Tom Salinsky

In the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood loved movies called “The Big Something”. These days it’s “American Something” (American Hustle, American Beauty, American Psycho, American History X, American Pie, American Graffiti, The American President, An American Tale, American Dreamz, Wet Hot American Summer et cetera and so forth). However, the title American Sniper is rather apt here, since Clint Eastwood’s uneasy meditation on Iraq is largely about being an American as well as being a sniper.

Two quick announcements before we proceed. Firstly, read on with caution – there will be spoilers. Secondly, this will be a rather indecisive review of a rather indecisive film. Okay. Ready, aim, fire…

Yet another awards-season biopic, this movie wears its true life credentials a little more lightly than The Irritation Game or The Theory of Nothing. Protagonist Chris Kyle is drawn from real life, but he’s nowhere near as famous as Britain’s beloved wheelchair boffin, or the Father of Modern Computing™. The first third of the movie is by far the most satisfying, build around a neat structural device as Navy SEAL Kyle targets a woman and child in the streets of Iraq and has to decide whether or not the object which they are carrying presents a threat to the American troops below. From here, we flip back to his youth, and young adulthood, but although the movie’s chronology darts all over the place, Director Eastwood doesn’t need captions or clunky dialogue to tell us where or when we are (four captions numbering off Kyle’s four tours of duty are all we ever get). Throughout his style is simple, economical and effective – with one exception as we’ll see.

Once Kyle becomes a grown-up, he is portrayed by a physically pumped-up but emotionally restrained Bradley Cooper. As a young man, chatting up Sienna Miller in a bar, and later in basic training, he is pinkly buff, like an over-inflated child’s toy, but as the war wears on, he becomes leaner, more grizzled. The bar scene is a neat one. Nothing very striking or new about it – you’ve seen similar scenes dozens of times before – but it’s hard to pick out a cliché in Jason Hall’s dialogue, and both stars give it life and specificity.

Once the narrative circle closes at the end of Act One, however, two things happen. The first is that the genre demands of a war movie start to make themselves felt. I have no idea how much of what happens in American Sniper is accurate, but I don’t have the same complaints that I had about the Turing biopic. Nothing in the Eastwood movie violates logic, but Kyle does quickly become a one-man army, taking charge of another division’s operations without orders, and uncovering hidden gun caches all on his own. And when we start narrowing the scope of the conflict down to a crazed war lord who murders children with a drill to the head, I can’t help but feel that the Prestige War is Hell movie has been hijacked by Rambo, or more aptly Dirty Harry. So, when a young marine starts showing off his new engagement ring, is it too much to hope that the improbably named “Biggles” won’t be next in line for a bullet? Bang! Yup, I guess so.

The second thing which happens is that we start flipping between Kyle’s life in Iraq and his life back home with wife Miller and suitably adorable kids. There’s a suggestion here that the emotional walls which Kyle has to erect in order to sustain his sanity in the madness of the war-zone make it impossible to fully function back in a domestic environment. His chipper, single-minded, simple-headed philosophy of “America first” begins to contrast quite strongly with the mess, chaos and lack of order he faces in Fallujah, and the pointless, saccharine quality of his suburban married life at home.

But while I admire the restraint shown in avoiding giving movie-Kyle the kind of full-blown melt-down, or colossal epiphany which real-life Kyle evidently did not have, as a movie experience it constantly simmers but never quite comes to the boil. This is perhaps why some viewers have read it as an anti-war polemic and other as a blood-soaked paean to the glories of warfare. Eastwood just gives us the story and lets us make up our own minds. This is an admirable stance, but a rather unsatisfying way of making a movie.

So, we avoid the movie-of-the-week cocksure young man who learns Important Lessons About Life and who Returns from the Theatre of War a Different Man rubbish, but we also avoid a third act. After a rather touching sequence in which Kyle befriends a number of injured veterans, the film ends very abruptly, as did Kyle’s own life. The circumstances of his death are unclear and don’t in any way form a continuation of the human story and thus are wisely omitted, and so the real third act of the movie comes twenty minutes earlier when the genre demands take hold completely, and we get an extremely well-executed and very suspenseful sequence in which Kyle makes an impossible shot to take out his Iraqi counterpart, and no doubt saves American lives by doing so. But he also calls attention to his team’s position and there follows a tremendous firefight and last minute panicky extraction in the middle of a dust-storm.

Well done though it is, this is pure boys own adventure stuff, which would not have been out-of-place in any moderate intelligent action thriller. The only bum note is the ridiculous CGI slow-motion bullet which whistles over a mile across an Iraqi cityscape, (which is the Eastwood’s one slip) but even without that, all of the complexity, both human and political, just drops clean out of the movie at this point.

So, what to make of American Sniper? Well, I’m certainly grateful that for all the compressing, simplifying and streamlining which is an inevitable part of the process of turning messy reality into a two hour movie, we haven’t ended up with something as plastic and hollow as the Turing or Hawking biopics. However, Eastwood only has himself to blame if people are reading the movie in a way other than he intended, since it’s very hard to work out just what he’s trying to say here. Kyle is altered by his four tours of duty, but less so (physically and emotionally) than many others we see and hear about. The Iraq conflict appears to be mismanaged and to lack any real coordination, but there’s no attempt at a Green Zone-style analysis of just how the point of going to war got lost somewhere between the politicians and the generals. And after that sparky bar scene, Sienna Miller just becomes “the wife” and the scenes with Kyle back home are frustratingly generic for the most part.

Bradley Cooper’s restrained performance fills in a few of these gaps – the contrast between the cocky young cowboy in his twenties and the sober veteran in his thirties is well executed, but quite what point Eastwood was trying to make I could not tell you. And whether this would have been a better or a worse movie if he’d make that point more clearly – well I can’t tell you that either.

As that concludes my viewing of the Best Picture nominees, let me have a go at a few predictions. After a generally rotten performance in most previous years, I did manage 100% success in our Oscars sweepstake last year, so here are my current thoughts about the top categories.

Best Picture must surely go to Boyhood. It’s the bookies’ favourite by a long way and is scooping up a lot of awards all over the place.

Best Director I’m not sure about. While these two awards often go in lock-step I have a feeling that Alejandro Iñárritu might have a better shot that Richard Linklater, simply because Birdman looks so stunning.

Best Actor and Best Actress are both pretty easy to call. Nothing the Academy likes better than a disability and so Eddie Redmayne and Julianne Moore both better have speeches ready.

Best Supporting Actor will very likely go to JK Simmons, and deservedly so. Best Supporting Actress I think might go to Patricia Arquette. She’s probably the best thing in Boyhood and she just scooped the BAFTA, so she must be in with a shout.

Best Original Screenplay is a tough one to call with Birdman, Boyhood and The Grand Budapest Hotel all having strong claims. I’ve got a hunch that Budapest is going to do well overall and it’s probably the best screenplay of the lot, as a piece of literature.

Best Adapted Screenplay is a touch more straightforward. If we discount the flabby boffin biopics, and remove too-controversial American Sniper and too-divisive Inherent Vice from the running, we are left with Whiplash which may benefit from the extra attention it got due to its bizarre placing int this category – but that might work out well for Chazelle.

My Star Trek movie reviews will resume next week, and I’ll also have a report on the ceremony and the winners and losers shortly after the big show on 22 February.

Oh god. If The Theory of Everything was bland then The Imitation Game is absolutely ghastly. Working with what is arguably a more compelling story, save that the central character’s failings are less conspicuous, it pours a high-gloss movie sheen over everything which almost completely obscures anything which might have been interesting about its central character or the events of his life.

The life of Turing is a bit easier to attack than the life of Hawking, from a structural point of view at least. Almost everything he did which is of interest to modern-day movie-goers, he did at Bletchley Park between 1939 and 1945, save for his prosecution for homosexuality in 1952 (or as the movie insists, 1951) and later suicide. Shamelessly ripping-off the excellent play and TV film Breaking the Code, with Derek Jacobi as Turing (both works cite Andrew Hodges’ book Alan Turing: The Enigma as a source but the new film doesn’t give playwright Hugh Whitemore even a sniff of a mention), the movie hops distractedly about through the same three different time zones (or four if you count the clunkingly melodramatic voice-over which keeps duplicating information given in dialogue) – Turing’s school days, his time at Bletchley and his investigation by Rory Kinnear’s honest Manchester copper.

Whereas Everything simply pretended that Hawking wasn’t a scientist at all for much of its running time, Imitation attempts to put Turing’s cryptanalysis front-and-centre but the rendition is laughably simplified to the point of near total ridicule. Knowing nothing about Turing’s life, a new viewer might conclude that he recruited young men and women who were crossword puzzle geniuses so that they could stand idly by and watch him build a code-cracking machine unaided which simple arithmetic would tell him is incapable or working fast enough to sort through all the possible combinations of German ciphers before they change them the next morning, but which he runs futilely every day until he is told for the second time that the Germans have a tendency to send similar messages on different days, whereupon the machine starts working and from that moment on decrypts all German coded messages without further intervention. Not only is none of that true, but most of it is absurd on its face.

Sitting at the centre of this mess is poor Benedict Cumberbatch, trying very hard to make sure no-one mistakes Turing for Sherlock. He certainly tries, giving donnish Turing a high, reedy voice with a slight lisp and none of Holmes’ demented swagger. It’s an attempt which is doomed to failure however, since the screenplay is so utterly determined to turn him into Sherlock in any case – historical veracity and internal logic be damned.

The supporting cast also show the same kind of bold outlines, bright colours and total lack of grace and subtlety, like that awful cartoon version of PG Wodehouse’s Blandings books on TV recently. Leading the way is the film’s sort-of love interest in the spindly form of Keira Knightley (fine) who solves Turing’s crossword puzzle test in three quarters of the time it takes him (why?), but thereafter restricts her involvement in the great work to being a winsome sounding board for the Eccentric Genius and having a vaguely unlikely (but possibly true) blasé attitude towards her fiancé’s homosexuality. Elsewhere, Graham Moore’s clunking screenplay manufactures a ridiculously blinkered baddie out of Cdr Denniston (whom Charles Dance somehow manages to play with a straight face), a smooth ally in Mark Strong’s General Menzies and a nice turn from Matthew Goode as Hugh Alexander.

For reasons which pass all understanding, the movie also finds it necessary to parachute in Soviet spy John Caincross as one of Turing’s colleagues, despite the fact that there is no evidence the two men ever met at Bletchley Park or anywhere else. But when we’re this far adrift from history – Christ, who cares anyway?

Look, I’m not saying that director Morten Tyldum should have made a documentary instead. Artistic licence is fair enough, and when it comes to biopics, I’m usually the first to say – more story and less Wikipedia-style recitation of facts please. One of the few scenes with any power at all is the dramatisation of the so-called Coventry Conundrum. In the movie, almost as soon as the first communications are successfully decrypted, our team of puzzlers can see from the positions of German U-boats that an Allied passenger convoy is in danger of attack. Before they can call this information in so that a warning can be issued, Turing stops them – pointing out that being able to break the enemy’s code is only valuable so long as they don’t know you’re doing it. Now, obviously, far more time would elapse before this dilemma was faced, and obviously decisions like this would be taken at a much higher level, but I don’t object to a movie condensing time and place and character like this, if the essential truth of the story is maintained (or, I suppose, if the false story is a helluvalot better than reality). This scene only dies a death ultimately because of the crass decision to have the youngest member of the team realise that – in a stunning coincidence – his brother is on that convoy, and start to blub. And thus a vital insight into the role of the code-breakers is reduced to maudlin and unlikely soap opera.

So I will take The Imitation Game to task for its lack of historical veracity, not because historical veracity is inherently a good thing, but because in this case the truth is far more interesting than the superficial nonsense paraded before us here. The film would have us believe that cracking the Enigma code was the work of one man, who in turn outsourced it to a prodigious machine which was the forerunner of the modern computer, and that the code when cracked required nothing more than the mechanical operation of the said computer. In fact, continuing to be able to interpret German messages was a laborious and on-going process which continued throughout the war, aided by Turing’s “bombe” machine (which he never called “Christopher” for fuck’s sake) and by other similar machines, including the Colossus which was the forerunner of the modern computer, but which Turing had nothing to do with.

The film would also have us believe that one genius was able to crack the Enigma machine, but actually in most respects the Enigma is a near-perfect encryption device, if used properly. The story of the defeat of Enigma is actually a rather more human story of operator error. Had the Germans been more aware of cryptanalysis, better trained or more disciplined, Bletchley Park would likely not have succeeded in deciphering their messages, machine or no machine. And that’s before we stop to acknowledge the Allied spies who managed to get a working Enigma machine back to Britain, without which Turing and co would simply have not known where to begin.

But none of this is of interest to Tyldum, Moore and co, who refuse to engage in any meaningful way with what Turing and co were actually doing, who let repeated platitudes sit where a theme should be, test our patience with five montage sequences (all on-the-cheap CGI unwisely mixed it with grainy newsreel footage), drown the worst of the dialogue with Alexandre Desplat’s sickly generic music, hope that the charm of the cast and their ersatz Richard Curtis-esque glib one-liners will carry us over the finish line, and if not, there’s always the sombre note of historical significance to give it a light seasoning of faux-profundity. How we laughed all the way to Awards Season. At this point I can’t even be bothered to be annoyed at the fact that the young cast don’t know how to pronounce “Euler” (possibly forgivable) or “ensign” (have they never watched Star Trek?), or that Turing’s school mathematics teacher stops in mid-proof (virtually mid-sentence) for the end, not just of the school day, but of the term.

The film can’t bring itself to depict Turing’s suicide, although Turing giving his team apples may be an allusion to his probable method of despatch. This scene is possibly the most outright ridiculous, where Turing – like an alien in a bad episode of Star Trek – asks Joan “what is ‘friend’?” and after she tries to explain, he awkwardly brings everyone apples and tells them a sort-of joke. Then they all stop despising and resenting him and start sticking up for him instead. Like you would. And we end with a reminder that Turing was pardoned in 2013 – a well-meaning gesture which had the unfortunate consequence of tacitly endorsing the thousands of other prosecutions for homosexuality in Britain.

Quite what the bloody hell this slack, lazy, syrupy, nonsensical farce of a movie is doing earning a nomination for Best Picture is anyone’s guess, but the nominations for Best Director and in particular Best Adapted Screenplay are completely ridiculous. The attempt to try and tie together Turing’s private life, mathematical game-playing, success as a cryptographer, philosophiser of mind and father of modern computing, while simultaneously devoting most of the running time to intrigue in Hut 8, was probably doomed to failure before it was even begun, even given that Breaking the Code had already done a pretty admirable job. Turing’s concept of a Universal Engine predated his work at Bletchely Park and the two have little to do with each other. His notion of the Turing Test, adapted from a party game called The Imitation Game, came after. This boring film has no room for either. It believes that it is comparing Turing’s keeping of secrets to The Imitation Game, but in the first place, this is an inapt comparison and in the second place, how could the naive audience member that the film is clearly aimed at be expected to work this out, given that the film never once tells us what The Imitation Game actually is.

Boyhood is certainly the most distinctive film in this year’s Oscar line-up, and in a year which includes Birdman, that really is saying something. In many ways, the two movies are polar opposites. Iñárritu’s film appears to have been shot in a single take, lasting the running time of the movie (although in fact there are numerous hidden cuts). Linklater’s appears to have been (and in fact was) shot over an extended period, lasting the amount of story time covered in the movie. Iñárritu’s film is stylised, surreal and metaphysical. Linklater’s is grounded, mundane and realistic. That they are respectively the most-nominated movie and the favourite for Best Picture says a lot about what a bold slate the Academy has put forward this year, in this category at least.

Before I sat down, I had some misgivings about Boyhood. A feature film cannot hope to sustain interest on the strength of its quirky mode of production, after all, and American coming-of-age sagas are not things which I generally rush to embrace. It’s not as if countless American sit-coms haven’t already given us the experience of watching young actors mature into gawky adolescents dozens of times before. The success or failure of Boyhood will thus rest on how interesting the individual segments are, and how well they cohere into a narrative – not on the fascination I might have with the decade-plus production schedule nor simply murmuring “my haven’t you grown,” each time we skip a few more months.

Strikingly, almost the first thing we see our three central characters doing is moving house. The family (six year old Mason, his mother Olivia and sister Samantha) moves three or four more times over the coming years/minutes and this gives the film a restless quality, always moving forward and rarely looking back. Early on Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) is the most engaging figure – quirky, precocious and funny. But she gradually cedes the film to Mason (Ellar Coltrane) who morphs from saucer-eyed little brother to shy pubescent to rangy, cynical young man while Mom (Patricia Arquette) tries to keep the family together.

Dropped into the mix is absent father Mason Snr (frequent Linklater collaborator Ethan Hawke) who initially seems like a pretty standard-issue deadbeat dad, but as future stepfathers will confirm, actually has a bit more compassion and smarts about him than first appears. Linklater is amazingly adept at picking out items of early-2000s technology which perfectly date the film without any need to explicitly mark the passing of time.

Of course, as the chapters go by, it becomes impossible to entirely forget about the mode of production, but as well as gaining the opportunity to see characters gradually mature and change without a sudden and jarring change in actor or inch-thick prosthetic make-up appliances, the nature of the shoot also dictates how the story will progress. The impossibility of keeping a large cast together means that whenever the Mason family moves, they almost always leave the entire supporting cast behind, never to be seen again. This is disappointing, since the opportunity to reintroduce forgotten characters, now transformed by the passage of time, would provide not only more structure but marvellously truthful moments, inaccessible to other films.

The gradually evolving screenplay also makes it hard for Linklater to plant elements which will pay-off later on, and this manifests itself in part in a reluctance to let the human drama become too dramatic. When Mason and his buddies are messing around with dangerous weapons, or when his step-grandparents give him a shotgun, we already know that there won’t be a fatal accident, because it isn’t that kind of movie. When Olivia’s second husband flings a whiskey glass across the room, it almost feels like a scene cut in from a more conventional melodrama.

The pay-off for this soap opera is all Linklater, however. Following Olivia’s desperate rescue mission to remove her kids from drunken Bill’s sadistic control, Mason complains bitterly about being sent to a new school rather than thanking her for her selfless bravery. And this is one of the things which elevates the movie. As well as most of the individual episodes being interesting enough to sustain the interest (while mundane enough to suit the tone), the issue of point-of-view is fascinating. Arguably, this is Olivia’s movie. Sure, Mason Snr also does some growing up, but mainly it’s the tale of how an aimless single Mom working a dead-end job and bickering with her ex about child support, grows to become a much-loved and well-respected psychology teacher with two grown up kids who adore her and no need for a man to define who she is. But we keep missing bits of this move because we at least mainly see it through Mason’s eyes, and so when she unexpectedly bursts into tears towards the end, we realise that we’ve only been on the edges of this story – and that’s really what childhood is like.

I have to be honest, though, I didn’t fall in love with Boyhood the way a lot of critics did. If you took the events of the film and wrote a novel instead, you’d have little more than a rather thin and uninteresting short story. Mason and his family are just barely individual enough to be interesting. Take away the fascination with watching the cast grow older and you do still end up with something which is frustratingly generic. A less “scorched earth” approach towards plotting might have helped, but as noted I think that may have been inevitable.

What remains however was almost never boring (only when Olivia’s third partner also turns out to be a drunk who is mean to her kids did I feel as if the movie was repeating itself), and so even if this isn’t one of those films I will keep going back to, I am certainly pleased to have seen it and delighted that Linklater and co were able to pull it off.

After the recent cycle of American guilt-porn movies, and given the Academy’s predilection for lumpen biopics, I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to Selma but I didn’t have much of a chance to right it off in advance as I saw it prior to its UK release courtesy of Odeon’s “Screen Unseen” series of surprise movies.

Whereas 12 Years a Slave was horrifyingly brutal but structurally flawed, and The Help was ultimately a bit too twee and winsome to really succeed as a cutting evocation of America’s troubled history of racial conflict, Selma being set barely half a century ago instantly feels far more relevant and the sickening violence in Ferguson and elsewhere gives it a grim modernity which its makers can’t have anticipated.

By sensibly focusing on a small period of time – the few weeks in 1964 between Martin Luther King accepting the Nobel Peace Prize and the march from Selma to Montgomery – the movie avoids the shapelessness which dogs so many biopics, and early on director Ava DuVernay is in total control of the material, juxtaposing King in Oslo, the shocking murder by explosive of four young black girls and producer Oprah Winfrey’s neat cameo as would-be Selma voter Annie Lee Cooper, where she pulls of the neat trick of combining stoic dignity with aching vulnerability.

As the movie settles down and we meet the rest of the cast, DuVernay’s camerawork becomes a bit more pedestrian. A magnificent crane shot towards the end is eye-catching but a most of the rest is unshowy, simple and just intended to capture the performances. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but a movie ought to full the frame a bit more than a TV show and from time-to-time Selma does feel a bit movie-of-the-week, with a little too much slo-mo and a little too much omnipresent syrupy music from Jason Moran. I’m not saying DuVernay should have gone full Michael Bay on this, but a more dynamic camera would not have undermined the story at all.

Where she does succeed is in marshalling a terrific cast, and balancing the sub-plots with the main story. Without ever taking energy away from the central thread, we get glimpses into the lives of King’s loyal followers such as James Bevel (Common), James Orange (Omar Dorsey) and Diane Nash (Tessa Thompson); we see the uneasy relationship between the two young men already working in Selma for voting rights; we see the earnest white folks who rally to the cause, not all of whom make it out of Selma alive.

It helps that we get some familiar faces in this sprawling cast like Lorraine Toussaint, from HBO’s Orange is the New Black and Wendell Pierce from The Wire, because we’re not done yet. As well as the law enforcement on the ground in Selma, we also have a brilliantly reptilian turn from Tim Roth as Governor George Wallace, and blink-and-you’ll-miss-them cameos from Cuba Gooding Jr and Martin Sheen, not to mention Carmen Ejogo who does a great deal with very little as King’s ever-patient wife.

There are a couple of loose threads. Dylan Baker appears in only about two scenes as J Edgar Hoover and irritating captions keep appearing which remind us that the FBI is spying on the Kings, while giving us further information we already know – but the FBI storyline never amounts to anything. Even more bizarrely, Nigel Thatch appears in exactly one scene as Malcolm X, is never seen to meet King and then dies off-screen.

Then main conflict then is between Tom Wilkinson’s rangy Lyndon B Johnson (fascinating to compare this performance with Bryan Cranston’s approach which I was privileged to see on Broadway last year) and David Oyelowo’s electrifying King. Pitting Johnson’s compassionate pragmatism against King’s fiery idealism is a fascinating dichotomy and the scenes between them are wonderfully handled. Being shamefully unfamiliar with the details of King’s story, I was struck by the shocking nature of his tactics – broadly to mount nonviolent protests in the hope that the other side will retaliate with violence. The movie is unafraid both to criticise this approach and also to consider the cost on King’s personal life as he knowingly puts young men and women into harm’s way in order to achieve a greater good, but ultimately it becomes clear that progress would be unlikely to be achieved in any other way.

Smartly surrounding him with a rich cast of supporting characters, DuVernay is nevertheless happy to let Oyelowo off the leash from time-to-time and my word does he tear up the part when he needs to. He is absolutely magnificent, embodying Dr King with fire and passion and integrity in a way which seems almost impossible for a British public school-boy to pull off. And a further hat-tip to DuVernay who is apparently responsible for writing new speeches for him to say, when the original Martin Luther King speeches were not available. That must have been a daunting project to say the least!

So, this is not the most ambitious film on the list, nor is it the most formally daring. But it is a compelling story, well-told, with a world-class performance at its centre and a deep pool of acting talent in support. That it was so widely overlooked by the Academy is absolutely baffling, particularly Oyelowo’s performance, and particularly the screenplay, if only for those astonishing speeches.

Warning – this review contains some potential spoilers

There’s no denying that Whiplash is an extraordinary film. What’s most extraordinary about it is how very, very close to being ordinary it comes. Here’s the set-up. Music student and aspiring jazz drummer Miles Teller, newly enrolled at a prestigious (fictional) music academy in New York hopes to be and is talent-spotted by martinet band-leader and conductor JK Simmons. Through his sometimes brutal tutelage, Teller develops his talent, but suffers mightily in the process.

I have to say, this set-up, neatly laid out in the trailer, did not inspire me with confidence. This is pretty familiar stuff. The older man whose ruthless and sadistic game-playing (while simultaneously firing off zippy one-liners) ultimately leads the callow youngster he takes under his wing to a greater understanding and eventual a rapprochement between the two. Off the top of my head, I can think of Scent of a Woman, every episode of House MD, Full Metal Jacket (only with a different ending), House of Games, and many sports movies including Million Dollar Baby, Rocky and (sort-of) A League of Their Own. You can probably think of more. Plus Shine sets the bar pretty high for musicians-who-push-themselves-to-breaking-point movies for me.

But if we must have another entry in the collection of demented mentor figures, let us at least have one played by JK Simmons who seizes the material with delirious glee – with a lesser actor in this key role, the whole thing might fall apart. He shifts effortlessly from laconic encouragement to full-on physical abuse, constantly keeping his young protégée off-balance, while continuing to manipulate, encourage and punish him to greatness. Teller, likewise, holds up his end of the bargain, giving poor Andrew just enough steel that we continue to root for him, and enough vulnerability that we fear he might fail. Teller’s Brat Pack good looks allow him to be laser-focused on his goal without losing too much audience sympathy. It’s a good job in a much less showy acting role, although his contortions behind the drum kit are amazing to behold.

But to understand what makes this film so extraordinary, it is necessary to consider (pace Julian Barnes) all the things which writer-director Damien Chazelle did not do. Anyone who has heard the set-up or seen the trailer will understand that the main conflict will be between charismatic but possibly loopy teacher and talented but possibly too feeble student and that the interest lies in seeing how each deals with the other, and who will end up on top.

Plenty of films would have built up at least one, if not both characters, before they first meet. They would show us Teller’s first day at school, establish his desire to be one of the great jazz drummers, clue us in on this school works, what power JK Simmons has (maybe his reputation precedes him), what competitions his band will enter and what the rewards are for doing well in them, and ease us into the story. Whiplash has no truck with any of that. Seconds after the company logos are off the screen, we get the two men’s first meeting, and already Simmons is playing mind-games with Teller. This is what you came for? Well, here it is, front and centre.

This ruthless efficiency certainly smacks of confidence in the material and the cast, and it largely pays off. There’s a pleasing lack of pedantry which, especially after the clunking Theory of Everything, is very refreshing. He picks the players. They play in competitions. It’s important. You got that? Okay, we can move on. But what’s also fascinating is that the nature of their interaction all centres on technical ability. Just like in a sports movie, Teller pushes his body beyond what it can bear, plunging bloody hands into ice water and then picking up the drumsticks again. But whereas you will hear the dread passive-aggressive phrase “Not quite my tempo” from Simmons’ terrifying conductor more than once, you hear hardly anything about the music and nothing about soul or inspiration.

You don’t even hear anything about improvisation, and this is a movie about jazz! The expected conflict between technical proficiency and playing from your heart simply fails to materialise. Good is good if Simmons says it is. It’s like being able to jump high or run fast or bowl a 300 game. When you can do it, everybody knows it. Okay then. And yet, the music itself belies that. Justin Hurwitz does an amazing job with the (entirely diagetic) score and Chazelle shoots the shit out of the practising, rehearsing and playing sequences which are edited with razor-accuracy by Tom Cross.

But while this lean approach pays dividends (the supporting cast is pared to the bone too – none of the other band-members really register, Paul Reiser is in maybe four scenes as Teller’s pleasingly rumpled Dad, and Teller gets a girlfriend only to dump her immediately to focus on drumming) it also has drawbacks. Finding the shapes so familiar, even though I was enjoying the bright colours used to fill them in, I pretty quickly constructed a road-map of the movie in my head, right the way up to the eccentric mentor’s eventual humbling followed by his little speech of self-justification.

However, removing all unnecessary material means the films burns through story pretty quickly and so we reached that point only around 70 minutes in. It’s in its final act – not so much a plot twist as an elegant narrative curlicue – that the movie finally did what I think it had been trying to do all along: it surprised me.

This is fine film-making, a little less adventurous in its construction than maybe its writer-director would like to admit, but rooted enough to feel real, brash enough to feel arresting and shot with real verve and brio. I somehow doubt it will last the ages, but it’s tight, exciting and grown-up cinema.

Black marks to my local Odeon (Camden) who allowed me to book online and pick my seats in their spacious, but misshapen Screen 1, and then without notice moved the film to their broom closet of a Screen 4 and stuck me in the back row, far left. However, kudos for politely and promptly refunding my money when I complained.

It’s the Oscars!

If you’ve any interest in cinema, you’ll probably have noticed that in the year of a major Martin Luther King biopic, Academy voters have delivered the least diverse slate of nominees anyone can remember. Every single one of the twenty acting nominees is white and every single director is a white man (okay, one is Mexican and one is Norwegian) and all of the 15 writing nominees are men. Given that the nominees (and indeed the winners) are decided upon by a secret ballot, there isn’t a whole lot anyone can do about this, but there do seem to be some pretty startling omissions, and Selma’s failure to get anything beyond Best Picture and Best Original Song (which somehow makes it worse) is chief among these.

Anyway, for new readers of this blog (because my delusion of readership is such that I find it necessary to subdivide my armies of followers into categories instead of, say, counting them on the fingers of a pair of mittens), every year I attempt to ensure that I have seen all the Best Picture Nominees before the Oscars ceremony itself. I first attempted this feat in 2010 (also the first year the Academy decided to nominate ten films instead of five) but couldn’t bring myself to sit through The Blind Side. I’ve not missed a movie since.

They now nominate between five and ten depending on how the voting goes and this year the total is eight, with Birdman and The Grand Budapest Hotel sharing the most nominations with nine each, although Boyhood is the bookies’ favourite to win the big one, despite having only six nominations in total. Even this list is overwhelmingly male and only Selma has a squeak of racial diversity about it. Every Best Picture nominee has a male protagonist and only one, The Theory of Everything, has a real female second lead (I guess you could make an argument for American Sniper or The Imitation Game). Look at the nominees for Best Actress – only Felicity Jones is nominated for starring in a film also nominated for Best Picture despite the fact that there are eight Best Picture nominees and only five Best Actress nominees!

This depressing trend aside, it’s not a bad list, although not a great one either, and at the time of writing, I have seen half of them, so watching the remaining four in the next month should be pretty easy. Here’s a quick list, with my preconceptions, review or a link to my review as appropriate.

American Sniper
w. Jason Hall (nominated), book Chris Kyle, Scott McEwen, Jim DeFelice; d. Clint Eastwood
Bradley Cooper (nominated), Sienna Miller

This has had some pretty poisonous press from the liberal media (i.e. people like me) so I’m not really looking forward to it. I don’t know an awful lot about it, but Eastwood is certainly capable of shooting humane and tasteful movies, so it remains to be seen whether this is sanctimonious gun-loving or a clear-eyed look at warfare or something in between. Also nominated for editing, sound mixing and sound editing, but not Eastwood for director. Just outside contention for the big prize I suspect.

Birdman

w. Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris Jr, Armando Bo (nominated); d. Iñárritu
Michael Keaton (nominated), Edward Norton (nominated), Zach Galifianakis, Andrea Riseborough, Naomi Watts, Emma Stone (nominated)

Marvellous, original stuff with terrific performances all-round, that manages to play games with reality while respecting the audience’s need for some kind of narrative through-line. My full review is here. Must be in contention for the sheer number of nominations (Keaton alas will be crushed under Eddie Redmayne’s wheelchair) but surely it won’t win?

Boyhood

w. Richard Linklater (nominated); d. Linklater (nominated)
Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette (nominated), Lorelei Linklater, Ethan Hawke (nominated)

Linklater follows up his, apparently on-going, After series with this extraordinary experiment in film-making, shot over twelve years. My question going in is – with limited ability to plot out the storyline in advance, will the incidents which make up the material of the film be interesting enough to justify the extraordinary commitment which went into making it? Heavy favourite to win, probably on that basis alone, but Linklater has strong competition for director in the form of Iñárritu and possibly Wes Anderson too.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

w. Wes Anderson, Hugo Guinness (nominated); d. Anderson (nominated)
Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori, Adrien Brody, Léa Seydoux, Mathieu Almaric, F Murray Abraham, Jude Law, Willem Dafoe

Marvellous ornate fantasy, very much in its director’s signature style, but with a bit more narrative drive and graced with a sublimely deft turn from Ralph Fiennes. Who knew he had such a lightness of touch? Certainly no-one who sat through his brittle performance as John Steed in the ghastly Avengers movie (not that one). I saw this and loved it when it was first released last February and failed to review it, but it’s terrific fun, it’s story-within-story-within-story puzzle-box structure allowing it licence to play far more fast-and-loose with logic and reality without the whole edifice collapsing under the weight of its own whimsy. Again, were it not for the sheer number of nominations, I would say it had no chance at all, but with nine, and that eleven months after its first release, it must be in with a shout, surely.

The Imitation Game

w. Graham Moore (nominated), book Andrew Hodges; d. Morten Tyldum (nominated)
Benedict Cumberbatch (nominated), Matthew Goode, Keira Knightley (nominated), Mark Strong, Charles Dance

The other crippled genius biopic, but Turing’s stammer and homosexuality may pale next to motor neurone disease and a tracheotomy. Still, Turing was trying to end a war, rather than ponder the rather more abstract mysteries which occupied Hawking’s mind. I haven’t seen it yet, but advance word is that’s rather soapy and I feel it’s unlikely to compare well to the BBC film Breaking the Code with Derek Jacobi. Very much in the also-ran category for Best Picture, but might just nick screenplay if it’s very lucky.

Selma

w. Paul Webb; d. Ava DuVernay
David Oyelowo, Tom Wilkinson, Tim Roth, Carmen Ejogo, Common, Wendell Pierce, Andre Holland

This one almost flew under my personal radar. I had expected to see Foxcatcher, Big Eyes, Mr Turner, Wild and The Gambler on this list, but almost failed to notice Selma sneaking under the wire. Maybe being released so close to the deadline hurt it? Or maybe it’s all those British actors in the cast, but for chrissake, if you can’t get an Oscar nomination for playing Martin Luther King, then you wonder why you bothered trying to master the accent at all. Is it any good? I’ll let you know in a few weeks’ time. Obviously has no chance at all at winning Best Picture unless the Academy voters are suddenly seized by white guilt (which I suppose is not impossible, but I’m still picking Boyhood at our sweepstake).

The Theory of Everything

w. Anthony McCarten (nominated), book Jane Wilde Hawking; d. James Marsh
Eddie Redmayne (nominated), Felicity Jones (nominated), Charlie Cox, Harry Lloyd, Maxine Peake, Simon McBurney, David Thewlis

Hugely disappointing, a ball-less and bland script squandering an awesome leading performance by Redmayne who will surely win, but it’s very unlikely to walk away with anything else.

Whiplash

wd. Damien Chazelle
Miles Teller, JK Simmons, Paul Reiser, Melissa Benoist

Another one which nearly slipped past me and the trailer made me fear the worst. I saw it last night and I will put my review in the next post.

A quick account of the other major categories. Best film, as noted, will be Boyhood, with best director a straight fight between Anderson, Inarritu and Linklater. Foxcatcher will likely get nothing, ditto Selma. Julianne Moore is probably favourite for Best Actress, with only Reese Witherspoon needing to bother writing a speech. In the supporting categories, things are a bit more open, as they often are. Both Edward Norton and JK Simmons have strong claims on the male side, while on the female side Patricia Arquette and Laura Dern seem to have the best chance, but it’s never wise to right-off Meryl Streep. Original screenplay I imagine will go to Birdman, although Boyhood and Budapest both have a shot. Adapted screenplay is a bit harder to call. Whiplash probably has the best chance at the moment.

My review of Whiplash will be here later today or tomorrow.

The Oscars are almost upon us. The BAFTA nominations were announced yesterday, the Golden Globes are on Sunday and the cinemas are full of beautifully framed suffering and gurning, which will shortly give way to the usual fare of explosions and solid jawlines.

In the last week I’ve crammed in three movies, at least of two of which I confidently expect to see in the Best Picture nominees come 15 January, all three of which I shall review here.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

After the slightly tedious An Unexpected Journey and the unexpectedly elegant and engaging The Desolation of Smaug, Peter Jackson’s sixth and final Middle Earth film is a rather ho-hum affair. Beginning almost immediately where the previous film left off (almost as if the material had been shot without anyone imagining there would a break of a year in between), the focus is all on Luke Evans’ anodyne Bard the Bowman who proceeds to almost immediately slay the fiery Smaug in exactly the way he said he would.

This brutally efficient, by-the-numbers style is the watchword for most of the film. After Gandalf is finally released from his “holding pattern” at Dol Guldur and after sufficient chat to bulk the thing up to a reasonable running time, the titular battle finally gets underway. Bonkers dwarf-king Billy Connolly is a bit of a treat and Richard Armitage’s mano-a-mano show-down with Azog works well, but the gigantic battle scenes contribute nothing we haven’t seen before and crucially none of the character drama really resonates, with Thorin’s re-emergence from “dragon sickness” disposed of in a few minutes with little more than a CGI pool of gold and a furrowed brow.

What’s particular disappointing is how little Martin Freeman gets to do. His performance was the saving grace of part one, the heart and soul of part two and his side-lining in the climactic instalment leaves the film without a happy centre. Still, I’d rather be him than, say, James Nesbitt who I swear gets two lines in the whole thing. A bit more Freeman and a lot less clumsy comic relief from Ryan Gage’s Alfrid Lickspittle would have gone a long way.

Birdman

One of the most bracing and exciting films I’ve seen in a very long time, Birdman deserves all the praise which is being heaped upon it. In a neat bit of self-referential casting, Michael Keaton leads as Riggan Thompson, Hollywood actor once well-known for his starring role in a series of extravagant super-hero movies, now attempting to show snooty Broadway theatre-goers that he is still relevant, talented and vital with a self-penned, self-directed adaptation of a (real) Raymond Carver story starring himself.

He is joined on-stage by his girlfriend Andrea Riseborough, a Broadway first-timer (Naomi Watts) and volatile supposed genius Ed Norton, gleefully following in Dustin Hoffman’s footsteps by playing up to his reputation as a difficult and demanding star. What sets this tale of desperation and personal need for fulfilment apart from the crowd is its casual attitude towards reality and the innovative shooting style deployed by director Alejandro González Iñárritu (that’s easy for you to say). Riggan is haunted by the voice of his musclebound alter-ego and appears to be able to – or believes himself to be able to – or fantasies that he is able to – alter reality with a single thought. Our first shot of him is floating in mid-air in the lotus position. He later apparently causes a light to fall on a recalcitrant fellow actor and later visits all manner of physical impossibilities on himself and objects around him.

While we watch these fantastic actors explore these great characters in this pressure cooker situation (I haven’t even mentioned brilliantly restrained Zach Galifianakis, an ice cold turn from Lindsay Duncan and a delightful cameo from Amy Ryan), Iñárritu’s camera swoops and circles and darts and dollies and never, ever (apparently) cuts.

The discipline of shooting the entire movie in a single take (although not in continuous time) makes it even harder to be certain about what is real and what is not, but this carefully calibrated ambiguity locates us inside Riggan’s head, as the camera crawls over Keaton’s panicky face, its sharp Batman contours now crinkled with a network of fine lines.

It’s not a perfect movie. I’ve had about enough of the cliché of real-acting-is-doing-it-for-real so when Norton starts drinking real gin on stage I rolled my eyes a bit – although, to be fair this is certainly on-theme. What’s much less satisfactory is Emma Stone as Riggan’s daughter who adds very little to proceedings, and when she and Norton start playing Truth or Dare on a balcony, the whole movie suddenly descends into after school special faux-profundity.

For the rest of its running time, however, the film remains bracingly original, constantly kept me guessing and even managed to pull off an obscure ending which doesn’t seem like a cop-out (it also includes a wonderful visual pun). Hardly stands a chance of getting the big prize, but surely it must be nominated – unlike the amazing percussion score by Antonio Sánchez which the Academy won’t even consider on the entirely spurious basis that the movie also includes some classical music.

The Theory of Everything

I don’t really like biopics. They’re very, very hard to pull off. Most non-biopic movies cover relatively short spans of time and those that attempt to work over longer periods need a great deal of discipline to find a central theme and hang on to it. When you are telling a true story of somebody’s life, there’s an apparent need not to leave anything out, so most biopics go from cradle to grave, with the result that we whip through key incidents and the overall effect is like reading a Wikipedia entry rather than being caught up in the reality of somebody’s life. Chaplin is possibly the worst example of this tendancy, The Social Network a particularly elegant way around the problem.

The Theory of Everything is blessed with an absolutely outstanding performance by Eddie Redmayne. Physically contorting himself like no other actor since Daniel Day-Lewis, he doesn’t so much impersonate Hawking as possess him. It’s sensitive, compassionate, funny, detailed, heartfelt and will surely win him Best Actor this year. It’s also a performance which the rest of the movie entirely squanders.

Telling the story of Hawking’s life means tackling at least three different narratives. The brilliant mind grappling with impossible problems of reality; the love story between young academics who don’t expect their marriage to last more than a few years; and the triumph-over-adversity story of a vital young man suddenly crippled by a life-threatening illness. It’s hard to pick just one of these and so my hope going in was that scriptwriter Anthony McCarten and director James Marsh would find a way of braiding these strands together which would somehow elevate all three of them.

In practice, the first story is all but ignored. There is maybe two minutes of science in the whole thing, most hilariously when a troupe of Cambridge post-graduates make a road trip to hear Christian McKay’s Roger Penrose deliver a lecture which would be elementary to a GCSE physics class, based on the thirty seconds we are allowed to hear. The life-threatening illness, brilliantly realised by Redmayne, is often the main focus but this is the least interesting strand being over-familiar in general from many, many similar movies and TV movies prior to this, but also because the details of Hawking’s condition are so well known.

And so, the love story forms the bulk of the movie, which is when the frantic skipping from scene to scene does the movie so few favours. Everything is trivial, glib, tick that box and move on. Why do we have to hear about Hawking bluffing his way through his viva at Oxford instead of taking the time to let that scene play out? Why do we jump from his first date with Jane to their wedding in the space of about ten minutes? Why do we never get a sense of who these two people are to each other, let alone as a couple? Hawking’s family is drawn efficiently and vividly, thanks in part to a lovely turn by Simon McBurney as his dad, but elsewhere the writer seems to be hoping that the cast will fill in the gaps and the cast seem to be hoping that the editing will fill in the gaps and the director seems to be hoping that enough stirring music will see him through.

How is it that a single film manages to be simultaneously so pedantic and yet also so coy? When we need to introduce possible cuckoo-in-the-nest Jonathan Jones (Charlie Cox, instantly forgettable), we can’t just show him giving piano lessons to one of the Hawking offspring, we first have to wheel in Emily Watson as Jane’s mum to laboriously explain to her that singing in the church choir is a Good Idea, then we have to have Jane creep mouse-like into the church just as the singing practice is conveniently finishing, then we have to have a lumpen conversation between the two of them – and so we exchange one telling, detailed, measured scene which would bring verisimilitude and texture to the story for three box-ticking snippets instead.

And yet at the same time, the film keeps eliding what’s actually interesting. The Hawkings’ sex life is included only by having Stephen and Jane embrace and then a cut to Eddie Redmayne cuddling a baby – not once but three times. And the potentially fascinating debates about the role of God in the universe are reduced to two quick mentions and one dinner table conversation in which C of E Jane is largely side-lined. That’s the other major problem with this film. Based on a book by Jane Hawking, it fails to realise that the story can’t be what is it like to be Stephen Hawking?, that’s largely unknowable in any case. But it could be what is it like to be married to Stephen Hawking? except that the filmmakers can’t bring themselves to cut away from their big-ticket item, the floppy haired one in the wheel-chair.

One particularly striking example is the diagnosis sequence. Hawking stumbles in the college quad, is taken to hospital where they perform a variety of tests and the young man is given his grim diagnosis. He returns to Cambridge and breaks the news to his bunk-mate Brian but when his then-girlfriend Jane tries to see him he refuses to talk to her. She is eventually given the news by Brian in a pub (we are not permitted to hear the dialogue).

But whose story is this? By never tackling this question, the movie is only ever able to give us the animated Wikipedia version, while steadfastly ignoring the colossally obvious point that every single fucking movie-goer is going to know the diagnosis before the characters do. If they had had the wit, the perspicacity – the fucking balls – to realise that this was Jane’s story, the whole sequence could have been played from her point of view. Her boyfriend has a mysterious fall in the quad but instead of just being patched up by the college nurse, he is taken away in an ambulance. In this pre-mobile phone age, she can’t get any information from the hospital, no matter how often she calls from the payphone at the bottom of her staircase. When Stephen eventually returns, apparently fit and healthy, he barricades himself in his room and refuses to talk to her. Imagine the confusion, the horror, the anger – and of course the ghastly dramatic irony because we, the audience, know all too well what’s coming.

What compounds all of these structural problems is just how fucking saintly everybody is. Hawking is unfailingly charming, funny, self-effacing and good natured – with the aforementioned brief strop the only moment where his disposition is anything less than sunny. Felicity Jones’s doe-eyed Jane is warm, supportive, patient, wise and deadeningly sincere, only leaving Hawking when he’s found flirty Maxine Peake to pal about with instead, and Charlie Cox’s Jonathan is essentially a tweedy martyr, tediously putting everyone else’s feelings ahead of his own. Where’s the vinegar? Where’s the tension? Where, for pity’s sake is the story?

At the fairly full cinema we saw this in, I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a damp eye in the house. When a film dealing with a wheelchair bound genius whose marriage is falling apart can’t even be bothered to be mawkishly sentimental, let alone attain any real insight, power or emotion, you know it’s really in trouble. Lazy, boring and trite, if it were not for Eddie Redmayne, this would have been utterly ghastly. As it is, it’s just dull.

The Marx Brothers are probably the most important comedy team in history. That isn’t to denigrate any of their peers, antecedents or successors, but just to acknowledge that they revolutionised comedy on stage and on film and their influence is still felt today.

Leonard, Arthur, Julius, Milton and Herbert Marx were born to German Jews in New York at the turn of the century. Their mother, Minnie, turned the four oldest boys into a singing act called the Four Nightingales, but when a touring gig went badly wrong, the four young men took their frustrations out on the theatre manager, tour booker and anyone else they could find to blame. The audience fell about laughing and so Minnie enlisted their uncle Al Shean (of Gallagher and Shean) to construct a comedy routine for them. Four distinct comedy personalities emerged and with them four nicknames which they eventually took on stage – Italian piano-playing Chico, mute harpist Harpo, fast-talking Groucho and now-forgotten Gummo.

The team hurled through vaudeville, took Broadway by storm and eventually arrived at Hollywood. Gummo at some point left the act and so baby brother Herbert was drafted in his place and given the arbitrary soubriquet “Zeppo”. They eventually made around 13 films (depending on how you count) from 1929 to 1949. The BFI is showing a selection of their best. Here’s a rundown of the complete Marxography.

1929: The Cocoanuts

Filmed version of their first Broadway hit play, made less than two years after Warner Brothers up-ended the motion picture business with The Jazz Singer. It’s almost impossible to say if the original stage version would have held up, because the film is so beset with technical problems. The probably-hilarious prison break is shot so poorly it’s almost impossible to see what’s actually going on. Even for the dedicated Marxist this is tough going, with a lot of the running time dedicated to an even more than usually tedious real estate / stolen necklace / young love sub-plot but Harpo is sublime throughout and there are some wonderful moments, including the fastest door-slam / adjoining room scene you’ll ever see.

1930: Animal Crackers

Their second Broadway play makes a much more confident screen outing, with Groucho in particular seeming much more at-ease. The first half contains a number of classic routines including Hooray for Captain Spaulding, the Bridge Game, Harpo Drops Knives and Take A Letter, all of which are absolutely hilarious but the plot takes grim hold for the last half hour which is almost a laugh-free zone during which everyone (except me) seems terribly interested in the fate of a stolen painting. It seems churlish to complain however when the first hour is so often so joyful.

1931: Monkey Business

Their first original and the only film in which they play “themselves”. Stowaways on an ocean liner is the perfect situation for the Marxes and neatly identifies what made them so unique. In the same situation, Charlie Chaplin or Harold Lloyd would emerge from hiding because a pretty girl had to have her honour defended, Laurel and Hardy would be unable to stay hidden out of sheer stupidity, but the Marxes want to get caught because being rude to authority is so much more fun than staying hidden. The Passport routine is just possibly the funniest thing ever put on film – but where is Margaret Dumont? And why does the film keep going after the Marx Brothers get off the ship?

1932: Horse Feathers

Groucho as a college president is a much less interesting situation than stowaways and TV censors have chopped to ribbons what was probably the highlight of the film – all four brothers trying to romance Thelma Todd. Even without the help of the censors, some very good scenes peter out with a whimper of a fade-out instead of ending on a good strong punchline. And the supposed climax is, again, a problem, being a very conventional football game with not enough Marx madness to distinguish it. On the other hand, the Speakeasy scene is fantastic and the film has some of Harpo’s best-ever gags.

1933: Duck Soup

Their most highly-regarded film, possibly correctly, certainly it’s their most concentrated with barely a hint of a romantic comedy sub-plot and with any number of wonderful scenes. Groucho has gone from hotel manager to feted explorer to college professor to running an entire country and – hurrah! – Margaret Dumont is back! But the traditional harp and piano solos are missing and much of the Harpo/Chico stuff with Edgar Kennedy owes more to Laurel and Hardy’s brand of tit-for-tat violence than the Marxes’ own style of mayhem. No doubt director Leo McCarey’s influence is at work – he was the guy who had the bright idea of pairing Stan and Ollie in the first place. Even the justly famous mirror scene is an old vaudeville routine given a thin Marx gloss. That said, the classic scenes when they come are amazing and no Marx film will make you laugh more consistently. It’s perhaps typical of this most perverse of all comedy teams that their best film is also in many ways their least typical!

1935: A Night at the Opera

Duck Soup flopped on its first release and cost the brothers their Paramount contract, but MGM snapped them up. Zeppo at this stage quit, fed up of being the under-appreciated straight man. This prompted the studio to ask if the three of them wanted to be paid as much as the four of them. “Don’t be ridiculous,” Groucho shot back, “Without Zeppo, we’re worth twice as much.” Wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg convinced the boys that removing the romantic comedy subplot had been a mistake (sigh) but he also spent months getting the comedy scenes for their new movie just right, and had the brilliant idea of sending the comedy scenes out on the road so the team could get the timing and the lines just-so. The result is that pretty much every comedy scene is a classic but – as with the earlier films – they now occupy only about half the running time. To be fair, now when the guy-that-nobody-cares-about sings a love song to the girl-that-nobody-cares-about, it’s with the full backing of the 80-piece MGM orchestra and looks gorgeous, but you’d still be tempted to hit fast-forward to get to The Contract Scene or The Stateroom Scene or The Bedroom Scene. Harpo’s presence is a little muted which is a shame.

1937: A Day at the Races

Opera was a smash hit and it was inevitable that MGM would try and get lightning to strike twice. The previous film suddenly became a template to be followed, and most of the films that came after it would try and recapture what made it work so well, including putting the comedy scenes out on tour before filming began. Allan Jones and Sig Ruman both return and the plots are eerily similar. A Day at the Races is fine, but many of the routines are not-as-good versions of previous scenes. Tootsie-Frootsie Ice Cream is good but not as good as The Contract Scene. Groucho’s introduction to the sanitarium is good but not quite as good as his introduction as President of Fredonia. Margaret Dumont’s examination is good but quite as good as the Passport Scene, and so on. The musical numbers are even longer and more boring than ever (the lavish water carnival sequence goes on for about a week – on the DVD I’ve got, even the film historian providing the commentary checks out while it’s on) and when Harpo gets mistaken for the angel Gabriel by a gang of Hollywood 1930s negroes, it’s enough to make you wish you’d never put the movie on in the first place. On the other hand, the twenty minutes in the middle with Esther Muir trying to frame Groucho is as good as anything they’ve ever done. Irving Thalberg died before the movie was complete and some say the Marxes’ enthusiasm for making movies died with him.

1938: Room Service

A real curio. A “straight” stage farce rewritten for the Marxes and the tension between the source material and the comedians playing it often shows. Why would Groucho Marx care if his play gets a backer or not? Isn’t there an authority figure he could spend his time insulting instead? Some of the blacker comedy plays oddly against the Marxes sunny pandemonium as well. The scene which gives the film its title is probably the best and – hey, look – it’s Lucille Ball. Their only film for RKO.

1939: At the Circus

Back under contract at MGM, they rattled off three films in three years. Each one contains at least something of note, but all three are depressingly ordinary most of the time. At the Circus is the least interesting of the three because what stuffy pomposity can the Marxes undermine when at a circus for chrissakes? Groucho now has to join his wig-wearing brothers to conceal his receding hairline, and those awkward negroes from Races are back. Margaret Dumont pretty much saves the film in the last third but before then we do get Lydia the Tatooed Lady which is a real gem.

1940: Go West

Somewhat of an improvement, with a crackerjack opening (albeit another riff on the Tootsie-Frootsie scene) and an amazing train chase at the end, but little that comes between is really worthy of comment. Harpo, who was once an invincible demon from another reality, is here mainly reduced to a doofus who just does silent imitations of whomever is talking, Groucho looks mainly bored and Chico ends up playing straight man far too often.

1941: The Big Store

All three brothers look a bit old and tired now – they were all in their fifties. Harpo and Groucho have a nice scene with Margaret Dumont at the beginning but most of the rest is pretty by-the-numbers. My favourite scene is the piano duet with both Harpo and Chico at the keys. They would reprise this act in their live show for years afterwards. Groucho has abandoned the toupee at least, for what was announced as their final film.

1946: A Night in Casablanca

But Chico’s gambling debts meant that when UA offered them a deal, they had to accept. Casablanca is quite a lot better than anything since Races and in a neat piece of symmetry sends Groucho back to running a hotel just like in The Cocoanuts. Sig Ruman from Opera and Races also returns (no Dumont alas) and Frank Tashlin adds some great gags for Harpo. If you can overlook the constant talk of death and injury, and try not to notice that Chico is now nearly 60, there’s some great stuff here, as well as some stuff obviously reprising earlier, better routines. What a great film to finish on.

1949: Love Happy

Planned as a Harpo film, Chico inveigled his way into the production and then the producers insisted on Groucho taking part too so they could market it as a Marx Brothers movie. He acts mainly as narrator, and nothing in the film is really that interesting, except an early appearance by Marilyn Monroe for five minutes towards the end.

If you really want to, you can count the very strange The Story of Mankind (1957) which includes all three Marx brothers but in different sketches, or the made-for-TV The Incredible Jewel Robbery (1959) which is a wordless Harpo-Chico story for 29 minutes and then has a surprise appearance by Groucho at the end – plus lots of TV appearances by one or two brothers at a time.

Which is the best?

If you want to watch a movie which is very funny all the way through with no longeurs, it has to be Duck Soup. If you want a professionally-made movie with lots of classic scenes, pick A Night at the Opera. If you want to know what the Marx Brothers were all about, watch Animal Crackers. If you want to understand them as a phenomenon, watch all three. And then all the others.

Now, that’s more like it.

Once again, with hindsight, what’s remarkable about Star Trek II is not so much that it set the template for the billion-dollar franchise which followed (although it undoubtedly did), it’s that Paramount was willing to make another movie at all. Actually, on paper that’s not so surprising. The film did make money – around three times what it cost to make – but it was hugely expensive. Disney’s The Black Hole, released the same year cost half what Star Trek The Motion Picture cost and it was Disney’s most expensive movie ever. But the reception from mainstream media and die-hard fans alike had been luke-warm. Did it really make sense to risk another forty million dollars to try again?

Enter TV producer Harve Bennett who confidently told Paramount bosses he could make five movies for the budget of the first one. After a year or two of script development going nowhere and staring down the barrel of a release date, Bennett sent for Nicholas Meyer who compiled a list of the bits-and-pieces people liked from the dozens of Star Trek II draft scripts and sat down to write the final screenplay, stitching all these disparate bits together, before beginning work on directing the movie, days later. These two men, neither of them familiar with Star Trek before they started work, saved the franchise, largely by completely and utterly ignoring the first film.

Meyer knew nothing about spaceships and future technology, but he saw the Enterprise as a sailing ship and Captain Kirk as Captain Horatio Hornblower. Ironically, Gene Roddenberry – who had by now been kicked unceremoniously upstairs – hated the naval paraphernalia and militaristic feel which Meyer gave to the Enterprise, but had himself used Hornblower has a frequent touch-point for the character of Kirk. Generally, Meyer’s reimagining of the Enterprise and Star Fleet through a naval lens works very well to create an impression of a colossal ship, manned by an enormous and active crew. Occasionally, he goes too far, such as when Kirk is literally piped aboard, or when photon torpedoes sit under hatches which have to be manually levered open, but these are tiny and easily-overlooked transgressions.

The whole look-and-feel of the film is vastly improved. The new uniforms strike the perfect balance between the colourful sixties jerseys and something which does actually resemble military garb, as opposed to pyjamas. They would still be in use for Star Trek Generations, a dozen years later. The bridge feels more like a submarine and less like the lobby of a futuristic hotel. The plot has the kind energy and drive so lacking in the first film, and the charm and humour of the characters returns, most noticeably in the early birthday scenes, but also throughout.

Despite – or possibly because of – the script’s mongrel heritage, it’s pretty much iconic scene after iconic scene. Playing into rumours of Spock’s death, Meyer apparently kills him off in the first five minutes as new crew member Lt Saavik struggles with the Kobyashi Maru scenario. Before long, Captain Chekov is facing down Ricardo Montalban’s fearsome Khan Noonien Singh, reincorporated from the original series, but that hardly matters.

Saaviki is also notable for actually making it to the end of the movie, but Paul Winfield as Terrell fulfils the usual role of doomed new cast member – in fact he does double-duty being both revealed as traitor and dying at the half-way point. Few of the rest of the cast get very much to do, but Bones gets a few choice lines and of course Leonard Nimoy gets to play a very real death scene at the end.

There are just a few moments where the film’s joie de vivre shades into smugness. On second viewing, it’s a little hard to understand just why Captain Kirk lets Carol and the rest continue to believe that they are trapped in the Genesis Cave with no hope of rescue, and the gag of the Reliant not bothering to look up or down in the final space battle in the nebula is a little hard to take seriously, but overall, this movie give us the space adventure we had so missed in the first film, and yet manages to be about something at the same time. Themes of age, decay, responsibility and obsession reverberate pleasingly throughout but never upstage the blood-and-thunder action and Montalban of course is an exceptional villain, gleefully chewing on Meyer’s theatrical dialogue.

What adds to the power of the film, and almost certainly secures its crown as the very best of the series, even thirty-odd years later, is that Kirk’s victory is so hard-won and comes at such a terrible cost. Spock’s death is meaningful, poignant and apparently permanent – three things it’s very hard to say about its karaoke re-enactment at the clumsy hands of Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and JJ Abrams recently.

Meyer might have cut back on the super-expensive transporter and warp drive effects, but he puts the money on the screen, re-using a few models and even model shots from the first film, and using then cutting-edge computer graphics to show the effect of the Genesis wave – a sequence which would become very familiar not only from its use and reuse in this film and its sequels but also as the iconic images for early eighties CGI in the movies in countless documentaries and behind-the-scenes TV specials.

Of course, as production neared its close, the whole cast and crew began to suspect that they might be on to a winner, and so rather than being the film that would shut the door on Star Trek, there was every chance that it might be only the beginning, and so Nimoy and Bennett hatched a plan to leave just enough of a thread to pull on if Spock needed resurrecting in Star Trek III – should that ever be made. This is done just gracefully enough that it doesn’t spoil the ending, and even that shot of Spock’s coffin on the Genesis Planet which enraged Meyer doesn’t bother me too much.

Pretty much perfect in every way, Star Trek II gave the series a future – without the Great Bird of the Galaxy who would soon turn his ambitions back to TV.

Facts and figures

Released: 4 June 1982
Budget: $11.2m
Box office: $97m
Writers: Harve Bennett, Jack B Sowards, Nicholas Meyer
Director: Nicholas Meyer
Producer: Harve Bennett

“You have your necessary illusions as well. But in your case they involve science. You don’t believe in magic but you believe in machines. So when he explained himself to you, he used your terms of reference. That’s the way a sorcerer behaves.”

Cat’s Cradle: Warhead by Andrew Cartmel

Opinions differ wildly about how much the current series of Doctor Who should be viewed as a continuation of what was started by Verity Lambert, William Hartnell et al in 1963 and how much it should be viewed as an entirely new series, like the Ron Moore version of Battlestar Galactica. Clearly this last point of view can only be taken so far, but it can’t be denied that structurally, tonally and in terms of its cultural impact, twenty-first century Doctor Who is a rather different beast than, say, the episodes produced at the end of the 1980s.

One way in which this difference is felt is at Christmas. While Christmas specials were a regular feature of UK TV, the nearest “old” (sorry “classic”) Doctor Who ever got was the misbegotten episode The Feast of Steven in 1965, sitting awkwardly in the middle of the lavishly bloody Daleks Masterplan. From 2005 onwards, however, Doctor Who has been the centrepiece of BBC1’s Christmas Day schedule, and these episodes are particularly tricky for whomever happens to be the show-runner.

Consider the constraints. First, it seems necessary to include Christmassy material. Second, it seems necessary to throw the tone lever away from “dark” and towards “romp”. Lastly, because the episode will have a wider and more diverse audience than usual, there can’t be too much mythology stuff – even when the episode has to introduce a new Doctor (The Christmas Invasion), write out an old one (The End of Time, The Time of the Doctor) or just tease us with the possibility (The Next Doctor).

Russell T Davies generally just threw the kitchen sink at the screen, an approach which sometimes paid off (Voyage of the Damned) and sometimes didn’t (The End of Time) but there’s no doubt that we allow greater leeway at Christmas. Steven Moffat has come at the problem from every conceivable angle. A Christmas Carol literally and avowedly glossed a festive classic, The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe tried to do the same with Narnia and then fatally bottle it, The Snowmen attempted to reintroduce a new companion and an old adversary and of course The Time of the Doctor had to write out Matt Smith, and pretty much abandoned all the tinselly trappings after the first ten minutes and the name of the planet.

Now, with the whole series rejuvenated, a new leading man with an appealingly anti-Christmas demeanor, it was with some excitement, but also a little anxiety that I settled down to watch Doctor Who Meets Santa Claus.

What we actually got is on the one hand a mash-up of quite a lot of familiar ideas. Not just the Troughton-esque based-under-siege stuff, also referencing Alien, but also lots of Inception, a fair bit of Total Recall and quite a lot of previous Moffat scripts including Silence in the Library, The Empty Child and Asylum of the Daleks. But on the other hand, the most assured, sleek, uncluttered Christmas episode in years. Maybe since The Christmas Invasion.

The opening with Nick Frost’s genial Santa Claus is charming and funny, with great supporting work from Dan Starkey and Nathan McMullen – but entirely baffling and confounding. The sudden post-titles cut to the Arctic base doesn’t clear up very much, but quickly it becomes obvious what kind of game is being played here.

When the words “dream state” are uttered in a Steven Moffat script, it surely can’t be very long before some serious narrative rug-pulling begins, and its entirely to the credit of this excellent piece of storytelling, that the rug is pulled from under us again and again and yet we are never in any doubt about what the threat actually is. All that’s missing (and I wonder if it was ever considered) is a Back to Reality style episode in which Clara is made to believe that her entire adventure with the Doctor was all an absurd dream. The Doctor’s comparison of his own ludicrous mode of transportation with Santa’s magic reindeer is the nearest we get. Danny Pink returns, still adding very little and that bizarre, pointless double-lie at the end of Death in Heaven is written-out in a quick exchange, rendering it even more unnecessary.

The four members of Arctic Base Nameless are sketched in briefly but are well-differentiated (in the way that, say, the inhabitants of the acid mine in The Rebel Flesh weren’t) with only Michael Troughton not quite registering (why is he the only one not to make it “home”?). And the trick of having not to think of or look at the Mind Crabs is another in Moffat’s line of childhood games made horrific (bringing to mind not only “I’ll give you a pound if you don’t think of pink rats,” but also Douglas Adams’ Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal “A mind-bogglingly stupid creature which assumes that if you can’t see it, then it can’t see you”).

The whole thing clips along very merrily indeed with Shona’s attempts to undermine Santa’s reality (“I got a second sled”) a particular highlight. Moffat also proves himself again to be a master of the show’s meta-narrative with the elderly Clara a perfectly plausible exit for the character, even if neither the make-up department not the actor could quite pull off the transformation.

So, after the derivative A Christmas Carol, the half-baked The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe, the impossibly saccharine The Snowmen and the flimsy nonsense of The Time of the Doctor, this is easily my favourite of the Moffat Christmas episodes. It’s easily worth four stars, but I’ll give it four-and-a-half because, well, it is Christmas after all.