Tom Salinsky

It’s Oscar time once more. Seth MacFarlane has revealed the shortlist and once again it is my mission to watch all the Best Picture nominees – which in a way is disappointing as there are quite a few films coming out in the next few weeks which I am keen to see and which the Academy has not so blessed.

One of these was The Master which I watched over the weekend, which certainly has not gone unnoticed by AMPAS but which failed to get a Best Picture nomination. It is up for three acting awards however, and that’s pretty fair as this is an actors’ movie in every sense.

The story, such as it is, concerns Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), an ex-Navy man finding it increasingly hard to adjust to civilian life and who falls under the influence of charismatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Both are nominated for acting awards and both fully deserve it – Phoenix seemingly in constant discomfort, his body bent and buckled under the weight of his frustration and confusion, dealing with his angst by imbibing paint-thinner or by finding things to hit. Hoffman is outstanding, grinning fatly behind a blond walrus moustache and genially attempting to crack open the psyches of his devout group of followers, through a technique which is part Freudian fantasising and part Meisner (the acting technique famed for its use of repetition).

Early on, the narrative is lean and sleek, cutting years at a time to propel Freddie into Dodd’s clutches, and throughout the camerawork is poised and careful, capturing the performances whole rather than creating them or amplifying them via cutting or framing. Amy Adams (also nominated) does well with very thin material and it’s nice to see Laura Dern, although she is criminally underused.

In the middle section, the details of Dodd’s environment and Freddie’s position within it are sufficient to sustain the interest, bar an ill-judged scene in which A Sceptical Onlooker confronts Dodd with The Voice Of Reason and gets a tomato thrown at him by Quell for his troubles. This scene didn’t work for me, not because it was didactic (although it was) but because it stopped me seeing Dodd through Quell’s eyes, and made his continuing support of Dodd more pitiable than relatable.

Like Dodd’s own bizarre crusade, the film itself fatally runs out of steam in the final third. The story design demands that Quell and Dodd continue to come into conflict, but Quell can’t be allowed to heal since that would imply that the cult healed him, which clearly would be unacceptable to writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson (and probably me too). But if Quell becomes his own man and abandons Dodd then that also seems to give the cult too much credit, and so the two men are shackled together – Dodd obsessing over Quell on the flimsiest of pretexts – until suddenly they aren’t any more because it’s time for the film to end.

A very negative reading of the film is possible. From what we see of Dodd’s techniques, it seems that by confronting the subject with endless pointless tasks, often the same task over and over again, eventually the subject, rather than the cult, is forced to provide an epiphany to fill the void – and the same could be said of this story: if we watch these two people locked together in enough demented activities, eventually we will be forced to imbue the proceedings with meaning. I’m not quite ready to level that charge, but Anderson asks a lot of his audience when his story has so little in the way of a climax.

Meanwhile back to the Oscars. Once again, we have nine nominees (between five and ten is now the rule) of which I have seen only one – Argo. Here’s a quick note of what to look out for.

• Amour – a film that definitely wasn’t on my list. Two old people clinging to their love for each other when one of them suffers a stroke. Clearly, the better-done this is, the less enjoyable it will be to watch. A total lose-lose situation.
• Argo – as noted elsewhere, an extremely able piece of true-life storytelling, which may now find itself outgunned.
• Beasts of the Southern Wild – very much the dark horse, although, as I understand it, one of two stuck-on-a-raft-with-wildlife movies out this year.
• Django Unchained – who could resist? Tarantino’s assault on the Academy continues, although no nod for him as best director.
• Les Miserables – I’m a sucker for a good musical, so of course this was on my list anyway, but Tom Hooper fails to capitalise on his success with The King’s Speech and like Tarantino is not nominated in the directing category.
• Life of Pi – one of a recent spate of “unfilmable” novels which have recently made it to the screen. If they make a movie of Finnegan’s Wake I’ll be impressed and if it’s nominated for Best Picture, I’ll eat my copy.
• Lincoln – this is it, the 800lb gorilla at this year’s awards. Expect it to carry off a fistful, including best picture.
• Silver Linings Playbook – I watched the trailer for this before I knew anything else about it and for the first two-thirds I thought “ho-hum, standard issue quirky rom-com”. Then they started dancing and I decided this was a movie which had no idea what it wanted to be. To see it nominated for eight Oscars, tying with Les Miserables and behind only Life of Pi and Lincoln is utterly confounding. Clearly I’ve missed something.
• Zero Dark Thirty – I’ve got a lot of time for The Hurt Locker. This movie could be half as good as that and still better than most of the films on this list (and all the films on last year’s list).

So, already a much more promising batch than 2012 offered, but I’ve got my work cut out to see them all, while hopefully also cramming in less-essential fare such as The Hobbit, Flight, Jack Reacher and Seven Psychopaths. If you’re the betting type, put your money on Lincoln to stroll off with Best Picture and probably win the night. Daniel Day Lewis, Steven Spielberg, Sally Field, Tony Kushner and John Williams all have excellent chances and it may very well pick up awards for things like cinematography, editing, costume and sound as well. Only Tommy Lee Jones, up for best supporting actor has got real worries, up against Alan Arkin, Robert de Niro, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Christoph Waltz. That’s a tough category to call this year.

I have neglected my post shamefully and will try and rewatch the episode soon to give some more cogent thoughts, but here are some quick observations…

• New title sequence and music seem to lack focus and drive, although the glimpse of Matt Smith’s face is welcome and stylish.
• Moreorless everything in the set-up is great – Jenna-Louise Coleman acquits herself splendidly, and Matt Smith is excellent as this darker, more lonely version of the Doctor.
• The nods to the Patrick Troughton Yeti stories are lovely and to have Ian McKellan and Richard E Grant is almost spoiling us
• Welcome returns too from Vastra, Jenny and especially Strax
• Don’t like the new TARDIS much. Too small, too boxy. I thought the previous version was the best since the series returned and possibly the best ever. I remember hating the Eccleston version when it debuted and I got used to that, so maybe this will grow on me too (mind you, they did adjust the lighting when Tennant took over).
• Fantastically bold to actually kill off Clara, although the storytelling was a bit wobbly there. If she’s dead, kill her off. If she’s not dead yet, then give her a line or two at least.
• Resolving the plot with “tears at Christmas” is almost unforgivably nonsensical and rather makes me wonder if the resolution to the Sherlock cliff-hanger will be that Watson closed his eyes and wished really hard that Holmes wasn’t dead.

I’m shortly turning this blog over to movies and especially The Oscars, but before I do a quick word about the New Yes Prime Minister which began on Gold tonight. As a writer myself of a satirical play about the, and called Coalition, I was duty-bound to take in the recent stage version of the venerable 80s sit-com which I found very disappointing. Trapped in a single set and playing out in real-time did the storytelling few favours, but worse was the way that the elegant wit and supple characterisations had desiccated over time, becoming hack imitations of their former selves. Naturally, the new actors couldn’t help but be compared to their progenitors, but the writing never added anything new, while simultaneously failed to resurrect glories past, and the plotting was glacially slow, and rarely managed to raise the stakes appreciably.

Putting this new incarnation back on the television seems scarcely wise, but I was stunned to realise that the first half hour installment is essentially the first thirty minutes of the play, with all attendant faults and compromises, and several jokes made appreciably less funny in the minimal rewriting. Too see such good actors as Henry Goodman and David Haig struggle with this third-rate material, while spectres of Nigel Hawthorne and Paul Eddington loom over their shoulders is a very discomfiting sight. I shan’t be watching any more.

Here’s quick run-down of some recent productions I’ve seen. Be warned, as these reviews are quite late in the day, I’ve been generous in my provision of spoilers…

Five Go To Rehab

To complete my reviews of Comic Strip films, I sat down to watch Five Go To Rehab with some trepidation. The first Comic Strip film, Five Go Mad In Dorset, is as good as anything the team is capable of but the sequel, Five Go Mad On Mescalin, produced just a year later, managed to tarnish the memory of the original, rather than add anything significant to the corpus. With the sole exception of Four Men In A Car, everything from Red Rose of Courage has ranged from disappointing (The Hunt for Tony Blair) to ghastly (Wild Turkey) but the idea of the Famous Five reunited in late-middle-age is a very good one, so I was prepared to enjoy this production for satellite station Gold.

Performances, in general, were great. All four leads look a little chunkier, a little puffier than before, but French and Saunders are as great as ever, Richardson essays a fine line in pop-eyed dementia and Edmondson, given the lion’s share of the plot to shoulder, does a truly excellent job (although his character has been subject to even further revisions since Mescalin when he already bore little resemblance to the person in Dorset).

The execution, as ever, was the problem. The script seems very uncertain about where the comedy lies, alternately presenting fake adventures with real ones, and lazily making not one but two of the main characters secret alcoholics, holed up at the same bizarre rest home. While it’s a pleasure to see Robbie Coltrane reprise his role, mere nostalgia isn’t enough to sustain the running time when the plot is as ropey as this. The appearance of Daniel Peacock at the end re-energises the story considerably and the betrayal of his own children is a great ending, but leaving the Rik Mayall / Felix Dexter storyline dangling is lazy and pointless. Another minor misfire, although not without its incidental pleasures.

Looper

One of the most eagerly-anticipated films of recent years, with a delicious high-concept premise fleshed out by two wonderful stars. Bruce Willis is Joseph Gordon-Levitt from the future and they’re trying to kill each other. Who wouldn’t want to watch that? Sadly, the end result is a somewhat of a mixed bag. I don’t object to Rian Johnson’s cheerfully inconsistent view of time-travel, especially when it produces scenes as heart-stoppingly gruesome and astonishing as Frank Brennan’s horrible demise. Time travel never makes sense anyway, so complaining that it doesn’t make sense in any specific way is slightly pointless, even if a movie is flagrantly breaking its own rules. What’s less forgiveable is the way the movie abandons its delicious premise about half-way through for another movie entirely, one which is rather less interesting and lumbers the plot with double mumbo-jumbo, albeit blessed with two lovely performances from Emily Blunt and six-year-old Pierce Gagnon, who is nothing short of miraculous.

What’s even harder to forgive is the gigantic plot-hole which sits at the heart of this film and which seems to have been rather unremarked upon. As Gordon-Levitt’s character explains via voice-over “Time travel has not yet been invented. But thirty years from now, it will have been. It will be instantly outlawed, used only in secret by the largest criminal organizations. It’s nearly impossible to dispose of a body in the future. I’m told. Tagging techniques, whatnot. So when these future criminal organizations in the future need someone gone, they use specialized assassins in our present, called loopers.” Okay fine, so characters like our hero Joe get instructions to lie in wait for a victim to be zapped back in time, bound and gagged with payment in silver strapped to them, and when they appear, blast them with a shotgun, take the body to a furnace and stash the silver for themselves.

When one of these assassins (“Loopers”) is retired, the future mob sends the old version of them back in time (“closing the loop”). They get extra payment in gold and can retire from this brutal life. That’s one niggle right there – why should not the killing of one’s future self be the first assassination? Why does it have to be the last? But anyway, in one of the film’s most elegant narrative sequences, we see Young Joe fail to execute Old Joe who appears unbound and so escapes. We then apparently flash back to the same scene again, this time watching Young Joe blast Old Joe away when he appears, correctly trussed-up. In a long montage sequence we watch Young Joe celebrate his retirement, get bored, grow old, fall in love, and become Old Joe who eventually has a run-in with the mob who come for him, guns blazing, slaying his wife who is caught in the crossfire. Joe is taken to the warehouse where the time-travel machine is housed, and it becomes his only means of escape and thus, when he arrives in front of Young Joe, he is untied and ready to outwit his younger self. The whole of Old Joe’s motivation from this point on is to prevent his future – the future in which his beloved wife is killed by the mob – from occurring.

But it seems almost inevitable that if you stick clever criminals in a time-machine and send them back twenty-five years that they will find a way of fucking-up whatever you have planned for them. If it is “impossible to dispose of a body” as we are told, then a far better plan would be to shoot unwanted persons through the head and then send the dead body back in time for disposal. Bursting in to Old Joe’s place, firing weapons with lethal force, demonstrates that actually the mob is perfectly happy to kill people in the future. They just prefer to send living bodies back in time, because – well because it makes for a better movie apparently.

Anyway, there’s a lot to enjoy here, but movies that want to play with science fiction concepts like this need to be a bit more careful to deal with these kinds of inconsistencies. I’m not saying it’s Prometheus bad – just a bit sloppy.

Argo

In the hope of getting a jump on my Best Picture Nominees programme for 2013, I went to see Argo, the third film directed by Ben Affleck. Having greatly admired Gone Baby Gone and thoroughly enjoyed The Town, it was with very high hopes that I went to see this, and despite paying a premium to sit virtually around the corner from the television-sized screen, in the very back row of the smallest auditorium at my local Odeon (ugh!), Argo made me smile a lot. Just like The King’s Speech, it’s perfect Oscar fodder. Not a great film, perhaps, but a very, very good one, expertly balancing humour, suspense and character notes; blending a real-life story with a bit of Hollywood sparkle; and tackling big themes without confronting any deeply-held beliefs.

To its credit, the screenplay fearlessly plays fast-and-loose with the truth when it makes for a better film. The two major scenes on which the structure of the movie rests – one of the hostages declaring that the plan will never work, and that same hostage playing his role to the hilt when they are detained at the airport – are complete fiction. So are the most exciting and suspenseful scenes – the “location scout” in the bazaar, the last-minute scramble for tickets and the final runway chase. And for that matter so is the most entertaining character – Alan Arkin’s hard-bitten Hollywood producer.

But none of this matters when the attention to detail is so great and the forward momentum of the plot is maintained so effortlessly. Chris Terrio’s screenplay is brilliantly written and Affleck’s evocation of the period is breathtaking. And Argo probably has the best supporting cast of the year, with John Goodman, Bryan Cranston, Richard Kind, Philip Baker Hall, Bob Gunton, Titus Welliver and any number of other familiar faces joining Affleck in his astonishingly accurate recreation of 1979-80. Marvellous entertainment and an amazing true (or at least true-ish) story of courage and ingenuity, it hardly puts a foot wrong, provided you aren’t expecting a super-accurate history lesson.

Skyfall

This week comes news that Skyfall is the most successful film ever at the UK box office, scooping up in ten weeks what it took second-place contender Avatar eleven months to haul in, and without Avatar’s stereoscopic tax (such movies are not 3D). And a well-deserved achievement it is too. Director Sam Mendes and screenwriters Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan have accomplished a minor miracle here. Unceremoniously junking Quantum of Solace’s tediously unresolved storyline, the new movie brazenly reinvents Bond, whom we last saw as a febrile and undisciplined rookie, now as weather-beaten and rueful veteran. I adore Kim Newman’s theory which is that between Quantum and this film, all the other 007 adventures have befallen the Daniel Craig Bond. So, having left Dominic Greene to die in the desert, this man has faced Dr No in Jamaica, battled Oddjob in Fort Knox, married and lost Tracey Vincenzo, blown up Hugo Drax’s secret space station, sledded on Kara Milovy’s cello case, been betrayed by Alec Trevelyan and been held prisoner by General Moon in North Korea (inter-alia).

In the amazing pre-credits sequence – just possibly the best-ever – Bond pursues his quarry on foot, by car, on a motorcycle, and eventually on a train, before a badly-aimed bullet from Naomi Harris’s younger agent’s gun sends him plummeting into one of the best title sequences the series has ever produced. From a twenty-first century perspective, many of Maurice Binder’s once-innovative sequences look repetitive and clumsy, with awkward post-production camera moves reducing the gyrating figures to cardboard cut-outs. Daniel Kleinman’s revolutionary GoldenEye titles added a third dimension thanks to modern CGI technology, and gave us a virtual camera able to slide smoothly past surreal vistas with genuine depth. The three subsequent sequences failed to live up to the splendour of his first, but the flat graphic style of the Casino Royale sequence was exactly what was required – utterly different from any previous incarnation, and yet recognisably a continuation of what had gone before. That’s what long-running series like the Bonds need to be, and that’s Skyfall all over – the titles included. Returning to the fold having missed Quantum, here Kleinman’s CGI camera pushes forward, forward, forward, through a landscape with more depth than ever before. It’s a remarkable piece of work.

Returning to the fold, Bond is tested and found wanting, but M nevertheless sends him out on the trail of Raoul Silva who has blown up MI6. Together with the immensely striking Bérénice Marlohe, he tracks Silva down with apparent ease, but must sacrifice his latest girlfriend to do so. The execution of the apparently leading Bond girl within about 20 minutes is another shocking development, another radical departure from established practice, although I have to criticise Sam Mendes or Barbara Broccoli or the BBFC or someone for squeamishness here. Forced into playing a murderous game of William Tell with a bound Sevrine and a shot-glass, Bond shoots and misses, following which Silva wins the game by simply shooting her through the head – but the photographing of this shocking development is so coy that it’s easy to mistake this kill-shot for another poor aim by the marksman and a flinch from the target. A shame, as this moment should have been heart-in-the-mouth stuff. It’s not unusual for James Bond films to begin with a “sacrificial lamb” Bond girl (Jill Masterson, Aki, Rosie Carver, Andrea Anders, Corinne Dufour, Paris Carver, Solange, Strawberry Fields, etc etc) but it’s unprecedented for the leading Bond girl to be executed half-way through the movie, never to be replaced.

No more so than in his interrogation scene, Javier Bardem has tremendous fun with this camply disturbing character, and the revolting jaw prosthesis which he wears. His Lawrence of Arabia style entrance, walking slowly towards camera in a single shot, is also worthy of note – possibly Mendes’ reposte to the frantic cutting of Quantum which helped make that film such an unsatisfactory experience. From here, Silva’s plan becomes increasingly unlikely, but criticising the movie for this I rather think this misses the point. The best Bond films, with the possible exception of From Russia With Love, aren’t spy thrillers at all, they are colossal absurd fantasy adventures. The trick is in balancing the insane on-screen action with enough ballast so it doesn’t just become laughable. Daniel Craig adjusting his cuffs as he lands on the back of that train is perfect. Blofeld evading capture by dragging up (Diamonds Are Forever) is harder to take seriously, and Bond pretending to be Tarzan (Octopussy) is so stupid as to be insulting. Silva trying to kill Bond by chucking an entire tube train at him is hard to take, sure, but the execution is so faultless and the idea so extraordinary, I’m perfectly happy to watch it in delighted slack-jawed amazement – it seems rather dull trying to wonder just what it would take to plan, time and pull-off such an outré method of execution. You might as well complain that the idea of a “licence to kill” isn’t entirely credible.

From here, the film boldly veers off into completely uncharted territory. There’s no particular reason why not, but Bond has never really presented a siege situation before. In film after film, Bond has stormed the villain’s lair at the end, whether solo (GoldenEye, Quantum of Solace) with modest back-up (For Your Eyes Only, Tomorrow Never Dies) or at the head of massive army (You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker) but never before has he holed-up in a safe house, set traps and waited for the villain to come to him. This splendidly suspenseful sequence both delivers the necessary excitement and catharsis and exemplifies the film’s theme – sometimes the old ways are the best. But the cost is ghastly – Judi Dench’s redoubtable M has paid the ultimate price.

It’s not until the credits begin rolling that I really took on board what had been wrought in the closing moments of Skyfall. This most revisionist of Bonds, as much a reboot as Casino Royale in its own way, has been quietly rebuilding the old Bond before our very eyes. Not just the little nods to previous movies (Bond’s escape on the backs of some reptiles, Q’s caustic reference to exploding pens, Bond telling Eve to stop touching her ear, probably others), but the mythos of Connery, Moore and Dalton movies is being reassmbled. As the screen fades to black, we are back to a patrician and avuncular M with complete if sometimes testy faith in agent 007, whose office hides behind a leather-panelled door, guarded by a spunky Moneypenny and whose payroll includes an enthusiastic gadget man, designated Q – a line-up we haven’t seen since 1989. Welcome home 007. I can hardly wait for your next mission.

Oh my god, they killed Rory.

You bastards!

There’s a lot to like about The Angels Take Manhattan. It looks fantastic, with director Nick Hurran making excellent use of the opportunity to go on location in the USA. The regulars are all on sparkling form – it’s a pleasure just to watch the three of them sitting in Central Park and teasing each other. The opening hard-boiled narration is atmospheric and captures the spirit of the novels and movies it’s referencing without being smug, and the story as a whole acts as a fine finale for the era of the Ponds and Amy in particular, with enough references to key episodes from the past two-and-a-half seasons to engage the regular viewer’s sentimentality without being key to understanding the episode.

That brings up what for me is the main point though – who is this really aimed at? On the one hand, clearly the regular viewer. The character of River Song blithely referring to the Doctor as her husband and Amy as her mother would be baffling for any casual or new watcher, and the emphasis of the whole story is very clearly on the departure of Amy and Rory – even to the point of just letting an Angel keep roaming around free, the Doctor is apparently entirely unbothered by the thought that the paradox they have created may not have been entirely successful in eradicating them. So clearly, this was made for the regular viewer then.

One the other hand, only a casual viewer would fail to spot that we’ve seen all of this before. The Weeping Angels first return in The Time of Angels brilliantly added to their powers and qualities while preserving their original Grandmother’s Footsteps appeal. This simply reprises scenes from Blink, when it isn’t ignoring established Angel lore altogether (like having Rory transmitted only in space for no reason at all except that it makes the plot work). Likewise the relationship between River and the Doctor is never explored in any new way at all, it’s just minor variations on themes played again and again by Steven Moffat in previous scripts – the Ming vase is simply a lesser version of the “Hello Sweetie” message in The Pandorica Opens, and the novel is just River Song’s diary rehashed for example.

There’s also a tendency in the episode for things to be true only because someone, usually the Doctor, says they are, rather than because they flow naturally from other story elements, or because they fit with things already established. Once you read something it becomes true. Really? Okay, I guess. The Doctor has healing hands now? Uh-huh. New York is messed up with time… things… so it’s hard to land a TARDIS there. Really? Didn’t seem to be an issue in The Chase, but I suppose. If you voluntarily go back in time, I can never come and visit you again. Huh?

When I overcome the aching familiarity of it all, then it does kind-of work – at least up to the moment of old Rory’s death. Honestly, has any character in fiction other than South Park’s Kenny McCormick died more frequently and less permanently? It’s impossible to take the sight of an emaciated Arthur Darvill seriously, given that he’s already been aged to death in a previous episode (as well as shot, turned into an Auton, desiccated to death, erased from history etc), and even Rory commenting on his propensity for resurrection can’t overcome the feeling of “here we go again”. Amy and Rory chucking themselves off the ledge is nicely done and is moving for as long as you ignore how fast-and-loose the show is now playing with the rules of the Angels (they basically obediently wait for you to finish being noble now, whether you blink or not) but tarnished slightly by the fact that we then get the same damned scene again in the graveyard. Only Rory Williams could exit the series dying three times in the same episode.

And yet, and yet, and yet… there is energy and power and pace to this episode. Moffat’s use of structure is as elegant as ever – “break mine” is if not a fresh melody then at least a nimble variation and Amy’s “afterword” is both a nifty idea and a nice bit of writing. And, following-on from the Doctor’s erasing of himself from history, maybe a bit more of a clean break with the past is what’s needed. The Ponds living a quiet life as a media couple in New York makes sense, and is a fitting departure for them – clearly the Doctor was never going to leave them alone. But what on Earth is the Doctor going to say to Brian…?

So, now I suppose I have to give this episode a star rating, which I find almost impossible. If I’d never seen Blink or the various other episodes plundered for ideas, I think I would have loved it. If I judge it on the basis that every episode this year is supposed to be a completely original “mini-movie” then clearly it falls very far short. If I didn’t truly believe that the Ponds were gone for good, I would have found the abandoning of the evil-Angels plot maddening, but equally if I hadn’t mourned Rory a dozen times already I would feel the loss of him and Amy more keenly.

It’s generally been quite a strong half-season, although nothing has absolutely hit it out of the park so far. We began with the impressive and vibrant but rather uneven Asylum of the Daleks followed by the rather clunky Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, redeemed by the thoughtful if not perfectly-realised A Town Called Mercy and the excellent, save for the hasty ending, The Power of Three. I think ultimately The Angels Take Manhattan is far more successful than Dinosaurs, but far too flawed to get the four-star treatment meted out to Asylum and so I think three-and-a-half stars is fair. But I want to watch it again, and I shall be interested to see what commenters make of this one. I’ve a feeling it may divide opinion.

Doctor Who is often at its best when it focuses on just one thing. There’s a Rutan in a lighthouse. Who created the Daleks? Don’t blink, blink and you’re dead. Trying to juggle too many different ideas, concepts, points of focus can easily lead to muddle, especially when you’re trying to deliver a movie-of-the-week in 45 minutes.

Sometimes an episode can suffer from being over-ambitious and yet the parts which work work so well that I’m prepared to forgive a bit of muddle. School Reunion never does anything interesting with its alien invasion plot beyond a bit of amusing undercover work from the Doctor in the first five minutes. But the return of Sarah Jane and K9 and the amazing meeting-of-companions past and present means that the underdeveloped melodrama never gets in the way of the relationship story which delivers handily.

Writer Chris Chibnall’s best script for Doctor Who is easily 42, which follows the principle of Keep It Simple Stupid. By contrast, the Silurian two-parter has barely enough material for 60 minutes, let alone 90. And Dinosaurs on a Spaceship is an obvious first-draft with no care or time taken to smooth over the bumps and properly bed-in the plot points (despite Moffat’s claims in Doctor Who Magazine that the script was “perfect” as delivered). How would The Power of Three measure-up given that it was trying to balance an alien invasion plot with a Ponds-eye view of The Doctor?

By and large, it worked very well indeed.

The sudden arrival on Earth of countless identical smooth black cubes is a delightful and arresting image, which works extremely well as a point of focus, providing The Doctor, Rory, Amy and not forgetting diligent Brian, with a deep mystery to explore, providing time for The Doctor’s impact on the Ponds’ lives to be examined. As well as including the traditional first-person narration by a shortly-departing companion, the story is full of incidental pleasures – The Doctor’s demented need to fill time by playing keepy-uppy, doing the hoovering and painting any available fences; an RTD-style series of celebrity cameos; the return of UNIT, now re-oriented (“science leads”) and led by daughter-of-the-Brig Kate Stewart played by bloody Jemma Redgrave; and the now apparently obligatory side-story, this time involving Zygons and Henry VIII.

All this time, we get only a couple of hints at the cubes’ necessarily malevolent nature and this too is a dangerous game. The longer you leave it, the more you spin out the suspense, the more jaw-droppingly amazing must the reveal be when it finally comes. Chibnall again plays it clever here by initially making the actions of the cubes when they come to life bewilderingly inconsistent, but when they do strike, it’s fierce and hard.

It’s really only in the last ten minutes that the careful balancing of timing and theme slips through the story’s grasp. While it’s an enormous pleasure to see Steven Berkoff snarling his way through the lines, Shakri’s plan and motivations were pretty standard-issue, and The Doctor’s solution seemed to amount to little more than a bit of sonic-ing. Here’s also where, in his zeal to build up the excitement and whack up the stakes, Chibnall hugely over-reaches himself. As soon as you announce that around a third of the Earth’s population has suffered fatal heart attacks, any half-awake viewer is going to recognise that a reset switch is about to be thrown. And while I’m grateful that a) we didn’t actually rewind time and b) the solution was properly bedded-in to the story and not grafted-on at the last minute, the timing is way, way off. Even given that the cubes, which are designed to find live, beating hearts and administer a fatal shock, can be reprogrammed with a flick of the sonic to instead find only those hearts which have already been stopped and administer a shock sufficient to get them going again, The Doctor still has only  something like two minutes to zap the victims before permanent brain damage is inflicted. Not the many minutes of Berkoffing which we actually got. And that’s generously drawing a veil over the fact that you can’t shock a non-beating heart back into life anyway, only correct the rhythm of a heart which is not beating properly. And while I enjoyed the sight of The Doctor struggling through with one heart out of action, I was frustrated at how quickly and easily this was resolved. Surely, if anyone is going to defibrillate The Doctor in a hospital, it should be medically-trained Rory?

So, if the climax was a bit skimpy, the Pond/Doctor story generally made up for it, with Brian’s final speech sending the Ponds back to the TARDIS I thought particularly effective. It’s an essentially unbreakable rule of scriptwriting physics that the more screen-time you give to your personal drama, the less you have available for your alien-invasion plot, and it’s to Chris Chibnall’s credit that he balanced both demands as well as he did for as long as he did.

Elsewhere, the production team is not tested to breaking point, but ably rises to the occasion. The make-up job on the two creepy orderlies is fine (if a bit reminiscent of The Empty Child), Douglas Mackinnon’s camera consistently frames the story in interesting ways and Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill prepare to send the Ponds off  to their final reward in fine style.

For the first half-hour, I honestly thought this was going to be my favourite of the season so far, earning four-and-a-half or even five stars until the last ten minutes, but that slightly limp resolution sees The Power of Three stuck on four, roughly even with Asylum and Mercy but still a tremendous improvement on the dreadfully clumsy Dinosaurs on a Spaceship.

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?

Hugo is not exactly a typical Scorsese movie, but then it’s hardly a typical anything. At first glance it appears to be a Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie by way of Pixar featuring a cast of mo-cap characters in the Tintin mode. Why is Hit Girl from Kick Ass talking like a character from E Nesbitt? What’s Borat doing there? Is that Dracula? What the hell is going on?

What’s going on is that Scorsese is making a movie which kids could watch without being scarred for life. It’s his first stereoscopic movie (it isn’t 3D), and although as usual with this technique, objects don’t appear to have any real roundness and form, appearing more often as flat cut-outs which move away and toward the viewer, the illusion of depth is often very well used.

It’s easy to right-off movies which are visually dazzling as all style and no substance, but that’s not an entirely fair criticism here. First of all, it really does dazzle. The production design by Dante Ferretti is absolutely eye-popping throughout and Scorsese’s camera swoops and glides through it, and seamless CGI augmentations of it, as if the director is channelling David Fincher. The story is admittedly slender, but it doesn’t grind to a halt so we can admire the execution. The spectacle of it all is part of the point.

Because this is the story of the rediscovery of the works of Georges Méliès, by way of a clockwork robot which recreates one of his designs, when Hugo finally completes the restoration job. Méliès was a pioneer of cinema in an age when spectacle was the principal attraction of the medium. While on the one hand this legitimises Scorsese’s sudden indulgence in every pixel-pumping trick in his new digital handbook, it also creates a narrative distance. The ostensible hero is Asa Butterfield as the titular Hugo Cabret – all saucer-eyed stoicism and fierce introversion. But his function in the plot is to reveal and elevate Ben Kingsley, restrained and dignified as Méliès. As uninterested as Scorsese is Hugo, he isn’t that interested in Méliès either – this is really a love letter from a filmmaker to the medium as a whole.

Still, as gossamer-thin as this is, it is still a lot of fun, populated largely by cartoon characters, to be sure, but handsomely drawn ones, with any number of top British actors given ninety seconds each to make an impact. Richard Griffiths, looking rather like Billy Bunter in his 70s, and Frances de la Tour, who put me in mind of the drawings of James Thurber, briefly flirt through the medium of pets. Emily Mortimer looks doe-eyed at evil Borat, who in his impossibly bright blue uniform and with his gammy leg and black-gloved hand, comes off like a demented blend of Doctor Strangelove, the Child Catcher and the Conductor in the Polar Express. I’m still not entirely sure that was Sascha Baron Cohen and not Andy Serkis in a body stocking. Jude Law and Ray Winstone get one fairly brief scene each. Ray Winstone!!

Standing out are Michael Stuhlbarg (A Serious Man) who doles out great lumps of exposition with a twinkly stillness which is totally arresting, and luminous Chloë Grace Moretz, who handles the cut-glass English accent with aplomb. (Why is it that Scorsese requires English accents from every cast member – does that say “Paris” to the inhabitants of Boise Idaho?)

What’s frustrating is how sanitised this all is – not just that it’s kid-friendly – but how limited in scope and ambition this is. There’s no real pain, no cost to anything, preciously little jeopardy – even the runaway train looks too pretty to carry any actual threat. Disney killed Bambi’s mother but the man who brought us Goodfellas and Taxi Driver can’t summon up any grit at all, any lemon juice to add a bit of sharpness to this sometimes cloying chocolate box of a movie.

All of which would be fine – I don’t think Scorsese has failed in his intentions, I think he’s made precisely the movie he wanted to – if it weren’t for the fact that this is the most nominated film at this year’s Academy Awards. Has Hollywood forgotten how to make truly epic films about emotions and relationships, or has the Academy just stop noticing them?

As I feared, it’s looking like a thin year. So far we’ve had one self-regarding doodle, one joyful bit of fluff, a piece of confectionary in movie form and a slice of superior soap opera which is currently the best of the bunch. The King’s Speech might have been a bit cosy, but at least it was about something.

Four down, five to go.

It’s Oscar time again – the nominations were announced on 24 January and I must say the list of Best Picture Nominees was a bit surprising. No longer locked-in to ten movies, the Academy has found only nine to nominate this year. As regular readers will know, in the past by this stage I’d already seen about half of the nominees, but this year I’ve only seen one (Midnight in Paris – not good except by the standards of other recent Woody Allen offerings). I’d like to think that this is because it’s such a thin year and not because my cinema-going has been more than usually philistine.

Here are my preconceptions of the remaining eight…

• The Artist – black-and-white, silent, French and many critics’ film of the year. Also featuring tap-dancing (yay!).
• The Descendants – from the director of Sideways, starring George Clooney in a tee-shirt.
• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ­– from the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, about a boy who on 9/11 loses his father but finds a key.
• The Help – being a black maid in the American South in the 1960s wasn’t entirely awesome, apparently.
• Hugo – Martin Scorsese in 3D
• Moneyball ­– don’t worry, it’s not all baseball. It’s also maths.
• The Tree of Life – Sean Penn ponders his life. In other news, the universe is created.
• War Horse – this time with real horses. Probably not an improvement.

Now, since the Oscars ceremony will be on 26 February, I’ve not got long if I want to see all nine, and so I’ve got cracking straight away with a double-bill this weekend. First, here are a few more quick thoughts about Midnight in Paris which I saw on a plane.

What the hell ever happened to Woody Allen? The hilarious clown prince of angst who segued beautifully from broad scattergun gagfests like Sleeper and Love and Death to the delightful but richer Annie Hall and then a wide array of splendid movies in a variety of genres (my personal favourites being The Purple Rose of Cairo, Crimes and Misdemeanours and Bullets Over Broadway) seemed to fatally lose his way from about 1995 onward. The 17 films which he’s made since then (and that’s more than many directors make in their entire career) have varied from the inessential (Small Time Crooks) to the tedious (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) to the insultingly incompetent (Match Point – of which my beloved Deborah so memorably said “I don’t think I would have been interested if that had been my life”).

And yet he still grinds out a movie a year – whether he has a good idea or not. The best that can be said of Midnight in Paris is that it isn’t as bad as Match Point, or actually as bad as Vicky Cristina Barcelona or Whatever Works (“why can’t everyone be a New York intellectual – it’s so much more fulfilling that anything you might think is making you happy right now”). That should be enough for at least one critic to trumpet it as a “return to form” – a line which it seems at least one critic is mandated to trot out as each new Allen movie makes its debut.

But is it good, as in Oscar-worthy? As in from the director of Annie Hall? No, let’s get real. It’s incredibly slender, a doodle in the margins of a life in which a man who has pretty much everything he could possibly want, is granted a no-strings vacation into the past to have his ego stroked by the great and the good of the 1920s. Owen Wilson is charming enough, and the various celebrity impersonations are all decent, and there’s one (count it, one) stand-out gag involving a private detective very near the end, but the rest of it is predictable, pointless and clunky with various characters endlessly stating and restating the conclusions which we cannot be trusted to find ourselves.

And there’s the issue of the relative fame of various of these characters. It’s treacherous for a person who has simply failed to connect with a piece of work to denounce it as “pretentious”. Just because my cultural intake so far hasn’t overlapped with the assumptions made by the artist does not mean that the art is worthless, and as delightful as crowing “the emperor has no clothes” can be, it’s actually a fairly feeble criticism. But it’s dramatically weak to have our novelist hero transplanted back to the very period he reveres in the first place, and I can’t help but feel alienated when he instantly recognises not just superstars like Picasso and Hemmingway, but the comparatively obscure Man Ray and Luis Bunuel instead. Wilson is Allen’s surrogate so it is impossible for him to ever be made vulnerable by not recognising someone he should – and all this despite the presence of the (typically amusing) Michael Sheen as the pseudo-intellectual poseur in the modern sections.

For Midnight in Paris to be nominated for Best Picture is certainly surprising. For it to get four nominations is unlikely and for it to be Allen’s most commercially successful movie in the USA ever is just wrong. For completists only, who will hate themselves afterwards.

Now – on with some better news. We took in The Artist and The Descendants as a rather eccentric double-bill this afternoon. Both movies look far more at home on the list of Best Picture nominees, and The Artist is the clear favourite to win with ten nominations (beaten only by Hugo with 11). The Artist is a nostalgic hymn to a Hollywood past. Set between 1927 and 1932, it charts the rise of young star Peppy Miller as the talkies sweep through movieland, and the simultaneous decline in fortune of silent movie megastar George Valentin. It is (almost) entirely silent, shot in black-and-white in the 4:3 Academy ratio and contains much to admire.

Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo, who star as Valentin and Miller (and who both seem equipped with a preposterous quantity of teeth) are both irrepressibly charming and are given handy support by a splendid John Goodman, who can express more with one twitch of his jowls than many actors can in five paragraphs of dialogue. James Cromwell is stiffly subservient as Valentin’s manservant but Penelope Ann Miller and especially Missi Pyle are criminally underused as his wife and co-star respectively. Malcolm McDowell also has a bizarrely irrelevant one-shot cameo but this is Dujardin and Bejo’s show, ably assisted by Uggie the dog.

Any film which depicts a silent movie superstar at the coming of the talkies is bound to evoke comparisons with Singin’ in the Rain, and The Artist just goes ahead and essentially recreates much of that film’s first act during its opening scenes – the quarrelling stars meeting their public at the first preview, the ingénue meeting the star without quite knowing who he is and not to mention the tap-dancing! And yet, despite the nostalgia which leaks out of every frame, this movie does managed to feel fresh and original for the most part.

Only daring occasionally to push the limits of the silent movie form (rather as Spielberg allowed himself one red coat in Schindler’s List), director Michel Hazanavicius seems to know what he is doing, plunging us into  despair before finally allowing the star pair to express their joyous contentment. You have to admire the cheek of a movie which depicts a silent movie star witnessing an early test of talking pictures, without even giving us a sound effect to represent the recorded speech which is about to end his career. But the overall effect is muted rather than captivating, and it never really seems to be about anything – it’s all effect and no guts.

The Artist is fun while it’s on, albeit entirely unthreatening, and will almost certainly take the Best Picture Oscar this year.

Alexander Payne’s The Descendants really couldn’t be more different. George Clooney stars as Matt King, a wealthy lawyer in Hawaii whose wife is comatose in a local hospital following a boating accident, while he tries to reconnect with his two young daughters. As he attempts to deal with this horrible situation, Payne and his fellow screenwriters Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, working from the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, consistently make his life credibly but dramatically more conflicted, complicated and confusing.

Entirely Clooney’s movie (we only get to see his wife’s father at her bedside because King peeks around the hospital door), he is magnificent, fighting to keep a public image in place as a ghastly set of circumstances is ranged against him. Again and again, Payne pitiless camera trains its implacable gaze on Clooney’s face as a fascinating web of emotions flickers across it.

A beautifully on-theme sub-plot is not overplayed and there is strong support from Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller as his two children. For me, the only bum note was the elder daughter’s slacker boyfriend, played by Nick Krause. Both in the writing and the playing, this was a little too broad, in a screenplay which manages tone so expertly everywhere else. Consistently mining little nuggets of ironic humour which prevent the film as a whole from becoming unremittingly bleak, this is a clever, brutal, complex, grown-up story which is sentimental in all the best ways.

The Artist, for all its sparkle and dash, essentially tells us that no problem is so difficult that it can’t be solved by a really good tap-dance (or even a merely adequate one). The Descendants tells us that life provides plenty of problems that just never go away, and that sometimes you just get punished more for doing the right thing. Which is both why it should win and why it won’t!