Angels & Demons

In true Miley Cyrus style, 7 Things I Hate About You.

you’re vain…

I tried many times to get this point across to people about Dan Brown’s book, and Ron Howard’s subsequent film of, The Da Vinci Code: for me, it’s never really been about the subject. I couldn’t care less, I really couldn’t, about the Holy Grail or The Knights Templar or Opus Dei, or any of that stuff. It’s all about the telling of the story.

And in that, we’re failed. Palpably failed. But already, I know I’ve lost them, the fans, the Brownites. The shutters come down; you’re branded some sort of snob, a sneerer, you’re someone who can’t allow that a film can be ‘only a movie’, or that a book can be ‘pure escapism’. This, of course is such a fatuous and thick-headed argument that you actually feel lessened for pursuing it. But, fuck it, I’m willing to march into Hell for a Heavenly cause, so let’s give it a try. If you want pure escapism, watch extreme sports or birds flying for two hours; and you know what, I guarantee after a few minutes you’ll want to know a bit more: why is the bleached-blond knucklehead throwing himself to his much hoped for death?; what sort of birds are they, where do they live, breed, nest? You see, you have to have something. You’ve got to hang your interest on some sort of hook, and if that’s the case, why not make it a bloody good one? Why not embrace a structured and satisfying conceit for a work crafted and moulded out of a genuine desire, as Lord Reith said, to educate, inform and entertain? Why settle for such dreadful shite? The Da Vinci Code fails as a piece of fiction because it is written by a moron who knows what he would ideally like to say, but who lacks, pretty much entirely, any of the abilities required to say it. “The famous man looked at the red cup” joked Stewart Lee, taunting Brown’s flat and unflinchingly bland style, and he hit it fairly squarely on the noggin. Dan Brown really is that crap. There is nothing to the man. He has as much style as a baby moving magnetic words around on a fridge door. When someone as lowbrow as Lee Child can manage to do it, and Dan Brown can’t, then shit, honey, you know you’re in trouble.

Now, I haven’t read Angels & Demons, but I have trudged all the way through The Da Vinci Code, and despite the possible shaking of heads and tuts of disapproval, I’m willing to believe that in it he hasn’t performed a startling volte face and produced a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. Sadly, I’ll admit, that is a massive assumption on my behalf, so if anyone wants to authoritatively contradict me, please go ahead.

…your games

OK, plot; here it is. Be warned, this is going to be painful. The Illuminati have decided to blow the Vatican up. To do this, they’ve waited for the Pope to die, and, during the conclave, managed to steal some anti-matter created in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, shipped it to Rome. Then, four cardinals are kidnapped. The reason for that is – bear with me – so that they can be killed on the hour in manners befitting the respective elements of scientific blah-di-blah, something about Air and Fire, Earth and Water. You know. You’ve seen this sort of shit before. Anyway, the cardinals are locked away in basements in various churches throughout Rome, while this nasty Illuminati type (who seems to work on his own, so has done quite well what with security and that) keeps heading out into the streets to dump the bodies every hour; once they’re gone, he’ll detonate the anti-matter and send the entire city to wherever it is evil non-church ancient science loonies blow things to. Who will save the day?

you’re insecure…

Well, if you’ve been watching and reading the Brownster, you’ll know the answer. It’s Robert Langdon…huzzah! The man who, in the books, “looks like Harrison Ford”, but in the movies is dependable potato-faced between-good-roles Tom Hanks! Yay! Langdon, as I imagine we all know by now, is a Symbologist at Harvard. I’m sure that makes him a Semiologist, really, but as we’re dragging as many people as possible along, it probably pays to follow the path of least resistance here, and the hard of thinking would only giggle at the accurate term’s first syllable. And then they’d get confused. And a bit scared.

Langdon is asked to fly to Rome by the Vatican itself. After the issues with the Catholic Church in the previous film (ironically – and it is the only use of irony in the entire thing – the movie takes place after The Da Vinci Code, whereas the book uses it as a prequel, and so we have several chortles at “our previous…difficulties”) you’d think this was a little rich, but it seems that the good Professor is the only person in the world who can work this shit out. As with all evil plans, the killer is intent on leaving frickin’ clues everywhere so that we can have a chase. Why these people don’t just blow shit up and be done with it is beyond me.

And, Jumping Jack Christ, isn’t Langdon happy to point out just how clever he is? All. The. Fucking. Time. Brown’s tiresome habit of telling us stuff we simply didn”t realise we didn’t know, or really want to know, or need to know, is echoed time and again. “Ah! The Great Castration of the statues by Pope Pius IX!” Hanks muses, without being asked, as he’s being walked to the Vatican offices, “In 1857…” Or, more patronisingly, “do I have to tell you guys your own history?” well, yes, Robert, clearly you do, because how else will we be lead along by the nose being told stuff you’ve whipped off wikipedia, you prick.

…you love me, you like her

Langdon’s character is followed around by the lovely Vittoria (Ayelet Zurer), an – I shit you not – enigmatic particle physicist. Her presence is crucial because a) making our hero an expert on the Higgs boson is a stretch for even the densest of cinema-goers, and b) Langdon needs someone to explain the plot to.

The action takes place over a roughly 6 hour period. This is not in real time, although it bloody well felt like it. It’s a nebulous timescale, swiped from Taken, and allows everyone to get into a bit of a lather, for ‘important documents’ to be flown from Switzerland, and for our protagonists to reach their artificially constructed deadlines at a minute to the hour, or just after, or just on. Leave me alone, I am trying to sex this shit up, dammit.

It means that everything can be done at pace. Langdon and Vittoria get to run into rooms, he gets to say something erudite about history or something, point at a picture, and then leave that room. Yes, it’s just like The Da Vinci Code. This is what passes for action. If you’re expecting to find out anything about these people, any hint of insight or motivation, you’ll be hugely disappointed.

Oh, and. And. God, anyone, anyone who has seen a twisty-turny thriller worth its salt will know at one particular point in this that the game is up. It is a cinematic truth, universally acknowledged, that when a reveal is made mostly off screen and the accused dispatched before he can explain himself fully, then issues have not really been resolved. We will be made to return – alarmingly, clunkily – via a secret camera to the unsatisfying scene to view it anew.

you make me laugh, you make me cry…

Things get worse. We are, as stated in Rome. Well, not Rome. That’s for damn certain. I mean, it is Rome, obviously. Look, there’s the Colosseum, there’s St Peter’s Basillica, that’s the Castel Sant’Angelo. The production values and the cinematography are fabulous, but, just as with Paris in the last movie, Dan Brown thinks you can get across town in minutes, he thinks that all the squares except St Peter’s are almost empty, and that people won’t notice if you tip a 70 year old man into a fountain. All the while, predictably, we’re being told this fact and that fact but if you think you might get an idea of what the Eternal City is actually like, you’d be better off watching almost anything else (Roman Holiday, La Dolce Vita, Sabrina the Teenage Witch Goes to Rome). Denied access to the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel and other areas, some famous landmarks have been brilliantly reproduced, but others, the Vatican archives for example, merely guessed at. And, so, if you need someone to remake a Bond movie circa 1973, Ron Howard is clearly your man. His secret underground library is hilariously Evil Nemesis Lair material. Who knew there was a hollowed-out volcano under the Basilica? No wonder the Holy Father commands such respect.

…your friends, they’re jerks

Brown’s books run along rails so painfully and determinedly, Ron Howard has no choice but to follow in exactly the same way. This is inevitable, because if they didn’t, if they had even a moment’s pause, to break out of the dull as buggery locate-and-cement-part-1-to-part-2 structure, it would all become even more obviously plastic than it already is. And of course this is the film’s almightiest failing. The film plays out like Dan Brown prose. It may just be the most faithful adaptation of a novel of all time, because it is flat, non-inflected, reactionary, shallow and tedious. All situations are signposted, all attempts at gravitas are misguided and amusing. The cliffhangers, when they’re not being ridiculous to the point of insulting (I can’t deny that it’s almost worth it for the helicopter ascending to Heaven moment, more of which in a second), are utterly pointless and derivative. Bombs with timers…you know what I’m talking about. It’s a bit like looking at someone else’s holiday snaps being described by a third party who wasn’t even there.

and the 7th thing I hate the most

…is Ewan McGregor. I was going to leave it there, but I can’t. In this, he’s the Camerlengo, the figure who allegedly acts as the Pope while the new Pope is being decided upon. He is supposed to be from Northern Ireland. What is his excuse for speaking in the bizarre Scottish/Italian hybrid he manages? Can’t Scottish people do Belfast accents? I bet they fucking can, you know. Why does he sound so terminally bored? Why does he look so terminally bored? If someone branded you with a three foot square red hot iron, would you be able to trot about five minutes later? Would you be able to fly a helicopter? Would you be able to time it perfectly to allow an anti-matter bomb to explode miles above Rome and then parachute out, straight back to the exact spot you took off from? Finally, the answer as to why Ewan can’t impersonate an Irish priest has become obvious; he’s Vin friggin’ Diesel, that’s why! It is, as I say above, almost worth shelling out for the helicopter moment (certainly, nothing will look more satisfyingly hilarious this year than a parachuting Super Priest with his soutane flapping merrily around his thighs as he floats into the wall of the Vatican), and it prefixes the most grandiose, self-regarding image manipulation you are likely to see in a long while. Ewan, creating a hole that goes up to Heaven.

Oh, OK, only sort of. But it’s a moment that really wants to wow you. It reckons itself big time, and it’s as tiresome and fatuous as everything that has preceded it.

Give me strength. Angels & Demons is a great fat wank fest of ill-considered head-scratching stupidity, limned by overblown imagery and pompous declarations of portent. It is full of the most dreadful dreck you can possibly imagine, and it is worse than all of that because it takes itself so painfully seriously. The straight faces and stern dialogue highlight just how far some people will go to make a buck. Dreadful.

Hannah Montana: The Movie

Sparky little pop princess, Hannah Montana, is the alter ego of sparky little school kid, Miley Stewart, who – in turn – is the alter ego of real life sparky little teen sensation Miley Cyrus. I imagine there must be some people in the world who don’t know this. I didn’t.

In her Disney TV show, Miley Stewart is a relatively normal kid who has to keep her Hannah Montana identity a secret, so that she can, oh I don’t know, get up to all manner of capering about, presumably.

Anyway. The movie assumes you know the set up and dives straight in with crowds clamouring to get in to a Hannah Montana gig. One of the clamourers is Miley herself, who can’t give away that she’s HM, so must break in to her own concert. Trust me. It sort of makes sense. Now, once she’s in, she has to meet up with her Dad (dependable widower, Robby Ray, played by Miley Cyrus’s real dad, the achy and indeed breaky Billy Ray). Robby Ray is quietly concerned that his daughter is becoming a little too California and endeavours to drag her back to her good ol’ Tennessean roots.

And that’s all the plot that’s fit to print, in essence. There’s a British tabloid newspaper story hidden in the background, but that just pootles along in the quieter moments, moving a few minor characters around for a vaguely redemptive coda. The main point really is for Miley to realise where her priorities should lie, and a few straightforward platitudes about family. That, and a lot of singing and goofing about getting covered in hay and water and chickens.

Miley Cyrus is such a phenomenon, of course, that she doesn’t really need anyone to sell her movie for her; the theatre was packed to the gunwales with pre-teens all in awe of her exuberant and simple comedy, and it really could have been any old crap they shovelled out. But, although sometimes this taking the kids to the movies malarkey can be a bit of a grin-and-bear-it chore (yes, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, I’m talking to you) it has to be said not in this instance. Miley’s very accomplished at what she does. She’s klutzy and funny and, despite the obvious over-rationing of confidence, full of charm and warmth.

The movie plays out like those old Jodie Foster Disney comedies of old, with no-one going home unhappy or unenlightened, and there really are no surprises here at all. Apart from a Father/Daughter moment, which did sort of sneak up on me. And the cinema must’ve been quite dusty, because I think at that point I got something in my eye.

Hey, at least I had an excuse, and two happy little star-struck poppets to drag me along. Brownie points and a few unexpected chuckles and sniffles; parenthood doesn’t get much better than that, I’m glad to say.

Sounds Like Teen Spirit

It starts quite worryingly. Two little Russian moppsies, the Sisters Tolmachevy, the previous year’s winners, are stopped by the documentary film crew and asked who their main influence is. Whitney Houston, they say, and immediately start belting out, “And I, vill alvays love you-u-u-u-u!” They are 9 years old. This is Junior Eurovision, and I’ll admit, on the first approach it’s bloody scary.

Enough of prejudice, enough I say.

You see, it’s not just easy to ridicule Eurovision, it’s second nature; but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right. Created out of a genuinely altruistic desire to bring a divided continent back together, the annual event is now the most watched non-sporting televisual event in the world. Bizarrely, it even gets beamed out to places as diverse as Australia, India and South Korea. Dogged by controversy in recent years, as a hotbed of petty rivalries and ancient nationalistic associations (otherwise termed, misleadingly, vote rigging) its biggest detractor has almost always been the UK*.

But Sounds Like Teen Spirit may just stand a chance of reversing the trend that our so-called sophisticated audience has developed of seeing the whole shebang as nothing more than an opportunity for cynical sneering. An almost unknown phenomenon on our little island, Junior Eurovision is massive on the continent, watched by nearly 25 million viewers.

Marina Baltadzi is a pretty 14 year old representing Bulgaria as part of her all girl group Bon-bon. She seems confident and happy, talking with a strikingly American accent she’s picked up from her International schools (she’s originally from Greece). She shows off her room, and her Buffy posters, clearly in awe of the monster-swatting super girl. Swiftly, it transpires her Dad has recently left and she now spends all her time with her Mom, who she feels she has to protect.

Giorgos comes from Cyprus and at 11 has won his national competition. He has a big voice and bags of self-belief, despite being bullied at school. His English is impeccable, and he talks movingly about his hopes and fears not just for the upcoming competition, but for his return and what the reaction to him might be when he turns back into a normal school kid again (“when I’m singing, I’m in a different world and I can forget about all the teasing”). His little sister adores him.

Trust is a group from Belgium. They’re gangly and uncomfortably adolescent; easily the eldest set of kids in the competition, they’re also the most accomplished (their keyboard player has played with national orchestras) and try to dispel that tag (“Trust do not need Eurovision,” says one of the press team) by acting around and being quite clutzy.

Mariam Romelashvili is a 12 year old from Georgia. She has to travel to the final in Rotterdam without her family and is clearly quite overwhelmed. At the first rehearsal she breaks down and can’t go on. But, she says, the country will be watching, so she’ll persevere.

All four threads come together at the final day, with the big show of course, but by then we’ve really got to know these kids and the things that drive them. No jazz-hands drama school nonsense from this lot, they’re there because they love what they do, but have no pretensions to anything else. One of the boys in Trust is asked what it feels like to be a rock star and he laughs it off, “Pop, maybe,” he smiles, shaking his head. Mariam is missing her mother but is soldiering on, knowing that she and her family will all be watching in the local club; Giorgos is just hoping he’s got everything right and will make people at home proud, even the ones who have picked on him; Marina just wants her Dad to be watching (“if he’s watching, that means he cares”).

And, despite all their worries and concerns and being hundreds of miles from home, they all go out onto the stage, with millions of people watching, and perform like true stars. The music isn’t important, really, and that’s OK because the songs are almost all indistinguishable from one another. The only one that stands out is the truly terrifying Ilona Galitska, the 11 year old Ukrainian entry, a girl so eye-poppingly confident she would make Miley Cyrus look like a shrinking violet. Fortunately, her Bucks Fizz reveal is deemed inappropriate before the cameras roll, and a more modest attire is adopted. But it doesn’t stop her putting in a frighteningly upfront performance.

When the music ends and the point scoring begins, the tried and trusted traipsing around to different national networks for the opinions of each participating country, the tension kicks in and after much nailbiting a winner is revealed. Most, of course, go home with nothing, but jump up and down with unbridled joy at 4th or 7th or 15th place; although there is one surprising national hero crowned. At the end-of-show disco, the real feeling of the entire thing is shown brilliantly; everyone is smiling and dancing with everyone else. Even the formidable Ilona is giggling away like 11 year olds should.

Sounds Like Teen Spirit is a fantastic little bit of movie making. Wading through the sludge of cynicism every year prior to, and following on from, yet another dismal performance, the UK might realise that here at least, there isn’t a hint of sour grapes to be found. But then, how would we know? The UK hasn’t offered an entry up for Junior Eurovision since 2005 (ironically when it came 5th, a placing that the kids on display in Spirit would have found astonishing).

I thought it was great from beginning to end, a real treat.

*as one of the biggest financial contributors to the European Broadcasting Union (without which the production of the Eurovision Song Contest would not be possible), it seems that going without a win since 1997 just won’t do for the UK, and there must be a sinister reason behind it. Arguments such as – for 2008 – choosing ‘the singing binman’ Andy Abraham, a runner up on The X Factor, as the UK entry, while those devious Russians chose a well-known singer with a dozen Top Ten hits across Eastern Europe (resulting in them winning and the UK coming last) do nothing to help the contest step out of the rather ugly mire it has found itself in…this side of the Channel at least.

Star Trek

I think I may have had a little snooze at one point. Just a little one. Nothing spectacular, certainly not the hour-long über kip I managed in the middle of, aptly, Sleepers; nor the wake-up-snorting embarrassment of X-Men 3. No, just a resting-one’s-eyes moment, if you will. Nevertheless, it was there, and in a movie filled with theatre-rocking bombast and shuddersome soundscapes as evidenced here, that’s quite extraordinary.

The new Star Trek movie, er, Star Trek, reboots the franchise after much wibbling about and endless losses of focus via the films based on the original TV series and the subsequent TV spin-offs. Admittedly these have enjoyed slavish cult followings, but there have also been varying degrees of artistic success and unintentional hilarity during the concept’s seemingly endless mission to explore new markets and new advertising arenas. Let’s be frank, for the most part it was Freak of the Week fayre, with yet more curiously human-shaped aliens with plastic bumps welded to their foreheads, or the ‘otherness’ of tattoos. Scary. It was ripe for dropping and moving on. Which is why we have a reboot, because – as we all know – there is no such thing as an original idea any more.

So, with breathtaking hutzpah/cheek/arrogance we simply go back to the beginning. That really is all that’s happened. An extensive pre-title sequence shows us Kirk’s birth and his father’s demise in one spectacular moment of evil alien nastiness, and then it’s younger slimmer versions of all the tubby oldies, shiny and new and ready for Space School. We’re starting all over again! A clunky time travel plot device brings Kirk Snr’s murderer back centre stage, just in time to coincide with the brattish young JTK’s graduation and, before you know it, we’re on a vengeance mission, picking up all of the regulars Magnificent Seven stylee, kitting them out in their regulation-coloured tops just in time for explosions and much self-referencing.

That’s it. No, really, that is all there is to it, and so the ability of the film to stand or fall lies in how much fun you’re going to have along the way, and not – I hope – because of anything involving the portentous heavy-handed Coelho-esque platitudes about destiny and loyalty which this sort of guff feels somehow obligated to include. So, is it? Fun, I mean?

Yes, of course it bloody is. It’s bags of fun.

It looks splendid, for a start, and there is much roister-doistering, bone-crunching and absurd death-defying to liven up the crazily wonderful special effects. Great fat gobbets of old Trekkie lore and all the obvious characters battling it out in a we’ll-all-get-our-go cliche wankathon are genuinely gigglesome. Joy and sheer bloody entertainment run through this like letters through Brighton rock, it can’t be denied.

But it’s wearisome, and in the end it’s a good 15 to 20 minutes too long. And despite the explosions and general brouhaha, I did start to drift off when Life Threatening Scenario No.47 hoved into view.

But, heck, all the new crew do a terrific job, although sadly Simon Pegg’s Scotty is just what you expected him to be (the geek from MI:3, with a cod Scottish accent) and he adds nothing bar an expected trotting out of “I cannae give her any more power”, or something. Chris Pine’s Kirk, though, and Quinto’s Spock are very very good, and the new Uhura (Zoe Saldana) lights up the screen, she’s just lovely. In fact, so intent is Star Trek on having a good time it feels giddy enough to include a few comedic turns (never a good idea) and very disappointingly, it fails to dish up a half-decent villain. Eric Bana as the rebel Romulan (read, Eastern European swarthy untrustworthy Johnny Foreigner) is all unshaven, be-tattooed and heavily-accented, but he’s about as threatening as a premenstrual tribble.

Never mind. It’s not about the first film, anyway, it’s about making a splash and getting the brand back on the shelves.

The Uninvited

I am, as my old Mum would no doubt say – were she not forever up to her elbows in Dreft flakes, blasting her silks and woollens – not quite the thing. It started at the movies, as such things often do. Shall I talk you through it? I think I will; I think it’ll help. Admittedly, I’m not quite the full Katie Boyle today, but the reason for that will become abundantly clear.

You see, I’ve started to get into what Mrs Simpkins next door calls a bit of a flap when it comes to remakes or re-imaginings of films.

Oh, you can have all the original pieces of art you wish, you can have a mise-en-scène cake stand with doilies and cream slices all the way down to the Arndale Centre and back again, that doesn’t bother me. My twinset remains distinctly unbridled by the idea of something all Stewart Granger at the Odeon; that sort of thing, if you’ll pardon the passion, is as tickety boo as it gets.

Well, I’ll start a new onion, but oh that did get her back up: “Mise-en-scène, Thora, love, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Ida,” I said, that’s Mrs Simpkins to you, and she would be grateful were you to do so kindly as to never forget it, “Ida, it may be film criticism’s grand undefined term, but I know what it means. I have Fritz Lang and Robert Wiene to thank for that. Harsh lighting and sharp angles may not go down very well with the Holmfirth WI Jam Committee, but give me a bit of German Expressionism and I’m as happy as a sand boy.”

But she wasn’t listening. They don’t when they get to that age. It’s all coconut slices and wondering why you can’t get Colman’s Mustard powder in tins anymore. Still, it’s a blessing. A bit of respect in your twilight years goes further than even the chiaroscuro in Barry Lyndon, modified Mitchell BNC camera and Zeiss lens or no modified Mitchell BNC camera and Zeiss lens. It’s a fact, unfortunately.

So, I find myself in the cinema on my own more and more these days. Well, what can you do? Ida’s a wash out, and even Connie’s stopped chuntering away about László Kovács and his contribution to cinematography. I see a lot of stuff that the other girls wouldn’t, which is nice, and sometimes it even unearths the odd gem. But not often.

I’m becoming more and more impressed with Asian films, of course. Well, who isn’t? They even show them at the fleapit in Barnoldswick now, you know, and you can get a cup of cranberry infused in the café beforehand.

Kim Ji-woon, him as did that A Tale of Two Sisters and A Bittersweet Life? Oh, he’s very good. Very entertaining, very intense. Films to make you clean behind the skirting afterwards, if you get my meaning.

But wipe me down with a copy of The People’s Friend, if they hadn’t decided they needed a remake of Sisters. I was in a tizzy, I don’t mind saying. It was like walking in on Gilbert Harding and Cyril Fletcher all over again. What’s the point, I asked? Well, what’s the point of salting aubergines, I thought, and so along I went. And, of course, it was dreadful. As inept and limp as my dear departed George, but not as polite, charming or indeed apologetic.

I should have known, of course. It was always going to be thus. As Mum would say, “you’ve brought it on yourself, love, now make that tin of peck last a bit longer. There’s thirty barm cakes need buttering and they won’t do themselves.”

Mothers. They always know best.