Jim Henson was like a father to me.  He was everywhere in the 80s; a puppet didn’t appear on TV or in film without Henson’s imprimatur.  My images of childhood are mostly foam or fur-covered, thanks to him.  I’m eternally grateful that I grew up in the halcyon days before CGI, when puppets were king.  The kind of wholesome anarchy Jim favoured was paradise for kids.  He was Walt Disney without the evil.  His most famous creations, The Muppets, didn’t have that weird, repressed quality you find in Mickey Mouse.  They’re free-wheeling, loose-limbed, all-too-human.  Kermit the Frog is wonderfully frayed.  You can’t feel so tenderly about pixels, or a drawing.  There’s a vacuum of sentiment.  Jim Henson’s legacy is tactile.

In their new movie, the Muppets return to the big screen with a little help from Jason Segal.  It’s fitting they’re brought back to life by a fan.  Segal plays a nebbish Muppet enthusiast named Gary, who lives with his Muppet brother, Walter, in a small town Norman Rockwell might’ve painted.  Amy Adams plays Gary’s girlfriend, Mary, in a piece of casting that seems to have been pre-destined for Adams since birth.  The fun begins when Gary and Mary take Walter to visit the now dilapidated Muppet Studios in Los Angeles.  Hard times have befallen the puppets of yesteryear.  With the rise of new technology, there’s a danger that Kermit and company might be relegated.  That is, unless the gang still have it in them to put on a show.

I can’t say the new movie is perfect, but its imperfections are part of its charm.  Like the original Muppet Show, it’s a mixture of wry humour and mawkish songs.  Jason Segal’s script isn’t strong on plot, but he obviously loves his source material.  The resulting film is like a Liza Minnelli concert at times, celebrating a phenomenon that was probably biggest in the 70s, somewhat camp, somewhat sardonic, somewhat Broadway.  Kids will like it for the Selina Gomez cameo and because, well, kids like anything.  For adults, it’s more a question of being in the right mood.  You don’t have to be charitable; it’s a better movie than you’re probably expecting.  But you do need to remember the original wasn’t meant for grown-ups.

Quite what youngsters will make of a James Carville cameo is hard to speculate.  Are kids eager for any other Clinton administration insiders to make guest appearances in children’s films?  Is Dee Dee Myers going to be in Dora the Explorer: The Movie?  I’m as happy as Mickey Rooney to see that Mickey Rooney is still alive, but it seems incredible that he also makes a cameo in this thing.  Jason Segal appears to have rounded up anyone who was walking past the studio for a walk-on role in The Muppets, and the paucity of A-list talent does make the finished product feel a bit second-rate.  That said; the original Muppet Show was built on the sawdust of showbiz, so perhaps has-beens are the most suitable support.

Kermit the Frog is an emblematic frontman for this group: part Gene Wilder and part Jimmy Stewart, inherently decent but perpetually nervous.  He embodies the camaraderie that is central to the Muppets; he literally can’t do his job alone.  As much as the other Muppets play havoc with Kermit’s plans, as much as they seem to court disaster every time they take to the stage; they’re a family, as the new movie makes clear.  Puppets are not sleek or efficient, like creatures imagined on a computer; they’re raggedy and wild, awkward and misshapen; closer to human beings, in fact, than some of us would like to credit.  Unlike Mickey Mouse and the whole creepy Disney cohort, the Muppets have jobs, too, don’t forget.  And difficult relationships.  Maybe that’s how grown-ups relate to them, or certainly grown-ups who work in the entertainment business.  These puppets are really stand-ins for the carnival of freaks we call “actors”.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Roth once launched an attack on the Muppets, in his novel Sabbath’s Theatre.  The protagonist of the book, puppeteer Mickey Sabbath, is a former friend of Jim Henson, who rejects what he sees as Henson/the Muppets “untainted view of life” where “everything is innocent, childlike, and pure”.  It’s typical that literature’s foremost grumpy old man should begrudge the Muppets their happiness.  But I think Roth missed out on something, besides his usual omissions: i.e. men who aren’t horny old Jews, and women.  The Muppets may be a bunch of cuddly toys, with tie-in merchandize at the ready.  But they’re cuddly failures, dammit!  I admire Jim Henson for creating puppets with feet of clay.

It’s funny how so many sad films are labelled comedies.  There’s a real gap in the movie lexicon under sad.  You’ve got weepies, of course.  And ubiquitous dramas.  But both those end with either death or change.  There isn’t a genre where the protagonist just stumbles on, helpless.  Movies aren’t meant to be like life that way.  Audiences don’t want to be told that loneliness and defeat can triumph.  We can cope with death on-screen.  A sad life is infinitely more hellish.  Maybe that’s why movie marketing departments prefer the word comedy.  Like Jason Reitman’s new comedy, Young Adult.  It’s the saddest film of the year.  Watching it, you come to realise: a woman without intuition is a heart-breaker, alright.  But not in a good way.

The movie is about a ghost writer called Mavis Gary.  Mavis is nearly forty, divorced, bitter. She is damn lucky to still look like Charlize Theron, given her diet of microwave food and alcohol.  But time is catching up with her.  One day, Mavis receives an e-mail from an old high-school sweetheart, informing her that he has recently become a father.  This message is misinterpreted by Mavis as a cry for help, and so she decides to win back her old boyfriend, by sabotaging his marriage.  With her trusty Pomeranian wedged into a pink holdall, Mavis heads back to Mercury, Minnesota, determined to relive her glorious past.  She was not what you’d call a nice girl in her youth.  Nostalgia is an excuse, to act like a total bitch.

The male version of Young Adult works better; it’s called Bad Santa.  With a man in the lead, we’re more ready to laugh with a drunk, no matter how sour or surly.  When it’s a woman who’s drunk, she’s a pariah.  It’s ugly for a woman not to care about other people’s feelings.  Maybe that’s why this movie shies off big laughs.  Whereas, in Bad Santa, Billy Bob Thornton could punch pre-teens in the face, and make a joke of it; in Young Adult, Charlize Theron is vilified for using harsh words.  This is because a man can be a drunk and still be a hero to other men.  Recklessness is masculine.  When a woman is reckless, other women think her cruel.  There’s no such thing as female bravado.  There’s no female Don Quixote.  For a woman, being a misfit is sad.  It’s not even tragic.  The truth in Young Adult is that Charlize doesn’t even seem to enjoy being bad.

A possible Best Actress nomination hasn’t been mooted for no reason.  Theron’s Mavis is a complex and finely nuanced performance.  I’m not taking away from that, when I say it’s not funny.  But it’s important to recognise: the movie is more a drama than a black comedy.  And quite a meek drama, at that.  Mavis is never allowed to relish being a bitch.  Her meltdown at the baby naming ceremony is shrewish where it could be Shakespearian.  She isn’t permitted to be dangerous.  It’s as if, worried about alienating a female audience, the film-makers have tried to make Mavis palatable by making her powerless.  I’m sorry, but she’d be a lot more fun if she crashed into Mercury, Minnesota with the power to ruin her ex-boyfriend’s life.

Young Adult is downbeat where it should be wild.  There’s too much of Mavis on the verge of tears.  Either she’s alone and gazing into the abyss, or else she’s trudging around town with sad sack Patton Oswalt.  I understand that calamity has to follow Mavis wherever she goes, because she’s misjudged her life and spent years living out a failed dream.  But the idea that the film shouldn’t be sexy in the least seems ludicrous.  It goes back to my Bad Santa comparison, where the lead character had charisma to go with his malaise.  In contrast, Mavis seems to become almost asexual for being on-edge.  She’s treated like a nerd.  But she still looks like a supermodel.  This is a woman whose bad deeds should be scandalous.

Maybe I wanted a different movie.  For an idea of how I think Young Adult should have played, take a look at the Between Two Ferns sketch Charlize Theron made with Zach Galifianakis in 2010.  In it, she plays a tearful, coquettish version of herself.  It’s clear she that she enjoys the chance to be naughty.  Now admittedly, this isn’t the sort of role you get nominated for in the Oscars.  It’s all a bit daft and both parties seem to be having a lot of fun.  But Charlize is a thousand times more entertaining to watch in this thing than the whole of Jason Reitman’s movie.  My problem with Young Adult is that it treats Mavis like an August Strindberg heroine: doomed to tears.  No-one in Bad Santa let sadness get in the way of laughs.

 
There are ways of dying that shouldn’t exist anymore; like being shot with an arrow, or run over by a medieval siege tower.  Being eaten by wild animals is right near the top of that list.  I can never quite imagine how you break the news, when “Chet” (hypothetical web designer and Apple enthusiast) gets gobbled up mid-Tweet: Lotta growling round here LOL…  And the next thing: Chet’s lunch.  Death should keep pace with the times.  You shouldn’t be able to buy an iPad in the same era when you can be eaten by wolves.  Unfortunately, the majority of scary beasts don’t own a calendar.  Whether it’s 2012 or the Bronze Age; to a wolf, we’re still man chow.  We always have been.  It’s only iPhones the wild animals can’t stomach.

Joe Carnahan’s The Grey is set in Alaska, the frozen armpit of America.  Liam Neeson wants to die, so naturally he lives here.  In the first five minutes of the film, Liam puts a gun in his mouth.  He’s tired of his job: lone wolf hunter for a big oil company.  When his plane crashes on the way home, it almost comes as a relief.  Now Liam is stranded on the snowy wastes with six other male survivors.  Their only companions are man-hungry wolves.  Apparently, the oil company is too cheap to send out a search party.  So it falls to Liam to teach his new buddies how to fend off a wolf attack and/or, failing that, how to die like a man.  Lucky for them, he brought his knife on the plane.  Luckier still, Liam knows how to go berserk.

If ever a film star had the face of a wolf hunter, it’s Liam Neeson.  He looks prehistoric, like a guy who might befriend a woolly mammoth in one of those Ice Age cartoons.  His nose is like a missing piece from Stonehenge.  You pity the wolf that would try to eat him.  In The Grey, Liam is like David Attenborough crossed with Rambo.  He’s got wolf trivia at his fingertips.  Need to know the “kill radius” for a wolf?  Ask Liam.  There’s never any doubt about who’ll be the last man standing on this hiking trip.  The other dudes are all dog biscuits.  For the audience, the main fun is trying to decide who’ll get it first: the Latino, the black guy, or Dermot Mulroney.  The wolves certainly plan their meals with D-listers for hors d’oeuvres.

This movie is tough as beef jerky.  The plane has barely crashed before the first man gets munched.  As director, Joe Carnahan seems to have spent his entire career living up to his own name.  “Joe Carnahan”, the kind of name they give to teamsters.  You can’t have that name and not be a man.  There’s a scene, in The Grey, where a guy cuts the head off a dead wolf and Liam nods gravely, as if to say: Yes, that’s what a man has to do.  Anything less and you might as well be Hugh Grant.  We’re in Hemingway country for this film.  These men are stronger for being fed to the wolves.  Their hell on Earth is treated as a test of character.  By not weeping, wailing, or crying for mommy; they prove they’ve got what it takes.

The wolves are computer generated, I suppose.  It’s hard to find a good wolf in Hollywood.  Real wolves or no, the film still retains a visceral urgency.  Joe Carnahan has coaxed some fierce performances out of his cast and the plane crash alone is harrowing enough to make you wince.  There’s a shelter-less feeling to this story, as if the world had ended.  I could go right off the deep end and say Liam Neeson was playing Alaska’s version of King Lear.  But future high school students are unlikely to be writing essays on The Grey.  The film does contain some metaphysical stuff, but it’s most there to break-up the feeding frenzy.  This is, foremost, a thriller, where the wolves might as well be hostile aliens.  It’s made with integrity, and the ending isn’t a cop out, but you shouldn’t go looking for meaning in The Grey, beyond the fact that bloodthirsty wolves mean us harm.

There’s a line from an Angela Carter short story: “We keep the wolves outside by living well.”  And it’s true: the best defence against wolves is living in a city, shopping on-line and viewing camping holidays as suicide.  I’ve never trusted nature much.  Even squirrels make me nervous.  The Grey is the kind of outdoorsy Gotterdammerung that looks, not only plausible to me, but inevitable, as far as any visit to the woods is concerned.  I’m pretty sure bareknuckle fighting with wolves is best left to Liam Neeson.  He seems to draw strength from the contest, rather than, for instance, pissing himself.  While I wouldn’t call being eaten by wild animals ”a good death”, I guess it beats having a heart attack at the gym.

 
Gina Carano could kick your ass.  I don’t care who you are.  This girl makes the boys from 300 look like a chorus line.  She chokes Michael Fassbender with her thighs.  She leaves Ewan McGregor to die under a rock.  She even makes a Steven Soderbergh movie worth watching.  You don’t need to suspend your disbelief when she launches into action.  Unlike that string bean Angelina Jolie; Gina does all her own stunts.  She’s a Mixed Martial Arts champion, from Dallas County, Texas.  Her demeanour is soldierly, through and through.  In Haywire, her mission is to beat the crap out of male movie stars.  She does so with aplomb.  As the tagline says, “They left her no choice.”  This girl was born to get into fights.

Special Ops hottie Mallory Kane (Gina) is the sort of no-nonsense fist-thrower who always lands the last punch.  She’s a former Marine who now works for a clandestine “contractor”.  Her rat-fink boss (McGregor) is about as untrustworthy as it gets.  On a mission to Dublin, Mallory is sold out by her employer and framed for murder.  A rogue Irish assassin tries to rub her out in her hotel room.  But Mallory being Mallory, it’s the Irish fella who winds up dead.  After that, Mallory heads back to the States, with a plan to “debrief” her boss of his worthless life.  All that stands between her and satisfaction are cops, killers and assorted bad guys.  Our girl is only too happy to relieve these gentlemen of the air in their lungs. 

And real fights are the main reason to see this film.  There’s none of that fast-edit Three Card Monte in Haywire.  When Gina wrestles with someone, the camera stays on her.  She’s the Cyd Charisse of ass kicking.  You need long takes to appreciate her art.  Although real fights lack the fantastical stamina of fake combat, there is something to be said for authenticity.  No-one lasts more than one round against Gina.  As anyone who ever got clobbered in high school can attest: real fights happen fast.  That’s the only similarity they have with fights in video games.  There’s no slow motion camerawork in real life; no adrenalized soundtrack to gauge how well you’re doing.  A good melee is over before you can call it a fight.

It’s just a pity Gina can’t give her director a kick in the ass while she’s at it.  Of all the people working in Hollywood today, Steven Soderbergh is surely the guy most in need of a good slap.  There has probably never been a director so prolific – or so patchy – in his output.  You know it’s a Soderbergh film when all the good ideas go to waste.  Does it look like it was shot quickly, by a guy who doesn’t really give a crap how it looks?  Does it seem insincere – almost as a point of pride?  Is there a nagging sense the film could have been made better by just about anybody?  If you’re nodding wearily, it’s likely you’ve witnessed the Soderbergh effect.  He’s undoubtedly smart, but his instincts are terrible.  Haywire has a great premise, but it doesn’t set your pulse racing the way it should. 

You keep waiting to get excited by this movie, but gradually, your expectations slump.  It’s just another exercise in vain, meta-movie posturing, with nods to films you haven’t seen and a soundtrack that would work better in a cocktail lounge.  This would be fine, if casting Gina Carano had been a mistake.  But she’s magnificent.  You have to imagine Die Hard being D-grade to understand my frustration.  Imagine Bruce Willis being the consummate action hero, and Die Hard with no pace.  Haywire is more a series of vignettes than a proper story.   It’s made the way only Soderbergh could be happy with: like a riff on a theme he’s bored with, before he’s begun.  Genre stuff brings out the clever-clever side of this director.  The only thing more enervating than CGI, in a fight scene, is a failure to commit.

I’m not sure if a woman kicking ass is a feminist statement.  A comment from a message board: “Gina, kill me, please” seems to sum up the masochistic appeal for men.  To his credit, Soderbergh doesn’t go the Russ Meyer route and fetishize Gina’s brutality.  At no point does Haywire resemble Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!  This is more like the sort of movie David Mamet would make: a celebration of a warrior; not her chest.  We’ve come a long way from the 60s.  This isn’t the era of “foxy boxing” anymore.  Although Haywire might not be the rousing triumph it ought to be, with Gina playing a literal knock-out; the movie still respects women.  The problem is: the film is comatose.  It lays there, as if struck by lightning…or Gina’s fist.

 
As Steven Spielberg’s old pal George Lucas once said: “Emotionally involving the audience is easy.  Anybody can do it blindfolded.  Get a little kitten and have some guy wring its neck.”  By my count, someone threatens the life of the horse (in War Horse) roughly every half an hour.  That’s a lot of mortal jeopardy.  Cynics will argue that Spielberg endangers the animal for the sake of the box office.  But I don’t think cynics should be allowed to see this film.  For while it may well be corn-fed sentimental hokum, every bit as contrived as Lassie Come Home, there’s something undeniably moving about War Horse.  Spielberg is fascinated by our capacity for good.  He might be a sap, but my God he knows how to make a movie.

Early twentieth century England, as envisioned by Spielberg, is a land fit for Hobbits.  Emerald hills stretch to the horizon, tiny hamlets sit nestled among the fields.  A farmer’s son, who looks like an Abercrombie and Fitch model, gambols through pastures, blissfully unaware of the oncoming First World War.  This boy is in love with a horse.  Not in an unwholesome way, like the kid in Peter Shaffer’s play, Equus, but in a nice way, like Elliott and E.T. or Tintin and his loyal terrier, Snowy.  The boy is called Albert.  The horse is called Joey.  After a lengthy prologue where Joey saves the family farm, WWI begins and Joey is sold to the cavalry.  No more gymkhanas for this brave nag.  This war horse is headed for the Somme.

Man’s inhumanity to animals can never really match the horror of when, in my job as English teacher, I once saw a 15-year-old boy spell the word “horse”: w-h-o-r-u-s.   Obviously, no act of inter-species barbarism could hope to match the senseless cruelty of what that boy did to a word (Whore-us?  Really?!  Was that kid trying to drive me insane?!)  However, there is plenty that will set animal-lovers weeping in War Horse.  In three separate scenes, a different actor levels a gun at Joey.  That’s not to mention the bit where the horse gets tangled in barbed wire.  Anyone who found Marley and Me hard going will be experiencing Watership Down levels of anguish for much of this movie.  Be warned: fictional horses do suffer. 

This is not to say, mind you, that every human in War Horse is anti-equine.  It’s not as if this is a remake of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, where all humans are portrayed as weak-willed and petty.  The guy who made Always isn’t known for his cool appraisals moral failure.  So there are plenty of instances in the film where human decency is celebrated, and both German and British soldiers are seen being extra-nice to Joey.  Even if the horse does seem a bit of curse on his owners (you’re better off petting a vial of anthrax for all this horse does for your lifespan), people seem to be queuing up to save the poor beast.   In one scene, two soldiers climb out from opposite sides of the trenches to rescue the animal.  This scene is also the source of the movie’s most risible line of dialogue, when a British soldier calls Joey a “war horse”, just in case anyone had been left wondering about the obscure provenance of the title.

The cast is a who’s who of British thespians…that didn’t get cast as wizards in Harry Potter.  Despite his resemblance to a male model, newcomer Jeremy Irvine brings a plucky naivety to his role as Albert, the boy who can’t say no to a horse.  Weasel-faced David Thewliss is well-cast as a villainous landlord.  If Peter Mullan was any more salt-of-the-earth, as Albert’s dad, you could use him to flavour crisps.  Emily Watson is effortlessly lovely as Albert’s saintly mum.  The guy who played the baddie in Thor gets at least four scenes where he, too, loves Joey (before they’re parted by a German machine gun).  And Benedict Cumberbatch summons every ludicrous syllable of his name to bestride the role of an ill-fated cavalry officer.

The main question I had, after all the hooves had finished thundering, was: would anyone really look at a picture of a horse before they went into battle?  I know Albert loves Joey and all, but… a picture of a horse?  Really?  Such criticism may be overly harsh.  Lord knows, I took my E.T. pencil case everywhere when I was a boy.  But how much you’re able to swallow that detail (or not to register it) may well determine the extent to which you enjoy War Horse.  For Steven Spielberg, innocence is the bedrock of his career.  He looks at the world with the eyes of a child.  And maybe that’s what’s needed to properly appreciate this movie: a little less jaundiced realism.  Like it or not, sugar cubes make this horse run.

 
It’s hard to be dapper in the age of rappers.  The whole idea of wealthy chic went out with the top hat, and the art of deference.  Perhaps we had to see the rich like jewels – something rare and precious – in order for them to shine.  In Michel Hazanavicius’ movie, The Artist, we’re tastefully transported back to a time when film stars were treated like aristocrats.  The movie is an air kiss to silent cinema.  In execution, it’s as impeccable as a Cartier watch.  I’m not sure it’s about anything, other than giving pleasure, but I felt about a thousand times more suave for having seen it.  Perhaps it’s enough, to be like a movie-lover of the 1920s: to swoon over trompe l’oeil, and to feel the romance of life in lustrous black and white.

This is the story of a silent movie star called George Valentin.  He’s an icon of his day, an artist, universally adored.  Even his dog gets fan mail.  We meet George at the very peak of his career.  The year is 1927.  At the premiere for George’s latest film, he gets kissed on the cheek by an unknown young woman.  The next day, the only question in the newspapers is: Who’s That Girl?  Answer: She’s Peppy Miller, a wannabe, soon to be the biggest star in talking pictures.  George, alas, doesn’t speak (on screen).  So his career is finished.  In a few years, he won’t even be recognised by the fickle crowd.  Thankfully, his dog (and Peppy) won’t abandon him – or their love of silence.  Some old-fashioned things aren’t allowed to die.

The genteel wit of The Artist is evident from the first scene, where George is tortured for information (in his latest film), but defiantly tells his captors: “I won’t talk!”  A later dream sequence, where George is bullied by sound, continues this play-on-(the absence of)-words.  By the time George’s wife says they “need to talk”, you’re either tickled by the joke or scanning for the nearest exit.  The Artist is not a biting satire of show business.  It’s a bon-bon that’s been cooked up to make cineastes go gooey inside.  Even the movie studio George and Peppy work for is named after Edison’s first motion picture camera.  George’s dog might as well be named Rin Tin Tin.  The movie has a crush on early Hollywood: that kingdom of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, where everyone was glamorous and no-one worried about their “indiscretions” winding up on TMZ.

French actor, Jean Dujardin, is so goddamn handsome he could fluster George Clooney.  The only thing you can’t believe about him as a movie star is that he isn’t one already.  The man has charm the way a hunchback has posture issues.  If you looked up the word “debonair” in the dictionary, you’d find Jean Dujardin in place of Cary Grant.  He has a chin that could get him dinner reservations anywhere in the world.  He even makes a moustache look cool!  The fact that he spends the film looking the way he does, while being accompanied everywhere by a cute dog, is a bit of a charm blitzkrieg.  But the fact you don’t end up jealously hating Jean is surely testament to his skill as an actor, and the remarkable appeal of the film.

His co-star, Bérénice Bejo, has a way of winking at the camera which should be encouraged in her future work.  She plays the ingénue with just the right amount of sass, and she wears the clothes of the period in a way Coco Chanel would have approved of.  Her slender beauty feels right for a “flapper”, even if real flappers weren’t quite so slender in their day.  The main thing is she has a sense of fun about her which is infectious.  She brings a spark of mischief to The Artist.  You find it easy to believe she’d catch George Valentin’s eye.  Bejo is gamine in a way perhaps you have to be French in order to pull off correctly.  She could stab a puppy six times…and flutter those eyelids, and there isn’t a jury on Earth that would convict.

If you’re too jaded for The Artist, I’m afraid there’s no hope for you.  You probably sneer at the first bud of spring.  This movie is joyous, elegant and life-affirming.  A half hour in, like George, you’ll feel it’s vulgar to hear people speak.  What needs to be said, after all?  This movie is pure cinema, undiluted by words.  Through watching it, you come to understand why silent films cast such an alluring spell.  Our world of texts and blogs; Facebook and Twitter needs The Artist.  It has a palliative effect for viewers in an age where words are hurled at us wherever we go.  There’s an ease to black and white silent film; it exists, without the urge to convince you that it’s real.  Once you take away speech, film is closer to a dream.

 
Of all the ways to write about America at the dawn of the 21^st century, this is, undoubtedly, the most mediocre.  The phrase “swinging for the fences” is not apt to this book.  Like the dull lives of the middle-class characters it details, exhaustively, over 600 pages, there is very little to make the heart race in Freedom.  You don’t get the swagger of Tom Wolfe, or the indignation of Philip Roth.  What you get is Jonathan Franzen, the milquetoast to end all milquetoasts, painstakingly doling out all the pet peeves of America’s chattering classes.  It’s like reading a blog by the Normals, of Liberalton, where dissatisfaction is as endless as the stream of words.  For all the handwringing, it’s a miracle the author could type.

Oh, piss off, Franzen…you long to shout, as he embarks on yet another dissection of conjugal woe.  Freedom is the story of a marriage, told over the span of thirty-odd years, between unhappy amateur novelist Patty, and her husband, the ever-loyal environmentalist, Walter.  We also hear a lot about their son, the capitalist asswipe, Joey, and Walter’s best friend, the musician, Richard.  As befits a novel aiming for Literary status (even when its plot is reminiscent of Desperate Housewives), there are several chapters written by Patty herself, to tick the Unreliable Narrator box on Franzen’s “Get Me a Pulitzer” checklist, and a last chapter which may-or-may-not actually happen; thus ticking off Meta-Fiction.

What’s missing is anything resembling a pulse.  Say what you want about the often dubious motives behind some of Tom Wolfe’s fiction, but The Bonfire of the Vanities has everything that Freedom lacks: race, religion, and good jokes are all but absent from Franzen’s vanity project.  Everything is so well-mannered; it stifles the life out of the book.  It’s like reading a college application essay; whereas Tom Wolfe reads like the brazen poetry from a bathroom wall.  In Freedom, a major plotline revolves around endangered birds, for God’s sake.  Even an ornithologist would concede that’s not much of a “grabber” as a premise.  Franzen’s point is made: yes, the environment is boring, and that’s why we don’t worry about it enough.  But that doesn’t seem like a strong argument for having to wade through several thousand words on Cerulean Warblers.  At least in Moby Dick, Melville killed the whale after all that guff about whaling.       

What is there, literally, left to say, if all you’re going to write about are the sex lives of rich white folk?  I know John Updike made a career out of this.  But Updike was catty and vain and, frankly, a giant slut.  Franzen is a choirboy by comparison.  He only writes about sex so much because, well, what else do people do?  We learn more than enough about Walter’s stultifying job.  Patty doesn’t work.  Joey only works to illustrate military-industrial hubris in a plotline that isn’t developed sufficiently.  So sex seems a good alternative in a story that otherwise revolves around birds.  But it isn’t enough to sustain 600 pages.  There’s nothing profound to what Franzen has to say.  It reads like the limp misgivings of the inert.

Philip Roth is more my kind of writer.  If Freedom were written by Roth, ok, Walter would be fixated with sex, and Patty would be an emasculating monster.  But they kinda are like that already.  It’s just that Jonathan Franzen is too wussy and objective to say it.  Most of my favourite writers are tabloid at heart: subjective, irrational, thrill-seeking jerks, with talent to burn and no compunctions about fairness.  A leftie with a conscience, like Franzen, only sounds shrill when he gets worked up about corporate culture or the state of the environment.  Philip Roth is an asshole and a leftie, so his indignation takes pleasure in outrage (and outraging those he hates).  What Freedom lacks, more than God, is recklessness.

In June of this year there was a photograph, taken during the riots in Vancouver, of a couple lying down kissing in the middle of street, while police with batons charged around them.  It’s clear the couple couldn’t give a damn about anything but getting laid, rightthissecond.  But the image is heroic, nonetheless.  It says: we want each other, even as the world burns.  The insane, risk-it-all, throw-your-hat-(and your pants)-into-the-ring dynamic…is what Freedom should be all about, and yet, resolutely, isn’t.  Jonathan Franzen doesn’t have enough soul.  He’s too afraid of not being taken seriously.  There’s a “properness” to his writing that makes your heart wilt.  Be unabashed, you bastard!  What else is freedom good for?

 
This review is dedicated to Tom Wheeler.

Everyone in this movie is waiting for a sign.  The Future is uncertain; it’s like a form of semiotics.  How would a happy couple know each other if they forgot they were a couple?  How do people who want sex attract the likeminded?  How is it that a picture connects with a person?  And what do we want people to understand about us?  The signals are everywhere.  But if we’re too ready, we risk picking up the wrong signals.  If we’re unprepared, we risk sending no signal at all.  We can be forgotten far more easily than we can be understood.  In Miranda July’s sophomore effort as writer/director, everyone wants to communicate their innermost thoughts.  The question is: how do we interpret this sincerity?  As kitsch?

The movie is narrated by a talking cat.  That alone may give viewers pause.  What is Miranda July up to?  The cat seems sentimental, even mawkish.  But it’s also unmediated, like a lot of July’s work: naïve, unknowing, embarrassing… even taboo.  She uses the cat to test the limits of privacy.  What is too private to be shared?  All the people in her films test boundaries of what is deemed appropriate: in terms of sex, or intimacy, the public and private self.  In The Future, two people in their thirties raise the question: do our lives have meaning?  They don’t have careers, or a family.  So they don’t have any of the usual signifiers of a well-lived life.  Instead, they seem aimless.  They can’t even be motivated to adopt an omniscient cat.

These characters could be seen as straw men by those who hate Miranda July.  They seem to embody the kind of navel-gazers who shop at Etsy online.  The fact that the woman is played by the director herself doesn’t help.  Nor does it help that her co-star has a haircut that bellows: ‘flake’.  It’s entirely possible to hate this film on the grounds that it isn’t about real concerns.  But I’m convinced Miranda July isn’t a narcissist, and that her films do contain deep truths.  Critics of hers use words like ‘twee’ in order to dismiss her.  They take her films at surface value: as equal parts girlish naivety and art world pretence.  In this way, she inspires the same scorn as Tracey Emin.  Both women are underestimated by those who accuse them of acting gauche.  Neither woman adopts naivety as a pose. 

Maybe ‘raw’ is a better word than ‘naïve’.  But ‘raw’ has connotations of anger.  It’s a masculine way of playing it straight.  Raw emotions can’t be soft…or so we’re led to believe.  You’re not meant to mix whimsy with what matters most.  That’s why so many critics get angry when Hamish Linklater stops time and starts talking to the moon (in The Future).  It isn’t the fantastical part which irks critics; it’s the sense of flightiness, of ‘girlie-ness’, if you will.  The sense that a starry-eyed girl is telling us a story and that only a fool would listen to it.  As if a unicorn had wandered into a poem by Sylvia Plath.  I think Miranda July does this kind of thing instinctively, as opposed to deliberately; not as a means to piss off critics, but because she genuinely believes that fey people are more honest about themselves.

In The Future (I do like writing that phrase), a woman leaves her boyfriend.  She moves in with an older, sleazier guy, who wears a gold chain around his neck so he can attract a certain kind of woman.  He’s a creep, but she wants him – so what does that make her?  She came to him because he was a sign-maker by profession.  She wanted him to make a sign for her, but she couldn’t specify what it should be.  Maybe he’s a sign that she needs help.  The movie seems to invite us to find him creepy.  But then again, he’s also the man who drew a picture that the woman’s boyfriend connected with.  He’s as lonely as anyone else.  So why should he be judged for trying to find fulfilment?  Isn’t the omniscient cat as creepy as him?

This isn’t a movie that says what it wants to say.  It’s flawed in execution, and it’s a lesser film than Miranda July’s debut, Me and You and Everyone We Know.  That said – it still stays with you.  It’s hard to shake the image of Hamish Linklater summoning the tide, or the little girl who literally buries herself up to her neck in her own back garden.  Both these people, in the film, are putting out signals that no-one seems to hear.  But it’s Miranda July who reaches out to them.  She takes the little girl into her arms near the end, and she reminds her ex-boyfriend of the love he’s almost forgot.  These scenes aren’t intended to be cathartic.  They don’t offer us resolution.  They’re there as a sign: Miranda July wants to converse.

 
When I was a kid I was obsessed with two things: Sherlock Holmes and the dubbed English language version of the Japanese TV show, Monkey.  Seemingly, these two things have nothing in common; one is about an aloof, analytical, brilliant English detective – while the other is about an Asian guy in make-up doing bad karate.  However, it’s clear from Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows that director Guy Ritchie has made a connection between these two, and the resulting film is exactly the kind of escapist nonsense that defined British television back in the eighties.  Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes is like magician David Blaine crossed with Chuck Norris, he’s a cross-dressing bohemian Kung Fu master who also dabbles as a sleuth.

Whether all this pleases Holmes aficionados is a dubious prospect.  In this sequel to the 2009 hit, everything is predictably engorged: the sets are more elaborate, the explosions are more gratuitous, the gay subtext is flagrant as opposed to demure.  The moment someone says “the Reichenbach Falls”, you can pretty much guess the climax.  All that’s left is for Holmes and Doctor Watson to do battle with Professor Moriarty.  This time, Holmes’ nemesis is plotting the onset of World War One, twenty years early.  He’s been nobbling arch dukes faster than venereal disease.  But the gloves come off when Moriarty poisons the lovely Rachel McAdams, reducing her from Holmes’ leading lady to a toxic cameo in the space of one scene.

What’s up with that?  Did Rachel punch Guy Ritchie in the balls?  She seemed perfectly adept as the “love interest” in the last movie.  In A Game of Shadows, her death doesn’t even rate a tear.  She seems to have been written out to make way for a feisty Gypsy, played by original Swedish Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, Noomi Rapace.  I for one was a bit thrown by this decision, as McAdams and Robert Downey Jr seemed to have real chemistry in the first Sherlock Holmes.  But such are the machinations of Hollywood, I guess, where one minute you’re second billing, and the next, you’re lying dead.  The rumour that Brad Pitt might take the role of Professor Moriarty is also proved misguided.  Instead, we get a competent turn from Mad Men’s Jared Harris.  He’s a less risky choice, obviously.  But there’s none of the frisson you would have got from watching Brad toy with Rob.

The movie is also one of the dingiest blockbusters of the year, with scarcely a scene that isn’t lit like they were using energy efficient light-bulbs.  I know London in the nineteenth century wasn’t exactly world-renowned for its air quality, or the brilliance of its illuminations, but you have a hard time seeing Holmes and Watson half the time, let alone discerning what they’re up to.  As director, Guy Ritchie appears to be asleep at the wheel.  This isn’t the same man who put a cattle prod to British cinema.  As sequels have a way of doing, somehow Part 2 has sapped everyone’s enthusiasm for the material.  There’s a journeyman feel to the story telling and execution, with very little that shows true passion for the tales of Sherlock Holmes.

I still can’t get over how they casually murdered Rachel McAdams.  Moriarty’s whole: “That’s gotta sting!” speech (where he confesses to the murder) doesn’t seem to ruffle Robert Downey Jr.  His reaction is more as if Moriarty had taken a whiz in his deerstalker, rather than offing the love of this man’s life.  Bunging-in a sexy Gypsy is no fit substitute.  She’s only there for the sake of the plot.  I wouldn’t mind, if she did more than pout.  But Noomi Rapace doesn’t seem to offer much beyond her unpronounceable name.  It’s symptomatic of the movie’s “that’ll do” attitude that they can’t even let Holmes grieve.  Knockabout fun and “bro-mance” are all well and good, but not at the expense of what’s best about Holmes.

Does anyone else remember Young Sherlock Holmes, from 1985?  It was Steven Spielberg’s attempt to kick-start a new franchise, with a teenage detective meeting a teenage Watson while they’re both at school.  I know it sounds crap.  I’ll admit parts of it were…not good (It was made during Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom phase, when he was going through a bad divorce and kinda being a bit racist).  But Young Sherlock Holmes got one thing right: when Holmes’ girlfriend dies, you know he’ll always be alone.  That made a big impression on me, aged seven.  The loneliness of the great detective… How tragic he is.  That’s the real Holmes; the Victorian gentleman who should have a Dragon Tattoo.

 
Aliens aren’t born; they’re made out of fear.  Sounds ominous, doesn’t it?  Well, don’t worry.  I don’t intend to write a serious review of The Thing.  Movie aliens aren’t projected out of existential dread.  Their origins are rarely so subtle, or enlightening.  Movie aliens are mostly crude manifestations of latent phobias…and blatant prejudice.  Think of the penis-shaped monsters in Alien, or the dreadlocks worn by the Predator.  Hate-filled extra-terrestrials are usually dreamed-up by hate-filled little men.  I’m half-way sure the new version of The Thing is surreptitiously homophobic (but more on that later).  It’s strange the way creatures from other worlds are always made out of the icky parts of things we find on Earth.

In the new version of the old story, a team of Norwegian scientists find an alien under the ice in Antarctica.  It’s 1982.  The alien appears to be made out of fangs, claws, suckers and sharp teeth.  Naturally, the scientists bring it home to defrost, and waste precious alien-killing time drinking and making toasts.  In a matter of hours, the alien wakes up, fires a tentacle through one guy’s chest, eats the guy, turns into another guy… And so on.  The scientists should’ve seen it coming.  John Carpenter made the exact same movie in the same location thirty years ago.  As you know, his version starred the great Kurt Russell.  And it was better in every possible way.  The only difference, this time, is that one of the tough guys is a girl. 

I love how, if you call it “fantasy violence”, you can do anything to people in films.  In the new version of The Thing, some beard-o gets his head ripped off roughly every ten minutes.   People are decapitated, eviscerated, immolated…and whatever they call it when a cadaver sprouts extra limbs.  The film is a splatter-fest.  It plays with viscera like a boy who doesn’t want to eat his spaghetti.  If you replaced every act of violence with a sex act, the movie would be banned.  That’s because film classification is nuts.  It’s ok to show a woman’s body tear itself apart, and for the bloody mess to start attacking people.  But it wouldn’t be ok to show the woman having sex; or for us to see a man’s penis… Unless it’s a psychotic, acid-spitting alien, with a head that looks like a man’s penis.

There are no scenes in the new version of The Thing to match the spooky paranoia of the original.  We don’t open with a huskie being chased across the Arctic tundra by a helicopter.  Instead, some Norwegian dude tells an incest joke.  Then a snowmobile falls into a crevasse.  We don’t get the laconic wit of the original script, where a man says – of a decapitated head on spider legs: “You gotta be fucking kidding.”  This new version comes with an abrupt, sort-of happy ending, followed by an awkward end-credits sequence which seeks to tie events up.  There’s none of the terse cynicism of Kurt Russell’s last line: “Why don’t we just wait here for a little while… see what happens…”  In the era of CGI, no-one bothers with the script.  It might risk distracting from the unspectacular.

Despite having a name like a suffragette, Mary Elizabeth Winstead is one of the better things about the new movie.  In keeping with the 1980s setting, she looks a bit like Phoebe Cates, the girl who broke hearts in Gremlins.  Knitwear doesn’t seem to dim her sex appeal, and she seems competent handling a flame-thrower.  She doesn’t get put off when her colleagues start gushing blood.  And she has a woman’s keen eye for men’s jewellery, which comes in handy when sorting out who’s human at the end.  It would have been nice if the script could have developed her character a bit more beyond “Sigourney Weaver clone”.  But at least she doesn’t have to strip for the finale.  You need a warm coat to fight evil in the South Pole.

Mary is important to the movie’s homophobic subtext, because she has to kill all the men who have become “infected” by the “virus” that means they “look like men” but are “secretly hiding something”.  Now, some people might say my theory is ridiculous.  But what was up with the original tagline for The Thing?  The one that said: “Man is the warmest place to hide.”  Didn’t that line have a kind of implied homophobia; the same way “Disco sucks” wasn’t only a criticism of the music?  The last man/alien to die in The Thing has a beard an ear-ring.  If he was wearing a Judy Garland t-shirt the symbolism would only be slightly more obvious.  I’m joking, of course.  But still.  Why does the Predator have dreadlocks?