My Top Ten Movies of 2015

10: Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Truth be told, this may only be in my top ten due to affection and nostalgia. I'm still waiting for J.J. Abrams to direct a film that is truly brilliant in its own right rather than efficiently riffing on his adoration for the movie adventures of his, and my, childhood. Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a perfectly decent caper but one which feels so much more because of the weight of cultural significance that we have invested into this world... and the sense of sheer relief that it's NOT another Phantom Menace. I've always maintained a sneaking admiration for what George was trying to achieve with those prequels: Something operatic, politically rich and mythically grandiose, an ambition mostly undone by his tin ear for dialog, leadenly delivered by poorly directed actors at a loss to find their feet in his CGI imaginarium. This new Star Wars has, so far, less of that epic sweep and scope, and many of its delights are recycled from the originals. But crucially what is does have, in spades, is FUN. Sprightly, seemingly effortless wit and action, delivered by real people, often in real locations, actually interacting with a real environment around them. It's hard to overstate just what a welcome feeling that is. A tribute act compared to the original it may be, but those are still some fine tunes.

9: Sicario.

A phenomenally tense thriller centring around a shady US drug enforcement task force attempting to take out a Mexican cartel, Sicario tackles familiar and often clichéd narrative territory with fresh verve and complex amorality. Featuring a clutch of superb, understated performances (with the marvellous Emily Blunt front and centre) from a principle cast essaying assorted FBI, CIA, special forces and other individuals with even murkier pasts. Many with shifting, hard-to-read agendas. Features possibly the finest stationary car chase in cinema.

8: The Tale Of Princess Kaguya.

With the future of Studio Ghibli in doubt, it's been a particularly painful two year wait for this, possibly their last masterpiece, to make it to these shores. But if it is to be the end, what an end. The very definition of a true fairy tale, this is a slight and gentle story, animated with the most delicate of brush strokes. Pastel watercolour beauty bleeding to white at the edges of the screen as if lifted straight from some museum preserved manuscript of a forgotten time and place. The running time and gentle pace may try the patience of some. But tune out the world and you can lose yourself in its beauty and wish never to return.

7: Bridge Of Spies.

Spielberg, Hanks, The Coen Brothers, a true story (mostly). You know you are in safe hands. Bridge Of Spies is no great revelation, rather it's exactly as expertly crafted as you would expect. It is however, rather wittier than you might imagine. And the brilliantly authored inertness of Mark Rylance's potential agent playing against Hanks' fast-talking, yet noble lawyer (remember those?) is an absolute joy to behold.

6: The Martian.

Ridley Scott's best film in some years. Exciting, funny, and shot through with old-fashioned heroic stoicism as Matt Damon's astronaut is marooned alone on Mars and has to survive on his smarts and his wisecracking soliloquisms. Shot through with a rare uncynical "Yay For Science!" motif. It's as if Castaway had been directed by Carl Sagan. Which is a good thing.

5: The Diary Of A Teenage Girl.

This bravura coming of age tale follows the travails a fifteen year old girl in 1970s San Francisco as she embarks on a sexual relationship with her mother's boyfriend and a heap of other complex, broken family and growing up issues. Bold and honest filmmaking that is nothing like as harsh to watch as you might imagine because it is also empowering, delightful and laugh-out-loud funny, and is visually as full of brio and invention as its creatively imaginative lead character. A refreshing delight.

4: Song Of The Sea.

Tomm Moore's second animated feature (following The Secret Of The Kells) is a beautiful, sweet and heartbreaking piece of Irish folklore fantasy that manages to dig deep into rich and whimsical mythology, while absolutely grounding its emotions in the story of a young girl dealing with real and tragic family drama (rather like Pan's Labyrinth... but with less torture). On top of this, the animation is a gobsmacking mixed-media masterpiece, as if Michel Ocelot, Hayao Miyazaki and Sylvain Chomet had all collaborated on the one movie.

3: Mad Max: Fury Road.

The most full-on, knock you flat, non-stop, crunching, brutal, old-school action movie of the year. Mad Max's first outing in three decades retains all the strange, colourful, insane elements that made the originals so iconic, and (unlike Star Wars) it doesn't feel like it's trying to simply live up to past glories. This one kicks the previous movies (not to mention the whole Fast and Furious franchise) in the face and drags them kicking and screaming though the post-apocalyptic waste in its dust storm wake. Director and creator George Miller is now 70. No, really. No-one else can quite believe it either.

2: Ex Machina.

Alex Garland, long-time writer / collaborator on many of Danny Boyle's movies, graduates magnificently with his directorial debut. A chilling, twisting sci-fi chamber piece set in clinical Kubrickian isolation. Four actors. One house. Humans and machines testing and deceiving each other. Morally murky, powerfully intense and superbly performed.

1: Whiplash.

It may be no more an accurate depiction of life in a prestigious music college than Black Swan was an honest tale of studying in an elite dance academy. What Whiplash is, is a fun, triumphant, indie-spirited maniacal howl of a movie. A study of artistic obsession, abuse of power and the drive to succeed against all odds. It boasts a riotously funny script, genuine heart, freewheeling performances (actorly and musical), and in J. K. Simmons' band leader, a thermonuclear full-leather-jacket onslaught of verbal abuse that is hilarious and terrifying in equal measure(s). Quite my tempo.

Rick Baker Retires. World Explodes.

The great make-up and practical special effects genius Rick Baker has announced his retirement at 64. It's just retirement, well deserved with an astounding body of work that he can look proudly back on. So why then do I feel like I'm writing an obituary?

Rick has bowed out surprisingly early for a creative master, selling off many of his prized collection of original props, with a handful of bitingly rueful comments about what it is like for a singular artist working in theCGI dominated effects industry today. "I like to do things right, and they wanted cheap and fast". He was one of the last of a dwindling group of in-camera make-up effects legends, Dick Smith, Rob Bottin, Chris Walas and Stan Winston among them, who have either died, retired, or been relegated to minor advisory roles in the face of a wave of world-obliterating digital mayhem that now swamps almost every big summer movie production. There was a time, in movies from the 1970s and '80s, when I could often recognise immediately the stamp of an individual artist responsible for an effect, such was their unique personality. I knew in an instant a Matthew Yuricich painting, or a Phil Tippet mechanical creation, or the blue-screen model work of John Dykstra. Like a great film composer or cinematographer these artists imprinted their character as well as pouring unparalleled skills into their work and so materially contributed to the unique look, feel and personality of the films they enhanced.

CGI today can indeed show us pretty much anything you care to imagine in pristine photorealistic perfect detail. Used well I acknowledge it is indeed a fine craft and I do not seek to belittle those that have mastered it and continue to push back the boundaries of what can be achieved. But from a studio perspective it is far too often now a mere marketing tool; a soulless, tiresome splurge of wave after wave of destruction, devoid of character and curiously lacking in substance in spite of its vast overwhelming scale. One by one we have lost from film-making a precious few unique and gifted individuals, replaced by squadrons of anonymous CGI work-houses. It is as if, in some parallel reality, Enrico Caruso announced his retirement because One Direction and a bank of Autotune plug-ins could do the same job with half the fuss. So I feel indeed it is kind of RIP. Not to Rick himself thank goodness, but sadly to much of what he represented.

I guess this guy just heard too...

Dick Smith: RIP

The legend that is Dick Smith: makeup FX artist has died. One of the truly great visual artists in cinema history. You'll probably have noticed his work most overtly when he transformed rosy-cheeked thirteen-year-old Linda Blair into the devil him/her/itself in The Exorcist. However, I would point you also to his Oscar winning work turning F. Murray Abraham into the decrepit, elderly Salieri for Amadeus. A feat of makeup ageing that still, thirty years on, no CGI has yet to equal.

Not One For All After All

Three episodes in, and I'm calling it quits with the BBC's new Musketeers adaptation. It's not without some redeeming charms, but overall, such a mess. Uneven performances, anachronistic script, toe-curlingly melodramatic and stylistically all over the place with so many jarring tonal shifts that it feels like the assembled work of six different student directors who weren't allowed to speak to each other. After careful consideration I think I will return to an adaptation featuring far more engaging and relatable characters, and a clear, well-structured through-line of narrative purpose that best honours the source material. Namely this one:

Oh Captain My Captain

Proving why Captain Phillips, ahem, ruled the waves in 2013.
(click for a more detailed view)

My Top Five Feature Documentaries Of 2013

There were a lot of great feature-length documentary releases this year, so much so, that I've decided to indulge them their own top five.


5: Side By Side: Basically a series of one-on-one interviews in which host Keanu Reeves, yes, KEANU REEVES, discusses with a range of directors, cinematographers, editors and archivists, the digital revolution sweeping cinema, and its effect on the past, present, and future of film-making. Genuinely engrossing stuff if you are interested in cinema, probably not otherwise, but then, why are you reading this again?

4: How To Survive A Plague: Charting, mostly through archive amateur footage, the fight undertaken by the gay community in America through the 1980s and 1990s to have AIDS research, funding and medicine approval taken more seriously and more swiftly, in the face of apathy, confusion and downright hate from the establishment. It should be (and at times is) heartbreaking, but more often, it is utterly uplifting and transcendent. A paean to human dignity and solidarity.

3: Blackfish: Starting out from one particular case but soon unfolding into a litany of poor practice, dreadful incidents and shady cover-ups, this is a shocking exploration of the appalling conditions suffered by, and danger from, killer whales kept in captivity for our amusement. If you see one documentary about our hideous mistreatment of marine Cetaceans, well to be honest, see The Cove. Whereas if you see one documentary about deluded humans thinking they have some sort of intellectual-spiritual bond with deadly predators then, well ok, see Grizzly Man. But if you can stretch to two of either category, and you should, then Blackfish is a worthy companion piece to either. I guarantee you will never set foot inside a SeaWorld again.

2: Fire In The Night: The story, or rather the experience, of the Piper Alpha oil platform disaster of 1988. An unfussy documentary told  from the personal recollections of the survivors. Mostly talking heads intercut with the terrifying real footage captured of the event. Simply devastating.

1: The Act Of Killing: A documentary maker travels to Indonesia to meet a group of elderly gangsters who tortured and murdered hundreds, maybe thousands of innocent people during the death-squad anti-communist purges in the 1960s. He then invites them to go beyond telling the stories of their atrocities, but to actually re-enact them for the cameras as movies in the style of their choosing. Grim, dumbfounding, and at times surreal almost beyond comprehension.

My Top Ten Feature Films Of 2013

At first glance, 2013 didn't seem like much of a vintage year of quality cinema for me, with quite a few disappointments in the event movie calendar. But on reflection there have been some hidden gems and a couple of guilty pleasures along with the few really high achievers. So, never one to knowingly leave a bunch of random thoughts unlisted, here's my personal top ten movies of 2013.*


10: Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa: Excruciating, absurd and eye-wateringly hysterical. The Roachford mime-along is a thing of sublime beauty.

9: Pacific Rim: Is this the dumbest awesome movie ever made, or the awesomest dumb movie ever made? And if a hundred meter tall robot beats the shit out of a three-thousand ton monster using a ship as a club and there is no-one there to hear it, does it make a sound? YES. A FUCKING LOUD ONE!

8: All Is Lost: Absolutely the year's best lone-survivor-marooned-thousands-of-miles-from-help-with-ship-disintegrating-around-them drama.... that didn't star Sandra Bullock.

7: Zero Dark Thirty: NOT a defence of torture or America's foreign policy, but simply a rigorous, nail-biting and thrilling retelling of the shit that went down in the USA's hunt for its most-wanted, and a portrait of the tough and resourceful woman at the eye of that particular storm.

6: The Kings Of Summer: 2013's breakout hit that never was. Great early whispers and then... nothing. Three boys take off and build a home in the woods to live as they please... for a while. An inspired mix of Lord Of The Flies, Stand By Me and even Son Of Rambow, this is a breezy, raw and refreshing tale of friendship and all that growing-up stuff. Seek it out.

5: A Hijacking (Kapringen): The year's OTHER hijacking movie, and a fictional tale that plays even more documentary-like than the true-story of Captain Phillips. Alternating between a long drawn-out siege on board ship, and the strained, claustrophobic negotiations on land. This Danish drama takes its time, and carefully underplays the melodrama, to eventually devastating effect.

4: Blue Is The Warmest Colour (La vie d'Adèle): Yes, it's that briefly notorious Cannes winner. You know, the three-hour French drama with all the explicit lesbian nookie? Well, it's beautiful, heartfelt, totally consuming and propelled by a staggeringly open and mature emotional performance from its young, brilliant lead actress. Spellbinding.

3: Captain Phillips: Back to sea for the third time in this top ten. A massive ship, some pirates, immense tension, brilliantly orchestrated action, and two leads, one a total newcomer, one absolute Hollywood royalty, who push each other to remarkable performances. The final scene from Hanks might be the best acting moment of the year (apart from the whole of Lincoln, which I'm discounting as it was clearly, actually Lincoln).

2: The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug: Bigger, Faster, Funnier, Scarier. It may still be a bloated behemoth, groaning under the weight of all the myriad ideas that Jackson and his team can throw at it. But this time, directed, or perhaps more confidently edited, with a bravura, joyous, kinetic abandon.  Almost as good as Lord Of The Rings, more fun than almost anything else all year.

1: Gravity: A simple, lone-survival adventure, pared to the barest bones for maximum edge-of-the-seat thrills, and then wrapped up in a quantum-leap of visual FX, sound-design and 3D perfection for ninety minutes of jaw-on-the-floor astoundment.


(*NB: based on 2013 UK general releases as best as I can ascertain, and not including feature documentaries, which I suspect I may tackle separately, in fact, I just have done)


Special Achievement (or Underachievement) Awards:


1: Funniest Scene Of The Year: Iron Man Three - Questioning The Mandarin: This movie was pushed a little outside my top ten as I found the final act rather uninspired. But for all the time that Tony Stark was kept out of the suit, Shane Black's wisecracking script, married to RDJ's hyperactive motor-mouth was a joy to behold, and nowhere more so than in this scene where Sir Ben's agenda is revealed.

2: Worst Geography: Thor: The Dark World: Yes, fine, I can buy a couple of jet fighters over London being sucked through a wormhole into Svartálfaheimr, the underworld realm of the dark elves, that's just dandy. But you CAN NOT get from Charing Cross to Greenwich in three stops on the underground, NO NO NO. back to school the lot of you.

3: Most Honourable Failure: Cloud Atlas: (sigh) Multi-stranded, epoch straddling metaphysical ambition. A magnificent, touching performance from Ben Wishaw, beguiling otherworldly sweetness from Doona Bae, stunning future-Seoul visuals and the best orchestral score of the year by a mile. But then there's Tom Hanks geezering up a role that Danny Dyer could actually have played better! Tons of absurd makeup, Hugo Weaving cross-dressing (and not in a Priscilla Queen Of The Desert good way), the least convincing Scottish bar in film history, and The Mighty Boosh seemingly called in to act out all the post apocalyptic stuff. Honestly, I suspect I will go to my grave TRYING to love this film.

4: Biggest Disappointment Of The Year: Man Of Steel: Let me be clear, I am not saying that this is the worst film of the year. Far from it. But when it comes to hope vs. reality, nothing let me down this year more than Man Of Steel. It breaks down like this. Act One: Magnificent. All the stuff on Krypton is beautiful, mythic, and set up Superman's origin and back-story better than any previous iteration. So far, very impressive. Act Two: Perfectly solid. The young Clark Kent growing up and learning life-lessons in his blue-jean middle-America adoptive life is gently paced and decently acted. However it just isn't as rich and heartfelt as the exact same take on the story delivered in 1978. Act Three: Awful. An endless, repetitive destructathon that sorely undermines Superman's essential charm and character by having him utterly ignore the thousands that must be dying as half a city is flattened, and it just keeps pummelling away till numbness takes over. This might have been mitigated if the movie had any sense of fun about it, but, save for one solitary visual gag, Man Of Steel is quite the most dour Superhero movie I have ever seen. The Dark Knight is a natural fit for conflicted sour-faced moodiness, Kal-El however is not, and I just needed him, and the writers to lighten up once in a while. Pacific Rim is probably a dumber movie, but it's ten times more fun.

5: The What-The-Hell-Did-I-Just-Watch? Mindfuck Of The Year Award: A Field In England: A film I actually really liked, but I will never, ever, be able to explain why.

Top Ten Of 2012

On balance then, it was a pretty good year for sitting in a darkened room I reckon. Here's my personal top ten films of 2012.

10: The Raid
Bruising Indonesian martial arts genre-flick. Minimal story, jaw-dropping moves. Just edged ahead of "Dredd" in the best cops-v-drugs-baron-run-tower-block-siege-battle movie of the year competition.

9: The Grey
"Liam Neeson: Wolf Puncher". Much more fun than "Liam Neeson: Kill Everyone In Europe part 2".

8: The Dark Knight Rises
The epic final instalment of Nolan's superior and sophisticated comic book odyssey. Complex, spectacular, just a little uninvolving.

7: Argo
Unfussy but deftly crafted thriller of CIA shenanigans during the 1980 Iranian revolution. Wisecracking script and edge-of-seat tension beautifully balanced.

6: Beasts Of The Southern Wild
A stunning, unique and uplifting tale of childhood coming-of-age in a twisted, run-down  world. Bolstered by remarkable flights of fancy and an astonishing central performance from its six year old star.

5: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Overlong opening, but otherwise highly engaging first chapter in Jackson's epic Hobbit adaptation. Bags of charm, spectacle and adventure, if not yet high drama. Against all the odds it still ended sooner than I wanted or expected.

4: The Cabin In The Woods
Enormously fun meta-horror, made for film-geeks, by film-geeks. Kind of like The Truman Show... with added Zombie Redneck Torture.

3: Looper
Time travelling who's-your-daddy paradoxes ahoy. Old Bruce Willis vs. young Bruce Willis. The maths doesn't bare too much close analysis, but you'll be too entertained to care.

2: Life Of Pi
Staggeringly beautiful fable and a simple but profound meditation on the nature of faith. Will stay with you.

1: The Artist
A perfectly formed, perfectly joyous piece of sheer entertainment. A film in love with film and in love with love.

The Andromeda Strain or: How I Learned To Start Worrying and Love Dystopian Science-Fiction of the 1970s

What is science-fiction? What constitutes a good definition of the genre? Ask any random selection of people off the street, and you'll get wildly differing responses and examples. This is rarely the case with the thriller, romance or western, for example. The setting may change (although naturally rarely in the case of the western) and the style may evolve over the years, but we all have a pretty solid idea of the core themes of each of these genres, and apart from the odd left-field experiment, we'd rarely be wrong in our assumptions.

For many people science-fiction is practically synonymous with fantasy, tales of romantic adventures in far off made-up places with silly sounding names. For some the genre is, uniquely, tied up with the hardware on-screen, requiring the presence of spaceships, robots or lasers to qualify for the breed at all. Go back to the 1950s and many people would be unable to distinguish it from horror. As the b-movie monster genre, which mashed up the pulpiest elements of both, was the dominant form.

All this changed in 1968, when the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey utterly rewrote the rules and presented, almost for the first time to a mainstream cinema audience, what was already well established in literature, that science-fiction is a genre of ideas. One of the cornerstones of proper science-fiction is simply to look at the world we inhabit from a new angle, and ask ourselves "what if?"

For a few brief years in the wake of that 1968 watershed, science-fiction (at its best) strove to match its literary counterparts, and asked big questions about the nature of existence, the future of humanity, and ruminated, usually pretty negatively, upon the big concerns of the day, of nuclear annihilation, of world overpopulation or the end of scant resources. Granted, not all of these were entirely successful, and many of the movies from that era are as bound to the post-Watergate and Vietnam sense of disillusionment and late-hippy, early-ecological social background of the day as those '50s monster pics were to the all-American apple pie family and red menace politics of their time.

But while the quality may have varied, what they usually shared in common was a gritty, downbeat style, mature writing with a believable and un-romanticised treatment of their subject, and a harsh, sometimes nihilistic world view. For the uninitiated, some better examples of the era, beyond that Kubrick masterpiece, include eco-parable Silent Running, THX-1138 (a kind of rewrite of 1984, and an astonishingly bleak work from one young George Lucas), Soylent Green, Solaris (the hard-work but rewarding Russian answer to 2001), a couple of classics in the form of A Clockwork Orange and Planet Of The Apes and, less well remembered now, but still very strong after all these years, The Andromeda Strain.

In a nutshell: A returning space probe crashes to Earth in modern-day America, leaving the population of a small town mysteriously wiped out. As the military prevaricate around how to act, it's up to a group of scientists, sequestered covertly to an underground bunker, to figure out the cause and avert a potential disaster.

The Andromeda Strain was the first filmed adaptation of a work by author Michael Crichton, later the creator of ER and author and/or screenwriter behind mainstream mega-hits of variable quality from Jurassic Park and Westworld to Congo and, ahem, Twister, and while he may have sullied his name somewhat with his more ludicrous later stories, this early work from his hit 1969 novel benefits enormously from his years as a medical student, and the believable, procedural detail that he brings to bear.

This is not to say that we don't get a fair helping of the "stuff" of science-fiction. There's plenty of futuristic (for 1971) hardware, a form of alien life (although unlike any seen in cinema before) and even a few lasers near the climax. But the meat of movie lies elsewhere, principally with the drama going on between our band of lab-coat technicians who are, uniquely for that most short-changed breed, real people. Complex, difficult, tired, argumentative, largely unattractive, and totally believable as they struggle to deal with the situation they have found themselves dumped in. Particularly wonderful is the sharp-tongued, dour-faced, chain-smoking researcher essayed by Kate Reid, who brings a much needed but entirely natural sardonic wit to the otherwise dry proceedings.

Also effective, and again reflecting the changing attitudes of its time, is the largely negative impression the movie gives of the politicians and military commanders on its periphery, who are either incompetent or untrustworthy to some degree. It's a common stance to a modern audience, but must have been pretty coruscating at the time and reflects a sense of malaise that feels very much appropriate to its era and yet still rings true today.

Marshalling the project is director Robert Wise, who has often been looked down upon somewhat as something of a journeyman, a studio man... or to put it harshly, as some would, a hack. Generally a director for hire, who rarely, if ever, autered personal projects, I suspect he'd have no problem with that description of him, but that should not lead us to underestimate his rare skill as a filmmaker. In a remarkably varied career that began in the 1930s as film editor on, amongst others, Citizen Cane no less, he has directed several stone cold classics, from The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951, and the only science-fiction to rise above the pulp b-movie nonsense of its day), West Side Story, The Haunting (1963, and still one of the most effectively chilling ghost stories ever filmed), and The Sound Of Music. Yes! Hate it all you like, the third most successful movie of all time. He was quite some hack then.

Nearly forty years into his career by this point, Wise brings a freshness and daring to the project. The visual look is bleak, almost documentary like. The research centre that the film spends most of its running time inside looks and feels wholly believable in spite of a fairly modest budget. He recruited FX guru Douglas Trumball, who had worked not long before on 2001, and together they ensured a rigorous authenticity in the design of the technology involved, such as the communication screens, which actually worked for real, rather than being post-production optical effects as would have been the norm for the day.

There are some remarkable visual flourishes. In particular the use of split screens (back in vogue recently with its (over)use in the series "24"), which, as well as adding to the documentary look, are deployed, quite unexpectedly, in dream sequences which are at once both stark and abstract and infinitely more authentic feeling than a thousand misty dissolves that had previously been the visual shorthand for almost as long as cinema itself. In a few seemingly effortless, but intellectually rigorous moves, Robert Wise showed just how effectively he could make a film absolutely modern in look and feel (at a time when a young, hungry breed of independent spirited filmmakers were turning the old Hollywood studio system on its head) , yet completely without drawing attention to itself.

It's not a perfect movie to be sure. The obsessive procedures used during the "descent" into the complex drag on rather too long, and the finale indulges itself the venerable cliché of a countdown race that was rather clearly signposted from the off. But despite these minor flaws, The Andromeda Strain delivers in bleak, taught tension with a satisfyingly paranoid atmosphere and effectively essays a disturbing vision of an all too plausible disaster scenario.

And so it was, that for a few brief years science-fiction cinema seemed to have grown up and come of age, matching the new grimy realism that pervaded so much American cinema of the time. That is until May 25th 1977 in a galaxy far, far away....

Rating: 4/5

Put The Right One On

It's a widely held belief amongst many moviegoers and critics alike that if you are going to remake a movie, it's usually best to remake a bad one. Right off the bat there are a couple of good reasons why this might often hold true. Principally it seems logical that as the film-maker, your remake is far less likely to suffer from critical comparison or emotive negative reactions from a loyal existing fan-base if you make-over a half forgotten mediocre movie than a beloved classic. However, from a more objective position, the likely advantage of remaking a bad (or at least not very good) movie is that it probably leaves a lot more creative elbow room for re-interpretation. If the script, or the performances, or the staging or pacing of the original left a lot to be desired then it seems reasonable to assume that the makers of the new version are more likely to throw out a larger amount of what came before, and start again with just the bare bones of the concept or story. Rather than simply reshooting the same movie to the same, usually diminished effect, this freedom then brings a corresponding increase in the chances of actually improving on what came before, and if you are not aiming to do at least that, then why are you bothering at all?

David Cronenbergs' '80s version of The Fly for example, started life when Cronenberg watched the 1950s original, and left the theatre fuming about technical issues regarding mass loss and gain as a guys' head ends up on a fly, at fly size, while the flies' ends up on a man, with a corresponding increase in volume of matter contained therein. When he finally got his chance to remake it therefore, he and his co-writer took a fresh look at the original short story concept, and along with a modicum of improvement in the science (still somewhat outrageous, but slightly more rationalised from an internal logic point of view), the resulting movie comprehensively trounced the original in every department. From the grotesquely inventive special effects, through a beautiful and tender central relationship, one the finest ever to grace the horror genre, to Jeff Goldblums' career best performance of a brilliant man physically and mentally disintegrating.

Then a little more recently we had Ocean's Eleven, which in comparison to the above example sticks more closely to its forbears' formula. In this case an all-star comedy crime caper which was a fun, but rather lazy and unfocused vehicle for its Rat-Pack stars. Through fine, pacey direction, tight-as-a-barrel scripting, and a clutch of well oiled performances, Soderbergs' superficially similar retread soundly beats it for cunning, wit, thrills and all-round cool.

So if the above wisdom is so commonly accepted, it begs the question of why we so often get subjected to inferior remakes of top-rank classics. Was anyone really asking for re-imaginings (a hateful phrase that tries vainly to smear some creative justification onto this vile process) of Planet of the Apes, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Wicker Man, The Ladykillers (proving that even the masterful Coen Brothers could not overturn this rule) or Psycho?

The answer of course is money. Old films have a limited scope for reaping further financial rewards for the studios that own them. There is but an ongoing trickle of budget DVD sales and some small royalties from TV showings which cannot attract high fees as the smaller audiences for each successive showing result in ever-diminishing advertising revenues etc. But there is a ready market of millions of people who wouldn't dream of sitting down on a Sunday afternoon to watch The African Queen on the telly, but who would pay top dollar at the box office if they heard of a new movie with the same name starring Angelina Jolie (yeah, I'd probably watch it too!).

The above list of recent offenders is of course evidence enough to all but the most cinematically-challenged observer that remakes of great films are generally a waste of time, money and creative talent that could have been so much better employed on something original. None of this is exactly news and frankly most of the time I couldn't care less about them. I, like most people who might give a damn, have seen those marvellous classics, I know them to be great, and should I be unfortunate enough to encounter one of these misbegotten cash-cows, it won't make a jot of difference to my love of the originals.

There is however, an evil, and insidious second thread to the remake scam and that is the remaking of recent foreign language films (foreign to us Western, English speaking audiences I mean of course). The motivation here is similar, but the effect, I believe, is far more damaging.

A high quality foreign-language film gets a bit of attention, maybe wins a couple of awards somewhere and earns itself some admirers. Now, if this were an English language film, with luck, a major distributor would pick it up, put a ton of money behind promoting it and make it the big hit it deserves to be. But it isn't, it's got, "GASP!", subtitles on it, and sadly there is (or is assumed to be) a huge proportion of the English speaking audience, particularly in America, where most of the big money is to be made, who just would not dream of seeing a subtitled movie, no matter how brilliant it may reputedly be. As English first-language speaking countries, we largely bring this on ourselves. We are notoriously lazy with regards to other cultures, having had the luxury of being brought up with one of the worlds' premiere international languages as our mother tongue. People in many other countries are used to seeing films, hearing music, and experiencing culture from around the world in multiple languages, such that seeing subtitles and dealing with tongues that they may not be so fluent in is part of daily life and not given a second thought. But not so here, and crucially not in Hollywood.

So what happens to our theoretical gem of a foreign movie? It may get a good critical response, perhaps does well in its own country, and is seen by a small, but fervently enthusiastic band of admirers around the globe. Now it is in the nature of cinematic enthusiasts (i.e. nerds like me), that when they discover a great film, but particularly one that hasn't been seen yet by every man and his dog, that they will recommend it to their mates, or take people to see it, because they want to share the experience of what they have found. In doing so, over time the films' reputation will spread, the screenings and the sales will grow, and it may, with luck, gain at least a share of the success that it richly deserves.

Except that is doesn't. What increasingly happens now is that Hollywood spots a good idea, just in the "wrong" language, and says "We'll have that!". And so, before the original film has even left the cinemas, a remake is in the can, made with ten-times the budget, pushed out there with a hundred times the promotional muscle and it's on the side of every bus before you can say "God damn you all to Hell!"

Is this so much worse than bad remakes of old classics? After all, in both cases the original version still exists for all to see if they so choose. Well, yes, in my opinion it is, for several reasons but the principle one is this: There is a magic in seeing a great movie for the first time (as there is of course with reading a great book or hearing a beautiful song), and that can never be experienced in the same way again. If you have already watched a remake of a movie before seeing, or indeed even being aware of, the original; you will never get to experience that movie the way it was meant to be experienced. You will know where the story is headed, you will be aware ahead of time of the fate of characters that you might have cared greatly about, or twists that change the meaning of everything you thought you understood. You will compare and contrast scenes, and dialogue, and performances, sometimes without even being aware that you have been removed from the first-hand experience of the tale and instead that you are now sitting outside of the world on-screen.  You are analysing the movie, rather than being immersed in it. The remake has robbed you of that gift, and you can never have it back.

So I come to Let Me In. It comes out here in the UK in just a few weeks. It looks pretty good, the trailers and posters look moody and atmospheric. It's directed by Matt Reeves, who made Cloverfield which I thoroughly enjoyed, and it stars that little cool-as-fuck girl from Kick-Ass. Sounds good? Let's go.

Except... have you seen Let The Right One In (or I should say "Låt den rätte komma in", and therein lies the problem)? Yes? Good on you. We can discuss the nerdy details later on. No? Well think carefully about where you spend your next 8 quid, because for me, Let The Right One In, which came out barely a year ago over here, is a true cinematic masterpiece. One of the most moving, melancholic, atmospheric and original films I have seen in a very long time. I could talk for hours about the stunning cinematography, the remarkable and captivating performances by the two child leads, the heart-breaking score and the sheer exhilaration of experiencing such an original take on an apparently familiar genre. But I won't, because you can experience it all for yourself, for the first time, and then get back to me and we'll talk.

In spite of having been a sizable hit for a foreign-language film, I regularly find myself talking to friends who have yet to hear of this movie, and of course I do my best to turn them on to it when I do. There are doubtless millions of people around the world who haven't experienced the dark enchantments of Let The Right One In but would in time do so. But in a few months time many of them will have seen the no doubt more commercially successful Let Me In, and the chance to have the same experience that I did when seeing it for the first time will be lost.

I have yet to see The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, by co-incidence another Swedish movie out in the last year and with excellent notices, and I thoroughly intend to do so at some point. However I have just recently learned that a remake is on the way (is it something against Sweden? Did the head of Sony Pictures get knocked down by a Volvo?). On paper the remake could not look more impressive. Directed by the formidable David Fincher who helmed Seven, Fight Club and Zodiac. Scripted by the same screen-writer as Schindler's List. I should be excited about this; it has every chance of being excellent... and yet, and yet... All I can feel is sadness and anger at the shameful pilfering of another apparently excellent work the minute it has gained a glimpse of recognition as such.

I will be making damn sure I see the original version of that movie before I go near the remake, if I do at all, and I urge you to do the same. However, before that, I implore you, see Let The Right One In. See it because it deserves to be a huge hit. Making a commercially successful movie in Sweden, with a small film industry and a modest ten million native speakers is a tough challenge at best, and the makers of this stunning work of art deserve all the success and recognition that they can get. See it because, by making original foreign language films more successful and snubbing American remakes a little more, we will be sending a message to those with the money to get films made and distributed that we, the audience, value originality, variety and creativity and will spend our money where we find it; and what we don't need, and crucially won't pay good money for, is to be spoon fed with lazy retreads and moribund imagination. This could pay us back dividends in the future by resulting in a greater choice of quality cinema, made by those who have the best creative minds, rather than simply by those with the most commercial nous. But most of all see it now! See it before the remake gets you and steals the magic, forever.

Doctor Who and the malaise of British TV Sci-Fi

I suspect that some of us have a rather fuzzy rose-tinted childhood memory perspective on how "good" the old days of Doctor Who were. For me Tom Baker will always be the man, but I think it's likely his tenure too would leave me cold if I were seeing it for the first time today. However looking back at the earliest shows, well before my time, the first actors (Hartnell and Troughton in particular) managed to carry off their roles with genuine weight and grit in the midst of an embarrassment of shitty FX and cardboard sets. There is a sense that serious Science Fiction and original creative work was at least being attempted in the face of a hopeless lack of resources.

I did have hopes for the modern series in the early stages of the Ecclestone re-launch. He seemed to tame the worst excesses of the hammery that the role often seems to have brought out in many of the preceding, otherwise capable actors; and Billie Piper I thought was a genuine revelation as a real equal in character and not just a mini-skirted bit of fluff on the sidelines. But the scripts just became increasingly dire with every episode. full of lazy in-joke references and jaw-droppingly bad rip-offs from better SF (does anyone remember the "spiders" in an Ecclestone episode just months after Minority Report had given us the exact same thing? I couldn't believe what I was seeing). Tennant, a fine actor in better fare by all reports, seems to have been worn down by a mixture of poor scripting and lazy directing into gradually replacing performance with just a bag of overblown ticks and mannerisms. His eyebrows rise higher than Penfold's to express interest in anything.

What infuriates me the most are the audience-insultingly low aims of the whole venture. When you compare this to the best of US Science Fiction (the recent Battlestar Galactica reboot or the best of Star Trek for example), but even more when you compare it to the BBC's own world-class output of what they label as “proper” drama, the writing is just so smug, childish and lazily repetitive. That the BBC can lavish millions on what is considered to be a flagship program, but hand it over to such talentless hacks can to me only be explained as sheer arrogance. The attitude seems to be “It's Science Fiction, therefore it's only for kids who don't know any better, and it's Dr. Who. Everyone loves Dr. Who, so why should we try any harder? Everyone will watch it anyway, especially if the lead actor is good looking and we throw a few b-list celebs into the mix”

This sort of under-achieving attitude has been a sadly predictable feature of most attempts at home grown sci-fi in recent years. There seems to be an utter failure to grasp the kind of dramatic and conceptual scope that the genre, at its best, is capable of. Other recent disappointments include "The Deep", and the shockingly bad "Primeval". It is remarkable to consider that of all programs, the space set sitcom "Red Dwarf" is probably the most sophisticated and original sci-fi series to have made it off the BBC's drawing board in the last quarter of a century.

Meanwhile, as far as the good Doctor is concerned, I bailed the moment Catherine Tate appeared. This marked for me the point when any vestige of interest in making SF/Drama was stomped on by a BBC in-house back-slapping fest and spin-off marketing machine.