Andrew Collins's Blog, page 48

Funny Monet

Well here's a pleasant surprise: a good Woody Allen movie. I contextualised my position on Woody in my review in March of You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, which may well be his worst ever film. You can read that again here, if you want to understand my disappointment in full. Needless to say, like many others, I used to love him, and fell out of love with him when he started to make films outside of New York. It's like the old Jewish joke he tells in Annie Hall: the food here is terrible … and such small portions! As a rule, Woody Allen films are now terrible … and they arrive at a rate of sometimes two a year!

Well, I'm relieved and delighted to report that the chatter is true: Midnight In Paris is a return to form. Not a fully fledged return, but a wander in the right direction. There are three things that make it work:

1) Owen Wilson. All my all-time favourite Allen films have Woody in them, in the lead, playing the screen version of himself. However, as he's aged past the point where he can any long "get the girl" without the rest of us squirming and mopping our brows, he's had to try out a few surrogates. John Cusack was good, Kenneth Branagh less so, Josh Brolin and even Larry David a disaster. But in Owen Wilson, he's found himself. Here, Wilson plays a writer (of course, which other profession is Woody interested in?) who becomes inspired to write his novel on a visit to Paris. He's clearly in a toxic relationship with Rachel McAdams, whose parents are overbearing, Europhobic Republicans, and whose attraction to Michael Sheen's pompous pseud marks her out as a shallow waste of space. But beccause Wilson plays it puppydog innocent and eager to please you root for him without thinking, hey, he's asking for it. There's something about Wilson's round, imperfect face and his shaggy mop that brings you onside from the first glimpse. If Woody decided to always cast Wilson from now on, I'd be more than happy.

2) The idea. Yes, it's a moderately-high-concept Woody Allen film. Because the story involves Wilson going back in time to Paris in the 1920s when the clock strikes midnight, and much of its humour revolves around the literary, musical and artistic icons he bumps into in the sort of cafes and salons that still exist in modern-day Paris, Woody gets to indulge his own love of a prelapsarian golden age when American greats like Hemingway, Porter and Fitzgerald rubbed shoulders with Europeans like Picasso, Dali and Bunuel. Woody has always had a symbiotic relationship with Europe, and Midnight In Paris sort of encapsulates that mutual admiration, but in a genuinely funny conceit. So it's not an all-out period piece like Sweet And Lowdown, Bullets Over Broadway or The Purple Rose Of Cairo, but it hints at all three, and that's a good thing.

3) It's not set in London. As proud as we are to have him in our great capital, Woody Allen does not understand the way people speak here, and as a result, he's made his worst films here: Match Point, Cassandra's Dream and Tall Dark Stranger. And maybe it's more irksome when an artist idealises a place you actually know inside out? (He does it to Paris, naturally, especially in Midnight's opening montage, but then again, he once did the same for Manhattan and he didn't even have the excuse of being a tourist!) Either way, any city that tempts him away from London is good news.

More context for my enjoyment of Midnight In Paris: I've seen an awful lot of violent films of late. Good and powerful films, but 18 certificate brutal. I was so looking forward to turning up to the Curzon and seeing a 12A certificate that would be guaranteed free of violence. Especially impact-based violence. The fact that it was a funny film, and I mean a film that made me laugh out loud often – not least when Wilson meets Dali (a show-stealing Adrien Brody cameo), Bunuel and Man Ray and explains his time-travelling conundrum and they find it perfectly commonplace ("Of course, but you're surrealists") - meant that it was just the tonic. This is not a revolutionary piece of work. It is not "important" in that sense of the word. But it was important to me yesterday afternoon. It provided cultural and comic relief. It was lovely to be sat in a pleasant arthouse of an afternoon and sense that others were getting the gags about Hemingway and Zelda Fitzgerald and Picasso and Gertrude Stein and Gaugin … frankly, most Woody Allen fans would. But Woody Allen fans are akin to those who support a local football team who used to be in the Premiership and now struggle on a regular basis to find their old form, and yet, you support them doggedly anyway, and take no pleasure in their downfall.

In contrast, last night I caught up with the opening episode of Romanzo Criminale, which represents Sky Arts getting into the BBC4 game by importing a subtitled drama series, this time from Italy. It's set in Rome, in the past – the 1970s – and presents anything but a tourist's-eye view of the city. A brilliant antidote, once again. I'll write about it, and FX's forthcoming French import Braquo, soon.

Nice to see you

Not sure about the stripy shirt, but after 22 editions of Telly Addict for the Guardian (not to mention the three pilots), I thought I'd try something new, keep it interesting, push back a few barriers. Under review this week: the return of Strictly to BBC1; the $20 million pilot of Terra Nova on Sky1; and the return of Mary Portas, although not to BBC2, but to C4, for Mary Queen Of Frocks. The link is here.

The Third Beatle

Five years in the making, Martin Scorsese's feature-length documentary George Harrison: Living In The Material World enjoyed a one-performance-only premiere at selected arthouse cinemas last night. It's released on DVD on October 10, with an airing on BBC2 pencilled in for late November. I imagine the DVD will be the full-length version, at a glorious 208 minutes, and I know HBO are showing it in two parts over two nights, so we must hope that the same will be true on the BBC, as it demands to be seen in full. I'm so glad the Curzon were showing it (with "sold out" notices posted all the way up the stairs and in the lift), as it's not often that I sit in a cinema for three and a half hours and barely move a muscle or stifle a  single it's-my-age yawn. It's a phenomenal piece of work. And though I congratulate myself as someone who pretty much knows the story of the Beatles – and Harrison's solo career – off by heart, it was full of lovely surprises.

Three and a half hours is no more than George deserves. Lennon and McCartney are eulogised, dissected, appraised, reappraised and hagiographied on a near-yearly basis, and Paul and Ringo are never off our screens or out of our magazines, promoting themselves and their latest wheezes and in doing so demystifying the last vestiges of mystique that may once have surrounded them. (I interviewed McCartney, at length, for a Q cover story in 1997, and although it was a personal milestone for me, I sensed that he was already becoming ubiquitous, and I seem to remember it was not a big-selling issue of the magazine.) But George remains the Third Beatle. The one McCartney told off during the Let It Be sessions. The one Eric nicked the wife off. The one who had a job getting his songs on Beatles albums. The quiet one. The Travelling Wilbury. Even the one who got stabbed in his own home and died of cancer. For me, he is the architect of the best solo Beatle album of all: All Things Must Pass, which is one of my all-time go-to records, and the one who was a mate of Monty Python, two aspects which push him right up my charts.

So, in researching and telling his life story, from bombsite birth in 1943 to sad, accelerated death in 2001, in this much detail, and with this much attention, Martin Scorsese is simply realigning the stars. McCartney is interviewed, and the subject of his old schoolmate brings the best out in him. So is Ringo, who is much less preening and annoying than his default setting (he almost gets the last word). We hear, too, from Olivia Harrison, Dhani Harrison (who also reads out some letters from his dad), Eric Clapton (again, on charming, self-deprecating form, and frank about the Patti affair), Neil Aspinall, Klaus Voormann, Astrid Kirchherr, Patti Boyd and George Martin (who, I fear, may have already said all that he can usefully remember about the Beatles). But it's the less obvious participants who add the real texture: Jackie Stewart (yes, that one), a drawling Eric Idle, a giggling Terry Gilliam, drummer Jim Keltner, a truly hilarious Tom Petty and Derek Taylor's widow Joan, who tells a lovely story about their first LSD trip as if recounting a particularly jolly picnic. And Phil Spector may be a bit nutty, but his memories of producing George and his involvement with the Concerts for Bangladesh are valuable.

It was a predictably "older" crowd in the Curzon. I mean, who but those of a certain vintage are going to spend a night out watching old footage and fond reminiscences of a dead Beatle? It was great to commune with these people. I was too young for the Beatles, although as anyone will tell you, growing up in the 70s, their back catalogue was just in the public domain, constantly played on the radio, alongside the solo stuff. (The Beatles singles were, pretty uniquely at the time, reissued in 1976 and they flooded the charts.) My mum and dad had John Lennon's Shaved Fish compilation in the house, which I enjoyed, but I didn't really become a student of the Beatles until the late 80s, when a friend really sold me Lennon's albums, particularly The Plastic Ono Band and Imagine. By the time I got to Q, ready to deepen my knowledge, I had started to expand my CD collection with "classics", and in what I still consider to be a particularly fallow period for new music in the years 1998-2000, I spent more on old music than at any other time in my life, and became a solo Beatle completist. It was then, belatedly, that I fell in love with All Things Must Pass. Its creation is given ample airtime in Living In The Material World. But then again, so is every stage in Harrison's life. That's what you get with a 208-minute running time.

Some observations. George looked the best a lot of the time during the Beatles' reign. He ended up looking the worst of the surviving three in middle age. Whatever natural fashion sense he'd possessed in the 60s and early 70s departed him. Perhaps it was when he got religion? His haircuts were increasingly misshapen in the 80s and 90s. It's a shame, too, to find out that he moved to Switzerland to end his days so that he wouldn't have to pay tax (if that is indeed the reason – Gilliam certainly believes so, giggling at the thought). There's a priceless moment when George is getting together with Paul and Ringo in the mid-90s for what would be the valedictory Anthology interviews, and he says to Paul, "Vegetarian leather jacket is it?" He was, we were told, a "closet Krishna", in that he did not shave his head or wear orange, but in other respects, he walked it like he talked it.

A witty, talented and spiritual man who clearly liked his drugs, perhaps a bit too much, and loved the ladies, perhaps a bit too much, his legacy is a whole circle of friends who have nothing but warm things to say about him. For an apparent recluse, he was a real socialite. And the footage of him pottering in the vast grounds of Sir Frankie Crisp's neo-Gothic Friar Park, tending to the garden without the help of "staff" is heartwarming indeed. Nice, too, to hear Dhani say that to rebel in his household was to go to school.

I often drift off while in the cinema, just for a couple of minutes, and then drift back. I am of that vintage. But I didn't lose my concentration – or stop smiling, actually – for the whole of this film. It is unique in that regard. And so was George, who is my favourite Beatle. And my second favourite Travelling Wilbury after Tom Petty, at least since last night.

Don't beat yourself up

Gosh. Having been repelled, repulsed and revolted by the impact-based violence in Kill List and Drive in recent weeks, I put myself through more punishment this afternoon at a screening of Paddy Considine's feature debut Tyrannosaur, which opens at selected cinemas on Friday. I appear to be on a strong meat diet.

If you've read anything about this film – or indeed seen Considine's Bafta-winning 2007 short Dog Altogether, from which Tyrannosaur sprang – you'll know that it comes from a deep love of Alan Clarke, Ken Loach and Nil By Mouth, and the kind of social realism that we, in this country, still excel at. That it stars Peter Mullan, who not only essayed one of British cinema's most compellingly real and complex alcoholics in Loach's My Name Is Joe, but has directed his own vital slices of life in Orphans, The Magdelene Sisters and Neds, merely adds to the sense of occasion. Considine's debut was always going to be worth looking at, but the assurance and skill with with he delivers is astonishing. I would say that this is essential viewing. But, again, and I'm going to get sick of saying this soon, it will not be for everyone.

Unlike Drive, which is compelling as much for its style as its story, Tyrannosaur is essentially a portal into the world next door. And by that, I'm not talking about "class tourism", for its horrors emerge not just from the forgotten Leeds estate where Mullen's isolated bruiser skulks, but from the comfortable, middle-class milieu where Olivia Colman's good-hearted Christian charity-shop worker hides her own story behind net curtains, a drive and a front garden. Considine has obviously grown up listening to, and observing, people around him – as well as watching and digesting the films of those that he admires, who grew up doing the same – and it's there in his dialogue, and in his characters. When an Irish rogue sidles up to Mullan's Joseph in the pub, you sense that Considine has been in similar pubs with similar rogues. (Joseph, by the way, has been named after the Bible, and yet he is a violently lapsed Catholic who has, he claims, lost his faith in God; Colman's Hannah clings to her faith – it is implied that her awful husband, Eddie Marsan's James, is also a Christian, with another Biblical name – but it is severely tested.)

I should also say that this is not the standard, handheld documentary approach to real life. Considine frames the ugliness beautifully sometimes: a close up of Joseph's head as he rolls over on the grass after a beating, a blade of grass stuck to his skin; the incongruous but seemingly meaningful crease in the framed photograph of Joseph's deceased wife on which the camera alights more than once; his nose squashed comically but still threateningly against the safety glass in the Post Office. It's sometimes too easy to shoot the grim grimly. Not here.

The three protagonists are broken. Has society broken them? If so, their contrasting backgrounds stop that being a simple answer. In many ways, one of them has been broken by another. But what interests Considine is whether or not we can be mended, or whether we can mend ourselves. Joseph is first seen in an impotent, Red Stripe-fuelled rage about something unspecified that has already happened inside a bookmakers. It was probably something and nothing, but that's all it takes. His rage finds disturbing physical release in the street when he effectively attacks himself, by attacking something he loves. This is a devastating beginning to a film, and one that has permanent resonance through the story to its even more sickening, circular denouement, but Tyrannosaur starts as it means to go on, and should be admired for the unflinching commitment with which it treats its subject. For a film about violence, it pulls no punches. (I don't want to give any details away – although this aspect is hinted at in the trailer – but the violence is not just meted out to people.)

You will think me a namby-pamby milksop for feeling more pain for the animals in this film than for the human beings; certainly, the whimpering of a dog affects me on a different level to the whimpering of an actor, as the dog did not ask to, or agree to be an actor, whereas the man or lady did. But the first act of violence is dramatically justified, and it's a fact that many serial killers display their earliest signs of disturbance by harming animals, including pets, so it's incredibly effective in conveying the darkness inside Joseph. We've seen Mullan play this type before, but the possibility for his redemption is clear even at the start, even if he himself can't see it, or even contemplate it. "Nobody's safe with me," he tells Hannah, when she says that she feels safe with him.

The threat of violence is as tough to bear as the actual acts in this film. Joseph could go off at any minute. He knows it – often seen pacing on his own, or talking himself down, or tapping himself on the forehead with a baseball bat to reduce the possibility of eruption. At one point, he smashes the bat down on a sofa, and refrains from doing it to something or someone that it might not bounce back off. It is from these glimpses of self-control that our hope springs. Joseph is a noisy neighbour, and he has noisy neighbours. This is an everyday problem with which we can all sympathise; they are the media's favourite "neighbours from hell" albeit they are already in hell. They exist on the edge of polite society and probably imagine, like Joseph does, that their calamities, frustrations and conflicts do not occur in the "posh" estate where Hannah and James live. But they would be wrong. They just don't occur in the street.

I don't give star ratings on this blog, but if I did, I might find my way going right up to five. Although as a viewing experience, and as an entertainment, it's draining, gruelling and deeply disturbing, Tyrannosaur is vital filmmaking. If this is Paddy Considine's first album, imagine what his second album might be like. Difficult, maybe, but nobody said real life was going to be easy.

One wedding and a funeral

As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing like a disaster movie. And Melancholia is nothing like a disaster movie. It is, however, more like a disaster movie than you might expect from a mischievous and iconoclastic filmmaker like Lars Von Trier. After his last film, the unforgettable but problematic Antichrist – which I reviewed here – I was expecting something mercifully less horrific, and the ubiquitous trailer certainly led me to this expectation: Melancholia seemed to be about a group of people at a country-house wedding on the eve of the possibility of the end of the world. Having seen it at the Curzon on Sunday, I can tell you that it is and it isn't.

A world apart from Von Trier's earlier, Dogme 95-influenced works – Breaking The Waves, The Idiots, Dancer In The Dark (although as pedants will gleefully tell you, only the middle one of those actually abides by the Dogme 95 manifesto), and their theatrical, anti-style follow-ups Dogville and Manderlay, Antichrist and Melancholia seem to inhabit grander worlds, visually ravishing, artistically precise, proudly cinematic. Antichrist went into the woods to discover primal and disturbing things about the human condition; Melancholia spends the weekend at a magnificent turn-of-the-century country manor house (actually, Tjolöholm Castle in Halland, Sweden), but achieves the same end. And the end is its cosmic vanishing point: a rogue planet, called Melancholia, is set to pass by this one at a specified time, but there seems to be an off-chance that it will hit us, and cause the apocalypse. Despite the gravity of the situation, nobody seems to follow this event on TV or radio, as would be the case in a Hollywood film about the apocalypse, in which the media response would be as vital as the response of the protagonists. This failure, or refusal, to engage, merely increases the sense of isolation for our characters. (One character looks up Melancholia on the internet, but it's as if the laptop is forbidden contraband.)

For a self-professed depressive – and one who apparently clawed himself out of a dark place by making the terrifying Antichrist – Von Trier has clearly inserted himself into the action, and inaction, of Melancholia by way of Kirsten Dunst's Justine. That's her, above, floating in the water of her own premonitory dreams at the very beginning of the film, Ophelia-like. (Oh, by the way, once again, Von Trier writes and directs what is essentially a Danish film, set in Sweden, but in the English language, using predominantly American and British actors, who use their own accent even when, say, the American Dunst and the Anglo-French Charlotte Gainsbourg are supposed to be sisters. In any case, the language in Melancholia seems far more naturalistic than in the more psychoanalytical Antichrist.)

Justine – a full-bodied and magnetic performance by Dunst – is a depressive who's somehow agreed to marry the seemingly blameless and sympathetic Michael (Alexander Skarsgård), a man she cannot love. Their wedding reception, organised by her straightlaced sister and held at she and her filthy-rich husband Keifer Sutherland's remote hotel where time seems to stand still, is an unsuitably lavish and formal affair, whose very opulence frames Justine's inevitable descent into, well, melancholia, which takes disturbing form as the festivities collapse into black farce. (I am not the first the spot the similarities to fellow Dogme 95 man Thomas Vinterberg's Festen, whose hotel celebration was similarly rent asunder. It's so obvious it barely needs pointing out.)

In this first section – named after Justine (the second act is named after Gainsbourg's Claire) – Von Trier has his expected pops at posh people, but allows plenty of humanity to seep through what is a kind of nightmarish social comedy, thanks in part to the warmth of John Hurt's performance as a rogeuish father, to Skarsgärd's guileless charm, and to the camp humour of Udo Keir's wedding planner. Von Trier drinks in the grand, partly studio-created surroundings, and the vast grounds of the castle at night, enjoying the sheer cinema of the sequence in which hot air balloons, inscribed with marker-pen messages of love from the guests, are released into the night sky – the sky that will later be filled with the approaching blue planet that will vaporise ours.

The second half is a chamber piece, after the wedding, when the guests are all gone, and Justine is now lost to her dark side, this bout of depression almost totally debilitating, and which recasts Claire as her carer, much to the inconvenience of the boorish Sutherland, whose main job is now to convince their young son, Leo, and his jittery wife, that Melancholia will pass gloriously by and not bring about the end of the world. Naturally, the depressed Justine's attitude is: bring it on.

Melancholia is full of arresting, ambiguous, apocalyptic visions. It actually begins with a premonition that the world will indeed end, and gives dream-like glimpses of how it might play out in these opulent surroundings. (There's a nice gag among the doom and gloom in this prologue where we see Claire clutching Leo in her arms and running across a golf green; the flag tells us that it's the 19th hole.) There's no denying that Von Trier is now an accomplished visual artist. He makes explicit references to art – a Breughel painting, The Hunters In Winter, is seen burning at the beginning; the Ophelia link is clear; and various key works are highlighted when Justine manhandles a series of coffee table art books into a display at the hotel – which is to be expected in an "art" film, but he creates art of his own, too: he dwarfs figures against the manicured lawns while the "extra" planet looms down from the night sky. This approach is painterly and can be consumed and admired as such.

I made the connection to the work of Peter Greenaway while watching Antichrist, and it's even more distinct here. He's not as playful as Greenaway, whose 80s films often felt like puzzles to be solved by smart alecks, but Von Trier has developed a similarly keen sense of visual rhyme. (Without going into any plot details, there is a small bridge over a stream, and twice we see a horse refuse to cross it, and later, an electric golf cart. This is not an accident; this means something! The horse refuses to cross it out of fear or foreboding, but of its own accord; the car simply runs out of juice before crossing it. Discuss?)

In all, it's a gorgeous looking film, with a powerful sense of foreboding. Even though it begins with the end, we have no real way of knowing if what we've seen is a flashforward, or a paranoid delusion, perhaps from the fevered mind of Justine. You can make your own mind up when you see it. Lars Von Trier can be annoying. He can dress up pretence in emperor's finery. But he's also transforming himself into quite a showman. It takes some front to use Wagner's Tristan und Isolde to soundtrack the impending destruction of the planet, as if to underline the "operatic" nature of the film. It's not Armageddon, but it is the end of the world as he knows it.

Now we see the violence inherent in the system

Everybody's raving about Drive. I'm a week late on it, but I caught up with it yesterday at the Curzon. People are right to rave about it. Nicholas Winding Refn's first American film (after – most famously - the Pusher trilogy, set in his native Denmark, Bronson, made and set in the UK, and Valhalla Rising, a Denmark/UK co-production) is a neo-noir in the Tarantino mould which which plays its LA-set criminal comings and goings much straighter. It is, therefore, much more disturbing.

The trailer hints at such (the scene with the hammer and the showgirls pictured above is in the trailer), but until you see it, you can have no idea just how violent it is. To the degree that I feel I should actually put out a warning: the violence in this film is pretty horrible. You know me – I'm fairly squeamish, but this has never stopped me seeing violent films, and many of my favourite films have violence in them. I just think it's worth knowing in advance, as you might think you'll be watching a stylish thriller with some driving in it. You will be, but, once a certain dramatic flashpoint is reached, you'll also be on a rollercoaster of violence. It is the kind of violence where the camera does not discreetly look away. It is the kind of violence that is often enacted in broad daylight. It is the kind that involves sharp implements going into flesh and shotguns fired at close range, but also the kind that is more primal and shall-we-say impact-based. (That's the kind I'm finding I have less of a stomach for,  as it becomes more and more fashionable. The big display of violence in the excellent Kill List is impact-based.)

In many ways, Drive is about violence, even though its first hour builds up to the flashpoint with patience and calm and subtlety. I say that because it's not really about much else. It's a fairly standard crime story revolving around a holdall full of  money and double-cross and threats and revenge, albeit one that's elevated by its selling point, and the selling point, presumably, of the source novel: Ryan Gosling's supercool and unnamed driver. He works as a stunt double and car mechanic by day, and as a getaway driver by night. He does this in his trademark silver bomber jacket with a scorpion emblem on the back and his trademark leather driving gloves, and with his trademark toothpick held in the corner of his mouth. He is beyond cool. Gosling plays him beautifully. He's in the business of crime, but he just drives, and is thus, in some wishful way, innocent. In the opening robbery, we see him just walk away from the scene once his work is done. Heading up a superb and offbeat supporting cast, Bryan Cranston from Breaking Bad is his limping, good-hearted enabler and handler. Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman are the local gangsters, one calm, the other hot-headed (although it's always the calm ones you have to watch out for in this kind of drama). Carey Mulligan is the young mother next door whose husband is in prison, but whose husband comes out of prison just when she and Gosling – and her little boy – are forming a happy little unit. The bad stuff goes from there. (Oh, and Christina Hendricks from Mad Men totters through all top-heavy on her high heels all too briefly, but it's another clever bit of casting.)

So, it has this sweet little love story at its centre, and Gosling and Mulligan pull this off with easy realism, all glances and gestures and mounting passion that remains largely unconsummated. If they have sex, you don't see it. This is so restrained on Winding Refn's part. Apart from the topless showgirls watching the violence in the above still, there is no sex on view here. He pulls back from sex, but does not pull back from violence. Violence, it seems, is more important to the narrative.

I came away full of admiration for this film. It's a very impressive film. It's framed exquisitely, with characters nearly always ranged left or right in the panorama. The soundtack, by Cliff Martinez, is all pulsing 80s synth (a faux-period illusion supported by the pink, hand-written credits), and if it weren't for the mobile phones, you'd swear it was set in the past. This is a classic, almost timeless LA, one that verges on cliché but wilfully, with its neon, and its freeways, and its diners, and its underground car garages, and its vast lots. Winding Refn's nationality – he's Danish but moved to the US and was educated there – explains this idealised, artificial attitude to the city. It's as if it's been shot through a prism of previous American cinema.

I'm not sure there's much else to Drive beyond a soundly constructed crime yarn with its attendant domestic impacts and some brutally inventive set-pieces. But the getting there is amazing.

Not strictly

We film Telly Addict at the Guardian on a Friday morning, so you'll have to wait until next week's for my review of Strictly Come Dancing, which began again last night. In the meantime, the 21st Telly Addict review covers the relocation of Blue Peter to Salford Quays, Stephen Fry's Planet Word on BBC2 (I say BBC1 here, but I am sometimes wrong, and nobody picked me up on it in the studio), and Glee, Season Three (just arrived at Sky1).

Homage to Catalonia

I illustrate this blog entry with an awe-inspiring painting by Spanish master Diego Velázquez, because otherwise, I would have to illustrate it with a picture of some bullfighting, and there's no such thing as an awe-inspiring picture of some bullfighting. As you may have read, the autonomous Spanish region of Catalonia staged its last ever legal bullfight over the weekend. The regional ban comes in on January 1, but since that's the end of the bullfighting season for this year, apparently, it's adiós to a tradition that stretches back at least three centuries, if not back to Ancient Rome. We have petitioning and lobbying by animal welfare groups to thank for the ban, although some commentators in Spain say that it's a bid for nationalism by the Catalan parliament, a ban further separating Catalonia from the rest of the country, where bullfighting continues, albeit in a much reduced form as its popularity everywhere shrinks. (At the beginning of the last century, Barcelona had three bullrings; since the 70s, it has had just the one, although its popularity has waned at a faster rate than in the rest of Spain.)

I love Spain, and I love Barcelona, the Catalan capital where the final corrida de toros took place on Sunday before a stadium packed with 20,000 enthusiastic fans of spectacle, colour, tradition, ritual and animal abuse. You may or may not be astonished to learn that I've always had a problem with bullfighting. On our first trip to the glorious if touristy city of Barcelona (a picture only spoiled by the dogs in tiny cages on sale on main drag La Rambla), I remember buying the Time Out Guide, which contained a rhapsodic essay in support of bullfighting by none other than Robert Elms, who seemed to have bought into the 1920s-forged Hemingway myth that it represented an "authenticity" that runs counter to more trendy bohemianism and given it the thumbs-up. I have no doubt that the bullring was a vital social and familial hub at its height, and just as I went to the circus as a boy and accepted its rituals – despite the evident displacement, humiliation and confinement of the lions, the elephants and, once, some clearly sedated crocodiles – I'm sure many Spanish kids were brought up on the bullfight, and thought little of the prolonged cruelty involved.

But you formulate your ideals as you grow up. And mine coalesced around a respect for animals that, in my early 20s, drove me to join pro-welfare organisations like the Whale & Dolphin Conservation Society and BUAV, and, later, in my 30s, to support the RSPCA, Greenpeace, the WWF, Cats Protection, Blue Cross and the PDSA. (I actually withdrew my support for the RSPCA when they endorsed Freedom Food, a farm assurance and food labelling scheme which, though a move in the right direction, seemed at what was a more militant time for me, to be a dilution of meaningful animal welfare standards in farming. I have calmed down a bit, but still cleave to basic animal welfare principles – and 19 birds per square metre of floor space, as set out by Freedom Food, still seems like a lot to me.) Yes, I used to be a vegetarian, but since the proliferation of organic standards and availability of organic produce in the 90s, especially meat reared to the standards set down by the Soil Association, I find it easier to eat meat with a conscience. Needless to say, vegans have my utmost respect for their more extreme lifestyle choice. (Apparently, the meat of fighting bulls is excellent, as these bulls are, ironically, raised free-range: looked after like prize fighters and then made to dance and suffer before they die.)

Prompted by the last Catalan bullfight, a deliberately inflammatory pro-bullfighting blog was published by a man called Brendan O'Neill in the online Telegraph – which, in the interests of balance, I'll link to here. To use his phrase, I am one of his "Bambi-influenced animal rights activists." I have no time to refute the simplistic idiocy of this generalistic smear. I am not an activist, anyway; I just call animal cruelty when I see it. And no amount of bullshit about – to use O'Neill's imagery – the "ennoblement" of the bull, as it is ritually humiliated, injured and killed to cheering crowds (elevating it "from being a grubby and dumb beast into a performer in a piece of beautiful, arcane theatre"), will convince me otherwise.

I heard an item on the Today programme this morning about the British Horseracing Authority bringing in a new ruling that limits the amount of times a jockey can whip its horse during a race – seven in flat races, eight in ones where the horses have to jump. I don't follow the sport, and I am prepared to believe those who insist that simply riding a horse is not cruel, and indeed that a horse may love being ridden, but jabbing it or hitting it to make it go faster so that a man can win at a sport is, to my "Bambi-influenced" eyes, cruel. Dog-fighting, bear-baiting and cock-fighting are banned – as now, is fox hunting – so the reduction of officially sanctioned whipping is reduced to eight times a race is surely just one legal sport dragging itself into the 21st century. (To a hand-wringing animal lover like myself, eight times seems like, I don't know, eight times too many? These owners and riders profess to love their horses. I would not whip my cat. Nor, as a Telegraph website user suggests, would Brendan O'Neill like to see his pet "ennobled" like a bull.) A full ban on horse-whipping seems to be predicted after this latest rule-tightening by BHA, which comes into effect next month, after which nine or more whippings will lead to suspensions and penalties. A jockey called Jason Maguire was suspended for five days for using his whip with "excessive frequency" on a horse called Ballabriggs at this year's Grand National; his punishment would run to £40,000 if he did it again.

Here's a quote from the BHA defending the whip: "If you are on a half-tonne of horse going at nearly 40mph over a jump and there are 20 other horses around you, you need a tool to steer, correct its stride, and balance a horse. It's a very risky sport and we've got to look after jockeys' safety." The more I read that, the more surreal it becomes as a defence.

Another related item: on Sunday night's Planet Word with Stephen Fry, he chatted amiably to a reassuringly white-coated man in Munich who experiments on mice in order to find out why humans developed language and, say, chimpanzees never have. Fry basically concludes that the only way we'd ever find out for sure would be to experiment on chimps, but that this would be ethically frowned upon. The implication as I read it was that Fry would be against experimentation on primates, but that mice were fair game. I realise my "Bambi-influenced" views are far too namby-pamby for the likes of Stephen Fry, but I find it hard to draw lines between which animals can be mistreated and which ones cannot, just as I find it hard to draw a line between how many beatings an animal may legally endure before the man dishing out the beatings may be fined for doing so.

So, back to bullfighting. It's a long time since Ernest Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises and Death In The Afternoon. It's quite a long time since early British holidaymakers on package tours to Spain in the 60s and 70s came home with their names printed on bullfighting posters, along with figurines of matadors and bulls. (I remember a relative had these, and as a small child failed to see any problem with it, although the souvenir manufacturer hadn't painted blood on the bull.) I expect a number of my favourite Spaniards, from Velázquez to Almodóvar, approved or approve of bullfighting – the latter made a female matador one of the tragic protagonists in Talk To Her and included a goring scene that was meant to make you sympathetic for the human. But, like fox hunting, some traditions are simply outrun by progress. If a bull really is a "dumb" beast, as O'Neill confidently states, does that remove its rights?

The beguiling painting by Velazquez, by the way, easily his most famous, and one which I was lucky to see up close on a trip to Madrid, is Las Meninas, painted in 1656, and – hey! – it's got a nice dog in it.

Sorry, I'll go back to typing out what I think about films and telly programmes for the next entry, I promise.

Team Upstairs

For this week's Telly Addict Guardian TV review, in which the great Downton-Spooks war is discussed, and Curb Your Enthusiasm welcomed back, click here.

Caution: steps

Thanks to Mark Cousins' electrifying 15-part Story Of Film on More4, its sister channel Film4 is showing pivotal films from his "redrawn map" of cinema history – albeit for my money not enough of them. (One a week? Each of the three chapters of Story Of Film so far have made me want to watch about a dozen films!) It's only when a supposedly intelligent, offbeat movie channel shows Battleship Potemkin [pictured] or Orphans On The Storm or Ordet or La Regle du Jeu that you realise how very rare it is that you see films that are this old or exotic.

It shouldn't be a "treat" to see silent movies, or foreign-language movies on TV – not in a multi-channel, narrowcast world – but even on Film4, it is. If you look at its schedules, most of what the channel shows is in English, and in colour, for a start. Yes, you get "old" films, but very rarely something you haven't seen before. I know, I know, it's a commercial channel – they run ads in breaks during films, which is a necessary evil, I guess, but annoying – but since it's the only free digital-terrestrial film channel, it has a lot of responsibility to deliver. I just wish that more corners of the cinema-loving populace were catered for by the film channels, and the non-film channels. Mark Cousins told me when I interviewed him that people who hadn't seen a 1960s Japanese documentary or an 80s film from Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé no longer had the excuse of not being catered for by TV, as such films are "a click away on the internet." This is true enough – Cissé's films are on YouTube, in full and in pretty high definition, including his most celebrated, Yeelen, from 1987 (although beware, it starts with the death of a chicken which some viewers may find disturbing) – but what about those without broadband? Or those who don't like watching entire feature films on a computer screen (which includes me)?

When I was growing up, in a three-channel world, we saw silent movies on TV, and I actually made no distinction between colour and black-and-white films, old or new, partly because we didn't even have a colour telly when I was very young. I suspect youngsters today, spoiled as they are, would turn their noses up at a film if they felt it was old, or if it wasn't in colour. (Some of them will assume that all films are in 3D if we're not careful.) I watched anything that was on. I realise now how lucky I was.

It's easy to see why modern channels might play it safe. They're after an audience. An audience wants new. An audience wants big. An audience wants famous. An audience doesn't want surprises. I love the way Mark Cousins expresses surprise on our behalf as he uncovers unexpected new twists in the history of cinema ("a surprise indeed"). He delights in them. As should we.

Remember when Film4, or FilmFour as I think it was branded at the time, used to have specialist offshoots: FilmFour Extreme and FilmFour World? They didn't last long. Unless you're happy watching films online, or have the bottomless funds to buy the abundant DVDs that are now handsomely available, exploring cinema backwards, or outwards from the English-speaking world, is not made easy. (There's a nice, 24-hour oldies channel called MGM HD on Sky, but you have to pay extra for the movies package to access it.) When I was a bit more flush and presented Back Row every week on Radio 4 in the early noughties, I invested in a lot of foreign-language DVDs and these form a vital chunk of my existing library. But that kind of profligacy is hard to justify in a recession, especially this really shit one. (I tried hooking my laptop up to my HD TV by the way, before you suggest it, but I have a monthly limit on my wi-fi that gets eaten up by downloads, so it's not practical, really.)

The Curzon cinema chain do an On Demand service, whereby the very arthouse movies they show at their London cinemas are available to download for £8 for brand new ones, and £4 for back catalogue, including my favourite foreign film of last year, Of Gods And Men, for instance (discounts with membership, too). It's a fantastic service if you have the facility to run your computer through your telly, or are planning on watching a film on your own, on the laptop. There are loads of more obscure foreign titles in the tank here.

Which brings me back to Battleship Potemkin. Cousins' section on Soviet silent cinema was enlightening in chapter three, and if you saw it, you will have been as desperate as I was to see Potemkin again, in full. And thanks to Film4, we could. Despite interruption by ads, it was amazing how easy it was to get into the 1925 silent groove. The music was stirring, too. There's no excuse for broadcasters not showing old, foreign films like this. Stick them on in the middle of the night! We'll record them! It's fine! They surely can't cost as much to buy in.

In related news, I had my annual email from BBC4′s World Cinema Awards this week. Now in its eighth year, it's an admirable initiative from a channel that will hopefully still be able to continue to invest in foreign and arthouse movies after its budget has been mauled. They basically poll critics and assorted academics and festival directors to come up with a shortlist of six films each year from the available pool of around 200, and a jury selects the winner. It's broadcast this year on November 20. Once again, when they send round the full list to pick from, it's always a) amazing how many foreign movies find a release in the UK, and b) how many I haven't seen, and that's after a concerted effort to see as many as possible, and under a scheme of affirmative action. I won't tell you which two I voted for, although if you've followed my blog, you might be able to guess. (Their Wikipedia entry has all the previous winners, if you're interested. Jonathan Ross has previously hosted the awards, but I guess it won't be him this year. Who will it be?)

The Story of Film is all up there on 4OD if you haven't caught it yet. You have to love Mark Cousins' voice – and indeed, if you don't, it may be a barrier (I find it soothing) – but the content is king.

Sighs. I feel as if I bang the gong a lot for foreign movies. I make no apology for it. Don't get me wrong, I love a good Hollywood movie; and I love it when this country shows the world how it's done (saw the trailer for Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights last night, and Paddy Considine's Tyrannosaur is coming soon: I cannot wait!); but you miss so much if you steer clear of subtitles. Or films with no talking in at all, like the one about the battleship. Back me up on this.