Mangetout (but the wolves have no French nor Princesses)

Well, I couldn’t find any Brecht references to Capra or It’s a Wonderful Life. I guess he was too busy with his Galileo/ Charles Laughton project at the time. I wonder what a Galileo Christmas was like? Either it was total misery as the Church continued condemning his planets orbiting the sun theory (well Copernicus actually) or he laughed his head off at a world so blind to the obvious (I know how he felt living in London) and left a trail of ‘doo-dahs’ around the Church’s majesterium. Interesting Wonderful Life blog-a-thon and Imdb gives you the whole script online.

The initial New York Times review described it as “a figment of simple Pollyanna platitudes”. Maybe that was because of the NYT article Capra wrote in May 1946 Breaking Hollywood’s Pattern of Sameness. In a chapter of Capra’s autobiography The Name Above the Title he writes: “The first scientific statement ever uttered by men is credited to an ancient Greek philosopher who said ‘Man can never step into the same stream twice.’ God knows man does his best to piss off that stream. Was it Back to the Future or The Terminator where it was uttered that man cannot occupy his same material space in time? One could be very cynical, of course, and point out that the reason Clarence (the angel) ‘saved’ George was to get his angel wings back and get the hell off this planet. So that too was a ‘business’ arrangement. Nothing wrong with that but I’m just pointing it out. George fully intended to throw himself into the water and commit suicide - something he would have done had he not jumped in to rescue Clarence who he thought was drowning. Whichever way you look at it It’s a Wonderful Life is a fascinating and thought-provoking film. Believe in your own path, of course, but a dollar will always be a dollar. When those angels stop needing wings, watch out!

Channel Four’s This Is Civilisation (primetime Sat nights) written and presented by Matthew Collings has been widely criticised for its rather cynical somewhat-lacking-in-nutrition take on the world. It claims to be a riposte to its sibling’s BBC arts programming (though I can’t say I see the need to throw down a gauntlet) while at the same time being a respectful hommage re-mix of Kenneth Clark’s classic 70’s BBC series Civilisation. My feeling about Collings is that he’s quite a modest chap though obviously self-assured and opinionated enough to front an arts series. He is full of rhetorical questions and statements. Modern art is “our Delphic oracle. Know thyself,” he emphasises with a Barnett Newman painting looming behind him. “Life in the uncertain presence, this is civilisation...What will the future see when they look back?” As 5 million visitors traipse through the Tate Modern “obscurity has become glamorous” insists Colllings. “Civilisation’s models for authority have changed. The greatest irony instead of the highest authority....There is no high and low anymore, we are all below. In our world God can be anything...You must do something but you’re guided by nothing,” referring to Pollack and De Kooning. And Mondrian: “testing the idea that society can be perfected...what is purity?...it’s part of human nature to want to be shaped, to feel whole, to be connected to others.” Collings wasn’t too keen on Christianity but then it is a bit of a dying art in England these days. His passion for the art of civilisation was so that oftentimes he was almost breathless with excitement. Why jump off the bridge when you realise that most other sane people are contemplating the same thing (that’s me not Collings – his rhetoric didn’t quite go that far) only to realise it’s the same stream as before?

Where else but England would you get a Christmas No.1 contender We're All Going To Die(Malcolm Middleton)

And anyone for the BFI’s DVD Night Mail (Collector’s Edition)? Very pertinent as more and more Brits complain of their local post offices closures. There was a Royal Mail TV ad for their Broadband recently The People’s Post Office where they had to re-create a local post office for the shoot as there were none left. In another world there used to be two morning deliveries through your letterbox, but now you’re lucky if you get mail before midday.

Jesus Camp (was playing at the ICA) is a brilliant, scary Oscar nominated doco directed by Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady about an American evangelical summer camp Kids on Fire held at Devil’s Lake, North Dakota (true!) “Children are engaged in a war...so they have to be taught how to fight,” believes Pastor Becky. Soccor teams wear red badges imprinted with HWJC, ‘How would Jesus compete?’ The film’s stars are the genuinely nice kids Levi and Rachael. The mother home-schooling her child in the fallacy of global warming says, “We believe that there are two kinds of people in this world: those that love Jesus and those who do not.” In a class of confessions, one kid says, “It’s hard to believe in God. Sometimes I don’t even believe what the bible says...he makes me a faker,” as he opens the bible in front of him bookmarked by a dollar bill.

For sport lovers Bluebell Films (no link) have Real: The Movie (DVD) a part fiction/part doco directed by Borja Manso about the Spanish football club. It’s seen through the eyes of five strangers across the globe including New York, Tokyo and Senegal where the boy walks two days to get to a TV. Not very revelatory as a film but fun if you’re a fan I’m sure. Not much fun at all is Rise of the Footsoldier (DVD) directed by Brit Julian Gilbey about Carlton Leach (true story) his rise from football terrace to organised crime. None of Shane Meadows grim humour and sharp social observation here and definitely no Scorsese psychology and panache. There is a whole extra disc of extras though that I didn’t get to see and, as it’s Optimum Releasing worth watching I’m sure. Also for the fact that the production company Carnaby Films fund their films through small private investors who are also offered extra parts etc. You’re far better off seeing John (The Last Seduction) Dahl’s You Kill Me, a comedy/drama with Sir Ben Kingsley inimitably playing an alcoholic hitman who cynically tries rehab (it works) and gets a girl (Téa Leoni, a client’s widow from his day job as a mortician).

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Three very frustrating ‘who are we?’ films opened in the last few London weeks: Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth, Martha Fiennes’ Chromophobia and Richard ‘Donnie Darko’ Kelly’s Southland Tales. Fiennes (Ralph’s sister and he’s in it) fares best with her unfashionable subject of the more privileged Brit society and the more fashionable seeds of their own destruction scenario- the title originating from a digital art work in the film whose colours change according to ambient human frequencies. Fiennes goes a long way to ‘bringing off’ this film with its starry Brit cast (and Penelope Cruz) but in the end we’ve seen it all before. Which is a shame because she almost convinces us that we haven’t.

Last Party at the Palace (Channel Four) fascinating doco on the last Brit debutantes’ season in 1958.

And sitting through Coppola’s and Kelly’s films wasn’t that bad either and was certainly preferable to enduring London’s crowded Christmas streets. Shot on HD (high definition video) Youth Without Youth looks amazing (DP-Mihai Malaimare Jr.) but wallows in its subject matter. Perhaps he should have gone the ‘whole hog’ and been more operatic and Leos Carax like. And you keep thinking Kelly will ‘pull off’ his apocalyptic, LA soap-opera Southland Tales but with its exploding mega-Zeppelin finale of society’s ‘great and goods’ you’re just left wondering what all those singers on stage were going on about rather than being mesmerised. For any readers who know about opera production it was a bit like a Robert Wilson show (not literally) with all its stylized gestures but lacking Wilson’s input.

Disney’s Enchanted is an unashamedly sentimental operetta sending itself up rotten – big apple poison and all. We’re in Disney animated Andalasia replete with singing birds et al and Giselle (the adorable Amy Adams) looks like she’s finally nabbed her cardboard cut-out Prince Edward (James Marsden), instead of the ‘Ken doll’ she’s made (don’t you just dig the disgruntled caterpillar who ain’t gonna hang around and be the prince’s lips). The scheming queen (Susan Sarandon) has other ideas for her son and dispatches Giselle down the well to modern-day New York “where they are no happily ever afters”. Rescued by slightly morose single-parent lawyer Robert (Patrick Dempsey) she finds her feet if not her heart in the big city. Furious, the evil queen then plunges her ingratiating love-struck jester Timothy Spall (totally brilliant as always) down the wishing well on a mission to poison Giselle. Robert's new girlfriend Nancy (Idina Menzel) arrives one morning after his 6-year-old daughter Morgan (Rachel Covey) has convinced dad that Giselle should stay the night. Ooops. And you can guess what happens. Almost.

What is so beguiling about this movie is that for the most part it retains an inherent logic (as do fairy tales). Only towards the end when the evil queen appears at the ball, transforms herself into a dragon and makes off with Giselle to the top of a skyscraper à la King Kong does this slightly fall apart. When Giselle wonders what to wear for the ball wishing she had her fairy godmother, Morgan produces a gold credit card that “daddy says is only for emergencies”. The film works because New York is such an anything goes ‘whatever’ place that nobody is that much surprised by the appearance of a court jester, a chipmunk (sans his Andalasian vocab and NY voice squeaked by the film’s director Kevin Lima), and a prince and a princess in full garb. The songs are by Disney favourite Alan Mencken and Broadway stalwart Stephen Schwarz (Godspell). And the final Central Park scene is akin to something out of the musical Hair. No Marxist fairy-tale critique here but Nancy follows the prince back to Andalasia where, though mobile reception is great, she promptly trashes her phone in favour of her new prince’s lips. Aaah.

Christophe Honoré’s Les Chansons D’Amour is a very French film where the characters slide into songs by Alex Beaupain, the first few having a strangely Left Bank Lily Allen lilt. Honoré’s films always border on the edge of banal without ever falling in, which is what I think he fully intends. But you may find it all far too ‘French’ in spite of the good performances.

Half way through the animated Bee Movie it seems writer Jerry Seinfeld wants to offer us a critique of globalisation and corporate greed. Erin Brokovich meets Wallace and Gromit? Alas, no but it’s a fun film with great gags though a disappointment to many. Seinfeld is the voice of Barry B Benson who breaks the cardinal rule of talking to humans discovering through befriending florist Vanessa (Renée Zellweger) that humans steal and package honey and proceeds to sue mankind in their courts. At least in Antz and A Bug’s Life you believed in the world of these insects. In Bee Movie they’re exactly the same as humans with their Honex Corporation, cars and consumer lifestyle. If this were cleverer it may just have worked. Seinfeld is a classic car collector but the cars in Bee world look more like clapped out former East German ‘Trabis’ than aspirant stingers. No clever Cars animation here. But the film’s gags ARE good and numerous and not always over kids’ heads. They’ll probably love the bees flying the jumbo jet into land and for the adults gags like Barry the gondolier gliding with a straw in a cup of Vanessa’s coffee on a sugarcube.

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No gags in Claude Chabrol’s Comedy of Power (L'Ivresse du pouvoir - literally drunk with power) though Isabelle Huppert’s humourless examining magistrate succeeds in taking the smile off corrupt CEO Michel Humeau (François Berléand). Inspired by the French oil company Elf Aquitaine scandal described by The Guardian as “the biggest and most scandalous fraud inquiry in Europe since the Second World War” it’s familiar dark psychological territory for Chabrol but may prove a little lean for some of his fans. Nonetheless, superb performances and subtle cinematography from master Eduardo Serra with Huppert’s workaholic judge and splintered relationship wondering in the end whether it was it all worth it in an unchanging world.

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Mr.Majorium’s Wonder Emporium is the 243-year-old Mr.M (Dustin Hoffman, at times sounding like Donald Duck) of the title who wants to ‘give up the ghost’ and hand over his New York toyshop to his assistant (the very cute Natalie Portman). But the magical shop nor Portman won’t allow such impudence and throws a tantrum. The script is by Stranger Than Fiction’s Zach Helm and though Mr.Majorium isn’t that strange it’s full of heart and I was truly seduced into liking it if only because it puts all high street toy stores into the Room 101 of shame and boredom.

For an obvious clanging clash of religions, and supporting Collings’ opinions in Civilisation, is Beowulf. Whether ‘tis true to the Old English 1000 AD original isn’t really the point? Neil Gaiman screenwriter: “You can defeat your dragons. When everyone’s a hero, nobody’s a hero as in the David Bowie song.” “The gods will do nothing for us that we can’t do ourselves” goes the script. Great special effects with synthesized actor’s bodies and Angelina Jolie emerging from the watery depths in high heels reminiscent (though not with heels) of Peer Gynt’s warning ‘to thine own self be true’ and you’ve got yourself a youth film winner. They might even open the original text. Wishful thinking I know.

The Golden Compass (based on the first book of Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials) has been eagerly awaited and is thankfully not a disappointment. After Brit Anand Tucker left the project early on as director, many must have raised eyebrows at his replacement Chris Weitz of American Pie fame. But as with so many successful artists Weitz has many strings to his bow. Critics who’ve read the books have felt the film lacks their religious complexity. But the film is complex enough as it is and if you’re not familiar, then at times you have to concentrate quite hard to keep up. And whether younger audiences will really stay the course is debatable. Yet casting (Fiona Weir, Lucy Bevan – they rarely get a mention) 12-year-old Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards) with her Cockney accent, and around whom the whole film turns, will hook the youngsters if nothing else. She’s a girl with attitude, blazing her path for truth to the end. The Majesterium, as in Galileo’s time, wants to control knowledge. Lyra knows better and when her friend is kidnapped she journeys to the icy north with her ‘lie detector’ compass the alethiometer, a clairvoyance of good and bad deeds. Each character has a ‘power’ animal protector, a daemon, and the Majesterium is conducting child/animal experiments to separate the pairs. As with any first-rate novel you should really read the Pullman and create your own film. But be careful of your shadow.

And BBC Four’s The Martians and Us showed the Brits such as Christopher Priest and JG Ballard were just as good if not better sci-fi writers than their American counterparts.