The Pitch:

The Review: Steven Soderbergh films are like buses; you wait ages, then two come along at once. In some ways they’re actually better than buses, as if there’s one you don’t like the next one will probably be completely different. So it should be no surprise that after last year’s taut but slightly underwhelming Outbreak-remake Contagion Soderbergh has arrived on an entirely different bus, but actually one that left the depot two years ago. (I think I’d better park this bus metaphor now.) The difference between Contagion and Haywire is a prime  example of Steven Soderbergh’s experimental and varied nature, but it also means that you can’t guarantee that you’re actually going to like every Soderbergh film. This time, the Soderbergh experiment is to take a female mixed martial arts star and to attempt to make her a movie star; but does this attempt to put the fair fight in My Fair Lady actually work?

A lot of that rests on Carano’s broad but still delicate shoulders. Coming off somewhere between Jet from Gladiators and Cynthia Rothrock, what she lacks in personality and acting ability and more personality she makes up for with a steely glare,  a slight grumpiness when asked to wear a dress and an unerring ability to beat the senses out of men twice her size. Sensibly, the story constructed is very much designed to show off the sense-beating, grumpiness and steely glares and minimise the need for personality and acting ability. It’s pretty much a Bourne clone; there’s running, fighting, driving, all in the name of Carano finding something about about the people who she’s fighting, driving past or running away from. The fights themselves have a real physicality and heft about them, and when Carano and Michael Fassbender start laying into each other, it’s verging on cartoon violence and quite satisfying, if you like that kind of thing.

In order to draw attention away from any perceived lack of abilities on Gina Carano’s part, Soderbergh has surrounded her with some of the finest acting and action movie talent known to man. Ewan McGregor sports a dodgy haircut and his usual unlikely American accent and does most of the exposition, and the likes of Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas and Bill Paxton also pop up in supporting roles. Here lies the first of two major problems with Haywire: the bits in between the running and the fighting are deathly dull, written as if the Enigma machine had turned its hand to screenplays. There’s lots of obtuse references to lots of things which aren’t stated explicitly, and then in the last ten minutes reams of further exposition turn up to make sense of it all. By that point, if you didn’t enjoy the fighting and the running, you may have also stopped caring.

The other drawback of Haywire is that, for all of Steven Soderbergh’s experimental nature, it actually feels about as fresh as a three day old nappy at times. There’s a little Ocean’s meets Bourne feel going on, thanks to David Holmes’ unmistakably trendy, januty score which creates a familiar ambience, but Soderbergh has been experimental so many times, and often much more so than here, that actually the familiarity of the material can breed contempt in the quieter stretches. There’s a great stretch in the middle of the film where Carano goes on the run across Dublin, beating up security guards and running over rooftops, and somehow an extended version of this sequence, stripped of the babbling exposition and filling the short but overstretched run time, might have actually been an improvement. Soderbergh’s talking about taking a sabbatical after his next two films and on this evidence he might need to recharge his batteries, as Haywire’s a lot of fun when its star is handing out violence like it’s going out of fashion, but the rest of the time you’ll wish you had Jason Bourne’s Swiss-cheesed memory, as the non-violent scenes deserve to be forgotten.

Why see it at the cinema: Yay fighty bits! Yay running about on rooftops! The rest might be a little scrambled, but whenever Carano’s kicking butt or running about in pursuit of some other low-life, then you’ll thank yourself that you saw it on a screen that did it justice.

The Score: 6/10

Oscar nominations were announced today. Most of the film industry has gone absolutely mad over them. I’m left wondering if the people who voted have actually seen half of these films. So here’s a little exercise. Listed below are the nine films nominated for Best Picture this year. I’ve seen the first five, and have ranked them in order, the other four are somewhat random.

1. The Artist
2. Midnight In Paris
3. Moneyball
4. The Help
5. The Tree Of Life
6. The Descendents
7. Hugo
8. War Horse
9. Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close

Now here’s a list of eighteen films which weren’t nominated for Best Picture. Your task is to count how many films on the bottom list should have been on the top list, and consequently vice versa. If you can’t find at least four films to swap over, you’re doing it wrong.

1. Shame
2. Drive
3. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
4. Take Shelter
5. Super 8
6. We Need To Talk About Kevin
7. A Separation
8. Tyrannosaur
9. Warrior
10. Submarine
11. Melancholia
12. Senna
13. Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes
14. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
15. The Ides Of March
16. 50/50
17. Bridesmaids
18. Beginners

Excellent. If you’re not weeping into your cocoa at the sheer injustice of it all by now, then you have my pity.

Her face had been stuck in that same expression ever since film number 76.

So, three weeks into January. Still keeping to those New Year’s resolutions, or have they all fallen by the wayside now? Just like last year and the year before, I’m sure. Setting up unrealistic expectations at the start of the year and then failing to keep to them is a national tradition, and by the beginning of February, chances are that you’ll have even forgotten what it was that you were trying to achieve. All those grand plans to change the world, or at least your waistline, will have gone out of the window for another year and nothing will really change. So how about a resolution that isn’t just for January, is guaranteed to expand your horizons and might just change your life?

Then my recommendation for you is to watch 100 films in a cinema. This year. It might already be past the middle of January, but there’s still plenty of time to get in a century of films before people start singing Auld Lang Syne, and it might be easier than you think. But why 100? Why a year? (If you’re next question is “why films?” or “why in a cinema?” then you’re probably reading the wrong blog, given that my whole point is to try to encourage you to watch films in a cinema.) In terms of a goal, I’ve already suggested a short term target, that you can, if you put your mind to it, watch seven films in one day. But this is the cinematic equivalent of running the 100 metres, and not everyone can cover that distance in ten seconds. So consider this to be your marathon rather than your sprint, and if you put your mind to it, there’s no reason why you can’t be celebrating a cinematic ton by the end of the year.

The other thing it’s worth doing, and this applies to any resolution setting, is to make sure that you’ve set yourself a SMART goal. Now, SMART goals might be taken from the school of business thinking commonly known as Management Bollocks™  but bear with me; these things have prominence in businesses for a reason, mainly that they do actually work. A SMART goal, if you’ve not come across them before, is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-Bound. Seeing 100 films in a cinema in a calendar year is actually all of the above, so allow me to share with you the how, what, where, when and why you should give this challenge a go.

1. Specific

It’s admittedly a very specific goal, and it’s simply our reliance on the decimal system that means 100 films feels like more of a milestone than, say 97 or 43. (If, for some reason, you’ve taken to counting only in binary, then this challenge is going to be ridiculously easy.) I would say, of course, that I’m not suggesting you stop when you reach 100, but rather that this be at least the point you aim to be at come December 31st. I’ve now done it three times in the last four years, but actually the first time was the only time I actively set out to do it.

But why 100? In 2008 I’d had a spare day at the beginning of January, so decided to have a cinema day and took in four films. Those four were The Golden Compass, Enchanted, I Am Legend and Lust, Caution. As you can imagine, for someone who’s seen seven in a day, four is a stroll in the park, so when I had a free Saturday the following weekend, I took in another four: this time it was Dan In Real Life, Charlie Wilson’s War, No Country For Old Men and The Kite Runner. Two sets of films that cover pretty much every end of the emotional spectrum, seeing four in a day also guarantees that if you don’t like one film, there’ll be another along in a minute that you do.

At that point, most people would have been thinking, “Time to go home and have a lay down for a week or two.” I’m not most people, so it got me to thinking, if I’ve seen eight in January, how many could I actually see in a full year? Eight in a month, twelve months in the year, and given that I’d done the eight in just two days, that should be easy to repeat across a whole year. But if I could get to ninety-six, then it’s only a short hop to imagine that the magic 100 figure could be achieved. Thinking that and doing it are two entirely different things, but despite a few ups and downs I got there, and on December 4th I watched Quarantine, my 100th film of the year, and promptly swore I’d never do it again.

2. Measurable

Of course, if you’ve been paying attention you’ll remember that I’ve actually done this three times now. After sticking to my resolve in 2009 that I wouldn’t go mad, I only saw 52 films. At the time it felt like a more manageable number, an easing of the hectic pace of the year before. Even in 2010, by the end of April I was only on 29, but the bug was starting to take hold again. It was about that point that I had the crazy idea of starting a film blog. Compare that year to 2008, and you can see that as soon as the blog started, things started to get a little intense.

The rest of 2010, and as you can see most of 2011, featured cinema trips at a significantly quicker rate than previously. I hit 100 in September in 2010 and in August last year, and neither time was I consciously attempting to achieve the milestone, it just… happened. As you can tell from this rudimentary graph, though, I do have a fairly good handle on what I’ve seen, and when, and if you want to hit 100 as well, I would suggest some method of keeping track of what you’re watching. The method I use is The Internet Movie Database.

If you log into IMDb, then go to the MyMovies link (as circled above), you’ll find quite a comprehensive list making functionality. You can rate your films out of ten, and then make them into lists; there’s also a Watchlist, so you can even make a generic list of what you’re going to watch and then move it into your latest list when you’ve seen it. When you’ve made a list, you can then export it into something such as a spreadsheet package, where you can make various graphs of your pointless achievements to bore your friends with. Here’s another one to show how pointless you can be – a bar graph showing all the lengths of the films I saw last year, sorted from shortest to longest. Lovely.

As with anything, keeping track of your progress will give you that sense of achievement, or alternatively that creeping sense of panic if you fall well behind your target.

3. Achievable

There is a certain sense of gratification in being able to say you’ve achieved something like this, although I’d be lying if there wasn’t part of me which wishes I could say I’d climbed the Andes or flown single-handedly across the Black Sea in a plane made out of old crisp packets – you know, something useful or meaningful. But whenever I’ve told people that I’ve seen so many films, they always sound impressed – at least, until someone said to me, “That’s not much – it’s only two a week.” When you look at it from that perspective, it suddenly becomes eminently achievable; most people in a 9 to 5 job should be able to fit in a double bill after work, or you can see one on a school night and one at the weekend. You even get to have two weeks in the year when you don’t see anything and then still hit your target.

You might also wonder if there are 100 films worth seeing in a calendar year. Ever picked up a copy of Empire or Total Film and looked at the number of films being reviewed in a given month? Typically somewhere between 20 and 30, and all of these films are playing in a cinema, somewhere. It’s just a question of your particular tastes – I’m as happy seeing the latest Disney animation as I am seeing an unrated Korean revenge thriller or even a British costume drama, and admittedly not everyone is going to have such broad tastes. But all you have to do is find two films a week that interest you; you might spend more time in the cinema in Awards Season (late December to mid-February) or Blockbuster Season (late April to early August) than you do at other times, depending on your taste, but there really is enough for everyone out there to hit this target.

The other concern you might have is about cost, and that’s where – unless you’re John Doe from Seven, and “independently wealthy” – you might need to be living in the right area to make this truly work. If you live near a Cineworld, and there are over 80 of them in the UK, then £14.99 will get you all of the films you can manage, or an investment of under £180 plus popcorn. I also live near two of the more arty Picturehouse chain, for which I have an annual membership which also gives me three free tickets a year and £2 off any film at any Picturehouse. Even last year, when I saw £164 films, I paid under £3 a film over the course of the year. It should mean you don’t have to turn to a life of crime to spend a significant amount more time in the cinema.

4. Realistic

The one absolute about this challenge is that the more cinema screens you live near to, the easier this becomes. Within half an hour’s drive of me there are 32 cinema screens, so I’m fairly spoiled for choice, but I also take other opportunities when they present themselves. If I’m away for work, I’ll often check what’s showing in the nearby cinemas – it beats staring at the four walls of a hotel room for the best part of the evening. I’ve not yet managed to watch a film while I’ve been away on holiday, but you can be sure when I’m away I’ll have a look at the listings; just to see what’s on, of course. I did, in the course of 2011, manage to set foot in 22 different cinemas to see all of the films I saw; ten of them were worlds of Cine, which meant they were all inclusive, and three more were Picturehouses, giving me a decent discount. (Disclaimer: other cinema chains are available. They might cost a bit more, but even then they’ll often have super saver days, and most do Orange Wednesdays, so there’s ways and means of doing this.)

But the most effective way to get a big number in during a short space of time is a film festival. For the last two years I’ve spent a huge amount of time in the Cambridge Film Festival, where I saw nineteen films in 2010, and twenty-seven last year. It’s an opportunity to see films that you wouldn’t otherwise get the chance to, as well as often seeing films before they get a wider release. If you think there might not be a film festival near you, you’d be wrong: the list of film festivals in the UK is pretty extensive, and even if you can only spare two or three days at one, you might still hit your quota for the month. Often they’re also a chance to hear question and answer sessions with people involved in the production, to see short films as well as long ones and to generally immerse yourself in a world of film even more than you have already.

If there isn’t a film festival that you fancy, then why not make your own? Last year, on the long weekend of the Royal Wedding, I had a couple of days in London. I took in six different cinemas, from the comfortable class of the BFI Southbank to the mainstream madness of the Vue West End, via the slightly-scary-it-smells-a-bit-of-wee-in-here Odeon Panton St, and saw films that wouldn’t have got a release anywhere near me. If you’ve ever looked at a film magazine, read a review and thought, “I really fancy that, bet it’s not showing anywhere near me,” then the likes of Google’s cinema search, FindAnyFilm.com or Screenrush.co.uk (heck, even IMDb has cinema listings these days) will help you track down somewhere to see that unexpected classic that’s just waiting for you.

And if you think no-one else out there would be mad enough to try it, then think again. Even at the total of 164 I saw last year, I don’t rank anywhere near the top in terms of the long distance achievements of some. Of course, I pale in comparison to most film critics; Matthew Turner, film reviewer for ViewLondon, has a blog with his running total which hit 500 by the end of last year. Others, though, do it simply for the passion, and you may have read in the national press about Neil White, who attempted to see everything released in cinemas in 2011 and is repeating the feat in 2012. While there might be a few screeners and other home options in there, you can be sure that to see all of the 600+ films released in the cinema this year, there will be more than 100 cinema trips. If they can do 500 or more, then surely you doing 100 is a doddle?

5. Time-Bound

Well, this last one’s fairly easy. Setting yourself a goal with such a long expiry date leaves plenty of room for manoeuvre; in 2008 I was slowing down, and only on 73 by the end of September, but in the end hit the goal with ease with nearly a month to spare. And I can’t stress enough that it doesn’t have to dominate your life. Remember the bar chart of film lengths earlier? There was a point to it after all. If you take an average of all of those films, by any of the standard average calculations, then it comes out at around 105 minutes. See two films in a week, and it’ll be taking up three and a half hours of your time, plus trailers, adverts and travelling time. (And there are ways for the experienced cinemagoer to cut down on their wasted time in front of ads, but that’s a story for another day.) Most hobbies that require any level of commitment are likely to take at least 3 – 4 hours a week, so if you’re serious about films, then this is one commitment that you should be able to make.

Hopefully that’s answered every question except one, and that’s the question in the title. Why? I hope I’ve pretty much covered how, what, when and where, but you might still be thinking that this is a worthless exercise, one for the extremists only. The real point of this is to encourage you to find those cinematic gems, the films that you’ll still get off the Blu-ray shelf in twenty years time to watch at home but might otherwise have never come across. Seeing them with an audience, with the best sound and vision imaginable, is still an unrivalled experience that no home cinema can ever replicate. And in the past three years, I’ve seen the likes of the following in cinemas, all excellent films with a place in my heart, that if I wasn’t doing this might have completely passed me by:

Hopefully I’ve convinced you to give this a try. Forget gym memberships and giving up drinking, this is one plan you can stick to if you just give it a little of your time, and the potential rewards are absolutely worth the effort. Think it’s too late this year? Think again. I’ve only seen five films in the cinema at this point, and even if I carry on at the same slow rate, I’d get to at least eighty this year. Add in a festival and it’s almost too easy. So, who’s with me?

The Review: Sat here, trying to find words for The Artist, feels like the world’s biggest irony. I write this review a couple of days after much has been made in the news of people walking out in a screening in Liverpool after not realising what they’d let themselves in for. Cinema has been evoking strong reactions in people ever since the Lumière brothers first charged people to sit and watch pictures moving on a wall over 115 years ago, and competition ever since from upstarts such as radio, television and the internet have caused cinema to attempt to innovate. Sound, colour, wide screens and even 3D have come and stayed over the years, so the idea of watching a film that abandons all of those concepts seems to be deliberately obtuse, clinging sentimentally to past glories without being willing to innovate. But the techniques of cinema worked successfully through all of those early years, and it wasn’t that cinema was evolving as it had exhausted all of its possible uses for the latest fads; it was evolving to survive.

So if you’re going to make a film in black and white, without dialogue, in the Academy ratio (1.37:1, closer to an old cathode ray tube TV than the widescreen LCDs of today), then what better subject to take than that loss of innocence and the passing of one of the first great eras of the medium? George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) is a star of the silver screen, but when talkies come round, he’s reluctant to embrace them, either unwilling or unable to make the transition. By that point, though, he’s already had his first brush with Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), a girl he literally bumps into outside a premiere; suddenly she’s an overnight sensation but he risks being left behind. Despite that, there’s an undeniable chemistry between George and Peppy, even though George is thoroughly domesticated, with both a wife and a dog at home.

The distinction to be made with The Artist is that it’s not a film made exactly to mirror the silent films of the Twenties, not least because the advent of sound happens fairly early on in the narrative. While it’s black and white, largely (though not completely) silent and filmed in narrowscreen, it has the unmistakeable gloss and sheen of a film made with 21st century techniques. The cinematography is crisp, the soundtrack is much more in the style of a modern orchestral soundtrack and it’s a film filled with characters in close-up; widescreen was designed to capture epic vistas and sweeping scenery, and The Artist is an intimate story of people and relationships, ideally suited to the smaller screen width. (See it on a big enough screen, of course, and it’ll make little difference). The tricks and the effects are to pay homage to the films of the time, not to slavishly copy them, and there’s a number of very clever sequences which subvert expectations and use the throwback effects, especially the sound, to wonderful comic and dramatic effect.

It helps that the quality of the performances across the board is also impeccable. Carrying most of the meat of the film between them are a central trio formed of Dujardin, Bejo and a canine co-star who steals practically every scene he’s in. Dujardin has the perfect matinee idol look and is as comfortable with his anger as he is his charm; you could imagine Clark Gable having taken on the role if the film had been made eighty years or so earlier. Bejo is full of charm and charisma and it’s easy to see why George is so easily smitten, and the pair make a timeless couple. If there’s one thing that the casual viewer will end up remembering long after the viewing, though, it’s Uggie the dog, who’s even been on a promotional tour for the film, and his tricks and his faithfulness should melt the hardest of hearts. The cast is filled out by a cast of familiar American faces, notably John Goodman and James Cromwell, but none of them would look out of place in a film from an earlier era.

What has always been hard to conjure in cinema, regardless of the tools and techniques used to make it, is a quality almost indescribable; it’s a magical tone when performances, script and direction work in such harmony as to transport the viewer completely into the world of the film. Many films have endured even though their techniques have long since passed out of regular use, mostly because they have captured that quality. If you look at the Internet Movie Database’s top 250 films, nine of them are silent films, but eighty-nine have some black and white element; it’s actually more of a wonder that anyone made such a fuss. If only those Scousers who walked out had given the film more of a chance, because one of the films that already falls into both categories in the Top 250 is this one. It has that magic, and what Michel Hazanavicius and his cast have conjured up is spellbinding, enchanting and thoroughly deserving of that place on the list. The Artist takes techniques almost as old as cinema itself, and with a sprinkling of post-modern playfulness produces a film which will hopefully be entrancing audiences long after the current innovations have also passed into history.

Why see it at the cinema: This is a film that this blog was made for. Find the best cinema you can, see this at the busiest time possible, and get lost in the magic of cinema.

The Score: 10/10

The Review: Willy. Dinkle. Ding-dong. Schlong. Dick. Penis. Silly words, aren’t they? Got that out of our systems for now? Good. When I was at school, and the time came for sex education, our teacher put in the shiny new VHS cassette, pressed play and within five minutes a man and a woman appeared, walking around their house like the fruity naturists they obviously were, with not a stitch of clothing on. To a room full of eleven year olds, this was worthy of plenty of laughing, pointing and discussion, until we were told if we continued, the tape would go off again and wouldn’t come back on. But that urge to giggle at the mere mention of genitalia, never mind seeing them on screen, is still suppressed deep down in a great many of us, and it’s also that need to suppress the nature of discussing or seeing something that pretty much every one of us has that has seen Shame get a lot of attention for mostly the wrong reasons. It’s felt at times as if Shame has been categorised along with the pornography that its lead character is so fond of, yet the comparison feels as sensible as likening Goodfellas to The Three Stooges on the basis of slightly funny looking people with strong accents.

One thing’s absolutely for sure; Steve McQueen isn’t afraid to shy away from the big issues or themes. His first film, Hunger, was a triumph of style marrying grimness to substance with his story of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. Michael Fassbender took on the lead role both then and here, but the characters couldn’t be more different. Put him in a crowd, and Fassbender’s Brandon might be the coolest looking there, but he’ll be the one at the back, doing whatever he can to avoid drawing attention to himself. Your eyes might be drawn to him if you’re an attractive woman; you can be sure, if that’s the case, that his eyes will already be on you, and will have discreetly looked you up and down, mentally undressing you both physically and emotionally. But Brandon might also be hanging back for fear of commitment; physical contact and emotional gratification are right up his alley, if you’ll pardon the pun, but the thought of emotional connection to a woman, even his own sister Cissy (Carey Mulligan), seems to be the furthest thing from his mind.

First things first, then: Shame isn’t really about sex. It’s been loosely described as being about sex addiction, but that might be no more than an attempt to put a 21^st century label on the fractured psyche of a man who just can’t say no to himself; but then again, why should he? In our internet led society of instant gratification and ready access to whatever you might desire, is it any wonder that someone channelling their OCD and overactive libido ends up following a path such as Brandon? it’s easy for Brandon to keep his deeper desires and needs to himself, but whenever his life rubs up against normal society, the relative innocents – or sister Cissy, about as far from innocent as Brandon – are what brings Brandon’s peccadilloes into sharper focus. Fassbender is fantastic, possibly in a career best performance in what’s been a busy few years, and retains just enough sympathy to keep your investment in the story, despite his more obvious character flaws. Again the charm and smoothness that’s picked him out as a future Bond in the likes of last year’s X-Men prequel are put to good use, but even Bond might blush at some of what Brandon gets up to, and it’s a neat trick in creating a character that both compels and repulses, often at the same time. Mulligan has a smaller role, but she’s almost up to the same standard, and her brashness and brittleness offer a strong dramatic counterpoint to Fassbender.

But Shame would be nothing without a director willing to take on material like this, and Steve McQueen succeeds in taking Shame up another level from his previous film. Hunger was almost a film in three distinct acts, the second of which was a standout single take scene between Bobby Sands and a priest. Shot from a fixed viewpoint, the conversation gripped despite being two people at a table, but even then, McQueen knew just when to cut to a more conventional shot for heightened effect. Here, his visual style is taken up a notch; from the crisp, functional blandness of Brandon’s apartment to the golden shimmer of New York nightlife, Shame looks gorgeous, and it’s not the occasional shots of genitalia at the edge of frame that will linger in the mind after the film finishes. The long single camera set-ups are put to more frequent use, but none outstays their welcome. The tight close-up on Mulligan’s face during her slow jazz rendition of New York, New York might get the most attention, but another scene were Fassbender has a dinner date is even better, allowing the slow burn of the chemistry between him and his prospective partner to ooze off the screen, every tiny detail captured in the frame.

As outstanding a debut as it was, Hunger still felt as if it would be as comfortable in an art installation as it would in a cinema. Shame feels made with only one possible destination in mind, the tricks less apparent when taken at a distance and the performances raw and resonant.  By the end, the vice-like grip that’s slowly been exerted throughout the film takes hold and refuses to let go amid scenes of almost unbearable tension. Through it all, the flesh on display is kept to a few scenes and used to best effect each time it’s seen; you might need to repress those inner-child giggles when the first male member appears, somewhat briefly and briskly, but by halfway through it’s to the credit of all involved that no matter what’s seen on screen, it feels perfectly in service of the narrative. The real shame in all this is that from the US’s NC-17 rating to the judgemental looks from the usher as your ticket is checked, Shame has been judged by its reputation, which might deny the film the level of viewers its quality deserves. (Balls.)

Why see it at the cinema: McQueen and Fassbender are genuine talents; the long sequences demand to be seen in a cinema to allow you to soak in every single detail. I cannot recommend strongly enough that you immerse yourself in Shame.

The Score: 10/10

The Review: The sports movies are in thrall with the underdog. It’s hard to imagine a film version of, say, a Barcelona FC sweeping all before them in Europe or Tiger Woods in the days when all he could do was win; without the inherent drama of the triumph over adversity, they have little to work with as the drama normally comes from the nature of the sporting event itself. But it’s not just sporting events that have underdogs, or winners and losers; ever since he made a name for himself in American Pie, the rictus grin and middle-distance stare of Seann William Scott have made him an unlikely leading man, but that’s just a failure of casting directors to marry him to the right material. We can’t all be the witty raconteur who’s the life and soul of the party, ready with a pithy comeback at any moment, and Scott’s Doug Glatt is most definitely not that man.

While all of his rather Jewish family are at a loss to understand his inability to hold down a worthwhile job, Doug does at least have two gifts: he’s very good at brawling, and he happens to be in the right place at the right time, a defence of family honour at an ice hockey game leads him to be offered a spot on the local team. But they’re not after his skills with a hockey stick; it’s his fists and his incredible ability to be repeatedly punched in the head that make him an invaluable asset for the local team. Forrest Gump had an almost wilful ignorance of the world around him which made him a complete innocent; Doug is self-aware, but a nice guy to the point of almost sainthood, which doesn’t seem to be helping his team-mates or his instant attraction to hockey bar girl Eva (Alison Pill).

Many of his previous roles have required him to be self-absorbed and sleazy, so innocent and endearing is a refreshing change of pace for Seann William Scott. He’s helped out by a script, from co-star Jay Baruchel and prolific co-writer Evan Goldberg that understands his strengths as an actor completely, and makes the most of them. Baruchel is also good value in a smaller role as the host of a foul mouthed cable TV hockey show, but the other standout is Pill, who makes the perfect foil for Scott’s slightly wider-eyed than normal purity. Sporting an early contender for best moustache of the year, Live Schreiber also gets to growl and grizzle as the older version of Doug the Goon, Ross Rhea, coming to the end of his career and waiting for the inevitable time when the two of them will come face to face.

There’s a warm feeling all over from Goon, partly despite and partly because of the satisfying crunches whenever violence erupts in the hockey rink. Goon doesn’t pull its punches; the first shot of the film is of a tooth cascading down onto the ice in an arc of blood, but the roughness is never over the top and balanced out by a good selection of fun moments and the burgeoning romance. There’s a few smaller sub-plots but they’re effectively padding out the running time and really neither add much or provide too much distraction. The actual hockey is well staged and clear, and Baruchel and Goldberg know the emotional beats they need to hit to keep things interested. While it’s just a little disposable, it’s good Friday night entertainment and Goon is one underdog that manages to go the distance.

Why see it at the cinema: Comedy violence on a wide canvas in glorious Technicolor, watching every drop of spilled blood scatter across the ice. Plenty of laughs to share with a big audience as well.

The Score: 7/10

The Review: There are certain pivotal moments that everyone is supposed to remember; not only what happened, but where they were when it happened. I’m too young for JFK or the moon landing, but I can remember being woken to be told of Princess Di’s fatal car crash, and I can remember sitting in my school library when someone came over to tell me that Margaret Thatcher was stepping down. I was five when she came to power, and sixteen when the mutiny in her party ended her reign, and my early years were dominated by the figure in power suits on TV. When she fell, it was impossible not to have an opinion on her reign, and even now, twenty years later, she casts a shadow over the political landscape that’s likely to last for decades to come. Surely a time for a biopic of Britain’s most significant leader since Churchill is right, especially as the country slips into the kind of conditions that blighted her first two terms in office?

So why we’ve ended up with this half-baked, ham-fisted effort is anyone’s guess. Let’s start with the obvious: Meryl obviously means mesmerising in some foreign tongue. Although she only portrays Maggie from her time in the Commons (Alexandra Roach does a pretty good job of her younger years), Meryl has the Prime Minister and later Baroness Thatcher down pat. The physical resemblance isn’t quite there, the narrow-eyed condescending expression of the real Thatcher replaced with a slightly more wide-eyed stare, but in every other sense her Margaret is utterly immaculate. Streep perfectly captures the sense of the woman, both in full flight laying down the law to the men around her, and in her dotage as she attempts to deal with the facets of her dementia.

Streep will probably walk off with an Oscar, and it would be well deserved, so it’s almost a tragedy that pretty much everything else in The Iron Lady is various levels of lacking. In terms of the cast, Streep is sublime, but the rest form a sliding scale to the ridiculous. Olivia Colman has a prosthetic which still fails to make her look like Carol Thatcher but does well on the acting stakes, and Jim Broadbent captures the bumbling, cheerful nature associated with Denis but is given little to do in reality. At the other extreme, Richard E Grant makes a slightly odd Michael Heseltine and Anthony Head might just be one of the most miscast people ever as Geoffrey Howe. A wide range of other figures get paraded through during the running time, most of whom you’ll recognise if you’re British but few if any of whom have chance to make much impression. Just like Maggie’s government, then.

But if the rest of the cast struggle manfully, it’s the script and the direction that are a real let-down. Abi Morgan’s script has an odd fixation with the dementia years; it might have made for a useful bookending device to give lazy context to the rest of the story, but so much time is spent with Margaret’s hallucinations of dead husband Denis and an equally odd fixation with Rogers and Hammerstein that the meat of the story feels swamped. When I see meat, though, I don’t want to give the impression that there’s any genuine understanding here of what made Maggie tick, or any attempt to understand the impact of her politics in any wider context. Watching The Iron Lady is like watching a dramatisation of a Wikipedia page, and about half as thrilling; the dementia episodes serve only to make it feel as if the page is still being edited while you’re watching it. Events are oddly out of order and without context (the Grand Hotel atrocity seems to inform Margaret’s views on terrorism prior to the Falklands war, even though in reality it happened two years later) and every scene has the depth of the shallow end of a paddling pool. The Iron Lady fails to understand either the woman or the situations in which she lived, and Lloyd’s direction is the icing on a rather bitter cake, adding an almost pantomime quality with scenes of farce that would have seemed over the top in her previous effort, Mamma Mia! There’s an evident feminist agenda at the start, but by the end the loss of faculties has affected the film as badly – no matter what your politics, you can’t help feeling that Thatcher deserved better than this.

Why see it at the cinema: I’m struggling to think of good reasons if I’m being brutally honest. Shot with a TV movie of the week sensibility, and using far too much stock footage to come over clearly, unless you want to be dominated by Streep’s performance then there’s no reason not to wait for the DVD. Or not bother.

The Score: 3/10

Hand ME the keys, you f****** c**ks***er! Oh, is it not that kind of line up? Sorry.

If ever you wanted proof that democracy is an inherently flawed concept and that we should all move to a glorious dictatorship, then the announcement of today’s Orange Rising Star Award is a case in point, a catalogue of idiocy that reflects poorly on you, me and everyone we know. Most awards ceremonies are content with allowing 40-50% of their decisions to look bad at the time and worse on reflection, but the BAFTA film awards seem to have come in for a particular level of stick, as the recent announcement of the longlist seemed to please precisely no-one.

But the Orange Rising Star award, the one publicly nominated award at the BAFTA ceremony next month, has taken the cake, the biscuit and various other types of confectionery for levels of general stupidity, and no-one is free from judgement here.

1. The Orange Rising Star award is stupid

I don’t disagree as such with the idea of a rising star award, as if you’re going to hand out glittery baubles to people for being in films, you might as well reward newcomers. But in the six years it’s been handed out so far, the Rising Star award has largely been given to people who’ve somewhat, er, risen. Over the last three years, it’s gone firstly to Noel Clarke, who’d been on screens in Doctor Who for four years, and was nominated on the strength writing and directing a sequel to a film that he’d also written, two years earlier. Two years ago, Kristen Stewart was hardly fresh faced when she won on the strength of several Twilight films, and last year was Tom Hardy.

I have a heterosexual man crush on Tom Hardy almost as big as the one I have for Ryan Gosling – i.e. huge – but he was the bad guy in a Star Trek film ten years earlier, had won an Evening Standard Theatre award in 2003, and even his turn in Bronson was the year before his smallish part in Inception finally got nominated for the award. Tom Hardy, Rising Star in 2011, was 33 at the time he picked up the award. Whoever thinks these people are rising stars are idiots.

2. The voting process for the Orange Rising Star award is stupid

The announcement today was of the final shortlist. This is a shortlist of five that’s been selected from a longlist of eight. It’s difficult to consider this to be anything other than a shameless marketing exercise on the part of Orange, as if you’re going to ask a panel of experts to pick a list of eight people, then eliminate only three of them in the first public vote, why not just get the experts to pick five in the first place? Or cut from eight to three? Asking the public to vote twice, for something with little return for their second vote, just feels overly cynical. Whoever put together this process is an idiot.

3. The five choices out of the eight nominees are idiotic

Jessica Chastain. Remember her? My top ginger of 2011, she went from relative obscurity to worldwide stardom in 2011, having been in… (deep breath) The Tree Of Life, The Debt, The Help, Texas Killing Fields, Take Shelter and Coriolanus in the last twelve months. Surely the textbook definition of someone whose star is rising. If the Queen of Gingers isn’t to your liking, though, then consider Jennifer Lawrence. Unbelievably powerful in Winter’s Bone, she followed it up with a scene-stealing turn in the X-Men prequel this year, and has nabbed the starring role in the next big Harry Potter / Twilight type thing, The Hunger Games.

Sadly, both of these up and coming talents (and Felicity Jones) have missed out on the final five, at the expense of the people in the picture at the top. If you know numbers one and four in that line up on sight, then you’re doing very well. Any award ceremony that puts them in (and they are Adam Deacon and Eddie Redmayne) above Chastain and Lawrence has committed a fail of the most epic variety. And whose half-brained decision was that, exactly? Ours, of course. The public failed to vote in big enough numbers to keep the right people in, or indeed to have the sense of taste to work out who the right people were. People are idiots.

4. Anyone who didn’t vote and who allowed this injustice to happen is an idiot

I didn’t vote. I’m an idiot.

Of course, when you see as many films as I do, it’s not all about the big summer (or winter) blockbusters. Just as the year is divided into seasons, so the Movie Evangelist’s year is also made up of four periods with a vaguely connected theme: Awards Season, Blockbuster Season, Film Festival Season and Busy Singing Christmas Carols So Not Getting To The Cinema Enough Season. We’re slap bang in Awards Season right now, so trailers abound for the likes of award worthy films like The Iron Lady and J. Edgar. While a couple of my picks this month have troubled the awards list compilers, there’s still plenty of stuff in cinemas for those that have a slightly different sensibility. For your consideration this month:

Goon

Alison Pill for Best Actress That Has Tiny Roles In Good Movies We Should See More Of

Seann William Scott for Best Attempt To Work Within The Limitations Of Your Career

Liev Schrieber for The Jason Isaacs Award For Best Facial Hair

Shame

Michael Fassbender for Best Actor Who Could Be James Bond Next

Carey Mulligan for Best Actress Who’s Quite Similar In Most Of Her Films

Steve McQueen for Best Artist Turned Director

Margin Call

Kevin Spacey for Best Actor From Fifteen Years Ago Who Inexplicably Stopped Being In Good Films For A Long Time

Jeremy Irons for Best Enunciation

Demi Moore for absolutely nothing whatsoever (speaking in a monotone isn’t acting love – sorry)

A Useful Life

A Useful Life for Best Foreign Language Film Of The Month In Black And White That Isn’t The Artist

Coriolanus

Gerard Butler for Best Actor Willing To Lower Himself To Pretty Much Anything But Nice To See Him In Something With Quality

Ralph Fiennes for Best Director Wanting To Make An Action Film, Shakespeare Or Not. (Who knew?)

William Shakespeare for Best Original Screenplay for Gladiator. Apparently.

The Grey

Liam Neeson for Best Fight With Wolves With Broken Bottles Strapped To Your Knuckles. That is all. (Frankly, what more do you need. This looks amazeballs.)

When she saw Octopussy, Melina regretted not taking her earlier opportunity to end it all.

Is it really a whole year since we started rewatching Bond films? Twelve months, and a round dozen films, and we now reach the point of no return – less films ahead of us than behind. For many others on this journey, it will actually get easier as generally better perceived Bonds will get their turn and the films will improve after the early Eighties fallow period. For me, each film gets harder, as my theory that each film has a legacy has less time to actually come to pass and each individual legacy becomes that much harder to pin down.

I had consoled myself with the thought that at least there was one more watchable Roger Moore film to come, but I was completely unprepared for the start of For Your Eyes Only. The worst pre-credits sequence of the entire series, it’s laughably bad and makes most of Moonraker look a work of art in comparison. From the decision to bring back Blofeld and then turn him into a pantomime caricature, to the whistle as Bond drops him down a giant chimney (the worst sound effect in the series since The Man With The Golden Gun), it’s a start from which most Bond films would struggle to recover.

Yet, more in line with my expectations, FYEO pulls it off. Generally reverting to a more serious and realistic tone than Moonraker – apart from the should-be-laughable-but-it-actually-made-me-weep-tiny-tears Margaret Thatcher scene at the end – Roger Moore is once again on top form and just about belies his increasing age, for probably the last time in the series, thanks to extensive use of soft focus and lens vaseline (sadly, by the time of Octopussy, even that won’t be enough). There’s also a sensible distribution of Bond girls, and James sensibly draws the line at the shouty one with pigtails young enough to be his daughter.

It’s also one of the more MacGuffin based Bonds, with the ATAC machine offering a tangible distraction for both sides to get their hands on. It also sees a shifting in Anglo-Russian relations (those of you playing the Bond Legacy drinking game, take a swig now) with General Gogol firmly on the other side, rather than hovering shadily in the middle. There’s some decent, rather than spectacular, action sequences and it all slips down fairly easily, although it might be a little forgettable a couple of hours after you’ve watched it.

Thankfully there’s still a few legacies to be had, before it’s all destined to go horribly wrong next month.

1. Car chases can be as effective without the gadgets

Bond wasn't convinced at the hire car company's idea of an "upgrade".

There might have been a variety of different cars or styles of driving over the past twenty years of Bond films, but generally Bond has been seen in quality motors, and even when he hasn’t – for example, The Man With The Golden Gun – the stunt has been spectacular enough or the rest of the driving mundane enough for it not to matter. But for the first time in the Bond series here, James is forced to make the best of a bad job, and works wonders with his Citroen 2CV, taking it off road even after Melina has managed to roll it trying to take a simple right turn. Women drivers, eh…

I’m sure Jason Bourne would like to think his various escapades in clapped out old bangers were showing a new or innovative side, a world away from the fast car sheen of the James Bond films, but Bond has proved here he can slum it with the best of them. One thing though; I’d have a word with Q about that ridiculously over-zealous anti-theft device if I were you, James.

2. The regeneration game

Bond visiting his wife's grave for the first time in over a decade finally gave Blofeld his window of opportunity...

While the characters have always had the same names, the Bond series had never made it as explicitly clear about the continuity of the character as it does here. So Roger Moore’s Bond is definitely the same Bond as George Lazenby’s Bond, even though they look different. Well, either that, or they both happen to have a wife called Teresa who died in 1969. Which, presuming that both films took place in the current year, is twelve years ago. Unless this isn’t actually 1981, or the whole opening is some form of psychotic episode on Bond’s part, driven to twelve years of grief over the death of his wife.

Anyway, the films would make further allusions to the fact that Bond had lost a loved one in tragic circumstances, right up as far as The World Is Not Enough, so assuming Bond was the same age as Tracy in the films (which he almost certainly wasn’t), and that film is also contemporary, Pierce Brosnan would have been playing a character well into his fifties, for which he was looking remarkably good. Inspiring the hard men of the world, Jack Bauer (born 1966) would have been well into his fifties by the end of 24 if season 1 of that show was contemporary and the gaps between seasons were correct, and if John McClane was 31 or older in Die Hard – quite likely as he’d been a cop for 11 years at that point – it would put him into his sixth decade by the time of Die Hard 4.0, and certainly well past 50 by the time of the upcoming A Good Day To Die Hard. (And you thought Skyfall was a rubbish title.)

This, of course, was unceremoniously pissed all over when Daniel Craig turned up, rebooted the continuity but M looked exactly the same as she did for the last Bond, even though she was a different M – or had a sex change and lost a lot of weight – than the M that didn’t appear in For Your Eyes Only, because he’d sadly died. Unless this is all still George Lazenby having an extended psychotic episode; on reflection, that might be easier to believe…

3. And Connery begat Moore, and Moore begat Brosnan

"No, I'M Spartacus!"

Speaking of Brosnan, the last legacy of this particular film was that it featured Cassandra Harris as Countess Lisl von Schlaf. Cassandra was also know as Mrs Pierce Brosnan, and hubby and Cubby met on set, whereupon Broccoli declared, “…if he can act… he’s my guy.” Fourteen years later, by which time Cubby was too infirm to work in any serious capacity on the series, he finally got his man. While it was Cassandra’s wish that her husband get the Bond job, sadly she died of cancer in 1991 and never saw him slip on the tux. Hopefully she would have been proud. Of Goldeneye, at least.

Next time: Go go Gadget innuendo. It’s Octopussy.