Andrew Collins's Blog, page 56

Ding, dong, the witch is dead

What a Bank Holiday that was. Two globally significant events, one planned, one a surprise, both of which I was expected to celebrate: a Royal Wedding on the Friday, and a Man Killed on the Monday. I am not a royalist, but neither am I a party pooper, and I think it's nice that people had the day off because Prince William married Kate Middleton. I personally chose to avoid all live radio, TV and internet coverage of the wedding itself, because I didn't really feel a connection to it, nor any urge to get involved. I watched the Royal Wedding in 1981 when Prince William's mum and dad got married, and I was happy for them, even though I had no real reason to be, as their marriage was one of convenience and lies, and doomed to fail. I was 16, and not yet fully-formed, politically, so I failed to spot the hypocrisy of it all. I enjoyed my day off school. This time, with a more measured view of the whole circus, and a massive problem with hereditary privilege, I felt it was time to make a quiet protest against it by going to the cinema to see Meek's Cutoff instead, which we did, at lunchtime, enjoying the post-apocalyptically empty streets. (We passed three street parties on the walk home, which looked to be mainly for the kids, which is fine, and I was happy to see little bursts of community spirit. I am not against that.)

Yesterday looked like it would be one of those Bank Holiday Mondays that meant nothing, and would just pass without anything special to remember it by. Wrong. Having heard on Smooth Radio that Henry Cooper had died, I went online and actually scrolled obliviously past the first story on the BBC News website, which was about Osama bin Laden, to find out how old Henry had been, and how he had died. It was only when scrolling back up that I discovered that bin Laden had been killed by US Special Forces inside the walls of his compound in Pakistan. Big news. Poor old Henry Cooper.

I know a lot about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, having read, among other useful tomes, the definitive Al-Qaeda by Jason Burke (whose services were quickly pressed into action by the Guardian – he's all over this morning's edition and his obituary, with Lawrence Joffe, of bin Laden is superb, albeit clearly on file, as these biggies tend to be), and The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, which traces 9/11 back to Egyptian scholar Sayyid Qutb's visit to America in the late 40s and its impact on his influential fundamentalism within the Muslim Brotherhood. In the latter, Wright records Osama bin Laden at a wedding before the 9/11 attack quoting a line from the Qur'an: "Wherever you are, death will find you, even in the looming tower," which has added potency now. We know quite a lot about bin Laden, at least up until the point where he disappeared into the caves and became number one folk devil in the West. To me, he is more than a symbol. To most, that's all he is. So his death probably appears symbolic too.

You can understand why those revellers at Ground Zero and the White House felt that bin Laden's death – not his capture, but his death – was cause for spraying beer into the air and painting their faces red, white and blue in the middle of the night. Many will have experienced the 9/11 attacks at close quarters; maybe some of them had links with people who died. But I don't mind admitting that I was instantly troubled by the scenes being bounced back from the United States of this unseemly and ill-thought-through triumphalism. At least our street parties on Friday were in honour of a wedding between two people we have never met; these street parties were in honour of the death of a man they have never met. I know how many deaths bin Laden is said to have caused. And I know why Americans, in particular, feel that bin Laden deserved to die, but I am physically unable to cheer and whoop at the death of a person, whoever they are. Surely by wishing death upon someone, we are no better than bin Laden himself. Or, as I wrote on Twitter yesterday at the height of the euphoria, am I being a big softy?

Actually, when I stated that I do not celebrate death, I was pleased by how many spoke up in agreement. One person called me a "big girl" and "a twat" for my views, and another said he disagreed with my views and hoped that Osama would "burn in hell." Well, if the second person believes in Hell, he must also believe in Heaven, and in what I see as a fairly arbitrary system of qualification for those two destinations, so that must cloud his judgement. I do not believe in Heaven and Hell, so my judgement is clear: murder is wrong. To murder a murderer is to relinquish the moral high ground. I am better than a murderer because I have not murdered. The moment I celebrate his murder, I am no better than him. (It's the same with the death penalty – if you support it, as many of the beer-spraying patriots at Ground Zero possibly do, then you lose the authority to condemn a murderer, for you too are a murderer, by proxy. Also, bin Laden did not bloody his hands with the dead in the Twin Towers; he also murdered by proxy.)

There's another troubling issue here: celebrating the death of a leader of a terrorist organisation is an act of the purest hubris. Without bin Laden, al-Qaeda still exists. If anything, his death – and his burial at sea – make the world a more dangerous place. Talk about fiddling while Rome burns. Enjoy your celebration of a murder, I thought, for tomorrow, you will be held up at airports and on your way into public buildings again – let's see how far you will wish to spray your beer then. (Hey, I know, many American citizens welcomed the curbing of civil liberties in the wake of 9/11 and were more than happy to give them up in the name of the War On Terror.)

I found the dialogue on Twitter to be rigorous and interesting. It took up more of my Bank Holiday Monday morning than I'd planned. Meanwhile, about 50 people forwarded a joke to me about bin Laden making the sea homeopathically evil by being buried in it. This is not unfunny, but it hardened my killjoy position. I really didn't think this was a time for levity. Also, when a joke has been Re-Tweeted at you that many times, it goes get annoying. Nobody's individual fault, but it does. So I became a misery yesterday, and wanted to have a serious discussion about the events of that morning, when all around – or so it seemed – triumphalism abounded. I made the mistake of watching some Fox News. I switched over pretty smartly. Most commentators on the proper news sounded notes of caution.

The word "evil" was bandied about. How many people do you have to kill to be officially categorised as "evil"? Are you evil for killing one person? I might say you are evil for swatting a fly. Bin Laden is, or was, "evil" apparently. Having masterminded the deaths of many, he is certainly not nice. You don't want a bloke that at large, masterminding more attacks on people from his cave. You want to round a bloke like that up and make sure he stops masterminding. But people who use the word "evil" seem confident that they are qualified to decide who is and who isn't evil. I don't have that confidence. My moral compass is bound to be different to yours. It's safer not to use the word "evil". It gets you in trouble. It's like Heaven and Hell. Life isn't that easily partitioned. It's like the word "hero"; use it too freely and it loses its meaning. Not every soldier who dies can be a "hero," or what are we to call those who perform actual acts of heroism?

Anyway, the dust has settled somewhat. I suspect, and hope, that the initial euphoria of flag-draped bloodlust has died down a bit in the US. I don't particularly want to see it, but has anybody seen bin Laden's body yet? Just asking.

And is Pope John Paul II in Heaven? He's currently being fast-tracked to sainthood, and was beatified in Rome yesterday. But wasn't he in charge when all that child abuse was being covered up, and its perpetrators being protected from the police? Surely a man who lets that happen cannot go to Heaven? This is why it's better to not believe in Heaven and Hell – that way, you can cover up child abuse with impunity, and nobody can call you a hypocrite! Sorry, where was I … ?

Everybody happy?

I read a fascinating quote from Christopher Eccleston in the Observer magazine yesterday: "The staples of drama are not people who have been happy. Nobody wants to watch a drama about a happy person." Let's just run that past again: Nobody wants to watch a drama about a happy person. I really like Christopher Eccleston; he's my third favourite Doctor and I was lucky enough to interview him for Elizabeth and he turned out to be exactly as I wanted him to be: earnest, serious, but not above self-lacerating honesty and good humour. So, I take what he says seriously. Especially about acting and drama. And this quote has been churning around in my mind ever since. (Probably because I've been painting; stuff churns in your mind when you're doing DIY.)

Last night I eagerly sat down to watch one of four new homegrown TV programmes starting this week: Exile on BBC1. (There's also Vera, Case Sensitive and The Shadow Line.) Inevitably, it's in three parts, but those three parts play out over consecutive nights because today's terrestrial TV schedulers think we'll forget everything in seven days. Ironically, Exile is about a man who forgets more than just what happened in a TV programme. In fact, what it is, is TV's first Alzheimer's thriller. As tricky as that may seem, creator Paul Abbott and his star protegee Danny Brockenhurst have welded two genres to create a third, and for that, you must applaud their guts and determination. And BBC1′s.

Exile began last night with John Simm's lad-mag writer losing his job and his girlfriend (somebody else's wife, naturally), and heading North, in the driving rain, to somewhere suburban in Lancashire to rehabilitate. (He's also a coke-snorter, so it's literal as well as emotional.) He returns to the family home, where his dad, Jim Broadbent, a former campaining journalist, is in the throes of Alzheimer's, looked after, round the clock, by saintly daughter and older sister Olivia Coleman. Although, well-written, she's not saintly in the beyond-belief sense, just less selfish than John Simm, who hasn't been back for years. The house is brilliantly grey and gloomy – as who's got time to redecorate? – which means it is frozen in time, just like Broadbent, and its ghosts are still in the walls, which makes Exile about the past, and about reconnecting with it. It's also an acting gift for Simm and Broadbent, who get to do two-handers about fathers and sons, and inevitably rise to the occasion. Apart from the heinous crime of having Simm call Coleman "Sis" when they first speak – in case we are too stupid to work out that a man and a woman who know each other and have the same dad are brother and sister – Brockenhurst sidesteps the usual drama cliches, and instead layers on the reality of the frankly unbearable situation with subtlety and wit.

The thriller begins to emerge towards the end of part one, when a memory sparked by being back in the old house reignites Simm's curiosity about a story his dad was working on before he started to lose his mind. The audacity of drawing a conspiracy thriller out of what feels like a traditional family chamber piece with a box-ticking "issue" at its core is head-spinning. But don't come here looking for glamour or flashy thrills. It's clearly going to be a depressing ride. Episode one ground lovelessly from failure and despondence to family tragedy and unsavoury symptomatic detail to rushed sex and a spin round the Co-op with admirable commitment to the dreary and everyday that are the hallmarks of Jimmy McGovern and Paul Abbott's work. Except it's Abbott that has carved thrillers out of this morass, and you detect his hand here.

Brockenhurst has proved his licks on Shameless and Clocking Off, and we're in able hands here, but we go back to Eccleston's theory: Nobody wants to watch a drama about a happy person. Let's hope not, or nobody's going to watch Exile. In this country we do gloom and grit so well. I loved it when Simm re-entered his teenage bedroom, now stripped of all posters, but still with the "same curtains." It was like something out of Tim Burton: all wonky angles and tiny window and a headboard from Hell. Just making sure nobody thought Exile was a light drawing room comedy. Let's see where it goes next.

Oh, and some of you will have spotted this already, if you've been reading: I have just created a drama, or a comedy drama, about a happy person. Still, I don't expect anybody to watch it, as it's on the radio.

Glasses, ref!

As you've probably gathered by now, Thor is one of the better Marvel comics adaptations, in that it's directed by someone with a more … let's say it … Shakespearean take on the source material – Kenneth Branagh – and it's faithful enough to the original comic to keep the fanboys onboard. I think if it has a trump card it's the clever way it expects you to take the portentous, echoey Norse mythology scenes seriously, and then expects you to giggle at the fish-out-of-water scenes down on Earth, when Thor is stripped of his powers and banished to New Mexico in order to fall in love with Natalie Portman. Such mood-swings are dangerous in a big, fat film like Thor, But somehow, Branagh and his team of screenwriters pull this off. It's almost two films for the price of one. Chris Hemsworth, an Australian beefcake whom I understand was in Home & Away, fills out the role of Thor very well, both physically (he's like two Jamie Bambers squashed together) and in terms of the light comedy.

It's a set-up story, with lots of set-up to set up – cue: portentous voiceover from Anthony Hopkins' Odin – and it carefully tees up The Avengers, which is coming soon to a cinema near you. But for me, it was ruined. By the 3D.

I have nothing against 3D per se. It enhances Pixar movies. And in Pina it finds its true calling: bringing clarity and depth to physical artforms. But being chucked at every new blockbuster, as it now is, can only devalue it as a gimmick. Apparently the non-CGI footage in Thor was shot in 2D, and put through the machine in post-production. This, I think I'm right in saying, is what happened with Clash Of The Titans and I'm sure countless others leaping pathetically onto the bandwagon. I hate the way it's becoming a default setting for noisy action movies. In fact, I admire any big blockbuster that feels confident enough in its own 2D merits to put itself out there naked, as it were. The 3D in Tron: Legacy was horrible, and detracted from the film. And I had the same demoralising feeling when I watched Thor, at the huge Odeon Leicester Square no less. The glasses were fresh from the packet, so my bad time wasn't as a result of smeary lenses. It was the 3D itself: murky and blurry, and impossible to follow during fast-cut action sequences. Unlike in Pina, it subtracted clarity and depth. Result.

Why would a studio do this to its own product? It's vandalism. I don't much like putting on eyewear in a cinema, but when the 3D is good, you are transported away from the plastic wrapped round your head. I am told that 10% of us have a minor eye defect that means we can't "translate" modern 3D anyway. I'm not one of those people, as I can appreciate the effect; I just don't like it. Millions of dollars will have been spent creating the parallel fantasy universe of Asgard for Thor, but it is a dark world, and dark worlds become muddy and indistinct through 3D specs. Subtle effects still work well, such as floating fragments of ash or snow. (The best bit of Avatar in 3D was when the flecks of ash came down after they blew up a tree. The rest … well, I could take it or leave it. Actually, I saw Avatar in 2D on Sky Movies: it gained nothing from the third dimension except the ability to deceive with smoke and mirrors; in 2D it was just a so-so jungle movie.)

Can we just stop this now, then, please? Thor is not a bad movie. It's actually a "solid" three-stars. But I have yet to see it in a form I can truly appreciate it in. Better wait for it to come on telly, then.

Trail mix

This is one of the best films I've seen this year, and I've just seen it for the second time in two weeks: Meek's Cutoff, a quiet, low-energy, minimalist Western from indie director Kelly Reichardt. Although set in 1845, it could have been made in 1975, such is the unshowy, realistic, grainy, mumbly modus operandi. Not much happens. But what does happen is pregnant with symbolism and myth, and the dialogue – by Reichardt's constant collaborator Jon Raymond – is so carefully chosen in a film with huge chunks of wordlessness and recorded in such a natural way that you need to see it twice to really get your ears round it. (Not that I'm recommending you pay to see a film twice. When I was hosting Back Row on Radio 4, I fairly light-heartedly suggested people should see Mulholland Drive twice because it's so difficult to understand on first viewing, and a listener complained to Feedback, accusing me of being in the pay of the film company! What a twat.)

I haven't seen Reichardt's previous two films, so I'm coming to her style cold, but I love it. This is my kind of film. Such an inspired idea to break down the whole history and mythology of the Old West to the tale of three families in three wagons who've broken away from the Oregon Trail to take a short-cut – or cutoff – at the behest of their grizzly guide Meek (Bruce Greenwood – John F Kennedy in Thirteen Days). They are lost. Early on, we see one of the husbands (Paul Dano), carving the word "LOST" into some tree bark. Their despair builds as the story progresses, and the arrival of an Indian (Ron Rondeaux) adds further tension, when Meek would have him killed, while the others, most vocally the wise old widower Solomon (Will Patton), think he will help them find water. The Indian – no more than a "heathen" and a "savage" to the unreconstructed mountain man Meek – is in touch with the landscape, and he too scratches something into the rocks, albeit something more pictorial and possibly more meaningful than a single word like "LOST." (Ironically the paranoid pioneers later worry that the Indian is leaving "signals" with his drawings; what was Dano's character doing but leaving a "signal"?) Oh, and yes, the Biblical imagery is clear – Solomon isn't called that for nothing, although the Promised Land looks increasingly unattainable in this exodus by God-fearing folk.

It's not new to see American pioneers come face to face with a native soul – the occupier thrown together with the occupied; civilisation meets pre-civilisation – but Meek's Cutoff spends so much time carefully and precisely setting the scene, describing the landscape and dropping us right into the dust and drudgery of everyday life on the road (one of the wives complains that the women are "working like niggers" at one point, laying wide open the inherent hypocrisy of the white man's racism), the moments of familiarity from previous Westerns are few and far between. This is a slow piece. It moves at the same arduously gradual pace of the wagons themselves, the constantly squeaking wheel of one announcing their progress throughout, and it is this empathy with the characters' plight, forced upon us through sheer attention to detail, that makes the film. You can feel the dust, smell the sweat, and eventually start to wilt from the hours each day they spend trudging through the desert. (I had a bottle of water with me; I nearly drank it all.)

One oddity. The film is shot in "Academy ratio", ie. 1.375:1 – which is almost square and was the industry standard before the Widescreen boom in the 1950s. This seems self-defeating when the Oregon landscape is such an integral part of the film. I don't know why Reichardt chose it. Maybe somebody out there knows? Meek's Cutoff still looks stunning – there are a couple of very slow dissolves that are pure artistry – and you forget about the ratio after a while, but I couldn't help feel I was missing something out in those wide open spaces.

It was a particularly fine choice to see at the Curzon again this afternoon in order to avoid the pomp and circumstance of the Royal Wedding. There were a few other republicans in there, and only one of them used his phone, once, to read a text, whose alert (luckily muffled by being inside his rucksack) actually came at about the worst time it could have done in terms of onscreen tension. Well done, that man.

Everyone's a critic

I am a film critic. No I'm not. But I must be. Look. It says I am in a BBC caption. I must be. I have spent the past two Fridays filling in for Mark Kermode in his regular review slot Film 24 on the BBC News channel, so I feel much more like one than usual. It's fun to do. I've been filling in for him, on and off, since April 2008. You can even see my appearances, logged by the BBC, here. The format hasn't changed a bit in all that while: three new releases, one DVD, and my recommendation for a film that's already out, usually with Julian Worricker or Gavin Esler to bounce off and a clip for each to cue professionally up. I used to fill in for Mark on Simon Mayo's show on 5 Live on the same day, but they phased me out of that role last year and replaced me with Nigel Floyd and Boyd Hilton, two men to whom I bear no bitter malice, as I've known them both for years, and two less Machiavellian media operators you could not wish to meet. I was replaced for this simple reason: if I was asked to fill in for Mark at the last minute – which is common – I couldn't always do it, as I needed to have seen all of that week's films. I probably said the n-word too many times, and a replacement was sought. (Hey, it took two men to replace one. Enjoy that!)

Here how it works. The film companies screen all the week's new releases on a Monday, traditionally. The national newspaper film critics attend those screenings on a Monday, sometimes a Tuesday, and file their copy in readiness for Friday, Saturday or Sunday depending on their paper. Most weeks there are about ten new films, released on a Friday, with the inevitable blockbuster that comes out on the Wednesday, to scoop up extra bums for seats and steal a march on that week's box office chart. When, as happened two weeks ago, a Tuesday night screening is cancelled, and rescheduled for the following night, a review of that film (Scream 4) did not appear in that Sunday's Culture section, due to its long lead-time. You can see how important the Monday and Tuesday NPS's (national press screenings) are. If, for whatever reason, I am asked on a Friday to fill in the following Friday, I might have other stuff planned in for the Monday, and thus have to turn the Kermode gig down. (Turning work down? In a recession?) That's why it's more often than not Jason Solomons who does Film 24. He sees all the films as a matter of course. Do you know why? Because he is a film critic.

I am not a film critic. I review films for Front Row occasionally, for Word, for Radio Times, and that's it. I go to screenings when I am required to. I have been reviewing films for Zoe Ball's Radio 2 show – and indeed I'm on this Saturday doing just that (I will be reviewing Thor) – but that's stopping after this week. As Film Editor of Radio Times, one of my jobs is to write reviews of films when they appear on television, by the magazine's very nature, which I can do. I can do this because I go to the cinema a lot. I'm lucky to live in London, where there are four Curzon cinemas in easy distance, so, as a member, I'm always up to speed with arthouse and foreign movies. The others I sometimes miss when they come out (although some biggies show at the Curzon, such as, recently, Source Code), but catch up on Sky Movies when they arrive there. I also watch DVDs, of course, and am lucky enough to be sent a number of them from nice film companies. So you can see why I am not a film critic.

Every now and again, if the cards fall in my favour, I play at being Mark Kermode for a week and attend the NPS screenings on a Monday. Here, I see the film critics. Most of them haven't changed since I started reviewing films professionally in the late 80s! I know one or two to say hello to – Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian, Dr Kermode himself, the aforementioned Boyd and Floyd (hey, their names rhyme!), Chris Tookey of the Daily Mail, David Edwards of the Mirror, the Telegraph's Tim Robey, Radio 1′s genial James King, even Derek Malcolm of the Evening Standard, although I spoke to him the other day and he looked like he'd never seen me before in his long life! – but by and large I keep myself to myself before and after the screening, and usually sit in the auditorium on my own.

I have no real interest in swapping war stories with other critics, as I always worry that I'm getting sucked into a clique. If I find out what all the other critics think of a film, it might subconsciously affect my own assessment. Some weeks I sense a consensus when I read through the various newspapers' film sections, and clearly sometimes an actual consensus arises, but sometimes I fear it has arisen through the sharing of opinion over triangular sandwiches and wine in a subterranean screening theatre in Soho. We are all impressionable.

I have been researching and writing a huge first-person piece for the mighty Word magazine this week about my induction into the world of films aged 14-18 in the early 80s, when I joined the Northampton College of Further Education's Film Society. This is my first ever membership card. The £6 membership fee entitled you to see 36 films over a year. Looking back, I realise this was my film education. I shall write no more, as it's all in the piece. But looking back at this golden period, during which, in my diaries, I actually totted up how many films I'd seen (121 in 1981, 144 in 1982, and an astonishing 175 in 1983), I am filled with retro-gratitude. I'm so glad I watched all those films. If I am to be captioned "film critic" by BBC News, I'd better be able to hold my own. And without having seen all those hundreds of films in my mid teenage years, I'd have much less of a grounding.

I really wish they'd replace those high swivel chairs on BBC News though. It's hard to look authoritative when you have short legs. Mark Kermode has long legs. I can't compete with that.

Team GB

United is what the BBC does best, and it makes you proud to be British, which makes a change. A 90-minute, one-0ff drama, scheduled sympathetically in a prime mid-evening slot on BBC2 and BBCHD and, although sold as a vehicle for one of the Corporation's de facto properties, David Tennant, it wasn't an excuse for him to grandstand, he was actually just a key cog in a larger machine. (I understand it's being released theatrically in other territories, but it felt right at home on TV, available for all to see.)

Written by Chris Chibnall, a quiet master of popular television with Torchwood, Born & Bred, Life On Mars and Law & Order UK under his belt, and directed by James Strong, expanding his portfolio after similarly glossy fare like Doctor Who and Hustle, this was an economical, intelligent and respectful slice of history that avoided the sporting drama's most voracious trap: dramatising actual football, which can't be done.

Deftly, whenever the Busby Babes went out onto the pitch, we left them to it, a simple captioned scoreline providing the result. We saw the actors training, and kicking a ball against a wall, but at no point did we see a football match recreated. That is fancy footwork.

It wasn't about football, it was about camaraderie among men, and how loss of life affects it. It was more like a war movie than a football movie. Tennant dialled down the eccentric face-pulling that people love him for and brought a knotted brow and grim determination to the Welsh coach Jimmy Murphy, who wasn't on the fateful chartered jet that failed to take off in the snow in Munich on 6 February, 1958, on its way back from Belgrade to Manchester, but was pivotal in keeping the team together after the terrible tragedy that befell them at their peak of youthful fitness. With Dougray Scott clearly relishing the part of Sir Matt Busby – now there's an actor who's becoming more interesting now he's out of his heartthrob phase – and the solid likes of Dean Andrews, Tim Healy, Neil Dudgeon, Melanie Hill and Kate Ashfield making anybody who watches TV drama feel they are in the safest of hands, United was quality product.

But it wasn't "starry" in that sense. This was a grave piece of social history – one that's carved into the hearts of Manchester United fans, and the hearts of anyone who was around to hear or read the news in 1958 – and United did not sensationalise. The opening tracking shot of blood and debris in the German snow, and the surreal sight of Bobby Charlton (Jack O'Connell, the real star of the show) and teammate Dennis Viollet (James David Julyan) still strapped into their seats yards away from the crash, was dramatic without being melodramatic. (It felt like a war movie right from the start.)

I understand a traumatised Charlton really did find the inspiration to get back in the game by having a kickabout in an alley with some local kids, so the film's perhaps most melodramatic moment actually happened. How about that? I'm sure other scenes were more fictionalised – and I know that the relatives of Sir Matt Busby felt United's portrayal of the man was less than three-dimensional – but you have to accept a certain amount of artistic licence in dramatised events. The point is, Chibnall, Strong, the fine cast and composer Clint Mansell – whose restrained but moving score felt period, too (nice to see him playing a home game for a change) – captured the feel of a moment in time. The look of the old boots, the sound of the old ball hitting a wall, the thick-framed specs perched on noses, the pint glasses with handles, the caps and overcoats, the birth of the "glamour" club … it's all in  there.

I'm guilty of overstating the case for American TV drama – and it's true, they own the 22-week series, because it's their gig – but you'd be hard pushed to find a one-off as focused and fair as this one. It's the kind of piece I aspire, or dream, to one day write. Maybe I'll do Northampton Town FC's journey from the fourth division to the first, and back down the fourth again, in successive seasons in the 60s. I might have to dress that one up a bit though. And get somebody as famous as David Tennent to be in it, as manager Dave Bowen, who was Welsh. He can do Welsh.

This type of thing

I'm just saying: film posters of late, eh? They're all the same. Faces with type all over them. That's it, really.

Attack the blog

I was going to be an obedient film critic and wait until Attack The Block was released (May 13 in the UK) before writing about it, but as it's aimed at the young people, the film company are not only happy for us to write about it in advance, they're all for it. I saw it last night. Its writer and director, Joe Cornish, introduced it, which was nice of him, although it can sometimes make critics either resentful or over-nice if they know that the filmmaker is in the building, neither of which is a helpful outcome. Let's remain calm. (I know Joe reasonably well, having handed over the reins of Radio 4′s film programme Back Row to him when I left in 2005, during which period we saw each other a fair bit. I am also an unashamed fan of he and Adam's oeuvre, as you know.) Attack The Block, which is essentially a comic horror movie with a social conscience, is very good indeed.

In his intro, and in other interviews I've read elsewhere, Joe made clear that his aim with his debut feature was to take his love of 80s creature features like Gremlins, Tremors and Critters – and "gang" capers like The Goonies and Stand By Me – and give it a more modern, urban setting, namely, the Brixton-Stockwell-Kennington triangle in South London where he's lived for years. He's done this by staging a malevolent alien invasion in a council estate, the "block" of the title. His heroes are five teenage hoodies, of mixed race but united by the exaggerated black hip-hop patois spoken by all streetwise British youths, and by an us-and-them attitude to authority, in particular the police (or "the Feds" as they are apparently now called on estates). These five characters are all played by newcomers to screen acting, recruited by Joe and his producers to bring authenticity to the characters as they posture and pose and project their personalities. This is clearly a defence mechanism. A form of male machismo that has preoccupied adolescent boys since the dawn of time. It is not new, but the sense of violence at its heart is.

If, in real life, you find the way kids today speak – in what is surely the ultimate counter-racist argot, in that all kids, from white to black, speak it – you may initially recoil, as Attack The Block drops us into a confrontation whereby the five Goonies, led by Moses (John Boyega), pull scarves over their faces and mug Jodie Whittaker's lone nurse, on her way home to the block where she also lives. These are not sympathetic characters. They intimidate a young woman, five against one, and a blade is flashed. Surely, you wonder to yourself, we're not supposed to like these kids? Well, yes you are.

What Joe has done here that's brilliant is make life difficult for his audience. Or at least, his adult audience. It's entirely possible that teenage audiences will identify with the muggers, and with their street smarts. But you could identify with the drug dealers in The Wire because they were presented realistically and frankly. There are reasons why some kids grow up to be drug dealers and hoodlums on BMX bikes (and in one humorous case in Attack The Block, a pizza delivery moped), and some kids don't. Cornish isn't letting them all off. He's just saying: look at where they live. No, actually, look inside it. While the perhaps over-caricatured posh white dope-smoker (Luke Treadaway) slums it and takes the nasty old lift up to the floor where his friendly dealer (Nick Frost) works, the council block rarely takes a central role in an action movie. Does anybody remember a 90s film called Downtime, a woeful British disaster movie set in a council block lift? It didn't work because it wasn't a glamorous setting. Attack The Block works because it bends familiar action-movie tropes and makes them fit in a council estate.

Joe Cornish has two weapons. One is a working knowledge of how action movies work. The other is humour. Get past the patois and the five hoodies are, to varying degrees, very funny. Either they're afraid of their mums, or they fancy themselves, or they just see the world through videogame/action movie eyes. When the aliens arrive, one of them says it's "raining Gollums." This is very funny. It doesn't say, ha ha, listen to the stupid boy, it's just a funny line and it tells us that kids look through a prism of popular culture. While the siege scenes are handled with supreme vivacity and grit, it's the dialogue – and by association, the naturalistic acting from the five leads – that gives Attack The Block its edge over any number of other films that involve one group of beings battling another. I can't quote chunks of it, as it's said in that street manner that doesn't translate to the page. Yes, there are guns (the block's kingpin Hi-Hatz, played by Jumayn Hunter – who was, ironically, in Eden Lake, which I liked but which simplistically used hoodies as feral, Deliverance-style demons – is tooled up; but this is countered by the two younger kids, Props and Mayhem, who have a water pistol), but the aliens are clearly beyond being shot, and must be defeated, as per tradition, by cunning and cleverness.

Clearly I'm going to give no plot points away, but I wouldn't be going out on a limb to say that redemption, of sorts, takes place. Someone on Twitter asked me how a film which starts with five young men mugging a young woman could ever earn our empathy. Have you ever seen a film before where a bad character comes good? Yes, so have I.

Obviously I wanted to like Attack The Block, because it's a first-time film by a talented broadcaster and writer whose continued success in Hollywood may lead to more radio work for me. And Joe's a nice guy. But if I'd come away feeling it was a sound debut, maybe a "solid three stars", that would have been a satisfactory outcome for all of us. To have been able to wish Joe further success would have been sufficient. (That's sort of how I felt about Richard Ayoade's Submarine: clearly his career will bear even greater fruit.) But it's a four-star movie. A four-star movie that I have already read an as-yet unpublished one-star review for. It may well divide as well as conquer.

I fully accept that the grim, South London setting, and the street language, will not be to everyone's taste. But this is not class tourism. If anything, it gives a voice to a generation, and a strata of society, who are usually marginalised by fiction. And that's no small thing. It will not miraculously make me feel any more comfortable when I am next forced to pass by a small gang of kids on bikes in South London with their hoods up, but maybe that's my prejudice as much as its their inherent malevolence.

I overheard two earnest-sounding men in the British Library canteen talking about it the other day. One had never heard of it, the other was enthusing about how, finally, underprivileged kids who live on estates would finally have a film that does them justice and give them a positive spin. I think I can see what he means. But don't watch Attack The Block out of a spurious need for political roughage; watch it (from May 13), because it's scary and funny.

Sacred Dancing

Released on Friday, Pina by Wim Wenders is far and away the best film I've seen this week – and bear in mind I have also seen the remake of Arthur and The Fast & The Furious 5. It isn't really very fair to compare it with the other films as it sits apart. It's a sort of documentary-cum-memorial to the radical German choreographer Pina Bausch by her friend Wenders. They were collaborating on the project – which is ultimately a presentation of four of her dance pieces on film – but she died of cancer in 2009. He saw it through to fruition as a tribute. And a tribute it certainly is. I'm a latecomer to the pleasures of seeing dance performed live, as regular readers will know, but I've been thrilled by some of the ballet and modern dance I've witnessed over the last couple of years, from the Royal Ballet to Michael Clark, and, judging by the physicality and originality on display in Pina, I'd love to see it live. There's something sanitising and distancing about seeing it on film. And if that's sounds elitist, it's meant only as an objective observation. I've seen two theatre plays, live, but in a cinema, in the past six months, and I found both to be compelling and worthwhile – and indeed, some of the camera work and close-ups made the experience more cinematic than theatrical. Make of that what you will. This film makes something physical almost metaphysical, if you'll excuse the pretence. (I am in arthouse mode.)

The film is in 3D. It's being sold as the first 3D arthouse movie, but who cares about firsts? Does it enhance the experience of watching modern dance being danced in front of your eyes? Yes it does. For once, the 3D is justified. It's not a gimmick. Wenders hasn't necessarily staged bits purely to show the technique off. What he's done is apply the technique to what's unfolding in front of him, and used it to clarify the picture, and exaggerate the depth of field. Much of the performance is done on a darkened stage in Wuppertal, in the Ruhr region, where Bausch's dance company have always been based. She is, or was, I have learned, an elemental choreographer; thus, we see a bare stage on which a shallow river is formed by cascading rain, which runs under a huge rock; in another sequence, the dancers move across a stage entirely carpeted in reddish peat soil, making footprints, clawing into it, and getting all mucky in the process as the dirt mingles with their sweat. This is amazing to watch, even in 2D I should imagine, but the 3D sharpens it all up.

Wenders' best trick is to relocate some of the routines to the outdoors; that is, a quarry, a river, the central reservation in a traffic intersection in Wuppertal, or inside the carriage of one of the town's iconic monorail trains (previously seen in black and white in Wenders' lovely 1974 road movie Alice In The Cities). The colours are beautiful outside, and the dancers seem both out of place in their finery, but also, surreally, part of the landscape. There's a short sequence where a male dancer jigs about in a precinct while a small dog tries excitedly to bite his legs. It's just one of many arresting visual moments in a film that's full of juxtaposition and gags. There's an astonishing sequence in a river with an artificial hippo that also has to be seen to be believed.

The dancing is very sexualised, especially when two groups, one male, one female, interract across the field of dirt. I loved the long procession, featuring the entire company, all repeating the same seasonal hand gestures as they walk in time, which is pictured above. It's simple but hypnotic and dazzling. If there's one problem with the film, it's the decision to allow the individual dancers to pay tribute to their beloved, inspiring, saint-like Pina by gushing about her to camera. These might have been fine in a South Bank Show, but they interrupt the flow of the film. And it's a film all about flow. We should be left to interpret and assess Bausch's ingenuity and invention on our own, without prompting.

It's showing at the Curzon in London, in 3D, and if it's anywhere near you, have a look, even if you think that 103 minutes of modern dance is not your thing. Even though seeing it on a screen rather than on a stage makes it a substitute for the real thing, thanks to Wenders' eye, much of it is utterly cinematic. The other brilliant thing about Bausch's company is that they span all ages, it's not just about lithe, borderline-anorexic, tight-buttocked young things as are most ballets, this is about a full picture of life.

Anything goes

I started writing this blog entry yesterday afternoon, before I heard of the sad death of Elisabeth Sladen. I'm going to continue with it, as it should act as a tribute to a very important woman in my early life, and in the lives of others of a certain age. Elisabeth Sladen 1948-2011

I can't believe I've actually found this. It's the moment in the first Tom Baker Doctor Who story, Robot (or The Giant Robot), where Sarah Jane Smith, frightened by the giantness of the robot in question, runs away and, in true damsel-in-distress style, falls over. This episode aired at the end of 1974, which makes me nine going on ten at the time. All I know is this: when I caught a momentary glimpse of Sarah Jane's underskirt riding up her thigh, I came over all funny. This can't have been exactly sexual at that age, but I was aware that I had seen something I shouldn't have seen, something forbidden, not for my eyes. An underskirt, which is what we used to call a slip in the early 70s, was exactly that: a skirt that went under an outer skirt. It was an undergarment, and I was old enough to know that underwear was secret.

I have had this image imprinted on my mind's eye ever since, despite having only ever seen it once, that day in 1974. Even 35 years later, I could still see it. And now, thanks to a rare clip of Doctor Who on YouTube (which I think has been edited with some silly music, I didn't listen to it), I can actually see it again. It's still pretty racy isn't it?

I loved Elisabeth Sladen as a kid. Or was it Sarah Jane Smith that I loved? It doesn't matter. It's actually both. I loved her in the same way that I loved Tiger on The Double Deckers around the same time. Even though too young to "fancy" fictional characters, or the actors that play them, you develop an attachment to certain among them, and – for obvious reasons – the Doctor Who companions were an automatic focus. (Just as Jon Pertwee was my first Doctor, Tom Baker was the first Doctor I saw regenerate at both ends of his era; following this pattern, Jo Grant was my first companion, but Sarah Jane was the first companion whose first and last adventures I watched – The Time Warrior in 1973 to The Hand Of Fear in 1976, and yes I had to look that up. I am, or was, a Doctor Who fan, not a Doctor Who Fan!)

The point I was going to raise here off that back of that abiding image of Sarah Jane's underskirt is just how innocent the times were that I grew up in, sexually speaking. It's 2011. Times have changed. We are, in many ways, more sexually liberated than we were in the 70s, a decade when, despite the progress of the apparently permissive 60s and the political leaps forward made in terms of women's liberation and gender equality – not to mention attitudes to homosexuality – it was still a dark age. Society and popular culture were inherently sexist (watching Dave Lee Travis drool over Pan's People in a recent edition of Top Of The Pops on BBC Four from 1976 was particularly repellent). Clearly, aged nine, and even into my teens, I wasn't aware of this. I accepted things as they were handed down to me, as any young boy in any era might. My confused feelings, the ones that eventually develop into urges, were all heterosexual ones, and within that broad area, I guess they were natural enough.

But in the 1970s, if you wanted to think about women, you were lucky if you could see a picture of any more than an underskirt. It will strike young people of today as either quaint or pathetic that we used to find pictures of models wearing bras in the Kays catalogue oddly illicit. Clearly, Charlie's Angels were sexy. They sometimes wore bikinis. But not always. And the camera did not linger too long on their bodies. (I saw the latest Fast & The Furious film yesterday; and Gal Gadot, an Israeli actress whose character is nominally a "strong woman", is seen going undercover in a tiny bikini and the camera sticks to her as she walks, from behind and in front, for what feels an age. It's a 12A certificate.) You saw busty women and women whose swaying bottoms required saxophone accompaniment on Carry On films; indeed some of the 70s ones were considerably fleshy. But these were framed by silly, falling-over comedy; this was not even the softest porn, not in the context of today's on-tap titillation. What I'm driving at is that in that faraway era before video, DVD and the Internet, you had to be grateful for anything. Oh how rude we thought National Lampoon's Animal House was in 1979! This was my first, legal "AA" certificate, which you had to be 14 to see. I suspect today it would look pretty tame – nothing you wouldn't see on television – but at the time, it felt like Deep Throat. (When I was much older, around 17, a bunch of us went to another boy's house at lunchtime and he showed us some of Deep Throat, which his parents must have had, on video. I was not only shocked and fascinated by the frankness of it all, I was a bit scared. Maybe that's just me. Or maybe it's a sign of more sheltered times.)

The underskirt question, to get back to my point, is simply one of context. A glimpse of bra strap would have had the same effect in 1974. When Sarah Jane was eventually replaced by Leela, a savage who by default wore a suede bikini, you might say that Doctor Who was moving with the permissive times. Certainly she seemed pretty saucy for teatime. (I seem to recall my Dad taking more of an interest in the programme at the time – or am I post-rationalising?) Already, social and sexual mores were changing, right before my eyes!

I like to think I have grown up without hang-ups. I certainly prefer to use my imagination than have images served up on a plate. When I actually came of age, in the early 80s, the girls round our way wore long pinafore skirts, and multiple layers. It was the fashion. You wouldn't see midriffs, or bra straps, or legs. (A girl called Heidi wore a midriff-revealing cut-off t-shirt at a sixth form party in 1983 and it was the talk of the school.) The kind of Goth girls my friend Kevin and I revered in mid-80s Northampton wore three of everything, layers upon layers. I realise now I sound like someone who grew up in Victorian times, but ironically, with those elaborate clothes, always done up to the neck, that's exactly what they were like. (I'm free-forming now. if I was writing this as a think-piece for a magazine, I'd get on with the second draft.)

I know I've gone off the subject of Elisabeth Sladen, but I hope, elliptically, I have positioned her in my life and expressed how important she was to me. Not just as a woman on the telly whose skirt once rode up in front of a giant robot – once! – but as an iconic figure, someone with whom I identified and someone whose adventures I followed, religiously, at a formative age. I always liked her more than I liked Kate Jackson from Charlie's Angels.