my delight. I demanded that we talk Star Wars, exclusively, insistently, in the same way that we talked Harry Potter and Doctor Who and Lord of the Rings, with forensic exactness and affectionate mockery. We were, in 2007, just about touched by the internet as a daily part of our lives (no smartphones, this was get-home-and-log-on-to-Messenger time) and there was a definite net-inflected language to the way my shippy heart took to Han and Leia, the meme-ish smart-alecky snideness of the way we used the same Whiny Boy Voice to impersonate both Luke and Hamlet and their daddy issues (a school set text, plus we’d just discovered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and the notion you could get paid to do fanfic was properly life-changing). My Livejournal entry (haha, like I’m giving you the link) recording the momentous occasion is all “OMG”s and “made of win”. I was seventeen, and I was young enough to be delighted. 

One of our regular rainy lunchtime chats was to ‘cast’ members of our friendship group as characters in a film; my friend turning to me and saying “You’re probably the most Leia-ish, sort of like, ‘why aren’t things happening? I have told them to be happening’” was, to my teenage self - fuck it, to my adult self - the most cherished of compliments. I was of an age where you begin to form Views About The World, and Leia provided a model for me: no-nonsense, smart but never dour, always open, happy to bestow a hug or a wounded comment. In retrospect, so much of that is Carrie Fisher’s performance. Leia as written is all of those things but a different actor - someone more guarded, more trope-aware - might have found them harder to synthesise. Fisher’s great strength in those films is her vulnerability, the way everything shines out of her face, and when coupled with her precise, scornful authority becomes a character that is instantly familiar, iconic for more than her hair. Leia was me, and she was who I wanted to be. In her publication of her teenage diaries that came out this year, Fisher wrote about knowing that she felt things too deeply, that there was something “too much” about her; she also writes about how carefully she cultivated a worldly persona, hiding how nervous she was through filming. It’s always tempting to apply new information after the fact, but I think it comes through in Leia, or I want it to at least - a public figure barely out of adolescence, fighting a war, falling in love: she’s all front and she’s all honesty, all at the same time.

The other thing that shines through, deliciously, is Fisher’s wit. She is undisguisably clever. She nails her comic moments, she gives a sense of wheels turning in her brain, all the time. Comedy was her forte, both as a performer (a minor appearance, but her episode of 30 Rock is a serious favourite) and as a writer. But others will eulogise her talents in these areas better than I can. I would come to learn more about her life later on, her honesty, her coolness, her charm, her openness both about her mental health and Hollywood’s sexism, and it would cement her as something close to a hero for me (by which I am not damning with faint praise - I find it very hard to use the term without feeling like a knob). Once again, she gave me a model to live by, not as Leia but as herself. She was a gadfly stinging away at the hide of a dinosaur, irritating the right people and refusing to shut up, and that is a great thing to be. As Harrison Ford told her, “You have the eyes of a doe and the balls of a samurai.”

But for now I am thinking of myself almost a decade ago at the age of seventeen, very much a child in very many ways. In the end, of course, it doesn’t matter than I never watched Star Wars as a kid - as though there’s only one way to love something. I watched it when I did, and it was shaped for me, as so much of my consumption of fantasy and sci-fi was then (god, it still is), by a desire to know how to achieve good in the world. How to take down the empire. Princess Leia was testament to that. Of course, real life rarely parcels the fight into handy quests, metaphorical colour-coded missions of good and evil, and Carrie Fisher was testament to that. In my mind, the two are inextricably intertwined, as I think they were for Fisher herself. Only last month, she wrote to a fellow bipolar sister, “We have been given a challenging illness, and there is no other option than to meet those challenges.” It’s a line that would do any heroine proud.

Unguilty, or Five Films I Really Like That I Definitely Shouldn't Really Like But I Do

So blogging didn't really work out for me for the last, ooh, all of 2015.  But this is 2016, baby, and we're strapping the typing gloves back on and kicking things off with a good old-fashioned listicle, like what Ma used to make.  There will be opinions, and there will be capital letters.

This latest triumphant return to the blogosphere came out of a pleasant conversation on the Docklands Light Railway, which is sometimes a magical urban safari skyline, and sometimes sweaty and crowded and full of people who haven't yet learned to take their backpack off and put it on the floor, just like any other tube line, and then what is the point of you DLR just be underground think you're so fancy all up in the sky but you're NOT.

I refuse to call these guilty pleasures because to hell with the idea that a pleasure should be guilty, the mixing of high and low culture produces some of greatest cultural landmarks, namely The Muppets etc etc etc blargh blargh bleurgh starting listing the films already.  What this is instead, is a list of films that I will openly admit to liking while a deep-rooted sense of shame coils around my lower intestine. I know they are not good films, either artistically or morally. I am not proud of myself for liking them. But somewhere along the way, something went very wrong in my cerebral cortex and I wound up with a bunch of DVDs* taking up space in my life of which, whenever someone stumbles across them, I have to say, "Oh, well, yeah, y'know, but like, actually it's got this one really good…" and then trail off into justly abashed silence.

And these aren't ironic either, or films I watch to make fun of, or films I think have an unfairly negative reputation.  There are whole different lists for those. These are bad films and I really like them.

Have mercy on my soul.

5) Night at the Museum, and Night at the Museum 2: Another Night, Another Museum (or whatever) (2006/2009)

Ok.  Ok.  I know.  I just.  Bear with me here.

I know it has a 44% Rotten Tomatoes score (and that's the first one).  I know it has a scene where a monkey repeatedly slaps Ben Stiller in the face (actually, screw you, that's an entirely valid reason to enjoy a film).  I know it has Ricky Gervais putting in a level of effort that is only visible on an atomic level.

But.

I think, quite simply, the reason either of these two films are on my rainy day playlist is that they occupy the perfect centre of the Venn diagram between two things I like very much: movies with gangs where the members all have different special abilities, and the past.  All the members of the gang have special abilities, and they are all from the past.  This is not rocket science.

And the sequel, while lazy and derivative, had more people in the gang who were more from the past, and one of them was Amelia Earhart, so...feminism?

Basically, Owen Wilson is a tiny cowboy and Steve Coogan is a tiny Roman Centurion, and they're enemies and then become unlikely friends. It's both heart-warming and hilarious. Leave me alone.

SO HEARTWARMING

(Honourable Mention: National Treasure, for exactly all the reasons you think.)


4) Down With Love (2003)

Ugh. Ok, so. Ugh. Yeah.

Down With Love, a 2003 'homage' to early 60s romantic comedies starring Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor…no, I can't even finish this sentence.  There's already too much terrible. It's not that any of those things or people are terrible in themselves, exactly, but somehow when you combine them into one movie, it's a perfect storm of ugh.

Firstly, let's not forget that 2003 pre-dates the serious revival of interest in the feminist movement and things like the 'third wave' and 'post-feminism' were still grimly clinging on by their pink-painted-because-they-definitely-chose-it-themseves-and-it's-empowering-and-not-because-of-gendered-societal-norms fingertips. When you combine that with the sexual mores of the 1960s, in which the film is set, it's just a recipe for ugh, ugh and more ugh. Zellweger is Barbara Novak, plucky girl author of best-selling women's sex book about how to give up men and achieve equality in the workplace, and McGregor is Catcher Block (yep), the quickly-becoming-obsolete Don Draper-esque men's magazine journalist. Oh, but wait.

Between Renee's plan for workplace equality being 'replace sex with chocolate' (WOMEN LIKE CHOCOLATE, SOMETIMES MORE THAN SEX WITH MEN, THOSE CRAZY BROADS), Ewan's plan to nail Renee being 'lie about identity, emotionally manipulate woman into having feelings, bang', and the whole thing turning out to be an elaborate plan to ensnare Ewan into marriage, it could probably send the progress of women's rights back to the Sixties single-film-reel-edly if broadcast with enough frequency. In the name of feminism, we should be hunting it down and scouring its existence from the face of the earth.

But I really like it.

Why do I like it? It's super fun to look at and the design is awesome - it's Sixties, but it's our dumb idea of what the Sixties were like.  Renee and chain-smoking best friend/editor Sarah Paulson (of Studio 60 fame) swish around Manhattan in capes and stupid hats and I want all the things they have in this film. Renee has a remote controlled fireplace. A remote controlled fireplace.

Ahem.

And it's shot in a really fun way, with lots of split screen and simultaneous conversations and general badinage leading to the most inoffensive innuendoes a PG-13 certificate can muster.  In other words, if you've ever seen a Doris Day/Rock Hudson vehicle, then it's pretty much that, only with not quite enough irony or commentary to make it smart.

There is a part of me that knows it's not really ok to switch off your values for the ninety minutes it takes to watch a stupid film. I know the 'Battle of the Sexes' stuff on show here is retrogressive and not handled smartly enough to be a 21st century take on 20th century attitudes. But I think we're smart enough to watch problematic things, know they're problematic, and enjoy them all the same. More on that later.

Also there's a remote controlled fireplace, and David Hyde Pierce** gets swallowed by a sofa bed. Some days, I don't need much more than that.

Also Ewan McGregor makes this face.

3) Treasure Planet (2002)

Let's be clear: this is not on the list because it's a Disney film.  It's on the list because it's an utterly forgettable Disney film.  As you may be able to tell from the super cryptic title, it's Treasure Island IN SPACE.  That's pretty much it.  It's fairly faithful to the original novel - obviously not a patch on the Muppets version, but what is? - with the minor tweaks of making the ship's captain female (good), voiced by Emma Thompson (bad), and making Ben Gunn a comedy robot sidekick voiced by Martin Short (BAD BAD VERY BAD).

I mean, objectively, it's just disappointing.  It has a lot of individual things to recommend it but they never quite add up into a compelling whole. The animation is beautiful - Disney finally (in 2002) getting to grips with mixing CGI and hand-drawn animation (SPACE WHALES), plus doing this create-a-360-degree-virtual-set-now-manouvre-the-camera-like-it's-live-action thing, which means that the Outer Space in question has, well, space and depth and dimensions to it. It's pretty.

Basically, this feels like an animator's pet project, a really cool art school exercise and writers, what writers? We don't need writers. Get outta here. But the art, alas, is not why I like it.

So why do I like it? IT'S TREASURE ISLAND IN SPACE.  Troubled-but-cute teenage protagonist Jim Hawkins is a junior delinquent with an Absent Father so it's also TREASURE ISLAND IN SPACE WITH DADDY ISSUES. It gives me feelings.

So yeah, if you mentally delete all the parts with the robot, it's basically Catcher in the Rye meets Star Wars, and that is just fine with me.

MUCH EARLY 00'S SUCH ANGST SO HAIR WOW

2) Sliding Doors (1998)

I actually used to hold this up as an example of romantic comedy done well.  Smart, I would say. Funny and charming, I would say.  John Hannah, I would say.  But I watched it again and ah jeez, it's just terrible.

The 'smart' 'thought-provoking' conceit that Gwyneth Paltrow's life diverges into two distinct timelines (Gwyneth Prime and Gwyneth Beta is how the film does not refer to them) depending on whether she catches a tube or not is, let's face it, the most first year philosophy undergraduate idea ever, and isn't quite rescued by the eleventh-hour magical realism of the timelines converging.  It's aged very badly, sort of an unintentional period piece, from the weird-looking London Underground trains to brandy being the casual tipple of choice for partying yuppies. Forget every BuzzFeed article you have ever read, the most 90s thing to ever happen is Gwyneth Paltrow smoking in a bar while John Hannah tells her she can easily get another job. (As if to compound this, she does. She finds it in a printed newspaper.) And whatisthedeal with the bizarrely heavy-handed product placement for Grolsh? In my twenty-five years of living, I have yet to encounter anyone who says, "Let's go out for a [brand name here]", rather than just "a beer", if they weren't being paid to do so. Not so in the world of Sliding Doors.  In the world of Sliding Doors, they drink Grolsh. And they want you to know about it.

So why do I like it? Well, mostly John Hannah. He's lovely, and your mum probably fancies him. But on further consideration, even he makes a move way too soon after Gwyneth Prime has discovered her boyfriend in bed with another woman, and actually a lot of his hilarious quips come off like someone who sits alone in a darkened room all day desperately trying to emulate human warmth.  So, a screenwriter, I guess.

What could be said, interestingly, is that he represents an early male version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope - he drops into over-worked, straight-laced Gwyneth Prime's life through a series of seemingly magical coincidences, takes her boating and shows her how to laugh/love again. What's also interesting is that this proves the MPDG apparently doesn't work in any iteration ever, not even as a male character, since - as with John Hannah's Manic Pixie sisters from others films - the quirkiness is incredibly forced. He quotes Monty Python! He makes hilarious gags about trying to give Gwyneth Paltrow cellulite! He quips to his sick mum about moving somewhere she can buy better crack! HE'S NOT LIKE OTHER GUYS!

And re Monty Python, if such a study could ever be done, it would be interesting to find out whether the percentage of conversation made up of endlessly quoting comedians/films/television shows until you actually have to kill one of the members of your group to put an end to it has risen since pre-internet days.  Whatever the answer, today John comes over like a cross between that Daniel Radcliffe interview where he thinks he's the only person in the world to have discovered Tom Lehrer and the tedious mate of a mate that you met in the pub who, for fuck's sake, won't shut up about Monty Python, like, we've all seen the Spanish Inquisition sketch SO MANY TIMES I KNOW HOW IT GOES.

And despite all this, I still like it. I will watch it again. What can I say? It affects me. It actually (there I go) does go to a darker place than most standard rom-coms, and it's painful to watch anyone slaving away to support a partner who's "writing their first novel" while in actuality copping off with their ex. Even Gwynnie Beta. It captures the humiliation of infidelity really well and, for what it's worth, does it while avoiding lazy demonisation of the cheating boyfriend, who has several scenes talking candidly about his conflicted feelings to another male chum. I mean, he's still the worst. But that's why there's John Hannah.

The message is that sometimes we get haircuts that don't work out for us and that's ok.

1) Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)

Hahahahahahahaha you guys it's a musical about rape.  I mean, basically.  It starts when rugged tight-trousered woodsman Adam strolls down from his 1850s Oregon wood-house into town to find himself a bride (maybe made of wood).  Surprisingly Awesome Milly decides she's plucky and spunky enough to make a go of it, and weds him on the spot. So far, so consensual.

Then it all goes to shit.

S. A. Milly ends up keeping house for Adam's six younger brothers too, all of whom are also tight-trousered woodsmen.  She eventually implements a regime of starvation and occasional ladle-based violence until they begin to say "please".  They learn to dance, put pomade in their hair and meet some nice local girls, and it's all set to be lovely until Adam - who got his bride in matter of hours and thus is crushing it on the Man Leaderboard - tells his brothers the story of the Rape of the Sabine Women.  In song.  The song is called "Sobbin' Women".  It is equal parts insanely catchy and horrifyingly misogynistic.  It is the Blurred Lines of 1950s musicals.  He then encourages his brothers to follow the fine example of the Ancient Romans and erase the word "consent" from their vocabulary.

Thus, the titular forest-dwelling Seven Brothers set out to abduct the titular (hee hee, titular) Seven Brides from the town - really abduct, there are blankets over heads - blindfold them and carry them off to their wooden shack, causing an avalanche on the way so that the boyfriends and families of the kidnapped girls can't mount a rescue until the snow melts in spring.   They are only thwarted in their plans by the fact that a) they forget to also kidnap a preacher (see, it's fine, because they just wanted to marry the women against their will), and b) Surprisingly Awesome Milly kicks them all out of the house and makes them live in the barn all winter, while she and the women form a happy matriarchal commune wait for heteronormativity to reassert itself.  Which it does.  The brothers come to see the error of their creepy ways - except for Adam, who storms off to have a patriarchal huff and only realises he might be in the wrong when the news comes through of his newborn baby daughter, thus suddenly forcing him to reassess his worldview that women are objects - and the town girls start doing things like walking past the window in their underwear and throwing snowballs with rocks in them (the traditional mating displays of 1850s Oregon), and it all ends happily if you don't think about it too hard.

But oh gosh, it's SO CHARMING.  There are handsome beard-men wearing plaid and dancing while they raise barns.  They jump over axes.  I don't know what the point of jumping over axes is, but it seems to prove something to them.  They sing "I'm a Lonesome Polecat", which is approximately exactly as ridiculous and wonderful as it sounds.  The backdrops are so obviously, unapologetically fake, you can see the brushstrokes on the trees.  It has that haze of garish 1950s still-overexcited-about-technicolour innocence to it that makes it extremely possible to turn off the sensible, up-to-date bit of your brain, and enjoy it for what it is.

I mean, just do yourself a favour and take three minutes to watch this:

Did you watch it? Do you see now?  Do you understand how much joy this brings me?  The flawlessly timed petulant axe swings?  The almost heartbreakingly simple insight that "a man can't sleep/ when he sleeps with shee-eep"? The one guy out to the side going full Dream Ballet? The fact that it's done in a single take?

No, I cannot, in all good conscience, hate on Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.  It is a part of my psyche, and a part of my soul, and you too are not above it.  You simply have yet to surrender.

Also there's this unintentionally hilarious bit when the girls are starting to soften towards the boys over the winter and the boys start making excuses to come into the house to fetch blankets and things to catch a brief glimpse of their sweethearts and there's one girl who just looks delighted whoever comes in from the barn, monogamy be damned.

Basically, Seven Brides is - our favourite overused word - problematic when viewed in the above terms (it's maybe not actually as bad as I suggested, the movie makes it pretty clear that the girls are into the guys too, both prior to and once they get over the whole kidnap thing).  But it's also joyous and stunningly made and excitingly danced.  It stands apart from all the others on this list because it is, actually, a great film that maybe I think I shouldn't like. But I'm also a thinking human person with a brain, and I'm not going to go and kidnap anyone to get them to marry me because of it. I might sing Bless Your Beautiful Hide as a form of courtship though. I can make no promises otherwise.


*cunning code for 'illegally torrented files on my hard drive'.
**That marks two entries on this list that feature DHP in a supporting role.  Come on, man. You were Niles Crane.

Death of/to the Author: Nine and Three Quarter Thoughts on the JK Rowling Shitstorm

A quick disclaimer here: I know most of you have lives.  I know most of you don't care.  I know the extent to which this story has been reported as 'news' is the most trifling bollocks ever.  However, I feel something along the lines of "oh god hold me my world is crumbling".

For those of you who don't have Harry Potter as a Google Alert (like what are you, some kind of nerd) the furore is thus: Emma Watson has guest edited Wonderland magazine and interviewed J.K. Rowling*.  Quel horror, you gasp in sarcastic French.  Wait a minute, judgey, because there's more.  A sneak preview of this interview has been splashing about all over the shop because in it - buckle up - JKR says she should never have put Hermione and Ron together as a couple, apparently also stating Hermione should have ended up with Harry instead. (I have marked the crazy parts in italics for your convenience.)

Naturally, I have some thoughts.

1) UGH FUCK YOUUUUUUUU JK ROWLING LIKE WHAT DO YOU KNOW YOU ONLY WROTE THE BOOKS - oh my god, down Fifteen Year Old Me, get down - WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO RUIN MY LIIIIIIIIFE - like seriously shut the fuck up, you have an undergrad degree, you are doing a masters - IT'S SO UNFAIR - GET BACK IN THE BOX.

2) Rowling states that she wrote the relationship as a form of "wish fulfilment fantasy"and "for reasons that have very little to do with literature".  Rowling has perhaps revealed more about herself than she anticipated here, given that she has previously stated how much she identifies with Hermione, for I look askance at the woman who looks at the sulky, immature, petty, ginger sidekick and goes "sigh I guess that was just wish fulfilment" and then at the dark, brooding, angsty hero and goes "yeah, much more realistic".** But then I shrug because, whatever, I guess it takes all sorts to make a world.  However, if literally all that is going on here is that JKR's tastes have changed in the last seven years and she no longer craves the flesh of red-haired men, then bad form, madam, that is not worth my heartbreak.

3) Buried within this flippancy is a sort of serious point: I bet a sizeable chunk of the female readership identified with Hermione.  I did.  I was a school girl and I liked books and I had bad hair and I located my self-worth in my intelligence and not my terminally disappointing appearance so I obviously did.   This is important for two reasons: a) most of the time, fans who didn't want Hermione to end up with Ron meant "I don't want to end up with Ron" and b) most of those fans didn't want to end up with Ron because he was (apparently) stupid and poor. (What I am giving you here is a précis of the internet in 2006.) No book should have a duty to send a message of any kind, but in a series that was all about fighting arbitrary elitism, I find the union of muggle-born go-getter Granger and pure blood dependable Weasley much more positive than heroine-marries-lost-prince-of-fantasy-kingdom.  And by the way, self-insertion is a completely legitimate teenage response to fiction (hello Twilight) because it helps you figure out how you feel about the world.  Odds on, those Harry/Hermione shippers*** will go on to have a lifetime of polite, slightly boring relationships where they die a little inside each day and the Ron/Hermione shippers will have sparky, challenging, often difficult but also passionate relationships.  (Look, I never said I wasn't biased.)

4) Having said that, I cannot actually find a quotation suggesting that JK thinks she should have hooked up Harry and Hermione instead but since that's the headline everyone is leading with, I am forced to accept it due to the infallible integrity of the press (oh, just make up your own punchline).  This is what I find most upsetting (if you are not on board with me using the word 'upsetting' to legitimately describe my feelings towards a fictional relationship between fictional people, I feel this blog is not for you).  After calming down from my initial shuddering nausea, I was able to hear the small voice in my head saying, "Do you really mind if Rowling thinks Ron and Hermione shouldn't have ended up together? Maybe she just means they probably realistically wouldn't have got married and Christ knows, we all regret the Epilogue." Which, actually, is fair enough.  I'm not a huge fan of the Young Adult Fantasy trope of meeting your spouse at the age of twelve or whatever, and it's particularly egregious in the Harry Potter series.  There are so many teenage marriages I wouldn't be surprised if the next 'revelation' is that Hogwarts is located somewhere in the Bible Belt.  Also I hear if you don't get hitched literally right on graduation day you immediately become a spinster and have to live with Mrs Figg in a state of quasi-Sapphic tension.

5) Anyway, what I'm saying is that there was a part of me that was always expecting Hermione to pack up her bags at the end of the series and go and study History or Law at Oxbridge because settling for wizard A Levels wouldn't be nearly enough of a challenge.  (And how much do you want to read the spin-off series 'Hermione Granger and the Cambridge Law Degree'? She battles Finals.)  And maybe while she's there she meets a nice muggle boy and they have two children, and one is magic and one isn't but they are both excellent at referencing and their footnotes are divine.  What I don't buy is that if you take Ron out of the picture then there is literally only one other option for Hermione, and that is Harry "Stop Trying To Help Me Hermione Oh No Wait I Really Need You To Help Me" Potter.  Harry, who always complained about Hermione being "shrill" and "bossy" and "dull as shit to hang out with" (one of these quotes is not real).  Who, every time he was forced to spend time alone with her, spent the whole time going WHERE IS MY MANLY MAN FRIEND RON OH I WISH RON WERE HERE I LANGUISH I PINE.  Like, if we're rewriting history here, maybe it's Harry/Ron we should be focussing on, if you know what I'm saying.  And I think you do.

6) Actually I could probably get my head around Hermione ending up with literally almost any other character in the series.  Any of the other Weasley children, including Ginny.  Pansy Parkinson.  Ernie Macmillan. Mad-Eye Moody, for frick's sake (it would be like Dorothea and Casaubon in Middlemarch).**** Just... not Harry.   From the ages of seven to seventeen I enjoyed Harry and Hermione's friendship immensely, and I enjoyed it all the more because it was safe and loving and uncomplicated and without bullshit, and because it was different to the usual female-lead-hooks-up-with-male-lead-and-sometimes-there's-some-other-comic-relief-guy trope.  Which is something that His Dark Materials (a far superior series in many respects) did not do, to my eleven-year-old chagrin.  I don't know who Ron would end up with though.  Oh wait.  I forgot.  Harry.

7) On that note, let us face it, there are other relationships we could be regretting in the series.  If Rowling really wants to revisit the past then let's embrace this opportunity to find out what in the holy fuck was Harry and Ginny about? She pretty much decided to marry him the first time she saw him when she was a child.  She wanted to be a child bride.  Run, Harry, run.  Then come back and try to explain to me how vaguely Oedipal thoughts about sunlight glinting off red hair constitutes the basis for a marriage.  And let's not even start on Remus "Totally Heterosexual" Lupin, shall we?  (Except to say Professor Lupin, teach me about grindylows, I will be your best student ever, you patchwork, chocolate-eating hero.) All this is ironic because, of course, Ron and Hermione's relationship does work and, as someone who has never quite given up on the tactic of saying "I find your arguments unconvincing and you smell" instead of "I fancy you", I also always found it to be by far the most realistic. (Having said that, there is no greater turn-off than a poorly conceived argument.  I have standards.) It's mostly comprised of huffy silences and irritable jealousy, which is exactly how polite British teenagers who are attracted to each other behave, with the occasional outburst of sniping and just a few moments that, though simple, are unbelievably tender.  Brainy, overly intense self-starter with a propensity towards merciless observation of the rules seeks combative, insecure but quietly selfless funny man for argumentative but mutually supportive relationship.  It doesn't have to work, but you know that it really really does.

(I'll leave it there because Fifteen Year Old Me is clamouring for me to write another four pages about how Hermione constantly expects more of Ron than anyone else does, and how Ron makes Hermione laugh even when she's at her most disapproving, and how Hermione goes pink around him like a million times and how Ron's compliments are always a bit adorably too extravagant and also how Harry and Luna Lovegood were meant to be together in a holy union of weirdo outsiderdom and caps lock rage and - BACK. IN. THE. BOX.)

8) I've see a quite a few comments on various articles talking about Rowling's 'right' to say what she said.  Let's be clear: of course J.K. Rowling has the right to say she would do some things differently if she could.  She wrote the series, I think she is allowed.  As a writer, it would be strange if she hadn't developed in the intervening years.  Even Shakespeare re-wrote King Lear, y'know? Dickens gave Great Expectations a whole new (sappier but better written) ending.  Rowling is invested in her work as  - I'm gonna say it - an artist, and I'm sure wanted to discuss her writing as an artist in that magazine interview.  BUT (because you knew it was coming), should she have?  I spent most of the Literary Theory sections of my degree drawing cartoons of Tony Harrison from The Mighty Boosh but I'm pretty sure some guy (was it Derrida? It's usually Derrida) said that once you put your work out there you cease to have agency over it.  It exists only in the minds of your readership.  The author ceases to have a say.  In other words, sorry JKR but you wrote Ron/Hermione so shut up and deal.  But that doesn't take into account the relationship Rowling has always had with her readers, which is to say she's active, she engages, and it's not the first time she's revealed information about the world of the series after the fact.  She knows that she can't comment on any part of the books without it having significance to the readership (in the interview she says she can "hear the rage and fury") - in the wake of 'Dumbledore is gay', Pottermore and the attendant books, Rowling has a track record of expanding her universe in interviews and more, building herself up as the divine (and perhaps only) authority on the series, and ultimately that just picks the pocket of the reader's own imagination.  So, knowing that anything she said about the series would have its own kind of truth to it, and knowing how loved her characters and their relationships are, I think yeah, it was a bit of a dick move.

9) And that's the big takeaway from all of this.  The word to describe the series that has come up most frequently in all the articles I've read is "beloved".  Harry Potter mattered to a hell of a lot of kids (and continues to matter to a hell of a lot of young adults).  I fell in love with those books not because they are perfect (spoilers: they are not) but because my reading experience of them was treasured and brilliant and intense.  I fell in love with them as they were, and though I may have grumbled about things here and there, it was with the affection that one uses to complain about a sibling.  I never really wished anything to be different - even the things I would have changed were part of my deeply unique relationship with the series.  For the same reason that I never wanted to see it on film, I don't want that world to shift.  And if Rowling says it, some part of me will take it as gospel, and it will change the characters and relationships I grew up with.  So I hope Rowling does not, in future, choose to share her doubts with us - or at least phrases them in a more equivocal way.  I hope she acknowledges that, whether she meant to or not, she has created something that has a life of its own, that means a lot to its readers, that was always so much more than a franchise, and that, in all its imperfection, is perfect to me, and to so many others.  And that, if you're looking for tips, Jo, is true love.


Three Quarters)
*I am lucky Internal Feminist Me has powerful slapping hands to beat down Jealous Bitch Me who frequently screams "GODDAMMIT WATSON GIVE ME BACK MY LIFE".
**Ron is one of my favourite characters, FYI.  Don't be all up in my grill.  I'm just saying it's whack, is all.
***Shipper = internet slang for a fan who is a proponent of two characters entering into a sexual or romantic relationship (the internet is clever this way).  Can also be used as a verb, as in "I kind of ship the Tenth Doctor and the Eleventh Doctor but don't tell anyone because I think that might technically be either incest or masturbation". Or "I very much ship Me/Ice Cream." Use it in a sentence today.  It'll make you feel better.
****I originally put a whole spiel here about how Dorothea and Casaubon's relationship plays out and then I realised that was major spoilers for Middlemarch, so if you have read it then high five, you know what I'm talking about, and if you haven't then now you'll have to in order to understand that joke, and I will have done a little bit of good today.  (Fred Vincy/Mary Garth = OTP.  You can look that one up on your own.)

From Outer Space to The World's End: A Pegg/Wright Retrospective

Contains spoilers for The World's End, Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead.  Also Spaced, a little bit.

The adult world seems horribly in evidence these days, which is the thematically appropriate excuse I'm running with for not updating in a while. I'm moving, if not 'out' then at least 'away', I'm keeping records of my finances, I'm doing horrible jobs because I need the cash - and somewhere in the midst of all this is the voice of a teenage hedonist, a furious Kevin, demanding to know what I'm doing and why and when can we get back to drinking cider out of paper bags in the park?

This, it seems, was also the mood Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright were in when they penned the final instalment of the Cornetto trilogy, 'The World's End'.  When I came home from the cinema, my sister asked me casually if it was good.  "It was kind of...sad," was my response.  I don't mean in a pitiful way.  I mean it genuinely made me sad.*  Originally, I wanted to write an anticipatory post about how I really needed The World's End to be a good film but then life, as always, intervened and I ended up seeing the film much earlier than I expected.  So, to make sense of all this, I decided to go back to the beginning.

Shaun of the Dead (2004) is often the most fondly remembered of the trilogy.  Key word: remembered.  That's not to say that it isn't, to use the correct parlance, a slice of fried gold - it's fast, it's sweet, it's stylish, it embraces the mundane and the extraordinary in one casual pop-culture-fuelled breath, and it's oh so very fucking funny.  Now is the time to start listing your favourite bits, and if you said the 'Don't Stop Me Now' sequence with the pool cues, SO DID EVERYONE ELSE.  But the best thing Shaun of the Dead did was to be different.  It had a freshness and, at that point, a relative fresh-facedness to its leads.  Pegg and Frost hadn't yet appeared in any major sci-fi franchises or terrible Richard Curtis films.  At a time when British cinema was best known for the likes of Guy Fucking Ritchie, it was kind of brilliant.  The lack of pressure being put on these - internationally speaking - relatively unknown quantities produced a film that is petulant and young, but with an ultimately grown-up philosophy.  The seam of social satire running through it (London is a city of zombies, see what they did there) isn't over-laboured, and takes its cue from the best of the *ahem* serious zombie oeuvre.  What is most palpable to me, though, is the glee of two (or three) nominally adult men being allowed to play with the toy box that infects the film throughout.  It's only a few steps on from those fantasy games you used to play when you were a kid: "Oh yeah, and then the Transformer could fight the T Rex with his laser canon!" "Oh yeah, and then the zombies could attack the pub and it turns out it IS a real gun!"

But, as I hinted in my opening parlay, a fair amount of the film's subsequent status as a modern classic is because we remember it like that.  Don't get me wrong, the combination of brains and guts (often literally) certainly makes it worth this title but I don't think it would have been so enduringly successful had it not tapped into something very potent in the psyche of its 20-35 year old audience: that we have somehow been forced to grow up.  For all that we're Shaun, with a respectable job and a nice girlfriend,  so long as Nick Frost's weed-selling, video-game-playing, layabout Ed is around, we have an excuse - we won't move out or grow up, we'll just put on the trappings of adulthood.  And sometimes it takes a little zombie apocalypse to get you to realise that - it's no surprise that the film's climax is not the (rather heartbreaking) death of Shaun's mum, but Ed's self-sacrifice that allows Shaun and Liz to literally ascend (on one of the pub beer lift thingies) to safety and grown-up existence (symbolised here as the, er, military riding in to take charge).  That the film tries to have its cake and eat it too in Ed's reappearance as a chained up zombie in Shaun's shed playing two-player shooters on the Nintendo always struck me as a false note, and just one of a few things that suggest the Wright/Pegg collaboration was still ironing out the creases.  The tonal shifts aren't quite managed smoothly enough, in particular the confrontation with Dylan Moran's David that ends in his disembowelment at the hands of the zombie hoard.  Coming on the heels of Shaun having to shoot his zombified mum and just after David makes his only real attempt at sincerity in the entire film, the gore - and it is, by a long shot, the goriest moment of the entire film - always seems to leave an unpleasant taste in my mouth (eh, you know what I mean).  Kate Ashfield's Liz, as well, is a slightly underwritten creature, more a cipher of what a 'grown-up girlfriend' should be like than a real person (her one quirk, answering the phone with "hi hi hi" is Ashfield's own contribution), and Hot Fuzz wisely dispenses with the love interest completely.

The first of those problems also goes a long way towards being solved in Hot Fuzz (2007).  Controversially, I actually prefer Hot Fuzz to Shaun: it's slicker, it's more confident, it's more tightly written, the performances are more finely honed, and it inhabits a bizarre universe all of its own that makes it an absolute delight.  Shaun of the Dead tries a little too hard to recreate the world of early noughties north London and then slot in a supernatural element; for Hot Fuzz, the relocation to the strange bubble of Sandford (a cunningly disguised Wells, Edgar Wright's own home town) allows the action to take flight.  Wright's trademark cinematography (take a mundane thing and make it EPIC) has never worked better than in Hot Fuzz, where it's less a sign of ordinary folk wishing their lives were more interesting and more a case of how interesting every day life actually can be.  The social satire gets its outing here as well, with the film taking a casual sideswipe at Middle England's refusal to enter the 21st century and again, I think it's best done in this film: the Neighbourhood Watch's intolerance of youths, travellers or, indeed, mimes (can't really blame them for the last one) becomes an apt metaphor for the extremity to which racial and social exclusivity can climb, without ever beating you over the head with it.  Or shoving a pair of gardening shears through your chest and calling it an accident.

The writing is brilliant in Hot Fuzz, the foreshadowing and ironic recalls are sharp, every single clue pays off somehow, and the thought that goes into things like the elaborate yet wildly incorrect theory that Sergeant Angel comes up with is astonishing.  The cast too, cannot be allowed to go unmentioned, not only the frankly ridiculous wealth of contemporary comedy royalty on show (Freeman, Coogan, Nighy, Eldon, Coleman, Bailey, Broadbent, Merchant, David Bradley, Threlfall, Adam Buxton, Lucy Punch - and Paddy Considine and Rafe Spall steal the film for me every time) but the embarrassment of riches that is the Neighbourhood Watch, including, yes, Timothy Dalton, but also Billie Whitelaw (muse of Samuel Beckett!), Edward Woodward (The Wicker Man!) and Kenneth Cranham (Belloq from Raiders!).  It's brilliantly soundtracked as well, with a mix of heavily anarchic 60s and 70s rock and roll alongside the original score providing a fantastic counterpoint to the idea of a town where the cops are the outlaws and the bad guys are city hall.  All in all, Hot Fuzz is just a really fucking good film, and a legitimately good, thrilling action film.  Which brings us on to The World's End.  Except not quite.  Because to talk about my reactions to the finale of the Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy, I have to go back even further and talk about Spaced.

Ah, Spaced.  Spaced sits solidly at the number three point on my list of favourite sitcoms of all time (I won't tell you the top two because I may do a sitcom list blog post at some point**).  I didn't watch it when it originally aired from 1999-2000 because I had the excuse of being nine and I was probably watching Toy Story.  Whilst in some ways a perfect time capsule of the late 90s/early 2000s (Pokemon, original Playstations, Coldplay and Muse being not mainstream, awareness of but not ownership of internet, ditto mobile phones, going clubbing dressed in a parka), the sentiment behind it holds endearingly true. It follows the story of Tim (Simon Pegg) and Daisy (Jessica Stevenson-sorry-Hynes), who would nowadays be billed as 'slackers', living in their north London flat (for £90 a week, another sign of the times - although even Simon Pegg admitted that that was a joke in itself by the time the episode was actually aired) and pretending to be a couple in order to get the flat, though this device largely fades out after the second episode.  It became famous partly for its proliferation of pop culture references, many so deft I'm still noticing them today, and partly for its creation of a universe that was cartoonishly surreal.  The brilliance of this was that it's such an obvious way to tell the story of these people: it isn't self-indulgent, it's simply that that's how they see the universe, so incapable of meaningful human contact that communicating via pop culture and breaking away from conversation into imagine spots and inner monologues seems perfectly natural.  As a result, the moments of reflection elevate the show to a higher level of poignancy - one of the sidebar quotations on this very blog is taken from Tim's end of Series 1 outpouring about how life fails to match up to fiction. It's not like it hadn't been done before, sure, but it's the intelligence with which the thought is expressed that makes it memorable.  Other such gems include Tim's advice to Brian on break-ups - so well-expressed I had to look it up to see if it was nicked from a film, and have since tried to drunkenly misremember it to many a heart-broken friend.  Cf also Tim and Daisy's Tekken 2-themed argument over his ex-girlfriend, Daisy's decision to move out and Tim's rom-com-inspired robot ride to the train station to get her back (it makes sense in context).

It is, of course, incredibly funny - and unlike Shaun of the Dead generates a myriad of responses over favourite bits.  Yes, ok, the finger gun fights, the paintball and the clubbing episodes are high on a lot of people's lists but it's the throwaway lines that make it: mine is the sequence when the gang is watching Star Wars and Brian explains chaos theory, to which Tim interrupts with the line about Jaffa Cakes.  Yeah.  You know the one.  It's also tender.  Half the delight of the show is in the subtle romantic tension between Tim and Daisy - it never takes centre stage, not even when Tim runs after her to catch her at the train station, but is manifested in the way the two constantly eyeball each other, needle each other about their sexual partners, and constantly wind up back together in the pub at the end of the episode.  Of course, there's also massive great hints, like Tim writing a poem nominally about his ex girlfriend Sarah that ends, "As distance dulls the memory and bitter history grows hazy,/ I realise that my one true love is in fact a girl called..." Cue confused look.  And while there was some talk of the romantic storyline being more obviously pursued had the show continued on to a third series, it is to the show's credit that it never became the lynchpin of the action, allowing us instead to enjoy the company of two grumpy, lazy, dysfunctional people who just clearly really enjoyed living together.  And for those of you who yearned for something more overtly romantic, watch the documentary 'Skip to the End'.  And skip to the end.

I suppose one of the reasons that Spaced trumps the trilogy is that I was much more invested in Tim-and-Daisy as a unit than I ever was in the at times overly blokey Pegg-Frost dynamic.  Frost's role in Spaced is brilliant and intrinsic to the show, and very much still embodies the bromance of the later films (the "He's not my boyfriend, cheers babe" gag from Shaun appears first in Spaced), but it complements the main duo without ever overshadowing or competing with it.  It also means that no-one ever has to play the 'straight man', a la Shaun or Nicholas Angel or, most recently, Frost's Andy, because the dynamic is simply that of three friends who go through varying phases of oddness.  It is true to say that ultimately the element I miss the most is Jessica Hynes.  Her writing brought a sharp-witted silliness to the show, a fondness for daft jokes and physical comedy, as well as some of the more astute observational stuff (I'm guessing about who wrote what but going on what's absent from the trilogy, it seems clear).  There's a moment on the Hot Fuzz commentary track (yes, I listen to commentaries, come at me bro) where Pegg remarks on the moment when Angel knocks out Sandor Clegane in the frozen veg.  Apparently at the premiere, Hynes said to him, "You should have said 'rest in peas'."  Pegg says, "And that is how much we miss Jessica Stevenson." It may be my favourite moment in the commentary.**

She's also a brilliant performer - even though her career has had something of a resurgence of late (her scene-stealing turn in Twenty Twelve comes to mind), it still disappoints me that she never got as much recognition for the show as she should have done (it's often billed now as being 'from the makers of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz').  I'm re-watching the show at the moment and there's a million fantastic little details in her performance that I missed the first time round: her strange half-rap to Mark Heap's Brian about a potential video-based installation, her delivery of the phrase "the cutting edge" with a sort of squat.  Simon Pegg, too, is at his best here; it's hard to come up with examples when some of the best moments are deliveries of the word 'yes', so suffice it to say that Spaced remains better observed and truer to life in terms of essential human behaviour than anything else on the resume, however surreal and cartoonish the universe might be.  I think what I'm trying to say is that Spaced has heart.  Not that the Trilogy doesn't, but at times it's a bit like being a third wheel.  With Spaced, they're your mates.  Spaced is what you want to come home to.

So.  The World's End.  As a film, I think it's the best made of the three.  Edgar Wright's cinematographic style is put to fantastic use here, with all the clever cuts, strange angles and adrenaline jumpiness of the first two, but just... better.  His time away has clearly been well spent, and having a bigger budget (presumably) can't have hurt.  Having said that, it's just less funny.  This seems consistent with the first two films: they've been getting smarter and more stylish, but simply less funny.  I won't deny, it is a welcome treat to see Simon Pegg in the role of the fuck-up (unlike some, I have no qualms about the role-reversal) because it means he just gets to exhibit how actually skilled he is as a performer.  His performance as the egocentric Gary King, arrested in time at the age of seventeen, is both heart-breaking and inventive.  It's just less...funny.  Sort of.  It doesn't help that the story lurches all over the place a little as well - slow to start and with a supremely unsatisfying (if not downright unpleasant) ending, it lacks the blissful narrative cohesion of Shaun and Hot Fuzz.  I suspect this is a result of the makers not quite knowing what they wanted from it.  Shaun and Hot Fuzz are pretty self-contained, local films, even if they deal with epic subject matter - The World's End, in its sudden lurch to global, end-of-the-universe dealings, misses a trick.  Bigger is not always better.

Ultimately, though, it is the ending I was disappointed in.  The World's End is the last of the trilogy, and it's natural that it should feel like the end of an era.  It is entirely possible Pegg, Wright and Frost will go on to make other films together, but they won't be part of the Cornetto series and, one imagines, will look further afield in terms of style and subject matter. It is right, therefore, that The World's End should be a film about homecoming, about childhood, about adulthood failing to match up to younger days - but the mistake it makes is to yield to that misery. When Tim lamented that real life just wasn't like the movies back in 1999, he made his speech, accepted it, and then danced with Daisy while they discussed porn.  When Gary King reveals that adulthood is such an anathema to his boyhood that he has actually tried to commit suicide, then goes on to head up a team of robot replicas (sorry, not robots) of his teenage best friends in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, that doesn't feel much like going out on a high.  It feels strange that two creatives who are so in touch with their fans and are surely aware of how their fans how grown up alongside them would leave them with the bitter aftertaste of the idea that yeah, your teenage years really were better.  Growing up really does suck.  Get out while you can, and avoid being an adult at all costs.  It's no coincidence that the real hero of the film was Paddy Considine's Steven who, in his blinding revelation of his love for Rosamund Pike (we've all had that moment) and subsequent soul-baring emotional honesty exhibits every admirable trait that confirms that yes, growing up isn't, in fact, the end of the world.  (And actually, speaking of, Pike's character Sam was both excellently written and acted, bar removing her from the men-only climax, so well done on progress made there.)

I suppose, in the end, the reasons I'm dissatisfied with The World's End are a reflection of me, not the film.  I feel like its message could have been an acknowledgement that growing up is necessary, that it generates new experiences that can be as fulfilling as those had in youth, even if not as technicolouredly hedonistic.  But perhaps here that would have been a saccharine Hollywood ending (and kind of the ending of Shaun anyway), and had I seen that, I might have been disappointed in Wright and Pegg, which is far far worse than being saddened.  As it is, the message is simply a little confused (you don't have to grow up if you're suicidal?) and the ending might have made me want to retire to bed with the X Men cartoon on full blast, but that's fairly standard for many members of my generation: we are the arrested development man-babies ('maybes') who might be just about pulling off a semblance of adulthood (jobs, flats, relationships) but our minds are clearly elsewhere - just look at any 'nostalgic' article on Buzzfeed.  Which, ironically, puts us right back at Spaced, making Shaun and The World's End pretty dire warnings about what's ahead.  I think I speak for us all, though, when I say that some days I'd rather face a zombie apocalypse or a hoard of bodysnatchers than my student loans or the Central line in summer - so in that sense, Pegg, Wright and, unforgettably, Hynes have created the most bittersweet wish fulfilment fantasies of all.


*This seems to be happening a lot lately with comedies.  There's nothing worse than the emotional sucker punch you get when you realise you're not laughing any more.
**Hey, it could happen.
***I am allowed to have favourite moments on commentary tracks, it does not betoken a misspent youth.

Robin Hood, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Really Bad TV Shows

Warning: contains heavy spoilers. But look at this like this, if you haven't seen the show, you're not going to watch it now. If you have seen the show, you already know what happens and you're definitely not going to watch it again. Also, I'll get back to Doctor Who soon. Promise.

In a state of the boredom/nostalgia/procrastination mash-up that I call Netflix Ennui, I wound up watching a few episodes of the BBC's 2006-2009 Saturday evening action adventure fare, Robin Hood. Or rather, re-watching. Y'see, I was a rather ardent fan of Robin Hood back in the day, until the third and final season when everything took a resounding nosedive from 'so bad it's good' to 'so bad it's oh god get it away my eyes my eyes'. Like, I really hope nobody from HBO ever watched this show, because I'm getting second-hand embarrassment just thinking about it. I was surprised to discover that there were quite a few things I'd forgotten about it, my memory consumed by the reckless shark-jumpitude of the final series. And it strikes me that the show had quite a lot of potential at the beginning, if it weren't for a few, damning things:

Things I Had Forgotten About Robin Hood That Fucked Up an Otherwise Solid Show:

• Robin strolls casually in and out of Nottingham, lounging around the town square and infiltrating the castle, week in, week out, with precisely zero effort to disguise himself. Nary a hood in sight. At one point, he rocks up in the Sheriff's bedchamber after dark for some light flirting and doesn't even tie him up or anything when he leaves. I mean – not like that – oh forget it. The point is, this is marginally plausible only because the Sheriff is clearly an unpredictable psychopath and one suspects he quite likes having Robin Hood around in his anachronistically tight trousers, but still doesn't explain why the eponymous hero made no effort to come up with a getaway plan beyond “Walk out of the castle, maybe wink at someone”.
• The attempts to make the setting 'relevant' and 'modern', despite the slight snag of being England in the 1100s. One of the things I do remember about the show is the clothes, which were a) bafflingly anachronistic (Marion in trousers, Marion's camouflage-print dress, Robin Hood being more Robin Hoodie ohIseewhattheydidthere, Guy of Gisbourne's leather daddy get-up, more on which later) and b) laughably cheap. I recognised jewellery from Primark and Accessorize more times than I could count. There's a kid in one episode who they just didn't seem to be able to find a costume for at all, I swear you can see the zip on his hoodie.
• The clothes were part of a wider problem, though, which was that the first series clearly just had no budget. It was filmed in Hungary for cheaps, which is all fine until you realise that the thing nagging away at you every time they cut to the forest is the awkwardly obvious lack of oak trees, i.e. the one thing that English forests are pretty pro at. It also means that 1100s England is full of clearly Hungarian extras who don't speak English, just nod with a look of polite confusion in their eyes. This reaches its nadir in the second episode when Allan a Dale's brother pitches up with two of his own men who have, we are told, had their tongues cut out. Why the script even called for the ill-fated Tom to have his own bros in the first place, I'm not sure, but the production damn well wasn't going to pay for them to have lines. Out with their tongues, cue baffled Eastern European locals looking uneasily from actor to actor, wondering who they're supposed to be agreeing with.
• The modernisation aspect also manifested itself through the camerawork. Each episode ends with a triumphant black and white freeze frame like an 80s brat pack movie. It's a bold move, and I'm not going to pretend it doesn't jar with the decision to film the rest of the show on shaky handycam, with a baffling over-reliance on dramatic zooms when a character is about to saying something profound. It feels slightly like the producers were trying to make it an actual mockumentary, before someone suggested that maybe that was a little too anachronistic, even for this show, and they hastily recut all the footage.

And Some Things It Did Ok:

• Women. Ok, it doesn't pass the Bechdel Test by a country mile, seeing as there are only two women in the whole of Nottingham, apparently, and I think they stand in a room together, like, once. Djaq, the Token Girl Outlaw, is pretty boss – all dressing up as her dead brother and doing Advanced Saracen Science and stuff – but I could have done without her horribly mangled love triangle that just sort of faded into a love...duangle in the second series, at the end of which she announces that she's staying in the Holy Land to take advantage of be-cheekboned jailbait Will Scarlett. And Marion is all kinds of smart and self-reliant – they actually make a pretty decent stab at a spy narrative for her, trying to work the system from the inside to protect her father, compromised loyalties, etc etc – of course, if the show had been made by HBO for grown-ups, instead of the BBC for families, it would have been much more sophisticated and also much more naked. C'est la vie. I also remember hating Marion with a passion when I was sixteen; watching now, I'm not entirely sure why. She's not a great actress, sure, but she's not offensively bad – about the same level of charisma vacuum as Robin himself, which fortunately means you can just ignore the romantic leads and get on with the business of the fine supporting cast.
• And I do mean fine. This is something the show did gloriously right – I swear to god, the burgeoning knowledge of my sexuality that was triggered in my youth by Johnny Depp diving off a cliff in Pirates of the Caribbean was completed here by Richard Armitage swaggering around in black leather and guy-liner*, pinning Marion against castle walls** saying things like “Do you not understand? You mean everything to me”, all accompanied by a gaze so smouldering that you could see the stone melting behind her head. Normally when you have a dastardly villain trying to run off with a blushing damsel, you applaud the hero swooping in on a rope to save her. Richard Armitage, on the other hand, would go around casually stabbing peasants and you'd just think, “Oh, well, he probably had a really difficult childhood.” Maybe that was why Marian was such a terrible actress. Could you keep your sang-froid convincingly in the face of all that?
• And it wasn't just Guy either. Long before I was making jokes about Merlin's Knights of the Round Table being a kind of Medieval Boy Band, the Outlaws were hanging around the forest posing for passing paparazzi (“Just a quick woodcut, be a darling”). Robin is ok in a Justin-Bieber-wishes-he-was-more-grunge sort of way but the show kept insisting that Robin was the most bodacious bachelor Sherwood had ever seen by having women throw themselves at him every two seconds, when this was clearly nonsensical because dude, Alan a Dale and Will Scarlett are right there. Actually, Will Scarlett was my favourite before I saw the light glinting off Guy's black leathers, and then his “What is this thing you call a girl, let me turn my head so you can see the way the shadows fall against my cheekbones, no I don't think my eyes can get any more big or green, I didn't realise my bottom lip was trembling” schtick got a bit wearisome. Alan had to become my favourite in the third series because everyone else good had gone and Guy's hair had taken a drastic turn for the worst, but his twinkly-eyed nonsensically-cockney conman routine was really very diverting – besides, he briefly dumps Will for Guy in the second series and starts wearing black so we're very much on the same page for a variety of reasons.

So thinking about it, maybe the best thing the show did was to arrange a buffet of attractive actors. But hey, that's not be sniffed at – there was clearly something that kept us watching through the bad times and the very bad. I'm inclined to pin it on the accidental sexual tension that seemed to emerge between every single character at some point (I'm talking a Sherlock level of possible permutations), but especially the Guy-and-Marion thing which, by the way, isn't really in the script at all but when you cast Richard Armitage, you cast a tsunami of hormones too. That's probably the area of the script that had most potential: a woman torn between her childhood love that she still carries a torch for, an outlaw on the run, any day could be his last, and a dangerous new man, brooding, cruel, but with a fascinating spark of good in him, a desire for redemption that only she holds the key to, complicated by the fact that he could be the only man truly capable of protecting her. Fuck, that sounds like a good show. I think I might write it. Sadly, the Guy/Marian/Robin triangle came to a rather undignified end when Guy ran her through with a sword that was in no way phallic at the end of Series 2.

The thing is though, I wouldn't want it to be any different. The reality is that if the bad things had been fixed, it still wouldn't have been a great show. It just would have been a much, much more boring one.

*This is actually a really good joke as his character's name was Guy of Gisbourne.

**Oh, maybe that's why I hated her.

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.

Pixar and Me: A Toy Story Retrospective

Warning: this post contains spoilers for all three Toy Story films and some extremely emotional italics.

The first Toy Story film came out in the UK in 1996. I was 6 years old. Like a lot of six year old girls, I had more than a passing fondness for pink, princesses, Cinderella, ballerinas, that kind of thing.  I had a princess party for my sixth birthday, much to the joy of my male playmates.  When I tell people this now, it usually surprises them; as regular discerning readers may glean, I'm not so much one for romantic comedy, more one for spurious escapism powered by explosions.  So what happened?  The short answer is Toy Story.  Toy Story happened.

When my parents took me to see Toy Story, the excitement on their part was largely to do with this new form of animation, which was – gasp – done on a computer.  Maybe some of this excitement rubbed off on me because, so far as I remember, I was rather keen to see this funny-looking film, despite obvious lack of castles, dresses, oppressive patriarchy etc.  By the time the credits rolled, I don’t think I or either of my parents were even considering the artistic and technological advances in animation because oh my god Toy Story was the best thing we had ever seen.  To this day, the trilogy tops every list of favourite films I make: nostalgia value, artistic merit, tight writing, aesthetics, storytelling, voice acting, it's got it all.  You can keep Citizen Kane.  I've got Toy Story.

But my relationship with Toy Story goes beyond artistic appreciation. It had a huge influence over my development as a person: from the moment Woody and pals did their jerky early-CGI swagger into my life, princesses were discarded.  I was going to be a cowboy.  I then quickly amended this ambition to cowgirl.  Toy Story woke in me some dormant tomboy gene, a desire for adventure and thrills: it was the start of a whole new way of being that was very different to the narratives that Cinderella was feeding me.  There's nothing wrong with being a girly-girl, of course, but there aren't nearly as many good stories involved.  If all your fairytales end with a handsome prince, you're getting a very limited worldview to say the least.  Toy Story led to me devouring Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, Pippi Longstocking, Roald Dahl and, not much later, Harry Potter in a way I wouldn’t have done before.  Fairytales were swapped for Greek myths: so much bolder and brighter, with gods and monsters and heroes and people doing things.  Suddenly, there were more colours in the world than pink.

You know the montage in the first film where all of Andy's cowboy stuff turns into Buzz Lightyear stuff?  That happened to me.  Discarded was my faithful Snow White costume and in came a swanky new Woody outfit, complete with sheriff badge and hat.  The plastic orgy of Barbies in various states of hard, shiny undress were converted from dress-up toys into complex societies of doctors, superheroes, witches, singers and actors with more back-stabbing, secret alliances and political manoeuvring than a Game of Thrones episode (though probably about as much nudity, I had been gifted a lot of second-hand Barbies but not many clothes to cover their dubious modesty).  The cherry on the cake of all this was my own Woody doll - much chunkier than the film's lanky rag doll, but I wrote my name on his boot nonetheless - and a shiny silver special edition Buzz.  I'll never forget the horror of a friend's younger sibling asking to borrow Woody and the reproving look on my mother's face as I turned my beseeching eyes towards her.  Woody came back minus his hat and with his pull string broken.  They bought me a new one that played guitar but it wasn't the same.  Woody as I knew and loved him was gone and it probably wouldn't have happened if I hadn't done what my mother told me.  Goddamit, mum.  It was a dark chapter in my history and if you think I'm joking, only a little.*  I suppose the long and the short of it is that Toy Story taught me how to play. 

I turned 22 on Sunday.  For my birthday present to myself, I sat down with a close friend and a lot of pizza and watched Toy Story 3.  Before I address the film itself, I'll just say this: even at this age, it is my 7-year-old self that enjoys car chases, heists, prison breaks, explosions and shoot outs.  When I reviewed The Avengers, what I could not show you was my facial expression, which was one of pure childlike glee.  Toy Story's influence lives on also in my sense of humour: silliness, snarkiness and surrealism living comfortably side by side.  Buzz proclaiming, "Don't you get it?! I am MRS NESBITT" will never, ever not be funny to me.  We love talking about how Pixar invented the kids-films-secretly-for-adults genre, although as I get older I'm not even sure they're for kids at all.  I was severely disappointed in Finding Nemo when I first saw it at the age of 13, but as (more of) an adult the scene where Nemo turns around and tells his Dad, "I hate you" is extremely powerful.  Witness also the separation and reunion aspects of Monsters Inc, the bleak yet hopeful view of humanity envisioned in Wall-E, the obligatory mention of the first ten minutes of Up: I don't think Pixar is making kid's films at all, not even secretly-for-parents-kid's-films.  I think Pixar is making films to please itself and by god, I salute them.  Except for Cars.  Cars was a bit shit.

No matter what else it produces, though, the Toy Story Trilogy in its entirety is always going to be the pinnacle of achievement for Pixar.  For me personally, it holds a cachet shared only by one other series - Harry Potter (the books, obviously) - of having grown up as I have grown up.  Both series place strong emphases on friendship, courage and resourcefulness, both are funny and wildly imaginative.  I spent a lot of my teenage years emulating the dress and mannerisms of various fictional characters (Winona Ryder in Beatlejuice, take a bow) in the fruitless quest for self-identity that is adolescence but there's probably only one fictional character I've ever really wanted to be, and though I've put away my lassoo-skipping-rope now, I still hold that if I can be something like Woody - wisecracking, courageous, loyal, a leader, flawed but ultimately good – I could do alright.  In fact, much of the first film is driven by Woody's flaws; on my recent re-watch I was kind of surprised to discover how much of a jerk he is, so I guess Toy Story is also responsible for starting my worrying tendency to become a furious apologist for anti-social fictional men.  And on the topic of changing perspectives, when I was a kid it was Woody's fears of rejection and replacement that I related to - playground politics can be so cruel - but as an adult, Jesus Christ, is there anything sadder than watching Buzz's heroic breakdown when he realises he's not a real space ranger?  With the sad song and the window and the no! I will fly! moment?  And because Hollywood teaches us that if you really really want something and are an attractive twentysomething or an adorable cartoon character you can definitely always get it, we believe he's going to fly and then he doesn't?  And he loses his arm for trying? Blimey, Pixar, you ever think about pulling your punches a little?

And, of course, the films only get progressively darker and more spiritually wounding as they go on.  Most conceptual universes don't tend to examine the ins and out of the realities they create, but Toy Story 2 took the difficult questions of toy ownership - and sentient toys - and ran with it.  What happens when the kids start to grow up?  There's only really a few exits for toys from the playroom: donation, the attic or, most likely, in a bin bag.  The bottom line is that kids grow up and move on.  Toy Story 2 was one for the parents in this respect: the feelings of abandonment and rejection that Woody and Jessie experience are a poignant analogue for the knowledge that every parent faces - one day they too will appear "used" and "outgrown" to their children.  But the final message is redemptive: we cannot stop ourselves or our children from growing up but we can enjoy it while it lasts.  And if we are loved, truly loved with the special bond that Andy and Emily shared with their toys, that love can sustain us when the relationship is no longer as immediate or dependent as it once was.  And it's probably no accident that the weepy Sarah McLachlan ballad that plays over the heartbreaking montage of Jessie's abandonment by her owner also borrows heavily from the semantics of a romantic relationship ending.  Far from the usual Disney fare, in which walking off into the sunset is par for the course, the second lesson Pixar taught me with the Toy Story trilogy was that relationships ending is a fact of life, but it doesn't have to be the end of the world.  The final note is bittersweet, a relative first for children's entertainment, with Woody proclaiming that Andy's childhood "won't last forever" but "I wouldn't miss a moment of it".  Of course, then Toy Story 3 took those themes and turned them into a harrowing emotional black hole from which I barely managed to escape with my battered soul intact.

I never doubted that Toy Story 3 was going to be good.  It was simply far too important to fail, not just to me but to the thousands of kids in my age bracket who were now packing up their bedrooms to head off into the unknown.  Like that other fictional boy I grew up alongside, Harry Potter, Andy was now my age, or thereabouts, and now here was Pixar, showing us that we had not been forgotten, that they were here to close the final chapter on our childhoods.  I'm pretty certain I wasn't alone in practically pushing small children out of the way to get to the front of queue because goddammit eight-year-olds, you have no idea what this means.  I also spent a fair few minutes in conversation with the girl at the desk trying to sell me Odeon membership.  After some rapid and confusing exchanges about how much money I would be saving, I wailed in a loud and plaintive tone that sent heads turning across the foyer, "I JUST WANT TO SEE TOY STORY 3."  So to say I cried might be an understatement - from the opening sequence, taken word for word from the first two films, to the last half hour solid, I was pretty much a mess.

When I re-watched it yesterday, sufficient time had passed that I could also appreciate how breathtakingly well made it is.  The animation had progressed astoundingly compared to the original 1995 film; Pixar has always been shy about animating humans unless cartoonishly stylised first (Ratatouille, The Incredibles) but they seem to have conquered Uncanny Valley (explained in this post) with a vengeance because holy crap, look at all those emotions!  Look at grown-up Andy playing with Bonnie!  Look at Andy's mum tearing up in his empty bedroom!  Look at all these people.  The textures and tones were richer, the lighting beautifully rendered: eerie and flickering strip bulbs, sunlight through leaves, rainstorms, every single piece of debris in the furnace glowing and casting individual shadows.  It's a beautifully designed film.  It's also gleefully funny.  Just when one is ready to condemn the Americans for lack of wit, they go and pull something like Spanish Buzz which was, without a doubt, one of the best things on celluloid this side of the millennium, and probably the other as well.  The level of nuance in it is far greater than I'd appreciated: I'd thought the real emotional heft was contained to the last half hour but my friend and I were brushing away stray tears from the first act as the toys make one last ditch attempt to reconnect with Andy and fail resoundingly.  Even the only thing that I actively disliked about the film - the absence of Bo Peep - wasn't something I could fault artistically since it established that the years really hadn't been kind to our gang (but seriously guys, did you have to make the look on Woody's face when he said Bo was gone so painful?  and did you have to not even say what happened to her so maybe she wasn't even given away, maybe she got broken or something?  Stop fucking with my essential sense of narrative justice).  The film juggles genres with a nonchalance that Joss Whedon (a writer on the first film, by the way) has wet dreams about.  First it's an adventure flick, then that's a dream sequence, that it's all farewells and gritty emotional drama, then it turns into an eerie dystopia, then it's a prison break film with Mission Impossible overtones, then we reach the last half hour and holy fuck every known reference point for film goes out the window because I'm crying like a housewife with a bottle of gin and a DVD of Beaches.

I am willing to admit that, like every other person in that cinema, I truly believed they were going into that furnace.  Even if you said afterwards you knew all along they were going to be fine, you're lying because a tiny part of you deep down was preparing to say goodbye to these characters forever.  Which is then exactly what we had to do ten minutes later.  God fucking dammit, Pixar, how dare you have such puppet-master-like control over my heartstrings?  How dare you?  And do you know why it worked?  Because having the toys melt into bubbling plastic globs would have been easier.  It would have been the cheap emotionally manipulative ending that we're so used to seeing Hollywood pull.  No, forcing us to confront the terrible, bleak, mentally-scarring reality - that we'd always have memories of childhood but we weren't allowed to be children anymore, that it was someone else's turn to be a child - that is so much crueller.  Damn you, Lasseter.  Damn you, Pixar.  Damn you all to the special hell.

So maybe what sets Toy Story 3 apart as a film, that cements the trilogy's place in my heart, is that it's neither for children nor for adults: it's for us, those in-betweeny, hard to place 'young adults' who grew up with the original films.  That doesn't mean no-one else can enjoy it - my mum walked in on the last ten minutes and started crying immediately - but it is for us.  For which one can only say, along with Andy, thanks guys.  You're all really special but I have to go away now.  And if we're really lucky, we get to see someone else enjoying the thing that we once enjoyed, and if we're really really lucky then we get to see them loving it, and that love doesn't fade or lessen even if time is against us in all other respects.

Blimey.  Batman Batman Batman.  That's better.  Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to stockpile some tissues and go watch Wall-E.


*EDIT: Since posting this, my mother has informed me that I wasn't actually there when the request came for temporary possession of my Woody doll, so I can only assume that what I'm remembering is outrage as only a seven-year-old can be outraged, along with a seven-year-old's morality which disregards things like kindness and common courtesy because everyone else should just stay away from my toys.  I'd also like to point out that I've neglected to mention that Toy Story was a hugely important series not just to me but my whole family - say "Mrs Nesbitt" to any member of my family and they'll laugh.  Or cry.  Damn, I think I'm starting again.