It’s been a bad year, but we did our best…

127 Showers, The King’s Reach, Season of the Itch, Assland, I Emit on Your Grave, The Disgustment Bureau, The Insatiable Poon, Bare Game, Lord of the Lance 3D, Norwegian Wood, Pussy in Boots

Fulfilling Bono, Sucker Munch, Old Fish, Fucking with Stella, Little White Prize, How I Distended This Summer, Daughter for Elephants, Deep End, Forget My Clot, A Screaming Man, My Week in Marilyn

Attack the Cock, Pirates of the Caribbean Sores: On Stranger Brides, Julia’s Cries, Sex-Men: First Pass, Screwed, Tongue Fu: Panda’s Goo, Bean Lantern, Ache Land, The Cum Diary, Wuthering Nights, Runnyballs

Merry Christmas, again.

A bit of of a back-slap, this, but I think it’ll be interest to anyone who happens across this blog looking for our late sponsor.

I’ve just edited a book, available now from Amberley Publishing, in which the estimable and gentlemanly Alan Gallop tells the full story of the big man’s notorious Halloween ‘38 broadcast of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. It’s great fun – I’ve rattled through it a few times, obviously – and paints a believable picture of New Deal New York, and all those bold theatrical folk (incl. John Houseman and Marc Blitzstein) making experimental (& often Government-subsidised) drama for a mass audience.

I just came across this old shot and wondered if I might take the opportunity to pioneer a new critical form… All contributions welcome; the parameters are self-evident.

First off, a disclaimer: I already pay tribute to the ‘local/sustainable/quality ingredients’ gods, so in a way this pilot episode feels like it’s preaching to the converted. However, where else on television can you get Michel Roux Jr and the Hairy Bikers on the same bill?

The premise of the programme is simple: each celeb foodie adopts a neglected British food and ‘campaigns’ to revive it in our hearts and homes, while rustling up some tasty grub with said ingredient to show us all how easy it is. The format reminds me of Hugh’s Fish Fight on Channel 4 earlier this year – is 2011 the year to campaign for your food (a step up from pedestrian food snobbery)?

It’s hard not to like Michel Roux Jr – he’s got French pedigree, he sounds English, he walks about Oxfordshire wheat fields in a smart blazer, and he comes across as someone passionate and relatable when he talks about food. I like the cut of his jib. The best part of his segment on Real Bread is when he visits a bakery under a Hackney railway bridge that uses a 200-year-old starter from Lapland. The finished loaves ‘turn him on’, and you can see why. Mmm.

His three recipes ranged from a simple white loaf (dead easy, but it’ll be a distant future where I dedicate an entire day waiting for dough to rise), a duck pie with bread crust (with a shocking amount of duck fat oozing absolutely everywhere) and a diplomat pudding – that’s posh French bread ‘n’ butter pud in wee little ramekins to you and me. Not exactly recipes I’ll be attempting in my wardrobe-sized kitchen. Lovely to watch and fantasise about.

In contrast to Roux’s savoire faire, you get the bumbling Hairy Bikers duo (it’s the Geordie one and the other one, sorry don’t know their names) espousing all things Brassica. Snowball, purple ones, ‘cheddar-cheese flavoured ones’ (they’re just orange) and my personal favourite, the Romanesco – which looks more like it could be the top of La Sagrada Familia’s towers than in your veg patch. What am I talking about? It’s the cauliflower, of course! Much maligned cousin of the trendy broccoli.

The Bikers’ food style is hearty to say the least, but their three recipes are meant to lure the British family back to buying caulis – cauliflower cheese with mushrooms and bacon, a ‘posh’ cauliflower purée with seared scallops, and an aloo bhaji curry. All ticking the ‘family favourites’ boxes. Guest chef Yotam Ottolenghi (he does sexy, sexy things to vegetables in a modern Middle Eastern style… check out his New Vegetarian column in the Guardian) is invited to do a crowd taste test, and he whips up a grilled cauliflower salad that looks easy, and yet it would never have occurred to me to try it. I would love to see Ottolenghi do a vegetarian food show.

But I digress. Overall the first episode is fun, informative and hasn’t stuck too stringently to a format that stifles each guest’s personalities. By concentrating on a key ingredient it’ll make the aspiring chef at home think differently about the same old veg, or maybe take a little time to try their hand at making bread. Will the campaign work? Well I’ve got a sourdough starter growing in my kitchen, and there’s a snowball in the fridge awaiting its transformation. But then again, I was at the altar from the start.

UPDATE: The Great British Food Revival is airing weekly at 8 p.m. from Wednesday 9 March, on BBC Two.

Alexander Jacoby reviews Tino Balio’s The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens 1946–1973 in the TLS, 18/02/11:

One distinguished British import of the early post-war era was released with the tag line “A horrifying spectre stalks the great stone battlements of the ancient castle. Its one command is … kill … kill … KILL!” The film in question was Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet.

Christopher Hitchens – Why The King’s Speech is a gross falsification

First Orson’s post on The King’s Speech! It’s just a link, but a good one: Christopher Hitchens takes the film to task on its rather fuzzy understanding of history, specifically the behaviour of Churchill and the royal family before the war. The word “appeasement” appears – one of those fun words that only ever appears in a certain context – and Hitch reminds us how so many British national myths, from the doughty heroism of Churchill to the magical ability of our royal figureheads to produce some quantity of “national unity”, are mostly fantasies. And good on him.

I went to see the film with a friend who said it reminded him of how much he believes in the monarchy. True enough, watching this film will not turn a royalist into a republican. Of course, the film refuses to flatter the royal family; but it does so by pulling that old con trick, “they’re just normal people in a strange situation”, inviting gasps and giggles as we watch these everyday human beings try to live up to the tradition of obeisance they just happened to inherit.

It’s hardly the first bit of screen fiction to “humanise” British royalty – but let’s unpack our need to “humanise” them. Though it seems like irreverence, it really just reconciles royalty to us as an acceptable novelty, neatly brushing aside all those awkward national and political facts that we would rather not confront.

Black Swan, the latest effort from Darren Aronofsky, is a complicated tale of obsession, madness and ballet. Natalie Portman plays Nina, an up-and-coming ballerina who gets her shot at prima under the stewardship of Vince Cassel’s demanding director Thomas. Along the way she encounters fellow performer Lily (Mila Kunis), embodiment the chaotic, darker elements which Nina needs to discover in order to dance as the Black Swan in the production of Swan Lake.

Despite spending all of the film up close with Portman, she always seems closed off. Indeed, Nina appears in literally every scene of the film, creating a claustrophobic effect for the viewer, adding to the general feeling of constriction that pervades throughout. I found myself longing for some time with other characters, to see events unfolded that weren’t filtered through the ballerina’s skewed viewpoint. The single -character focus achieves an unsettling effect which lingers, but also pushes the viewer away.

Nina is cold and unsympathetic, often coming across as a sulking child. I found myself heartily agreeing with Vince Cassel’s character, Thomas, who repeatedly urges her to ‘lose yourself’, but I wasn’t sure whether I was aiming it at the character or the actress.

The theme of obsession with perfection – and the lengths that Nina will go to achieve it – suggest that she is intended to display this closedness to other characters, but the fact that she fails to reveal anything to the audience even in the depths of apparent psychosis, critically undermines any relationship with the viewer. Fear, yes; anger, yes; emotion, not really.

While the film gives the impression of accelerating and building to its climax, it -again – felt like things were on too short a leash. The energy of the production (within a production) felt very controlled, orchestrated and deliberate, and even the actual manifestation of the titular black swan didn’t unleash enough chaos. It felt like a portrayal of dark energy and insanity, but in a perversely restrained manner.

At the heart of it, sharing in the fear and madness of the character isn’t enough to build a sympathetic bond with the viewer. It’s a staggering and accomplished portrayal of an intensely disturbed individual, but I can’t say that I enjoyed it in the same way that I enjoyed the – equally traumatic but infinitely more relatable – Requiem, which retains its crown as Aronofsky’s masterpiece.

Black Swan is a film that gets under your skin and makes you want to scratch, but the whole experience is troublesome and doesn’t quite gel.

Noted horror director Hideo Nakata (The Ring), goes British with Chatroom, which will prove to be one of the last films you see funded by the UK Film Council. Nostalgia aside, Chatroom basically crashes on startup: More gosh-horror than shock-horror, the film concentrates on the social disquiet that visits five Chelsea Teens, who run around pouting and touting and generally looking for attention in a chatroom named… ahem… Chelsea Teens.

Nakata doesn’t seem to have pegged that no-one uses chatrooms anymore. Still, some thought has clearly gone into filming (making ‘real’) the virtual chatroom, and the film is initially enjoyable if mainly for watching just how Nakata does it. The chatrooms are represented along a great corridor in a sleazy hotel; inside, they are each different, as designed by their ‘owner’. These rooms are either free to all, or locked down to some. Makes sense, I think.

Conversation in the chatrooms is uninhibited, to the point, and frequently clichéd. You’d hope exchanges like “you can do whatever you want” / “I know isn’t it great?” purposefully mirror the stilted and rapid-fire way people converse online. But then it could just be shoddy scriptwriting – it’s hard to tell. Whatever the case, it seems to work. For the first half an hour, at least.

In that first half an hour, Chatroom exhausts all it has to say – that, given the chance, we’d all create a better looking, more confident version of ourselves; that the internet can help loners find solace; that the internet can also give a false sense of community to a handful of deviants on the trail of perversity. Thereafter, it just becomes an itinerary of teenage angst, a la Skins, filtered through the strong jaw lines of teenagers living in Chelsea.

There’s Eva (Imogen Poots), the self-conscious model, Emily (Hannah Murray), the prissy conservative, Jim (Matthew Beard), the fatherless loner, and William (Kick Ass’ Aaron Johnson), the son of a famous novelist. William is the ringleader, a young man (or aging kid) who likes to enjoy by proxy his obsession with suicide. A model, a conservative, a depressive and a spoilt suicide-minded brat: it’s easy to see why Chatroom fosters a dearth of empathy from its audience. (I found myself rather hoping they’d all top themselves – an ending sensitive of humanity, I think, though admittedly far-fetched.)

In the midst of all this upper-class urban-youth jeopardy-frolicking, one character stands out. Mo (Daniel Kaluuya) is 15, cool, well-intended, and hot for his friend’s 11 year old sister. Concerned about his inclinations, he tells his friend about the crush. And receives a beating in reply. The genuine horror of pedophilia deserves no place in a film that is otherwise content to mine such limited quandaries as teenage angst, and yet the judgement-free depiction of Mo’s position is impressive.

Daniel Kaluuya (Posh Kenneth in Skins) is outstanding in the role, exhibiting an underplayed style and perfect tragi-comic sensibility. Sadly, Mo is always on the periphery of the group, and Chatroom is too in thrall to its more glitzy, gobby characters to recognize its diamond in the rough. By the end of the film, Mo is largely forgotten.

One last thing to say. Chatroom reminds me not of The Ring, but of another rectally referential title: The Hole. Like The Hole, Chatroom ‘traps’ a group of well-off youngsters in a small space. Like The Hole, the main narrative conceit is that one of the characters is a massive bastard. Like The Hole, the majority of the characters are just unlikable. And, like The Hole, there’s a young English actress, more pretty than good, who may just end up on an alarming amount of screens, billboards, and minds. In this case, the actress is Imogen Poots.

Remember the name. And the pout.

Here’s my half to partner this.

5. Nightwatching (dir. Peter Greenaway). An extended lecture on the ontology of art dressed up in Greenaway’s favoured Renaissance ruffles, Nightwatching is a neoclassical tale about Rembrandt that manages to be in turns sexy, strange, and literally smeared in shit. It didn’t get the press it deserved on release, which is probably because the film lacks the comic lurches that helped The Draughtsman’s Contract and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover gain Greenaway attention back in the 80s. Nonetheless, Greenaway is in full artistic pomp here, proving himself a visual composer worthy of the Dutch Master he paints.

4. Memento (dir. Christopher Nolan). Intriguingly planned, carefully paced, attentively acted, shot with a thorough yet not self-satisfied knowledge of its genre: it’s a shame no-one asked the director of this gorgeous fin-de-siecle noir to helm Inception, 2010’s big blowout.

Oh, wait.

3. Dr. Strangelove. Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (dir. Stanley Kubrick). I saw this in strange (sober) circumstances in a warehouse in the East End. And boy! How I had forgotten.

In retrospect, I think my memory had been clouded by Anthony Lane’s unnamed friend, who said, somewhere in Nobody’s Perfect, that Dr Strangelove works best when considered a B movie. Absolutely not! Just because there’s a simplicity of means here – the satire is oh so clean; the sets step straight off the stage – doesn’t mean Dr. Strangelove should be downgraded. Far from it. There’s a tenderness to the comedy of Strangelove, from Mandrake’s quiet pleading to the closing montage of mushroom-cloud destruction, that makes this 1964 classic a match for anything Kubrick did thereafter.

2. Taxi Driver (dir. Martin Scorcese). The Brixton Ritzy screened Taxi Driver without context in October. Perhaps the programmer there had read the most-likely-balls rumour doing the rounds that Scorcese and, um, Lars Von Trier, were going to team up to make Taxi Driver 2. Whatever the weather, no excuse should be needed to watch a film like this (or, apparently, ticket: most of the audience walked in for free).

The feel of Taxi Driver alone had me in full swoon. Scorsese’s soundtrack of residual jazz rhythms mingles with a camera that shoves dewy eyed impressionism through an urban filter characterised by rain hitting tarmac. The result is caustically sensual and scary: the first and last word in the aesthetic of urban obsession and alienation.

1. Four Lions (dir. Chris Morris). A film by Chris ‘Laughter-in-the-Dark’ Morris about jihadi terrorism, Four Lions had critics and community support officers cowering before its release. The virulent reception never quite materialised though, largely because Morris clearly knew his stuff (and wasn’t afraid to show it).

There are some wrong-in-the-belly-laughs in here – the type of spiraling, self-satirising laughs Morris has made his own. But they arrive at different points for different viewers – the audiences I sat in never moved as one into hysterics. I suspect that’s not uncommon to Chris Morris vehicles. The Day Today and Brass Eye don’t just get better (and better) on reruns (and reruns): entire new lines become suddenly noticeable for their genius. But I also suspect it’s something to do with the this particular film’s agonizingly excavated position. Given that he’s satirising black and white thinking, Morris impressively avoids painting his characters, or his audience, as one.

A wonderfully clever, careful, and comic piece of work.

Oscar for Best Film? Anyone?

Hopefully one of Orson’s other minions will step in to complete this Top 10. Here’s my half of it, anyway – the best of 2010. (Mea culpa: living with only an Apollo in walking distance, I had precious little to go on this year, hence the rather suspect idea that the following could be claimed as the ‘best’ examples of anything. The Apollo only showed one, by the way – guess which.)

5. Exit through the Gift Shop (dir. Banksy). Misunderstood, I think, by an embarrassment of eminent critics, this fun-but-harsh mockumentary is another of Banksy’s occasional assaults on the absurdities of the arts establishment – but what makes it great is that instead of standing heroically apart from the horror, he includes himself as one of the age’s worst offenders. Banksy is Thierry Guetta.

4. The Kreutzer Sonata (dir. Bernard Rose). Orson’s already rambled on about Rose’s achievement on a couple of occasions. Suffice to say, it’s a magnificently literate film on all levels: as an adaptation of Tolstoy’s story, as a tale of charity gone awry (I think it has a lot of moral freight), and as a masterpiece of editing (Rose himself) and sound design (Nigel Holland).

3. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul). After Syndromes and a Century, I expected to be further stunned by ‘Joe’ Weerasethakul’s other films, and Palme d’Or-winning Uncle Boonmee is suitably terrific. It has the same demandingly slow pace as before, but this is here married to a pulp-fiction cheekiness: out-of-body experiences, ghosts, and monsters done the old-fashioned way (men in suits with LED eyes).

2. The Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call: New Orleans (dir. Werner Herzog). My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? came out as a too-loyal homage to its producer, David Lynch, but Werner Herzog’s other US film gave Nicolas Cage his best role for years, and offers a shot in the arm to the identikit thrillers Hollywood prefers to spend its money on. It was the best comedy of the year – I watched it a second time to remind myself how outrageous it was.

1. The Social Network (dir. David Fincher). Fincher redeems himself after insipid Benjamin Button by historicising Facebook and working with Aaron Sorkin, whose charming, geeky dialogue is a near-perfect match for Fincher’s restless camera. The pomp of Sorkin’s banter means rooms and corridors are usually enough for any scene – except Fincher always wants to be poking his way into the corners of the stage. And they both get their way. For a film about a website, it is chock-full of weird sounds and fine compositions. It’s a feast second to none in 2010.