Tom Salinsky

I haven’t seen Steve McQueen’s earlier efforts, Hunger (which friends of mine hated) and Shame (which friends of mine loved) and as noted in my earlier post, I was a little wary of guilt porn here. It’s not that the brutal horrors of the American slave trade need not be recreated on film, it’s more a question of what can McQueen add to what has been depicted already. Slim Pickens opting to save a handcart from quicksand but leaving his slaves to their doom in Blazing Saddles is shocking and funny, but Blazing Saddles was a long time ago.

The recent cycle of Hollywood movies examining America’s racist past has so failed to produce a major movie which wasn’t either twee (The Help), focused only on politics (Lincoln) or simply demented (Django Unchained) so there is maybe a need for a movie like this, just as there was, arguably, a need for Schindler’s List to be made, which almost trumps any conversation about the film’s actual merits as a piece of cinema.

Well, I don’t really think I’m sticking my neck out too far when I say that broadly speaking I think slavery was A Bad Thing and so I’m not surprised to have left the cinema sickened and horrified by the brutalisation of those poor unfortunate wretches who found themselves owned by other humans. But overall, I didn’t leave the cinema feeling that this was a magnificent piece of film-making. Important, yes. Necessary, possibly. Deeply felt, almost certainly. But free of flaw? That’s another matter.

The story, just in case you didn’t know, concerns one Solomon Northup, living as a free man in Saratoga, New York, who unwisely accepts the invitation of a couple of white strangers to come and play violin with them in Washington (where slavery is still legal). After imbibing a Mickey Finn, he comes to in chains, and is told that his name is now Platt and that he is free no longer. He is passed from owner to owner until, well, the title of the film kind of spoils the ending.

As might be expected, McQueen and cinematographer Sean Bobbit compose the shots wonderfully, holding on certain images for much longer than might be expected which gives them a stark beauty, even if what is being depicted is horrendously inhumane. And McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley assemble any number of individual scenes of tremendous power – the slave trader touting his wares, the plantation owner’s wife who hurls a decanter at the comely young slave woman who is her husband’s favourite, Northup desperately lying his way out of trouble at knife-point when his letters to his wife and children are discovered, and most shockingly of all, Northup forced to whip another slave to the point of death. Guilt porn? Maybe just a little, but McQueen’s camera – neither cold, dispassionate observer like Michael Hanneke’s, nor soaringly emotive like Spielberg’s – makes you feel every horrible lash.

However, where the filmmakers stumble is in their failure to successfully link individual scenes together to make arresting sequences. This is a film full of unnecessary stops-and-starts, with far too many one-or-two scene guest stars (Paul Giamatti, Brad Pitt, Alfre Woodard, Michael K Williams, Sal off of Mad Men) breaking up the flow. Almost no element of the story carries over from one scene to the next, and several key moments are robbed of their power, either because the context is missing, or in one case, the bizarre choice to show that moment as a very early flash-forward before the film has really got going.

It’s also striking to me that, in common with Schindler’s List, McQueen has chosen a very particular, very unusual slave story to tell, just as Spielberg didn’t want to tell a tale of everyday ordinary Auschwitz folk. Oskar Schindler’s perspective on the Nazi holocaust is utterly unique and the moral calculus which he performs gives a very specific lens through which to view the terrors of the Final Solution. In theory, Northup’s position does the same. Although many free black man and women were kidnapped by the slave trade, almost none escaped to tell the tale, and so Northup’s story is very unusual, and he also makes an excellent viewpoint character. How much easier for McQueen’s affluent, free audience to identify with a man who had everything they had but had it snatched away?

And yet the demands of the plot mean that we only very occasionally get this perspective. Northup is told early on – tell no-one who you really are, tell no-one you can read and write – and so most of the time, he looks and sounds like all the other slaves and this opportunity for a new vantage point is at the very least muted. That’s why it is so frustrating to see his early attempts at writing a letter thrown away as an unnecessary throw-forward. It’s also striking that his eventual release is dealt with in an almost perfunctory manner, in the last few minutes of the film, and his reunion with his family and rehabilitation after the agonies he has suffered provide none of the expected catharsis.

So, why is this and why does nobody else care? Well, there’s a perception that a well-crafted screenplay with neat set-ups and payoffs is formulaic or cheating. This I think is very far from the truth. Obviously, such a thing can be done badly and when the plot gears grind too loudly, one can no longer believe in the events depicted. But even to do this badly takes a lot more effort than what has apparently been done here – make a list of the noteworthy events in Northup’s 12 years’ incarceration and then run them in sequence until he is released. But maybe this stop-start, never building, never crescendoing quality is deliberate? Either to make the film seem more important, or to make it seem more authentic, or to give it the grinding, never-ending, soul-crushing feeling of a life in servitude.

None of these seem to me to be defensible positions. The Shawshank Redemption, for example, free of the perceived need to tell an important story about a terrible human tragedy manages to be authentically relentless, and well-structured, and even to include moments of grace and beauty which Slave can’t or won’t. And it’s not like writing the script didn’t involve making a thousand creative decisions about what to include, what to leave out, what to emphasise, what to overlook and how to paper over the gaps in Northup’s account. All of these choices certainly have been made – this is not a documentary and it certainly doesn’t suffer from walking Wikipedia entry syndrome like say, Behind the Candelabra.

Thankfully, this shortcoming ultimately does very little to undermine what is essentially a very fine piece of film-making. The performances are excellent throughout, with especial praise going to Fassbender and newcomer Lupita Nyong’o who I think must now be a shoo-in for Best Supporting Actress for her heart-rending turn as the luckless Patsey. But it’s on Chiwetel Ejiofor’s sturdy shoulders that the whole enterprise rests and he is nothing short of magnificent. When McQueen’s camera hangs on his face, impassive and yet hauntingly expressive, he is able to take the disparate bits and pieces of Northup’s life and somehow braid them together in the way he stares at the horizon. In those moments, the film achieves an almost terrible beauty and an almost unbearable sadness.

Edited 2/2/14 to correct some errors of fact and poor phrasing picked up by commenters – thank you.

As part of my now-annual January abstemiousness, I thought a potato curry might make a filling but low-calorie supper. Despite the fact that I was largely improvising with whatever I happened to have on hand, it came out rather well.

Sorry, the only shot I have is of the left-overs!

Ingredients

• 500g new potatoes
• Half head of cauliflower
• One can chickpeas
• Two medium onions
• 100g low-fat natural yoghurt
• 125g spinach
• 500ml chicken or vegetable stock
• Four cloves garlic
• One thumb-sized piece of ginger
• One green chilli
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp turmeric
• 1 tsp ground coriander
• 1 tsp garam masala
• 1 tsp medium curry powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp black pepper
• Peanut oil for frying

Cut the potatoes in 2cm pieces, separate the cauliflower into florets, slice the onion and measure out the spices. Note – the spices are what I had on hand, and I’m well aware that the garam masala and curry powder contain some of the other spices, but this came out so well, I wanted to record this particular combination.

Heat the oil in a wok and gently fry the onion until soft, about 6-7 minutes. While it fries, mince the garlic, ginger and chilli, and add them to the pan once the onions soften. After about another minute, add the spices, mixing well.

Add the potatoes to the spicy onions and mix well, coating the potatoes in the spice. Then do the same with the cauliflower. Finally, add the chickpeas, including their water, and the stock and bring to the boil. Turn the heat down and simmer for 25 minutes or until the potatoes are cooked through and the sauce has reduced and thickened.

Dollop in the yoghurt and combine. Check the seasoning.

Finally add the spinach and turn down the heat. Stir the spinach into the curry, letting the heat of the mixture cook it and wilt it down.

Serves four with rice. About 300 calories per portion (curry only).

If you want it vegetarian, use vegetable stock (I used chicken stock). If you want it vegan, omit the yoghurt. This is quite a mild curry. If you want it hotter, throw in another fresh green chili or some dried chillies along with the other spices.

It’s Oscar time again. Ladies and gentlemen here are the runners and riders…

The ones I’ve seen already…

Gravity

Tying with American Hustle for most nominations (ten, one more than 12 Years A Slave) it’s perhaps a little surprising to see this getting quite so much Academy love. Pared-back and innovatively-shot it may be, but it’s still essentially a blockbuster thrill-ride at its core. What’s even more surprising is that it hasn’t been overlooked in the “big six” department. Alfonso Cuarón is nominated for Best Director as is Sandra Bullock for Best Actress. To be honest, I don’t think it has much of a chance in any of these categories, except possibly Best Picture ironically. I wouldn’t give myself odds of better than 4-1 but since Paddy Power was offering 12-1 I’ve put a tenner on it. My full review is here.

Captain Phillips

Another one-person-against-the-odds movie (Robert Redford’s All is Lost didn’t get a nod), Paul Greengrass makes a huge virtue of his lean, documentary shooting style and Tom Hanks makes an appealingly unsympathetic hero – although his real-life crew insist that the real guy was even a bigger asshole – but what knocked me out is the total collapse of the Captain Phillips character when the ordeal is over. Tom Hanks’ raw, authentic, bewildered inability to cope with his recent experience is some of the very best screen acting I have ever seen and his failure to be nominated is utterly confounding – especially when antagonist Barkhad Abdi has got a nod for Best Supporting Actor. This is not to take anything away from Abdi’s performance which is very fine, but Hanks’ snub would be easier to understand if the Academy had failed to notice any of the acting in the movie. Anyway, this won’t win the big prize.

Philomena

A delightful, personal, and very moving film showcasing a completely different side of Steve Coogan, who abandons Partridge-style mugging completely to carve out a much more detailed and intimate portrait of a journalist whose compassionate zeal never tips the story into mawkish sentimentality. In fact the whole film pulls off a very delicate balancing act between humour, soap opera, detective story and politics. The detective story is the loser, but it’s by far the least interesting and necessary component. Judi Dench also gets yet another acting nomination. Nothing for Coogan as actor (which would have been surprising but not wholly undeserved) but the screenplay gets a hat-tip.

Nebraska

Alexander Payne continues an extraordinary run beginning (for me at least) with the brilliantly spiky Election, continued with the more subdued but still excellent About Schmidt, the splendidly freewheeling Sideways and the truly marvellous The Descendents which readers may recall I favoured over eventual Best Picture winner The Artist. Nebraska is a very, very simple story. In fact my only real criticism is how noisily the plot gears were grinding in the first twenty minutes to achieve its fairly straightforward set-up, viz – septuagenarian Woody Grant mistakenly believing himself to have won a million bucks in a sweepstake stops off in his old home town en route to collect his winnings.

As soon as we arrive in Hawthorne, however, we are off to the races as Woody reunites with old friends, family and rivals, most of whom are eager to get their hands on his new-found dough. Accompanied by his son (SNL’s Will Forte – a revelation), and eventually his wife (June Squibb, delightful) and brother (Bob Odenkirk), Woody drifts through much of the movie in somewhat of a senior daze, but this lack of desperate questing serves to give the rest of the movie time to settle. Much of the dialogue is peppered with one-liners, but nothing ever seems forced, except possibly the final pay-off which is just a little too neat.

Immaculately shot in cool, grainy black-and-white, this is a real treat and it’s great to see “little” movies like this and Philomena getting the Academy’s attention as well as the big spectaculars, all-star casts and “important” movies – see below.

The ones I haven’t seen yet…

American Hustle

A strong contender in the three horse race for Best Picture, only a year after Silver Linings Playbook, director David O Russell assembles much of the same cast and gets them nominated in all four acting categories again. I was dissatisfied with Silver Linings because I felt the ending sold the characters down the river. Early reports of this suggest that the plotting also goes awry towards the end, but we’ll see. Like Argo, this could make it if the Academy finds Gravity too frivolous and 12 Years A Slave too self-important.

Dallas Buyers Club

This is the one I know the least about. Part of the recent rehabilitation of Matthew McConaughey which began with 2012’s rather unsatisfactory The Paperboy, it also stars Jared Leto as a transgender character and follows the tale of a drug smuggler – not cocaine but untested HIV pharmaceuticals. It’s released in the UK on 7 February so look out for a full review some time after that date.

Her

One of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard for a movie, grinding through the unproductive furrow of the wretched S1m0ne, and the absurd Electric Dreams as well as the ghastly AI and the limp Bicentennial Man. I didn’t see Robot and Frank so maybe that was better. On the other hand, this is Spike Jonze who can usually relied on to be interesting, so let’s give it a whirl. It’s released here, appropriately enough on Valentine’s Day.

The Wolf of Wall Street

I can’t remember the last time I looked forward to a Martin Scorsese movie this much. I couldn’t get on board with The Departed which began by examining the mirror-image moral conundrums faced by a cop-turned-mobster and a mobster-turned-cop, then turned the movie over to Jack Nicholson who proceeded to Nicholson all over the middle third. After his character’s demise, the afore-mentioned moral conundrum is entirely lost in a welter of gunfire and bodies hitting the decks. It scarcely seems to matter what moral choices any of these characters make, today everybody dies. Completely pointless in my view. Shutter Island was diverting but ultimately a rather empty puzzle-box picture, and Hugo was very disappointing (full review here). This, on the other hand, seems to have a much clearer direction to head in, a crackerjack cast and – hey! – jokes! I doubt it will sweep the board though, in what is looking like a pretty strong year.

12 Years A Slave

And here it is – the bookies’ favourite and the likely front-runner, but it remains to be seen after Django Unchained, Lincoln and The Help how much more guilt-porn the Academy can take. It also remains to be seen if it’s any good. I haven’t seen either The Hunger or Shame but I’ve heard extremely mixed reports about both. 12 Years has been largely praised by critics and has done decent box office, but I worry that it will be too worthy and not engaging enough as a piece of narrative.

What wasn’t nominated

As well as All is Lost missing out, I had expected to see Inside Llewyn Davis get a mention and possibly August: Osage County. I feared that the execrable Blue Jasmine would appear and vaguely wondered if The Butler was in with a chance. Although I loved Saving Mr Banks and although the Academy generally appreciates Hollywood-devours-itself movies, that film always looked too… breezy to be in with a chance. In fact, the breezy parts I liked the best. When it attempts to wring psychological depth out of a piece of fruit, and when we spend endless tediously repetitive minutes cavorting with Colin Farrell in what is meant to be small-town Australia, I want to check out.

Other predictions…

If it all goes Steve McQueen’s way, and it still could, then Chiwetel Ejiofor has a good chance for Best Actor and McQueen himself for Best Director. Best Actress is probably going to Cate Blanchett – it’s hard to overlook such a stellar performance if, like me, you didn’t think much of the script. For people who liked the rest of the movie, it must have seemed virtually god-given.

As is often the case, the supporting nominations are a little more open. Michael Fassbender is probably the front-runner, again for 12 Years A Slave, but I wonder if Jared Leto might just nick it. For Best Actress, June Squibb must be a good bet. The Academy loves them some old ladies and if those old ladies are on film lifting up their skirts in a graveyard in order to taunt an old suitor in his grave, so much the better.

Best Director will probably go the same way as Best Picture, so if they give it to Alfonso Cuarón, and your bookie is still open, put a big bet down on Gravity immediately. On the other hand if, as seems more likely, it isn’t Gravity’s night, I can see these two awards splitting between Slave and Hustle although I’m not sure which way around is more likely.

Finally, screenplays and as usual we have two bites at the cherry as the Academy distinguishes (sometimes eccentrically) between original screenplays and adaptions. In the Original Screenplay category, I imagine American Hustle has it sewn up, and likewise I would expect Adapted to go to 12 Years A Slave. If, say, The Wolf of Wall Street pinches Best Adapted Screenplay, we could be in for some 3:00am surprises.

Okay, that’s where we’re at. More reviews coming soon.

My approach to obtaining television material to watch is currently undergoing a significant change, but before we get there, it might be as well to update you as to the continuing evolution of my set-up since I last wrote about this subject a little over three years ago.

First to go was the £30 remote which utterly failed the Wife Compatibility Test. It’s replacement, a Logitech Harmony One for £150, with its snazzy touch-screen, was deemed more suitable, but when repeated harsh treatment bust the snazzy touch-screen it was replaced with an even snazzier Harmony Touch and then more recently a Harmony Ultimate which allows for control of devices hidden in a wooden cabinet and also controls my Philips Hue lights.

When we moved into our new flat, a number of other changes took place. We got our own Sky dish nailed to the outside wall, avoiding all of those tedious single feed issues. I bought a cheap-and-cheerful Sony Blu-Ray/AV receiver which generally did a much better job of filling the room with 5.1 sound and so I eventually took the step of consigning the wheezing, puffing Windows Media Centre PC to the scrap-heap. Having experimented with a WD Live box which was hugely reluctant to access the files on my NAS drive reliably, I ended up with a Boxee Box shortly before they were discontinued. Despite the fact that no further updates will be forthcoming, I have yet to find online evidence of a device which will do a better job of getting a variety of video files off my NAS and on to my TV.

So, let’s recap. I want to accomplish three things. Watch DVDs and Blu-Rays. Watch broadcast TV (and time-shift it). Watch video downloaded from the Internet. The first two are easily covered by the Sony and Sky boxes respectively and the Harmony remote takes care of selecting all the right inputs. Let’s have a little talk about downloads.

Most of the shows I’m watching at the moment come from the USA and not all are promptly broadcast in the UK. Not just the premium “box set” dramas like Game of Thrones, Mad Men, and Masters of Sex but also mainstream network dramas like The Good Wife, sit-coms like Parks and Recreation and Community, and even some reality shows like Mythbusters or Kitchen Nightmares. It’s a complete lottery which of these will turn up on any of the various Sky channels, even though Sky’s On Demand service makes it easy to catch up on what you’ve missed.

Enter BitTorrent and, in particular TVTorrents.com. Within a couple of hours of the latest episode of Modern Family airing, a copy will be available on the site in your choice of compact .mp4 or hi-def .mkv file. I have an RSS feed set up with my favourite shows on it, so my laptop downloads the torrent file automatically, usually overnight, copies it over to my NAS drive, where the Boxee finds it, identifies it and adds it to the list of shows, downloading the episode title and synopsis, all ready for me to watch it that evening.

Now, Modern Family airs on ABC in the states which arrives free in people’s homes. So I’m not really depriving anyone of an income here, am I? True, I get an ad-free version, but I would skip the ads if I recorded it legally anyhow. Is this a crime? What about True Blood which airs on HBO in the states? Well, I would give HBO money to let me watch their shows if I could but they aren’t interested in taking it, so what choice to I have? Wait a year for the box set to come out? C’mon.

Of course, I could go to iTunes instead, but UK iTunes doesn’t have a complete (enough) library of these shows either. So, I’ll stick with the torrenting, please and thank you.

However, some notable torrent sites have bit the dust recently, and so it occurred to me to wonder what I would do if TVTorrents were just to disappear one day – in the middle of a particularly gripping storyline in Orphan Black, say.

Okay, now enter Netflix.

It certainly was convenient that the final half-season of Breaking Bad was on UK Netflix. But I didn’t have an easy way of getting it on my TV. Hooking up my iPad to the TV was possible, but not convenient and didn’t always work (seemed to be much more reliable with my iPad 3^rd gen than my iPad Air – not sure why). So I tended just to torrent it and watch it via the Boxee anyway.

But that wasn’t an option for the various Netflix original series – Arrested Development, House of Cards and best of all Orange is the New Black. And while it’s fun to snuggle in bed watching on an iPad, sometimes you want to take advantage of that big screen out there. And none of my existing devices – TV, AV receiver, Boxee, Sky – had Netflix built in. They all had streaming services of some sort, but not that one. Was it worth buying an Apple TV just for Netflix?

Well, I waited a while, but when at the last Apple event no update was released and Apple was knocking out the most recent model for £75 I went for it, using up the last remaining HDMI input on my TV and having to use an optical cable to get the sound to run through the AV receiver.

It’s very nice. Slick, fast and I have AirPlay back (which an update to the Boxee mysteriously killed) which means that when some of the various automated virtual moving parts in the TVTorrents – RSS feed – uTorrent – RoboBasket – NAS Drive – Boxee system fail, I can AirPlay from the iPad to the TV instead. Nice.

And – oh yes – I can get iTunes content on the TV now without having to hook up the iPad. Hmm…

So – here’s the thing. Only about a quarter of the American shows I watch regularly are broadcast on UK TV in a reasonable timeframe. But only about a third are available to buy on iTunes UK. Now, I’ve had a US iTunes account for ages (I wanted to download the Movie Trailers app which bizarrely wasn’t available in the UK app store. I think it is now.) although it doesn’t have a credit card associated with it. The reason being that while iTunes was perfectly happy to accept the fake address in Florida I gave it, I have no credit card registered at that address to assign to the account.

Surely there would be some way of getting cash in there? Actually, there is. There are plenty of services which will sell you US iTunes gift cards, and these can be delivered on-line giving you a line of credit to make purchases from the US store with. Now downloading the latest series of The Big Bang Theory is as quick and easy as a few clicks and my Rube Golderg torrent/NAS/Boxee system is starting to look obsolete. I’ve finally upgraded my home broadband to Virgin fibre-optic, so now I hardly have to wait before the episodes start streaming in full HD. And while I don’t have copies stored locally, I have access on my TV or any other i-device whenever I want and I can always download there if I need to.

Actually, that isn’t quite true. This is the most tedious part of a quite laborious post, but I’ll try and make it brief. The Apple TV, which only streams and does not store anything, is perfectly happy for me to have many iTunes accounts and lets me flick between them at will. My iPad however insists that it be “registered” to one account or the other and I can only change this every 90 days. While it’s “registered” to my UK iTunes account I can still buy individual episodes or movies or movie rentals on the iPad from the US store, but I can’t download items previously purchased and that includes newly-released episodes where I’ve bought a “season pass”. After some reluctance, I took the plunge and switched my iPad to the US store, leaving my laptop set up on the UK store (so I can download items previously purchased there and sync them to the iPad if need be).

Almost all my shows are now available to me, at a cost of between $20 and $50 per year, which I can live with, and I now have the benefit of being able to flip between the Apple TV and the iPad without losing my place. Neat. There are a couple of exceptions – US iTunes seems very slow to get Game of Thrones but Sky Atlantic doesn’t hang about so no problem there. And Saturday Night Live is only carried in an expurgated version, but honestly it’s so hit-and-miss I think I can do without seeing every single minute.

Telling the Apple TV I am using an American iTunes account also causes US apps to pop up, but these are largely useless. There’s an HBO app, but unless I can give it details of my US cable provider, no soup for me. What’s curious is the different ways in which different providers assess your location. iTunes only cares about the source of funding. Got an American credit card? Here, have access to the US store. Netflix on the other hand only cares about where you physically are on the planet. Set up a UK Netflix account and then take your iPad to the states and you will suddenly get access to the American version.

But, as I already know from using a VPN to get access to iPlayer in Europe, it’s not difficult to fool these apps into thinking that you are somewhere you are not. I wonder about the Apple TV Hulu Plus app…? With a bit of help from Unlocator.com, I had changed the DNS settings on the Apple TV and bingo! I was able to sign up for Hulu Plus at just $7.99 per month (via my US iTunes account) and get access to about half of my favourite shows including full episodes of SNL. There are unskippable ads, but they don’t last very long.

I lose the ability to download a show and take it with me, but if I opt to watch Community via Hulu and then want to take an episode on a plane, I can always pay $1.99 to download that locally on to my iPad.

Obviously this is more expensive than the torrent solution, but I feel better about giving something back to the content creators, even if I’m not always doing it in the way they want me to. And I do feel less at the mercy of the MPAA. Of course, I am now at the mercy of Apple and Hulu instead. But maybe that’s a subject for a future post.

In the meantime – that’s my new system. I’ll let you know how it pans out…

To begin with, the fiftieth anniversary was an extraordinary milestone, celebrated in style. The tweedily earnest Matthew Sweet documentary was lovely; the Mark Gattiss drama was charming and moving, if unseemly brisk; the Peter Davison red button extra was properly hilarious and the Paul McGann mini-episode totally unexpected and absolutely extraordinary. Over the BBC Three post-show party, I must draw a polite veil in the interests of propriety.

What then of the episode itself? Hardly the direct continuation of the Series Seven finale I thought we had been promised. You’ll remember, if not really comprehend, that the Doctor and Clara were trapped, seemingly forever, in some bleak landscape of the Doctor’s own timeline, with no possible means of escape, and facing a hitherto unknown Doctor whose baleful powers were terrible and absolute. Hell of cliffhanger to leave us on. And resolved by – ignoring it completely. Oh well, maybe they weren’t quite as comprehensively trapped as they had seemed. Maybe there was an escape pod (there frequently is).

What we do get is a lovely widescreened version of the original titles, a glimpse of Coal Hill School where Clara The Impossible Girl (I think that’s her surname), her baffling reason-to-be having now been discharged, is working as a teacher. For reasons not clear even when explained, Kate Lethbridge-Stewart finds it convenient to very, very publicly air-lift the TARDIS to UNIT’s top-secret headquarters in order to explain some plot.

And now we meet the other Doctors. David Tennant slips back into the role so effortlessly that it’s easy to miss that Moffat has fallen into the same trap as Bob Baker and Dave Martin, Terrance Dicks and Robert Holmes have before him. The returning Doctor is not written quite as we remember him, but as a rather broader, almost parody version. Tennant’s speech to the bunny rabbit is properly hilarious, but I can’t imagine RTD letting it through under his watch.

“The War Doctor”, as we must apparently call him, is more problematic for various reasons. Firstly, it seemed pretty obvious to me, and Moffat has now confirmed in interviews, that if Eccleston had agreed to come back, this would have been his part, and just as the “together, we’re a match for you” scene in The Five Doctors stumbles a little because Tom isn’t there, so too do the scenes of the three “modern” Doctors creak because we know one of them is a retrofitted interloper.

Far more damaging is the depiction of the Time War itself. As a phrase, as a concept, this fills the mind with all sorts of terrors and wonders. Once shown on the telly it looks like a video game. As another commenter pointed out, the Time War was introduced by Rusty to avoid all the continuity baggage of the Time Lords, but has now become that very continuity baggage.

Pretty soon, The Moment, cheekily played by Billie Piper, is chatting idly with John Hurt – which creates its own problems; surely the Eccelston Doctor would have recognised her in 2005 from this earth-shattering encounter? And before long all three Doctors are cheerfully shooting the breeze. There are some very, very funny lines here, some lovely nods to the fans and some signature Moffat touches with the sonic needing all that time to perform the calculations. And something about some Zygons. But around this point, I began to wonder – where is the urgency? Where is the jeopardy? Where is the threat? Have we finally put The Terrible Apocalyptic Time War on screen in order to turn it into a slightly dull undergraduate ethics class?

The problem is that the notion of wiping out Gallifrey in order to spare the universe, firstly is not adequately spelled out. It’s not really made clear what the Moment is going to do, nor what the alternative is. Secondly, the cost of either choice, not in terms of Universal Armageddon – such a thing is literally inconceivable and therefore undramatic – is not really apparent because the Hurt Doctor is so stoic. Compare his vague mulling over possible outcomes to the agonies which the Eccleston Doctor goes through in The Parting of the Ways as he attempts to decide whether or not to use the delta wave generator. It’s essentially the same plot device, but the extra power of the Davies’ version is hard to miss.

At some point, the Zygon plot rears its head again (even in 75 minutes it feels like there is at least one major plot-line too many here) and the solution provided is genuinely clever and arresting. Such a shame we can’t stick around to see the outcome. And then we pluck Gallifrey out of existence in a Blink-style manoeuvre in order to redeem the War Doctor while not quite unravelling the last eight years of television.

Quite apart from the fact that the entire Dalek fleet simply would not be eliminated in the crossfire, this is a shameless attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too. It undermines the very concept of actions having consequences. It undermines the whole idea of an incarnation of the Doctor who would do unthinkable terrible things (we never see this, the worst he does is graffiti a wall). It undermines the whole idea that the Doctor is alone in the universe. And it doesn’t even make sense.

The scene with the curator is lovely, (now you turn up, do you, Tom? Where were you in 1983?) and the Doctors Assemble shot is a magnificent summation of the series, if slightly-iffy effects-wise and it brings to an end a frustratingly uneven episode. The Fiftieth Anniversary Story had to be so many things to so many people it was almost doomed to fail. It had to be a love letter to the fans, in which it really did succeed. Just by putting Tennant back in the suit, it stood a good chance of doing that, but we got so much else besides. And it had to be an epic turning-point in the history of the show and to tell a really good story. It largely failed in both of these because the former undermined the latter. Take out all the Gallifrey stuff and have Ten and Eleven joining forces to battle the Zygons and you probably have a really good hour. Even with all the Gallifrey stuff, it might have worked if there had only been a greater sense of urgency – if Moffat had been able to make the awful choices faced by his heroes actually feel awful and then avoided that “with one bound they were free” ending.

But Moffat’s work is not yet done. The Christmas special also awaits in which supple, mercurial Smith must give way to Caledonian Capaldi. As is traditional, we start with a companion’s family. As is far from traditional, we also start with a slightly off-colour gag about the Doctor’s nudity. It’s odd that despite two return visits to Clara’s estate (see below) and the plot going to great lengths to remove Clara’s clothes as well, we never get the expected pay-off of both time-travellers returning to Christmas dinner in the altogether.

Thousands of ships are massing around a planet, bewilderingly identified as Gallifrey, later identified as Trenzalore – grave of the Doctor. Sepulchral voices demand to know “Doctor Who?” and so the Doctor has to go down and investigate. Clara and Eleven find themselves enveloped in a truth field, a startling idea which might give rise to all manner of best-kept-hidden secret hopes and fears but which is subsequently entirely ignored.

In fact, what they have discovered is a crack in time, the same crack which was first seen in Matt Smith’s debut episode, The Eleventh Hour, through which the Time Lords are now calling. Before this episode aired, Moffat promised that many unanswered questions would finally be addressed in this story. Good news, if like me you found the endings of the previous three seasons all utterly confounding. But we are no clearer now about what the hell was happening on the shore of Lake Silencio, or just how Amy Pond was able to reboot the universe by getting married, or what Clara Oswald was actually doing which made her so impossible. Instead, various elements of the previous three years are treated more like running gags to be mentioned briefly and occasionally connected to each other, while shedding very little light on anything.

The plot gears grind on and before long place the Doctor in a suitably impossible situation. If he speaks his name, the Time Lords will emerge and the Time War will start again. If he doesn’t the massed forces above will murder the people of Christmas. Unless of course, the Doctor bundles them all into his TARDIS and hides them away somewhere. It’s a bit of a feeble contrivance really, made more feeble by the fact that the murderous alien hoards as presented are so pathetic and easily-defeatable.

In yet another repeat of The Parting of the Ways, the Doctor tricks Clara into leaving not once but twice. It would be bad enough to repeat a story beat almost exactly, and with so little emotional cost; it’s unforgivable when that beat is lifted entirely from an earlier episode, part of whose function was also to regenerate the Doctor. Once again, see how much emotionally welly Russell gives to the Ninth Doctor abandoning Rose, and how little anyone seems to care that the Eleventh Doctor flagrantly breaks his promise to Clara.

That having been said, the scenes with geriatric Eleventh Doctor are some of the episode’s most effective. Old age make-up is always tricky, requiring expert co-operation between actor and prosthetics. Here, as the younger older Doctor (if you see what I mean) Matt Smith’s face sometimes looked unnaturally puffy, but the illusion of the older older Doctor I thought was superbly maintained. And what a clever device it was, I thought, to avoid the fact that Smith is so much younger than Capaldi, to age him almost to death before the regeneration occurs.

The cleverness of this idea is then immediately undermined by the final goodbye scene with the young Matt Smith. As nice as it was to see Karen Gillan again briefly, this scene was too maudlin, too late and had far too many final-sounding lines. Frustrating in an episode which didn’t seem to have time to pay off all its set-ups as it was.

For both these two episodes, then I have very mixed feelings. Professional standards are generally as sky-high as ever (although there was some nostalgically dodgy greenscreen work during the Doctor and Clara’s first entrance into the Mainframe) and the programme can now command top-flight actors in even minor parts – quick shout-out to Kayvan Novak as the voice of “Handles”, a lovely performance – all of the directors are working professionally within the show’s house style, so it’s all up to the scripts and while they both delivered in superficial ways, neither of them entirely made sense, lived up to their promise or created any truly memorable moments.

But, there it is. The Matt Smith era is done. Moffat has done all he is ever going to to tie up loose ends and resolve plots from this part of the show’s history. Having written some of the finest scripts ever for the Ninth and Tenth Doctors, and having cast one of the most unexpected and yet brilliant actors ever to have played the part in Matt Smith, who in turn has given us several stone cold classic episodes including The Doctor’s Wife, A Good Man Goes To War, The Girl Who Waited, The Crimson Horror, Steven Moffat can now leave the show in at least as good shape as he found it, with a strikingly different lead actor and – let us hope – a strikingly different approach to storytelling.

He’s what?

Oh…

This is a quick spoiler-free review of Gravity which I saw yesterday at the IMAX. A more thorough review, full of spoiler-y goodness may follow later. Or not.

So, firstly – believe the hype. Everything you’ve heard about these being the best space sequences, and especially the best weightless sequences ever shot – that’s all true. Almost every frame is stupefyingly convincing. IMAX 3D makes all the difference, I imagine this would lose a lot on Blu-Ray, or heaven forbid DVD.

And I’ve been pretty down on 3D in the past but here it’s used with remarkable taste and restraint. We got a trailer for The Hobbit before the movie and it had that awful cardboard cut-out look that so many stereoscopic movies have these days. In Gravity, apart from some flying debris, what you mainly get is depth – horrifying, unimaginable, inky, depth.

The storyline is lean to the point of austere. After a dizzying 12 minute sequence with no apparent cuts, all hell breaks lose when a cloud of debris ploughs in to astronauts repairing the Hubble Space Telescope. Minutes later George Clooney’s grizzled and loquacious old space-salt and Sandra Bullock’s wet-behind-the-ears scientist are the only survivors with no working shuttle to get them back to Earth. What follows is an amazingly contained and sustained ordeal as they struggle to make it back to Earth safely.

Director Alfonso Cuarón (who wrote the screenplay with his son Jonas) is extraordinarily rigorous about point-of-view, almost never showing us material which would not be visible to the protagonists, and only allowing such sounds as would be likely to transmit through spacesuits to be heard. In one groundbreaking shot, the camera drifts, almost lazily, inside Sandra Bullock’s helmet and back out again. What’s impressive is that this doesn’t seem like showboating, it’s a natural part of the visual grammar of the movie.

It isn’t perfect. Most of the technical quibbles are irrelevant to me, when they got so much else right. I don’t really care that the shuttle has been decommissioned, or that orbital mechanics make journeys from one craft to another much more complex than is depicted here. I’m sure the law and medicine I see practiced in movies isn’t accurate either. So what? But I do have some issues of pure audience credibility in the last few minutes.

And the tone wobbles a little in the middle. By making the bold, and probably correct, decision to avoid clumsy flashbacks to her life back on Earth, Cuarón as writer and director requires that Sandra Bullock’s back-story is delivered almost entirely in two brief dialogue scenes, at least one of which felt just a little forced. But Bullock and Clooney both do excellent work here – theirs are basically the only faces we see – aided by (of course) Ed Harris as mission control, voice only and precious little of that.

Gravity is an extraordinary achievement, a fine adventure story in a breathtaking environment, helmed with precision and rigour. I don’t know how much of it will live with me, but I’ve very, very pleased to have seen it, and delighted to see it get made. Such a strongly authored piece, with no franchise to back it (and it’s essentially immune to sequels) deserves to do well and it’s been killing it at the box office.

There is even talk of Oscar nominations – about which, more very shortly…

A decent session just now, playing with a variety of different partners.

Hand one

I pick a rather shapely 5143 hand with 9 HCP, not enough to open, but enough to bid 2S over their 1NT overcall. West responds with 3H and partner doubles which I assume is for penalties. Defending 3HX, partner leads the spade five to my Queen. I cash my Ace, noting (but not surprised by) partner’s discard. I lead my spade nine for partner to ruff and partner now cashes AK of trumps which defeats the contract, declarer winning the rest of the tricks. Not a bad result, but several NS pairs made 3NT, one doubled and one with an overtrick. Partner, holding AK of hearts should realise we controlled all four suits and with my 2S bid showing 10HCP could have bid game instead of doubling. 0.2 IMPs to them.

Hand two

Another shapely hand for me – this time with a five card heart suit and a spade singleton, but not enough to open, so it’s passed around to West who starts with 1NT. Partner passes and so does East, but I’m damned if I’ll let them quietly stack up seven tricks in no trumps, and partner could have quite a few points, and not have a suitable bid, so I try 2H, which is raised to 3H by partner, which becomes the contract. The defence start off with a low spade and dummy comes down with AKQ7 in spades, plus four good hearts. I cash the Queen (not the Ace – if I cash the Ace I will have to remember that the King and Queen are good later) and proceed to draw trumps, the missing Ace popping up on the first round.

Having no better return, West leads another trump, East showing out and I draw the final trump with dummy’s Jack. Now I’m a little stuck. I have two more top spades but no way to establish the seven. I have two more winning trumps, but that still leaves me two tricks short and it’s likely that the missing AQ of diamonds and clubs are all with West. Anyway, I cash the Ace and King of spades, since I can ruff any spade return, and lacking any other good ideas, I try the diamond finesse, but of course, my King is covered by the Ace. West follows up with the Queen which spikes my Jack, but West no longer has a good lead. More by luck than by design, I’ve executed an Elimination End-play. West has no spades or hearts left to lead and leading a diamond gives me a ruff-and-discard.

That having been said, West can still set the contract by one by leading another diamond. After my ruff-and-discard, I can try the club finesse again, but again it will fail and so the defence will take the setting trick. After a lot of thought, West actually lead the Ace of clubs. Now whatever happens, I will take the last four tricks.

At other tables, 1NT made and so did 2S for West, so our 3H making was very good. Two foolhardy NS pairs tried 4H, one doubled, neither making. 4.3 IMPs to us.

Hand three

With my flat 12 point hand, I open 1C since we are playing five card majors. Partner responds 1S but I feel I have no good bid over East’s 1NT overcall, and this is passed out.

The play is not especially interesting as the hands are very balanced. We make some diamond tricks, they make some spade tricks, but no-one even has a five card suit so no-one can get a suit established. Eventually they make it with an overtrick, which is a common outcome at other tables, although some pairs were held to seven tricks, so 2.5 IMPs away.

Hand four

Partner opens with a weak two hearts and I look down at 14 points but only three hearts myself and a flatter shape than I ideally would like. With a singleton or a void I would bid on to game, but with my 3352 hand, I just bid 3H over East’s double. West passes and so does partner, and East now goes on to bid a rather reckless 4C. With a third club to my King I might have doubled, but after partner’s pass I did not want to compete, so 4C it is.

I start off with a low heart which runs to declarer’s Ace. Rather than pull trumps, Declarer returns a heart and I win my King. Dummy is now out of hearts, so leading my last heart is pointless. Instead I switch to the diamond King (top of a sequence). Declarer covers with the Ace and prefers to take dummy’s last diamond instead of starting in on those trumps. So I’m back in with my Queen and try a spade which gratifyingly partner wins with the Ace. Even more gratifyingly, partner returns a spade to my King and then I give partner a spade ruff. That’s five tricks to us already, and when declarer leads the Queen of clubs from dummy, I win my King and that’s three down and 1.9 IMPs to us.

Hand five

Partner opens 1D and having no four card major, I raise to 3D, expecting to end up in 3NT. On reflection, 2C is probably a better bid. Since partner might have only three diamonds, I need to have five for the raise, and 2C is forcing so I will get another chance to bid while keeping the level a bit lower. As it is, partner bids 3H which I convert to 3NT, satisfied that we have all bases covered.

The defence cash two top spades and then try a third spade, presumably hoping to find partner with Qxx, but actually I have the Queen – but no more spades left. West is now sitting on two established spades, but that shouldn’t be an issue as I have nine top tricks now. I run through the clubs which spit 3-2 so I pick up the nine as well, and then cash three top diamonds and ace of hearts for ten tricks and 5.3 IMPs. One or two pairs made +2 and one even made 5C but several were messing around in part scores or defending an EW heart game undoubled.

Three pairs made only eight tricks in NT, all with North declaring. If East leads, the obvious spade lead creates a finesse of the Queen in dummy, allowing West to make five spade tricks off the top. And the sequence 1D – 2C – 2NT is a perfectly good description of North’s hand. In fact, arguably better than 1D – 2C – 2H because North should know partner doesn’t have four hearts or they would have been bid.

Hand six

Playing with a new partner, I pick up a flat 17 and open 1NT (playing strong no-trumps). Partner eschews transfers or Stayman and bids 2NT which I obviously convert to 3NT with my maximum-strength hand. I’m a little surprised to see dummy come down with ten high card points (suggesting a jump to game) and even more surprised to see four hearts to the Ace (suggesting Stayman). 3NT will need a bit of doing here.

West starts off with a low diamond, East tries the Jack and I play the Ace. I can only withstand one more round of diamonds so I need to be careful. As well as two diamond tricks I can count five club tricks and the Ace of hearts, that’s seven. The KQ of spades should be worth one trick and then I’ll have to try and do something with those eight hearts. Getting to work on the hearts is a priority, so I try the Jack which falls under East’s Queen.

East continues the diamond assault, but this time I play low, hoping to exhaust one opponent of diamonds before I have to play my King. On the third round of diamonds, I throw a spade and since West has followed each time, I now know that West only has the Queen left. North switches to a spade and when West plays the ten, I take the chance to win my Queen.

Back to the hearts now and I lead the five over to the ten which West wins with the King, but East has followed suit again. That means the outstanding hearts were 3-2 which in turn means that I can safely play the Ace and have a winner left in the shape of the lowly seven. However, it’s all too late. Getting here has taken so long and cost me so many tricks, that all West has to do now is play the Ace of spades, winning the setting trick for the defence. For some reason, however, West actually played the diamond Queen, which fell under my King, following which I cashed my clubs, crossed to my Ace of hearts and won the final trick with the seven.

In fact, as the King is singleton, playing out the Ace will win – as indeed it will in any situation other than one opponent having Kxx since I also have the ten. But it’s hard to know that at the time.

Even this miracle win wasn’t enough to get us positive IMPs though. Our 400 for 3NT bid-and-made is less than the 420 made by the dozen or more people playing and making 4H, some of them with over-tricks.

Here are two reviews of Star Trek into Darkness. The first is the review I would have written immediately upon leaving the IMAX cinema. The second is the review I would have written a week later.

Initial reaction

Now that’s how you do a Star Trek movie for the masses – in fact, that’s how you do a tent-pole, late-franchise blockbuster. Driving action, great character beats, well plotted and hugely entertaining. A genuinely hissable villain, who still gets some depth; fantastic set pieces directed with genuine brio; loveable characters with snappy banter; peerless effects work and – amazingly enough – a plot which basically makes sense all the way through. Even the villain’s evil plan makes some sort of sense! Add to this some for-the-fans kisses to the past and you have a pretty much perfect package. Only that silly name lets it down.

One week later

Fucking hell, what was I thinking?

Okay, it does look great on an IMAX screen, and the cast are basically all up for it – the new trio of Pine, Quinto and Saldana (no love for Bones?) are keenly aided by regulars Pegg, Urban, Cho and Yelchin. Guest stars Peter Weller and Benedict Cumberbatch understand what is expected of them and Alice Eve, I dunno, gets her kit off for absolutely no reason at all.

And yes, the big sweep of the plot makes some kind of sense, but all the details are badly handled. The opening sequence (oh, by the way – spoilers!) in which Kirk and co detonate a device to prevent a volcano from wiping out a primitive civilisation and in which Kirk demonstrates that violating the Prime Directive is worth saving a crew member for (especially if it’s Spock) is fine, except when you start thinking about it, which a week after I’d seen the movie, unfortunately I was.

So, let’s take it as read that for reasons unspecified, the Enterprise happens to be close enough to this planet to notice that a) the volcano is about to blow and b) the people on the surface are not technologically advanced enough to be able to survive. And let’s also grant that Spock, who is supposed to be on the side of non-interference don’t forget, agrees that interfering on this occasion is warranted, provided they don’t get caught. This is all pretty thin, but okay.

So, they will save the day with a magic anti-volcano device. I say magic because we are given no indication whatever about how it is meant to work, but it seems to be freezing or solidifying the erupting material, which means that the pressure will continue to build up. The Enterprise crew may have only bought the Tribe of Face Paint a day or two. But this preposterously advanced device which can manipulate matter in undreamt of ways, created by a civilisation hundreds of years ahead of our own has to be put there by a bloke and not sent in by a robot? We have pilot-less drones that can drop bombs on autopilot today – did we just forget how to do that in the 23^rd century? Okay, fine – who will we send on this unnecessary and incredibly risky mission? How about the second most senior bridge officer? Brilliant!

Oh, and that’s before we come to the Enterprise’s cunning hiding place – under the sea. On the day, this looked so spectacular, I quite forgot to ask how the rubbery fuck it got down there without anyone seeing or hearing it!? Like so much of this damn movie, it sounds good for a second, it looks great for a moment, but it doesn’t really mean anything or make any sense.

I could go on at much, much greater length than this – almost every scene makes this error in one way or another, (Federation top brass doesn’t sit behind bullet proof glass, that wasn’t what you said Trans-Warp was in the last film, sure let’s have these very suspicious torpedoes on board, Bones has cured death etc. etc.), but instead I’d like to touch on just two points. I’m even going to give the movie a pass on the whole villain’s-plan-was-to-get-captured-by-the-good-guys-all-along trope. Well, be fair, I gave Skyfall a pass on that too, and I’d hate to be inconsistent! (I even gave Skyfall a pass on Silva trying to kill James Bond by throwing a tube train at him, because – even on second viewing – I’m having such a good time with the movie, I’d far rather gape in happy stupefaction at the awesome spectacle, than gripe humourlessly about how, and why, one would actually set such a thing up. Suspension of disbelief has its limits, however.)

No, I want to talk about two ways in which JJ’s Trek is very different from Roddenberry’s (or Berman’s or Meyer’s for that matter). The first is that JJ goes to great lengths to make everything in the movie solid, tangible and physical. The bomb which Bones and Marcus (why Bones!?) have to defuse, for example, clamps Bone’s hand inside it; the piece of machinery which Kirk has to fix must be battered into alignment and so on. For a time I thought this was a plus, but it sometimes has the effect of making things which should be extraordinary and amazing, instead feel prosaic and ordinary.

In Stephen J Whitfield’s amazing book Star Trek: The Making of A Television Series, published after the second season of the original series went out, and which goes into fascinating detail about how this landmark show struggled on to the air, Roddenberry is described striding into the offices of the effects team and telling them that whatever method of propulsion the Enterprise used should look hugely powerful, but that he never wanted to see any rockets, plumes of smoke or anything familiar from current Earth technology. He then strode out, leaving the team feeling he had asked for the impossible. But the way the Enterprise moves through space is impossible and so it needed not to look ordinary. The glowing nacelles of the Federation fleet have been modified many times since then, but that wise dictum has always been adhered to.

Until now.

Now, when – following a scene of appalling carnage which gets completely glossed over – the Enterprise pulls out of a near-fatal dive, lots of absurd little rockets are seen firing out of the saucer section to keep the thing aloft. Suddenly, we have to confront the physics of what could possibly keep this colossal ship in the air, and the whole thing starts to seem entirely ridiculous.

To be clear – I’m not saying “Roddenberry said it and so it can never be changed.” Roddenberry said all sorts of nonsense, and TNG in particular improved dramatically when he stepped away. But I am saying that on this occasion he was dead right and JJ was so, so, so wrong.

Worse however is this film’s insistence on homaging Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan – probably the best of the Trek movies to date, with its only real competition being First Contact in my opinion (Voyage Home is fun, but it isn’t really a Star Trek movie and Undiscovered Country is hugely flattered by the films either side of it, but pales next to Khan). This trend started in the first JJ film, wherein we actually get to see Kirk’s completion of the Kobyashi Maru test.

A major theme of Khan (see, it’s a proper movie, it has things like themes) is whether or not Kirk can face a no-win situation. The Kobyashi Maru is an unrealistically tough simulation which Star Fleet cadets are put through. Facing a highly unlikely attack by super aggressive Klingon war-birds, rookie captains will have no choice but to abandon ship or be destroyed. Kirk, we learn in the 1982 movie, covertly rewrote the simulation so it was possible to win – for which he was awarded a special prize for initiative but, notes Spock, he thus avoided having to face a no-win situation which was the point of the test.

The 2009 film actually shows this incident, but whereas I had always assumed that the point of Kirk’s deception was to fool the Academy into thinking that their supposedly no-win situation actually did present a perceptive commanding officer with a way to win, here the simulation which Kirk plays out has quite clearly been altered. I had always assumed that he hoped to get away with it, and be thought an astoundingly brilliant commander, not a grubby-handed hacker. How would it help his career in any way at all to cheat in such an obnoxiously obvious way. Chris Pine plays the scene with apple-chomping insouciance which I imagine is supposed to be crowd-pleasing but in fact, since the rewritten simulation could have been beaten by a five-year-old, he just seems like a jerk; and because his deception is instantly obvious to all, it is entirely without reason.

Star Trek Into Darkness continues revisiting and traducing its far worthier progenitor, but here we go one step beyond dramatizing scenes we had previously only heard about (and in the process turning subtle character beats into farcical kids cartoon sequences). Again and again, the new movie repeats scenes from Khan but – wait for it – with a twist. Alas, on a second viewing my reaction shifts from being a happy chuckle of aren’t-I-clever recognition into the slightly seedy cough of a laugh on seeing a familiar scene from a classic movie largely and witlessly reproduced in the service of some ghastly spoof such as Scary Movie or Dracula Dead and Loving It.

Spock giving his life for Kirk was shocking, moving and meant something in 1982. Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto’s cross-cast karaoke version of the same scene is unoriginal, unearned, frustratingly impermanent (because Bones has cured death) and frankly laughable. What next? Will the next Pine/Quinto film give us the death of Spock’s son instead of Kirk’s? Then manatees instead of whales? God help us when we get to the fifth film, if we get that far. Must we endure bad photocopies of favourite scenes for movie after movie? What the hell happened to creating original plots?

And the name is still stupid.

JJ is moving on, of course, to Star Wars. We can only wait and see what he makes of that franchise.

Sorry to have been away for so long. I will put up a few catch-up posts now and in the next couple of days and try to get back on a reasonable blogging schedule shortly.

Kittens!

Fulfilling a long-held desire to be cat owners (that’s not how they see it of course, to them we are staff), we completed our current phase of home improvement and immediately went and picked up two adorable ragdoll kittens – sisters from the same litter. Here they are on their first day with us.

Ragdolls are a breed of cat developed by a slightly-more-than-usually-demented American cat breeder. They are known for their tendency to go limp and floppy when picked up (hence the name), their friendly and trusting disposition, their long-but-manageable coats and for being happy to be kept indoors – vitally important for a couple living in a second floor flat.

We named our two Mimi (after Emilia Lanier, the first Englishwoman to make a living as a writer) and Toast (after grilled bread). Mimi is the one with the white stripe on her nose – plump, lazy and contented with almost everything. Toast is the one with the white face and pink nose – she’s the eccentric who jumps on to the bed at 6:00am demanding playtime and who tries to clamber into the bathroom sink when I’m shaving. She seems to defer to Mimi if there’s competition over who gets her nose in the food bowl first though. Toast will sometimes sleep on my lap for a bit, if I pick her up and put her there, but neither of them go floppy when picked up as advertised – in fact they both start squirming almost immediately.

As if they weren’t adorable enough on their own, they often sleep snuggled up together, like this.

I am acutely aware that the Internet is already fairly full of cat pictures, and I’m also aware that while (almost) everyone likes kittens, there’s a pretty thin line between enjoying sharing your life with feline companions and being a Crazy Cat Person. For anyone else who is worried about on which side of this line they fall, here’s a quick check-list.

• If you call yourself “Mummy” or “Daddy” to your cats, you are a Crazy Cat Person. (Note if you provide voices for your cats, you are not a Crazy Cat Person, provided the conversations are witty and/or infrequent enough. If you genuinely believe you can understand what your cats are saying or they you, then you are obviously a Crazy Cat Person.
• If there are more cats than adults in the household, you are a Crazy Cat Person. No exceptions. Adults must be over 18. A couple can have two kittens. If you live on your own, you can have a cat. If there are three of you and you have four cats, you are Crazy Cat People. Not fair? Hey, I don’t make the rules.
• You may give your cat a human name like Joe or Susan, or a “pet” name like Patch or Whiskers as you like, but if you give your cat two or more names like “Lady Purrington” or “Sir Furball Kittychops Fluffbundle III” you are a Crazy Cat Person. Exception – if the vet pleases to append your surname to your cat’s name, that’s just an administrative convenience for them. You are not a Crazy Cat Person.
• If you put your cats in any clothing more elaborate than a collar, you are Crazy Cat Person – obviously.
• If you cook food only for your cats to eat, you are a Crazy Cat Person – even on Christmas Day.
• You may have photos of your cats on your phone, or on your computer, but no more than one small one on your mantelpiece, and definitely none in lockets, or portraits in oils. If they sneak into family portraits, that’s okay.

I don’t think making lists of criteria regarding who is and who is not a Crazy Cat Person in itself makes you a Crazy Cat Person. At least I hope not.

Here it is then. The big one.

I wrote at length about what Doctor Who season finales have become and need to be this time two years ago, so won’t go over all that again. I heard it said recently that a fair reviewer should be trying to tackle the following questions. What was the thing under review trying to do? How well did it succeed? Was it worth doing? To try and tackle the first of those questions, let’s go back to Blink.

Blink is a bit of a miracle in Doctor Who terms. A Doctor-light episode created to solve the problem of shooting 14 episodes in a schedule designed for 13, which Moffat agreed to do to make amends for pulling out of the two-part Dalek story. It’s an elegant puzzle-box of a story which stands entirely outside the continuity of the season and the series as a whole (bridging the gap between Martha’s early and late adventures with Ten) and thus accessible to new and old fans as well as casual viewers. It introduces a new enemy with a genuinely creepy and novel mode of attack, it is terribly funny when it wants to be, it is terribly sad when it wants to be and the resolution is properly thought-through and satisfying. And it gave the world Carey Mulligan (sort-of). It’s pretty much perfect.

And Moffat isn’t exactly unaware of this fact. The Weeping Angels are almost the only monsters he has created and then brought back again. We’ve never seen the Nanogenes, the Clockwork Robots, the Vashta Nerada, the Atraxi ever again, and the Silence were created as villains to sustain a season-arc. And the puzzle-box structure of Blink is evident in a lot of the stories we’ve seen since Matt Smith took over – much more than the love story structure of Girl in the Fireplace for example.

So, here we are at the end of another series. What kind of resolution is Mr Moffat ready to provide, and can it possibly match Blink? Well, it depends what you mean by resolution.

Blink provides a number of puzzles to be solved. How are the Angels able to move without being seen? What has happened to Kathy and why? What about those DVD “Easter eggs”? All of these are given proper, coherent answers, but answering those questions isn’t the same as resolving the predicament. That’s done when the TARDIS dematerialises from inside the ring of Weeping Angels, each of whom is suddenly staring another in the eyes, locking them in stasis forever. It’s a completely logical extension of what we already know about the Angels and it’s entirely obvious – as soon as it happens, but crucially not before. The emotional resolution doesn’t come until Sally takes Larry’s hand. Blink works so well because all three resolutions are present, clear and delivered adroitly.

But lately, Moffat has been mistaking resolution of puzzles for resolution of plots and has been putting puzzles ahead of people. He’s always been a daring formalist but it’s starting to lead him wildly astray.

Let’s take this step-by-step.

First there’s that prologue. Full of fan squee, but some bits work better than others. The colourised Hartnell looks very awkward, and it’s a shame that the Troughton and Pertwee footage is of them looking a bit doddery in The Five Doctors and not when they were in their prime. The extras in funny clothes actually work much better. But it’s hard to say at this point what it all means – what it’s all for.

The meeting of the Paternoster Gang, plus Clara and River, in Slumberspace, is great. Full of Moffat wit and dash, with a hint of tension and pathos too. “I think I’ve been murdered” – golly! (Such a shame she was reset so quickly.) They all meet up at Trenzalore – the one place a time traveller must never go; their own grave. Not sure why that should be. We’ve seen people visiting their own graves before – in fact earlier this series – and there was not so much as a Blinovitch flash, let alone a gang of Reapers. This feels grafted-on.

Much, much better is the Doctor’s tomb – a bloated, ruin of a Police Box, victim of size leakage. Absolutely lovely. And then, oh look, it’s REG as the Great Intelligence once more. Except wasn’t it Ian McKellen who was the Great Intelligence? And why the Great Intelligence anyway? A couple of minor skirmishes on Earth and that was it for ten or so incarnations. Even the Judoon have been in more stories. It might as well have been the Ogrons.

REG needs the Doctor to say his own name to open the doors. Moffat, whatever I think of his approach to Doctor Who lately, was never going to volunteer this information because there are only three options, all awful – his name is “Doctor Who”, his name is “Steve” or is name “Zanthanzanzibarthollberrytrumpettitorpergraviformaquizotl the fourth”. He finds an elegant way of dodging it, and – behold the tomb of the Doctor.

REG jumps in and is able to… actually I don’t know what he’s able to do. Presumably not kill the Doctor in any of his earlier incarnations, because then the current version wouldn’t exist either. But even foiling the Doctor’s foiling of his opponents results in his own death more often than not and sometimes it results in the end of the Universe. So REG has been just generally getting in the way? Helping the bad guys out here and there? Tipping them the wink that they had better watch out for this Doctor feller, but making sure they don’t actually kill him or blow up the universe? Why?

Inevitably, Clara goes after them. So, I guess we do have a solution to the puzzle. Clara is the impossible girl, is present in the Dalek Asylum and Victorian London, looking and sounding like Clara because she entered the Doctor’s timeline. That’s the beginning of a solution to the puzzle, but it’s nowhere like as easy to understand as the Doctor inserting Easter Eggs into the DVDs he knew Sally Sparrow would one day own. And what does it mean for all those earlier adventures?

I thought at one point that every previous companion had some aspect of Clara in them. Moffat has been writing an any-companion who is now Every Companion. (Don’t believe me? Try switching the casting of Carey Mulligan and Jenna Louise Coleman. Doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference does it?) This would make some sense of this entering the Doctor’s time-line business, but makes no sense at all of her appearance in Asylum and The Snowmen. And is at odds with that teaser sequence. On the other hand, the teaser is at odds with every single other episode of Doctor Who we’ve ever seen. And what about the episodes with modern Clara in them? If there is a shadowy timey-wimey ghost Clara looking out for the Doctor and Jo Grant on Peladon, the Doctor and Leela on Pluto, the Doctor and Rose on Satellite Five – is there also a ghost Clara looking out for the Doctor and Clara on Akhaten?

So, we kind-of get the answer to the puzzle, except we’ve waited over half a year for it instead of thirty-odd minutes. But we’re no nearer to resolving the threat – if anything the answer to the puzzle has obfuscated what the threat actually is. And there’s no emotional resolutional at all. Clara is a shape to fit a hole. She isn’t a person, so why would I care when she jumps into that hole and fills it? A shame too that this episode had to be tied to the two rottenest episodes of this half-series, Ringpiece with that godawful leaf and Journey with its appalling reset-button-that-wasn’t.

And then, suddenly John Hurt appears and it’s a cliff-hanger ending.

Wait a minute, how is John Hurt a fucking cliff-hanger ending? Far, far too much of this series has been trying to get an emotional response from the viewer out of casting. We are meant to go “squee” when we see Jenna Louise Coleman in Asylum of the Daleks, when we see REG in The Snowmen and now when we John Hurt as Not-The-Valeyard-Please-Anything-I’ll-Give-You-Money-Anything. But within the context of the story it means nothing at all.

Okay, look, I didn’t hate it. The Paternoster Gang are still a joy and still well-used. Fanboy that I am, I did grin stupidly at that pre-title sequence, the journey to the Doctor’s tomb did feel suitably epic and Richard E Grant is a good actor, well cast, who mounts a credible threat. River’s reappearance as her digital self post-Library­ is a neat spin on the character and Matt Smith is as good as ever. Even the slack editing has been given the week off.

But as far as a star rating goes, well it’s impossible isn’t it? This is all build-up and no pay off. All tickling and no laughter. Which is fine, except that the tickling started in October 2011 in The Wedding of River Song and now we have to wait until November 2013 for the supposed resolution.

I wonder if it will ever come?