Tom Salinsky

For the 2012 Season, Mr Moffat has promised us a mini-movie every week, but so far neither has really lived up to the billing. Not only because of the presence of the archetypal returning foe, in the shape of the Daleks, but also because of the shenanigans involving Jenna Louise Coleman, and the ongoing Rory/Amy soap opera, Asylum of the Daleks, good as it was, felt much more like the latest episode in a continuing saga. Dinosaurs on a Spaceship was much more self-contained, but it just felt too ordinary to earn the title of “mini-movie”. A Town Called Mercy might just qualify however.

It helps that we get to drop the Doctor and co into a fresh genre. Westerns have only been attempted rarely by the series, with the most notable version from 1966 carrying the reputation in some quarters as the worst Doctor Who story ever (this is probably unfair). Last year’s season-opener included some Western set-decoration but was concerned with other things entirely. This genuinely was a Western with all the swagger, morality-plays and suspense that implies. The Doctor’s arrival in Mercy was especially pleasing and accurate. Whereas last week, Chris Chibnall’s script doled out achingly familiar icons one-by-one as if they were astonishing innovations, this week Toby Whithouse dashes off Western clichés in a flurry, but with a knowing wink, and with efficiency bordering on haste. You want a Western? Okay good, here’s the border town, swinging saloon doors, piano that stops playing as soon as strangers enter town, just like you asked for. Now let’s do something more interesting.

And more interesting it certainly was. Instead of a simple good-vs-evil, we get a satisfyingly complicated mix of self-interest, tribalism, ends, means and justifications. Jex is arguably a war criminal, even though his actions ended a war which would no doubt have cost further lives. The Gunslinger is arguably bringing justice, but in his single-minded pursuit of Jex and his colleagues, he is bringing more suffering, not ending it. Now, none of this is especially innovative, and it maybe needed an extra twist in the final ten minutes, rather than having Jex simply solve everyone’s problems by obediently committing suicide at the first opportunity, but it’s refreshing to see Doctor Who attempting to tackle some of these issues, and the Old West setting and the Doctor’s uncharacteristic lapse into vengefulness I think means that the team pulled it off, assisted by lovely performances from Adrian Scarborough and especially Ben Browder – a neat bit of casting that made the character wrongly seem invulnerable, making it all the more shocking when the Gunslinger guns him down.

I do have niggles though. Very unusually, on Moffat’s watch, the rules aren’t especially clear. Will the Gunslinger risk collateral damage or not? The answer “sometimes” is rather unsatisfying. And the business with the town’s rocks-and-bits-of-wood border was very confusing. I initially assumed that the Gunslinger was incapable of crossing the barrier due to some bit of Kahler magic, rigged up at the same time as the lights and the heating. Yet, when the time comes, the Gunslinger simply marches over it, as if he and Jex had simply been playing a game up till then and the Gunslinger had now opted to change the rules. Oh, and Rory is rather poorly served. Remove him entirely and the plot is scarcely affected.

Hardly perfect then, but a huge improvement over last week and easily deserving of four stars, but it’s a bit frustrating, that especially after such a long wait, the script wasn’t given that final polish which it needed.

A few additional stray observations.

• Having criticised the usual indefatigable design departments last week, I have to take them task again this week for the very derivative look of the Gunslinger, whose make-up was exactly half-and-half Borg from Star Trek The Next Generation and Tony from Total Recall.
• Lots of good jokes this week too, especially the Doctor’s tea order and Susan the transgender horse.
• As well as the Gunslinger’s willingness or not to injure others in the crossfire, the business with the squiggly tattoos confusing its targeting system was undercooked and far less relevant than you might think given the amount of attention it got on-screen.
• Can we have a rule that you can’t do robot POV shots any more unless you think of something new to do with them? The Gunslinger was already in the habit of speaking commands aloud to himself. Did we have to see them on a heads-up display as well?

When Russell T Davies brought Doctor Who back in 2005, his first concern was that it should be fun. This is very smart thinking. The possibilities of the series are, after all, endless. If you have the entire universe of time and space at your disposal, and where you are isn’t fun, then by all means find something more fun to do. We can do without a lot of tedious hand-wringing and hair-pulling. We need to get the mass audience back.

The casting of Christopher Eccleston slightly pulled the stories in another direction, and the two strands of tortured lonely god and devil-may-care galactic adventurer were not always perfectly braided together. Much more successful was David Tennant, who pulled off the joie-de-vivre with much more ease and comfort than his predecessor and so made the flashes of angst and pain more significant for being fewer and further between. And so a good series of Doctor Who can and should include heart-breaking episodes like Doomsday and Human Nature as well as those which are just a (horrible word) romp such as Partners in Crime or Tooth and Claw, but the Doctor is usually permitted one scene of headshaking moralising so it doesn’t all seem too glib.

This is what was so profoundly odd about Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. First of all, it’s a complete muddle. Silurians, Rory’s dad, Queen Nefertiti, big game hunters, a sinister trader, comedy robots, dinosaurs – and, of course, a spaceship – assembled virtually at random with no sense of purpose, focus or theme. And it contains a number of things which we haven’t seen before. The Doctor’s new habit of dropping off Mr and Mrs Pond at the end of each adventure and then scooping them up again at the beginning of the next is bothersome. There’s no particular reason for him not to do this, I suppose, but he’s never done it before and I don’t quite understand why he’s doing it now.

This is extended in tonight’s episode in which he also takes Queen Nefertiti from the end of a previous (unseen) adventure and Rupert Graves’ standard-issue great white hunter, not to mention Rory’s dad. “I’ve never had a gang before,” comments the Doctor, hanging a lantern on it. No, and there’s no particular reason to have one now. Except of course, because it might seem fun.

And for once, even the art department lets the side down, with the spaceship interior also a jumble of location work, exteriors (for no good reason) and then a very, very standard-issue spaceship set (possibly reused from an earlier story?). That’s this episode all over – nothing is consistent and yet all the individual pieces seem very familiar. The dinosaurs are faithfully duplicated from the Jurassic Park playbook, even including a big game hunter triangulated by two raptors (if Rupert Graves had said “clever girl” I might have given up altogether). Indira of the Indian Space Association is no different from the countless other stubborn military types we’ve seen before. David Bradley’s Solomon is a carbon copy of venal traders from other stories and Rory’s dad, while brightly played by Mark Williams, is exactly as we might have guessed he’d be.

This all might have played better if the stakes had seemed higher, but the drawback of the characters – especially the Doctor – treating the adventures which follow as a romp is that it becomes harder and harder for the viewer to take it at all seriously. If it’s all just larks, then what’s the point? And, then – right on cue – comes the Doctor’s moralising speech to Solomon.

By the end of the episode, everyone has been issued with their raison d’être – Nefertiti is a prize to be won, Riddell is necessary to fight off raptors, Indira’s missiles will destroy Solomon’s ship instead of the Silurian ark and, most limply of all, the flight controls require two pilots of the same gene… thing.. and that’s why Rory’s dad is there. So that’s why the Doctor suddenly felt the need to assemble a gang. This is dreadfully clunky writing with the basic pieces assembled, but no attempt made whatsoever to smooth over the joins or create any sense of organic growth. And, most unforgivably of all, even having hired two famous comedians to provide the voices, the two comedy robots never say anything even remotely funny.

Reading all this back, it sounds rather as if I didn’t like it, but as bumpy and as clumsy and as over-familiar as it was, much of it was very charming. Matt Smith was as winning as ever – I particularly liked his line-reading of the word “run”, faced with the dinosaurs for the first time. Karen Gillan, although rendered rather redundant by the plethora of other characters, gave good banter and the lovely shot of Mark Williams sipping his tea while looking out over the planet Earth was worth any number of unfunny comedy robots.

This is the trouble with “fun” episodes of Doctor Who. If you scoop up a pick-and-mix of characters and ideas that have worked before, fling them all at the page and keep everybody quipping back-and-forth then you might make a “fun” 45 minutes of television, but at the end of it – what’s the point? If it’s bracingly original, remarkably structured or features a truly astonishing turn from a major guest-star then it may not need to be high drama. But familiar components don’t get any less familiar when you mix-and-match them and clumsy plotting is still clumsy plotting even if you’re lucky enough to have Matt Smith reciting your exposition.

And this still sounds as if I didn’t like it, but it was perfectly entertaining while it was on, it’s just that – with the whole universe to explore, I’m frustrated at being given hand-me-downs. But, you know what, if this is as bad as this series gets, then this could be regarded as a classic year. What worries me is that this is the norm, and that when Chris Chibnall inevitably takes over as show-runner (please, no) we’ll get a lot more like this.

What is Doctor Who about?

I don’t mean what are its themes, its preoccupations. The answer to that is simple – whatever it likes. I mean what is constructed out of? What do its various writers and, in the modern era, it’s “showrunner”, need enough of to make an episode?

Classic Doctor Who is about incidents (and, on a good day, dialogue), from the early 1960s to the late 1980s with very few exceptions, it’s just about setting up a situation and then stringing together enough incidents to get through the allotted number of episodes. The Daleks, the second-ever story, contrives to strand the TARDIS crew on the planet Skaro, introduces malevolent aliens and fills the remaining time with incidents until the Doctor and his companions can finally depart (or almost fills, at any rate). The need for radiation drugs, navigating a deep chasm by rope, the final attack on the Dalek city – incident follows incident with only enough character development to get to the next incident. There is a theme of some kind – pacifism can’t defeat totalitarianism – but it’s scarcely what viewers are tuning in for.

Survival, the last story of the classic run, works in exactly the same way. The Doctor and his companion are wrenched away from contemporary Earth and the safety of the TARDIS and transmitted to an alien world, complete with malevolent foes and the script now fills the remaining time with incidents until the Doctor and Ace are returned to the TARDIS (over-fills, if anything). Even the very best stories of the classic series, such as The Talons of Weng-Chiang or Inferno, conform to this model.

But the Russell T Davies era of Doctor Who wasn’t made out of the same stuff. Sure, there still were exciting incidents – the astonishing motorway chase in the The Runaway Bride, the showdown with Mr Finch in School Reunion, the Ood going rogue in The Impossible Planet – but the episodes now existed to put the characters through the wringer emotionally, in a way much more akin to most narrative fiction from soap to Shakespeare. The point of Doomsday is not that the Cybermen and Daleks are banished to the void, the point of Doomsday is what it feels like to lose a loved one. The point of Midnight is not watching David Tennant and Lesley Sharp lip-sync, it’s how small groups of people can make very bad moral choices. Russell T Davies Doctor Who is about emotions.

But there’s another strand to this era of the programme, which began back in the early 1980s. Contemporary Doctor Who is also about moments. The point of Earthshock isn’t the death of Adric – insofar as that is dealt with at all, it’s handled in the following story. The point of Earthshock is the reveal of the Cybermen at the end of part one. The point of Rembrance of the Daleks is the Dalek going up the stairs, and Davros popping up at the end, and that spaceship landing in the school playground. And so, at least part of the point of Doomsday is actually the Cybermen fighting the Daleks, as they have in playground after playground since 1966. You only have to look at some of the episode titles to see this – The Doctor’s Daughter, Let’s Kill Hitler and so on.

Since taking over as showrunner, Moffat has embraced this wholeheartedly. But these moments, untethered from emotion, don’t always work. Rory, facing an army of Cybermen , asking “shall I repeat the question” as the entire Cyberfleet immolates behind him, is either punch-the-air glorious or hideously smug, depending completely on your mood as you watch it. And it’s a far bigger problem for Moffatt than it ever was for Rusty, since Moffat isn’t nearly as interested in emotions as he is in concepts. His model for Doctor Who isn’t the whirl and sacrifice of The Caves of Androzani (probably the nearest the classic series gets to the RTD style), it’s the wit and dash of City of Death, with its multiple time zones, endless copies of the Mona Lisa, constant quipping and preposterously high stakes.

This can let him down badly, as it did at the end of the last series, where dozens of complex ideas furiously orbited a hollow centre, and ultimately didn’t even make any narrative sense, let alone have any emotional resonance. Whether as part of a long-held plan, or in response to negative feedback on the last series, Moffat has promised to “throw the lever back the other way” this time and give us 14 stand-alone stories instead of attempting a single series arc. Asylum of the Daleks is the first of these movie-of-the-week episodes. Was it any good?

Well, actually, yes it was. Especially as a season-opener, it worked very, very well. It doesn’t have the scope or ambition of A Good Man Goes To War or Doomsday, but neither is it groaning under the weight of a year or more’s worth of ferociously complicated plot. The opening, complete with portentous voice-over and atmospherically shadowy figures, tells even the newest viewer everything they need to know about these tinplated gravel-voiced foes and then we’re plunged into the story proper, pausing only briefly to scoop up Rory and Amy along the way.

The three of them are then inserted into the titular Asylum on the flimsiest of pretexts, but the place looks gorgeous, from the amazing snowy exteriors to the gloomy caverns beneath. A bit of shame though that “every Dalek ever” have all been lit with the same orangey glow, rendering them all looking the same as the bronze 2005 model, which now apparently is the default. (Part of this of course, is to excuse the hideous redesign from last year, and pass it off as just another variation.)

One of the benefits of Moffat’s concept-first approach is that he is very, very thorough at mining each of those concepts for everything they’re worth. The Weeping Angels from Blink (still possibly the finest episode the new series has produced) seemed to fit the confines of that Swiss watch of a script perfectly, and yet when they reappear in The Time of Angels he wrings fresh nuances out of the same basic idea. Asylum of the Daleks is likewise full of ideas we’ve seen before, but each is given a lick of paint, a new angle or simply a placing in the narrative which manages to make them seem brand spanking new.

We’ve seen human-controlled Daleks before, from the second-ever Dalek story in fact, but we’ve never seen them presented quite so viscerally, with eyestalks and gunsticks protruding from their very flesh. And we’ve been confronted with the horror of being converted into a Dalek before – most shockingly in the form of Arthur Stengos in Revelation of the Daleks. But here, just when it seems as if Amy’s fate is to lose her humanity and turn on her friends, it transpires that the author (and the Doctor) had another agenda entirely. Thus we are (at least I was) totally unprepared for the horrible fate of the other guest artist of the week.

Okay, now hang on a minute. Wait one goddamn moment here.

Steven Moffat has been perfectly clear in interview after interview that these five episodes are his goodbye to the Ponds, and that we will meet Jenna-Louise Coleman playing “Clara” (probably) in the Christmas special. And yet I’m pretty sure, no I’m very sure, actually I’m positive, in fact there’s her name is in the credits – that’s bloody Jenna-Louise Coleman right there on my telly, right now, playing someone called “Oswin” and now she’s a Dalek and now she’s been blown up! Just what the hell is going on here? No doubt, in five episodes’ time, some monstrously convoluted timey-wimey backstory will explain, but for the moment her presence in this story was just confusing, and an unnecessary distraction from what was by, and large, a rather artful balancing of the demands of incident, emotion and concept.

Anyway, whoever she turns out to be, Coleman gave a very good account of herself, and the regular cast were also on very good form, with Matt Smith in particular finding a slightly firmer, stabler reading of the Doctor which I thought was very effective. Possibly the Asylum itself wasn’t quite as Dalek-y as it might have been, but that’s the inevitable problem with Doctor Who vs the Daleks – have him surrounded by swarms of them on a regular basis and their failure to pull the trigger becomes a bit awkward for everyone. In fact, various Dalek “puppets” had ample opportunity to swiftly and suddenly exterminate all three regulars, but they were generally too busy pretending to be human and/or dead – apparently only for our benefit. The set design was wonderfully Dalek-y, though and I did like the shot of Rory and Amy peering out through the mesh surrounding the prison in which they first find themselves, in exactly the manner that Dalek operators do to this day.

And while I like, I very much like, the notion that any memory of the Doctor has been erased from the collective Dalek consciousness, I am also acutely aware that this was exactly what all that screwing around faking his own death was supposed to have achieved at the end of the last series.

So, if not scaling the very heights of what the series can achieve, then this was certainly an effective relaunch of the show for 2012, thoroughly entertaining and exciting, more-or-less making sense most of the time and neatly avoiding the worst excesses of the previous series. I’m still not quite sure why the Doctor keeps feeling the need to return the Ponds to their suburban home at the end of each adventure though. Does he want them as travelling companions or not?

I wasn’t going to include these details in this blog, because talking about money isn’t exactly British, but several people have asked and it gives me an opportunity to give thanks where it is certainly due.

Taking a show to Edinburgh is not exactly cheap. Many stand-up comedians who use the Fringe to light the touchpaper of their hopefully-explosive careers see it as a loss-leader. Their plan (or that of their management) is to spend thousands of pounds more than they could ever hope to recoup through ticket sales – even if every show was sold-out – and then make the money back touring, having built an audience and garnered critical approval during those four intensive weeks. It’s not a bad model, but it doesn’t work for plays in quite the same way.

So, given that our original plan had been to get a theatre such as The Bush or The Soho to put Coalition on for us, when it became obvious that Edinburgh was the place for it, we initially approached friendly producers. A fairly meagre budget would still require us to stump up about £15,000 which is not the kind of cash I tend to keep lying around. Alas, the only producer we approached who showed a genuine interest didn’t have funds available to commit to the project, and being a pair of control-freaks, we weren’t prepared to give up control of the project if the other party wasn’t helping us to fund it.

When we did the deal with The Pleasance, we were still lacking in funding, and although The Pleasance similarly had no funds available to invest, they were able to support the project by providing certain things for free and deferring payment for others. This reduced the cash requirement somewhat, but it still meant a bit of a shoe-string operation – only a tiny budget for set, props, marketing, and so on, even given that our offer to our cast was really only a token payment. Still, in a big space like the Queen Dome and with a generous ticket price, we had some head-room. A good turnout would mean a healthy profit.

At this point, my dear friend ES volunteered a sum of money which, while not ending our financial worries, did significantly ease them. This was then followed by JS, who had been a stalwart of the afore-mentioned Brains Trust, grumbling that we would surely fuck up the whole project if it wasn’t capitalised properly, and who gave us a truly hefty chunk. Our deal with both is that if we make a profit, they will receive back proportionally more than they put in, and if we make a loss, we will share the loss with them proportionally. Now we could relax a little – the remaining funds could be provided by my company and by Robert and we could afford to give this piece the care and attention to detail it deserves.

Spending the extra money does mean that the potential for profit is reduced, but I think I am confident in saying that everyone involved would rather that the piece is given every possible chance, and that we play to full houses, than scrimping and saving and possibly making a bigger profit, but having fewer bums on seats and reviewers grumbling at the tatty look of the thing. If this production is a success it will be in large part due to our generous backers.

39 days to our first performance in Edinburgh…

Gosh, this has been quiet hasn’t it?

Well, the chief reason (other than general disorganisation and indolence) has been that the play what I wrote has been gathering momentum on its journey to Edinburgh. I’m going to devote a lot more blogspace to documenting the last stages of this process, so here is the story so far.

September 1990

Tom Salinsky meets Robert Khan at Southampton University and they become friends.

1993 – 2006

Robert and Tom from time-to-time work on various writing projects together. Robert helps to gag-up some corporate entertainment scripts, Robert and Tom write radio and TV sit-com scripts together. Nothing really gets off the ground.

2000 – 2002

Robert and Tom edit the on-line satirical netzine The Brains Trust, which was of such high quality that when it finally closed down, Tom immediately wiped it. Some pages survive on the Wayback Machine.

2006-2010

Robert’s theory is that there is always an audience for political plays – see for example Whipping It Up, Feelgood, Absence of War and so on. He suggests that we collaborate on a piece tentatively entitled Opposition about how the “natural party of government” deals with a decade out of power.

6 May 2010

The General Election returns Robert as Labour councillor for Bunhill Ward in Islington and also obsoletes Opposition.

February 2011

Work begins on Coalition when Robert writes the last page and Tom prepares a scene-by-scene breakdown. The concept is to show how the leader of the Liberal Democrats, by choosing to enter into a coalition with the Tories, has signed the death warrant for his party. The approach will be a roman a clef with fictional characters inhabiting these positions. This work is of such high quality that neither party touches it for another four months.

June 2011

Works begins again in earnest, as we begin to flesh-out characters, write new scenes and develop plot points. We prefer to work by writing alone and exchanging scenes, meeting only to solve story problems and develop big ideas.

September 2011

A first complete draft is completed, albeit still very rough around the edges.

October-November 2012

A version suitable for showing to an “inner circle” of trusted friends and colleagues is prepared. The reaction is generally positive, if not effusive. We decide that it is necessary to put the piece on in front of an audience and so a rehearsed reading is arranged. Tom calls and emails various actor friends, including Thom Tuck of the Penny Dreadfuls who will play the leading part. Copies and invitations to the reading are also sent to various promoters, agents, producers and fringe theatres, none of whom bite.

30 November 2011

The reading, although long, is a great success and there is much talk about what will happen next. Astonishingly, Thom Tuck is interviewed about it for the Independent. We decide to stage another reading at The Leicester Square Theatre in January.

December 2011 – January 2012

More tinkering, rewriting and fine-tuning. Philippa Waller is unable to reprise the role of Angela Hornby, the Liberal Democrat Chief Whip but we are delighted when Diana Quick agrees to take the part.

20-22 January 2012

Despite an afternoon slot and a £5 ticket price, the second reading sells out two out of three performances. Representatives of Assembly, The Pleasance and The Underbelly are there and the focus shifts to Edinburgh, with Thom Tuck still in the lead.

February-March 2012

Negotiations commence with cast, producers, and Edinburgh venues. It isn’t possible to bring all of our existing cast with us, but plays in Edinburgh with a cast of comedians have been very successful in years past, and it’s very convenient to engage the services of performers who are already in Edinburgh with their own show. We are delighted when first Phill Jupitus and then Simon Evans agrees to come on-board and we do a deal with the Pleasance who will present the show in the Queen Dome.

April 2012

We cast the remaining parts, retaining Jessica Regan and Jamie de Courcey from our London cast and engaging Jo Caulfield, Phil Mulryne and Alistair Barrie in the remaining parts. Idil Sukan takes photos of Thom, Phill and Simon and begins work on our publicity. Flick Morris will handle our PR. We begin buying furniture off eBay for the set.

May 2012

We engage a composer and a video company to create the audio-visuals for our play. We also record a series of “tease trails” with Thom Tuck in character. On 31 May 2012, the Fringe Guide is published and we are gratified to see coverage in a number of publications, and even more so to see this translate into advanced ticket sales.

That brings us more-or-less up-to-date. I am leaving for Canberra’s Improvention at the end of this week, but once rehearsals start, I will be keeping a daily Coalition diary. Watch this space…

www.coalition-play.co.uk

Here’s a really, really quick update on my fitness and weight loss. Following the “Couch to 5k” programme as delivered by the iPhone app Get Running, I have completed my first 30 minute run today. Tracking my path with iMapMyRun reveals that I covered 4.96km, so I guess I’m there. Now I can work on decreasing the time and/or increasing the distance.

Good news too from the scales. After a few days of levelling off, my weight this morning was 142.8lb which means I’ve lost 17.2kg and have only 2.8kg to go!

On to the final stretch now, with three movies none of which I would have chosen to see if it hadn’t been for this project. That’s part of the point of course. I doubt I would have gone to see Precious two years ago if I hadn’t attempted this experiment then, but I was very, very glad that I did – I thought it was quite magnificent.

I can’t be quite so positive about The Help but I can say that it was nowhere near as bad as I had feared. I am quick to criticise movies for being too long and/or too unfocused and The Help is both of these things, but they weirdly help it to overcome a much more profound and serious problem which is that its central storyline is appallingly trite, sententious, self-important and dated. I have no doubt that the indignities heaped upon black maids in the American South were ghastly, but this is old ground and this story – of a white girl (headstrong, doesn’t fit in, speaks her own mind – standard-issue in other words) who documents the stories of these maids for a book which becomes a best-seller – can’t add much to the corpus.

Not only does it have little to add, the whole approach brings a succession of problems, from the sometimes “Uncle Tom” portrayals of the black characters, to their need to be rescued by a white woman, to the fact that while I’m sure the details are well-researched, the story of the book and its publication is not true. This all means that one particularly outré choice is rendered rather hard to, um, swallow.

In the central role is Emma Stone, who is perfectly capable of playing this kind of part, for whom the word “spunky” could have been devised, but she never seems credibly of the era, in the writing or the playing. She never manages the artful trick pulled off by, say, Peggy in Mad Men – aware of the limitations that this society places upon her, and yet still credibly a part of that society and not an alien visitor or time-traveller. This is a shame, especially as the rest of the movie captures the period and place extremely well, and here is where the length and lack of focus helps. By giving the story breathing space and by creating an ensemble feel, writer-director Tate Taylor allows us to spend time away from the central and problematic central narrative and explore some smaller and more intimate stories, and hang out with a vibrant supporting cast.

These include a lovely turn from Allison Janney as Stone’s mother, hilariously useless white trash Jessica Chastain and some deliciously vile work from Bryce Dallas Howard as the apotheosis of casual racism. And this is without mentioning the excellent performances of Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis as the two maids who are the first to jump on board. Spencer is sometimes given some unfortunately stereotypical dialogue, but her manner is so engaging I couldn’t help but smile at everything she did. Viola Davis doesn’t get as much screentime as I might have liked, but towards the end she is given the task of landing the film’s message and grounding it in some kind of human emotion which she manages with real feeling and dignity.

So, not quite the horrendous movie-of-the-week I feared, but still a TV movie with aspirations rather than a real piece of modern cinema. The same cannot exactly be said of The Tree of Life, the fifth film (in over forty years) from famous recluse and madman Terrence Malick. This film provoked both boos and applause at Cannes where it eventually walked off with the Palm D’Or and initially, it did capture me in its spell. Opening with an American family (father Brad Pitt, mother Jessica Chastain again) receiving the news that one of their sons has been killed, we then flash forward to the present day, where the boy’s brother is now a grown up architect played by Sean Penn. From where we go back in time to the creation of the universe (yes, you read that correctly) and then track the family’s early life through the eyes of the Penn character.

Presumably, the need to attach the relatively trivial story to an event as big as the creation of life is an attempt to give it greater depth, profundity and impact, but actually it has the opposite effect. Just as we grieve more for Luke Skywalker’s severed hand than we care about or even notice the dozens of anonymous stormtroopers gunned down by the good guys, it’s by placing us right at the heart of deeply felt events that film-makers can engage our emotions – not by continually insisting on showing us the bigger picture.

Equally misjudged I felt was the camerawork. Malick shoots the entire movie in either extreme close-ups or long wide shots (fitting for a movie which can’t decide on an appropriate scale from suburban to universal) but always with a steadicam lurching drunkenly around the actors. During the opening parts of the movie, this felt appropriate as a visual dramatization of this disorienting effects of grief and loss, but as the movie settled down into its long middle sequence, and as the by and large perfectly ordinary episodes of childhood played out, the looming, reeling camera became distracting and the effectiveness was lost.

It’s easy to give a patina of profundity to a narrative that hasn’t earned it by shooting it elliptically, by chopping up the time-frame or by juxtaposing other material, but is that all that The Tree of Life is doing? I’m not entirely sure. There’s clearly something important going on here for Malick – something about a childhood struggle between rigidity and clarity on one side (represented by Pitt’s manly father) and grace and flexibility on the other (represented by Chastain) – but something has got lost in the translation. I don’t mind the visual poetry of the opening sequence, nor indeed the similarly abstract closing, but if you abandon any sense of narrative and just show an audience a montage of images then to me the appropriate comparison isn’t with written poetry, it’s with a pop music video.

For me, though, it’s the banality of the middle section which kills it. The events of Jack’s life are just not interesting or extraordinary enough to bear the weight of pomposity which get heaped upon them by the modern-day bookends. And while Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain are both fine, second-billed Sean Penn gets almost nothing to do (which may explain his negative attitude towards the film).

Overall though, in a year in which so many Best Picture nominees seem so entirely ordinary, I’m glad that the Academy recognised The Tree of Life. It has plenty of fans, even if I’m not one, and it’s certainly a bracingly original, strongly authored piece of work that deserves to have others decide for themselves whether there’s anything to it or not. That I found little may ultimately be my loss.

Finally then, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close which has got pretty rotten reviews for a Best Picture nominee. Based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer and directed by Stephen Daldry, this is the first movie I can remember which uses the events of 11 September 2001 not as the main focus of the narrative (United 93, World Trade Centre) but as a mere MacGuffin – a device to get the plot moving and nothing more. That plot is the story of a young boy played with suitable intensity by Thomas Horn – cast after his prize-winning performance on a TV quiz show! – who finds a key presumably belonging to his father who was killed in the attacks. With his probably-Asberger’s brain pulsating furiously, young Oskar Schell sets off in search of the key’s owner in a quest to reconnect with his father.

There is some good stuff here, but there are some lumpen choices which consistently drag the movie back down. One is the largely-redundant voice-over which continually points out what it might have been more satisfying for us to discover on our own. Then there’s the polished and syrupy direction which makes everything look like an advert, even (or especially) the recreated shots of the stricken towers. Overall, there’s a strong sense that the piece has been constructed, rather than evolved. Now, of course, all screenplays are constructed, but the best artfully conceal the nuts-and-bolts of their construction (just as the worst of those which don’t collapse entirely reveal all of the scaffolding). With Oskar’s father sending him off on treasure hunts, the selection of a key with no lock as the clue which Oskar must pursue, the juxtaposition of Oskar’s secret phone messages from his father with his friendship with Max von Sydow’s mute, the whole thing feels deliberately assembled and this makes it very easy to disengage.

It’s not even as if this makes a feature of its artful construction, like Amélie, say or Life is Beautiful. On the contrary, von Sydow’s character is dropped into the story very late in the day to prop up a narrative which is running out of steam, and then summarily removed having altered nothing. It’s a lovely performance, but a horribly clumsy bit of storytelling.

And then, suddenly, just when I was ready to give up on the whole thing, there’s a moment between Oskar and his mother, played with generous restraint by Sandra Bullock, which seems real and true and heartfelt. Some of the less credible details from earlier in the film are rendered much more believable, the script does manage to achieve a certain level of structural sureness and – yes! – that damned voice-over shuts up and for a whole ten minutes it’s a wonderful film.

Before the credits roll though, it’s slipped back into all its bad habits, with a closing sequence which is just as trite, unconvincing, mawkish and lumpen as before. Obviously designed as an Academy Award honey-pot (even down to the name of its central character subliminally suggesting gold statuettes), in the event, it won neither of the awards for which it was nominated.

Finally, let me assess my own performance. Out of eight predictions, I got six right which isn’t too bad for me. My out-there pick of Melissa McCarthy for Best Supporting Actress was proven wrong when the heavy favourite Octavia Spencer was named. And I was sure that The Artist would cement its success by winning Best Original Screenplay, but they actually gave it to Woody Allen. I was also pleased to see the excellent Rango scoop up the Best Animated Feature gong and delighted for Bret McKenzie who won Best Original Song.

Join me again next year – the standard surely can’t be any worse than it was this time!

My final reviews will be up shortly, but in the meantime, here are some quick predictions.

Overall, it will be The Artist‘s night. No picture will win more awards, it will probably bag around 5-6 of the ten it has been nominated for. Hugo will be largely overlooked, except maybe for some technical awards.

Best Picture will go to The Artist but should probably go to The Descendants (or RON)

Best Director will go to Michel Hazanavicius, probably deservedly.

Best Actor will go to Jean Dujardin, but I would love Gary Oldman to get it for his George Smiley instead.

Best Actress will go to Meryl Streep – no bet will be safer this year. There’s a reason why Bérénice Bejo was put up for Best Supporting Actress instead!

Best Original Screenplay will go to The Artist, but I have also heard good things about Margin Call.

Best Adapted Screenplay is a very tough category, but I think The Descendants must surely get it.

Best Supporting Actor will likely go to Christopher Plummer, in a lifetime achievement sort of a way.

Best Supporting Actress should go to Melissa McCarthy by rights, and with Jessica Chastain and Octavia Spencer splitting The Help‘s votes, it just might.

Check back here tomorrow to see if I’m right. I don’t have access to Sky currently so I can’t watch them live, but I’ll try and see some highlights early next week. As noted, my final reviews of The Help, The Tree of Life and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close will be up here very shortly.

Steven Spielberg’s War Horse continues the 2012 Oscars trend of handsomely made and utterly unthreatening movies. Adapted from, let us not forget, a children’s book and also owing a huge (and credited) debt to the National Theatre’s stage version, this is bracing, stirring, wryly funny with a great feeling for time and place and character. It’s also an almost suffocatingly cosy chocolate box of a movie which never even begins to transcend its kid-friendly origins.

Lack of time and planning this year means I haven’t done my homework as well as I could have. I haven’t read Michael Morpurgo’s novel in which the story is told from the horse’s point of view. Nor have I seen the acclaimed theatre production. So I am forced to judge Spielberg’s movie on its own terms, but I can’t help feeling that an extra element, such as a first-horse perspective or an astonishing feat of puppetry would be required to makes this naïve fable into something richer and more arresting.

Given that the narrative is going to be rendered in such a straightforward way, Spielberg is an ideal match for the material. His camera swoops and darts, virtually canters, around the environments and with no need for funny glasses he creates tremendous depth and energy in every frame. Possibly no director working today understands light, space and movement better than he does and together with production design Rick Carter and director of photography Janusz Kaminski render the rolling hills of Devon, the French woodlands and the grime of the trenches with an incredible lush richness. Parts of it look like they were shot in 1940s Technicolor, but unfortunately this same simplistic approach carries through to the rest of the movie.

It’s not just that the characters are so broadly drawn, or that in deference to his young audience, Spielberg tastefully cuts away from or otherwise elides the deaths of speaking characters. Bluntly, in story terms, any adult watching this movie is required to accept that Joey – the central equine character – is a horse who is so unimaginably appealing that adults and teenagers from almost any background fall in love with him as soon as they see him, and in the grip of this romantic delusion, they are then compelled to spend vast sums upon him, adopt him, even risk their own lives to protect him, and finally to put themselves in the line of fire to be reunited with him. The fragile spell which this movie casts could be shattered at any moment if anyone were just to say “I’m terribly sorry, this is just a horse like any other, isn’t it? I do beg your pardon, I must have lost my mind for a moment.”

This danger is most apparent during the incredible scene where Joey is rescued from No Man’s Land. Here Lee Hall and Richard Curtis’s script, as well as some nicely underplayed performances, just about prevent the on-screen action from tipping into total absurdity. As it is, credibility is merely strained and not completely shattered.

By the time Joey rides joyfully home, silhouetted like Lassie against a painterly sunset, I assume the idea is that there isn’t a dry eye in the house, and if I was a horse-obsessed eleven year old girl then I might have succumbed. But even John Williams’ swooping strings couldn’t wring a single tear from my stubborn eyes.

This I followed with Moneyball, the true story of how a baseball team struggling for cash harnessed the power of statistics to identify overlooked and undervalued players and change the nature of the game. This is a fascinating story, with a sharp script from old hand Steven Zaillian, burnished up by Aaron Sorkin – who fits this material like a catchers’ mitt – and it’s certainly a film for grown-ups as opposed to War Horse.

Watching the story unfold, I was never bored, but I was struck by the fact that it’s very much a process story – a sports procedural if such a thing were to exist. I’m inclined to give the larger share of the credit to Sorkin for making the early scenes between Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane and his army of advisors, and then with Jonah Hill’s pudgy economics whizzkid so engaging. The dialogue crackles without ever seeming overly smart. But there’s a remote, chilly feel which the brief divergences to Billy’s family life and history in the game of baseball does little to dispel. In fact, at times, these glimpses of the human life behind the quasi-political struggle feel like distractions.

What’s curious is that there’s no attempt to bring the emotional story and the procedural aspects together in any meaningful way, beyond a few fist-pumps and exhortations. When Billy’s carefully constructed team on a shoe-string budget is not deployed on the field the way he intended, he has to outmanoeuvre the team manager Art Howe, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. But although we understand how Billy forced Art’s hand, there’s never any emotional pay-off – not even when Art starts getting the credit for Billy’s savvy hiring. The character just fades away as unceremoniously as he appeared. Nor does Jonah Hill’s character seem to grow or respond to his new success in any way. And it’s part of Billy’s story that he remains resolutely fixed on his goal even as the movie closes – in fact, the moment which moved me the most is a caption which appears at the end of the film, just before the credits roll, which says a lot about the approach taken.

But, before I’m tempted to say outright, that this would have been better as a talking-heads documentary, which would have allowed even more analysis of the statistical methods used (“woo!”) I must pause and acknowledge the contribution that Brad Pitt makes. No longer just a pretty boy actor, Pitt is now a genuine movie star in every sense of the word, and he illuminates the whole of Moneyball, making the whole thing seem worthwhile.

So, that’s six down and three to go, and at the moment I feel like I would happily rewatch The King’s Speech before I saw any of them again and that The Hurt Locker absolutely pisses on all six of them. But my movie week wasn’t entirely disappointing. I won’t say too much about The Muppets except that it is wonderful. Knowing enough for the adults, sweet enough for the kids, funny enough for the teens, and if Fozzie Bear sometimes doesn’t sound quite right, then that’s a small price to pay for having Kermit and Co back. Commission the sequel right now!

A quick update – there will be a more substantive post tomorrow.

Fitness

My weight today is 145.8lb meaning I have lost about a stone since early January and putting me exactly on target to lose 20lb by mid-March. With a little help from the iPhone Get Running app, I’ve successfully completed a 25 minute run (albeit not at a ferocious pace and on my second attempt). I’m even considering keeping up the calorie counting and running after mid-March, although my resolve may eventually crack, especially where my late evening cheese-and-biscuits is concerned.

Movies

A small interregnum but I hope to see War Horse tomorrow. I also have gained access to copies of Tree of Life, Moneyball and The Help but so far I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch any of them. Instead, I’m going to see The Muppets tonight.

Other writing

As well as working on the next edition of The Improv Handbook, I have finally found a publisher for my Columbo book, provisionally titled “My Wife Thinks You’re Terrific”. This complete episode guide will be published by Miwk in early 2013. And I am now contributing Doctor Who articles to the What Culture blog. The first one is here.

More news will follow shortly about Coalition, my satirical play which is going to the Edinburgh Fringe this year. You can also see photos of my new flat here.

That’s my life. How’s yours?