If you can read this sentence, my method of hiding spoilers is not working for you and you should treat this as an entirely spoilery post.

I enjoyed it a lot! It sounds like all my bigger-Star-Wars-fan friends did too, which is great. I’ll keep this spoiler-free and then let people who’ve seen it click the spoiler buttons for what I’m specifically talking about.

It alternates a bit between three different ways you could approach making a Star Wars sequel:

• Nostalgia Trip: the same characters come back and do the same things but 30 years older.
• Mimic: new characters who are curiously similar to old ones, facing a curiously similar configuration of curiously similar enemies with a curiously similar threat, which they resolve with a curiously similar plan.
• New Story: new characters that occupy new roles in the familiar world, using them to explore new corners of it and create new situations and conflicts.

As you can probably tell from my phrasing, I like it best when it’s doing New Story stuff. A whole film of that would turn me full fanboy. As it is, the new stuff is still central enough that it kept me excited throughout.

Click for spoilery specifics

Spoiler stuff follows

I really like Rey, and that counts for a lot – I don’t know how the screen time tallies up, but the plot certainly revolves around her more than anyone. It’s reasonable to call her the new Luke, but she’s different enough to count as new. She’s stoic where he was a complainer, isolated where he had adopted family, fiercer and funnier. And she’s a woman, which is immediately refreshing.

Finn, as a character concept, is new: a turncoat Stormtrooper. I like him too, and generally very much like the idea of humanising people who were previously seen as valueless and interchangeable cannon fodder. But the fiction can’t make good on that idea. The very first thing he does after going rogue is slaughter dozens of interchangeable Stormtroopers, then minutes later whoops about it with his new pal. Once he’s out, he talks and behaves exactly like a normal, rogueish, wise-cracking, functioning member of the free galaxy. There’s instantly no trace of the fascist culture he’s lived it for as long as he can remember, where people get serial numbers not names, and devote their lives to working on ways to destroy more than one planet at once.

As I say, I like him. But taking on a big concept like that is a bad idea if the genre of film you’re making clashes with the inevitable consequences of it: that he would be fucked up, that Stormtroopers are people, that it’s not cool or fun to kill them.

Poe is not a new or very interesting character – standard hotshot – but I wanted to mention him here because Oscar Isaac’s performance makes him so charming. His fast friendship with Finn is what ends up making that character feel real, and stresses the stakes: when they unexpectedly see each other again and hug, it feels like they’ve been through something truly affecting.

Kylo is great. Aesthetically, in costume, he’s very guilty of the ‘Mimic’ side of the film – we need a Vader, dress someone up as Vader. But once the mask first comes off, he becomes something much more interesting: someone doing all the awful shit Vader did while being a person.

His inner conflict is happening visibly – he hides his face but will show it when challenged. He bullies his underlings like Vader but then can’t control his rage, to the point that it’s almost embarrassing. We’re told that he has ‘light in him’ and we see it: we hear his doubts and how he contextualises them as ‘temptations’ in a way that lets him dismiss them. He wants to look invincible, but can’t quite ignore his injuries – punching himself in a disturbing way that could be masochism, penance, or self-surgery. And his encounter with Han genuinely felt like it could go either way, to me. Which made his betrayal much more affecting than just bad-guy-does-bad, or even major-character-dies. There’s a sense of losing Ben too.

It spends most of its time in Mimic mode, which baffles me. It’s fine, I’m just puzzled that anyone, even the most rabid fan of the originals, thought that to recapture them you’d need to literally copy and paste the exact same elements and rename them as if they’re new.

Click for spoilery specifics

Spoiler stuff follows

Hero is a technically adept unwittingly force-sensitive loner on desert planet, villain is a masked man in black with a tannoy voice filter, who reports to an enigmatic seated overlord, and has a hierarchical rivalry with the stuffy and force-sceptical commander of the military wing, who he threatens but does not seem to entirely outrank, and the commander wants to use the big weapon but the mask guy wants to use the force, and the big weapon is a giant spherical object that can destroy planets – a strategy they have tried twice before, to expensive and memorable failure – and the rebels’ plan to defeat it is to have one set of people sneak in and disable its shields, and then another set to fly in and shoot its weak spot.

Again, this is the superficial stuff – even the strategic mechanics – so I don’t care that much. I like Rey and Kylo, who are new character-wise. Just bemused.

I’m not completely against a Nostalgia Trip. I like that old characters are back, and I think some of them are used well – as welcome cameos, or lynchpins of the plot. The time it starts to hurt the film, for me, is when old characters are leading the action and very pointedly doing exactly what they were doing 30 years ago. It feels like putting on a show – “Look! This is what you want! Things are just like they were!” It’s fine to do that for a moment, then show why things have moved on. But it’s more than a moment, here – some of them are lead characters, and that’s where it starts to feel like wallowing in the past.

A while ago I would have said there was no point at all to doing stuff like that. But once the trailers came out, I realised some people respond to it on a completely different level to me. When I see Han Solo again, I think “Yes, I recognise that man. There he is, on that ship of his.” Apparently some people experience something a little stronger, and this part of TFA is obviously for them. If it worked for them, it was probably worth it.

Click for spoilery specifics

Spoiler stuff follows

Obviously I’m talking about Han and Chewie here. Story-wise I really like Han’s arc: how the aftermath of saving the world and getting the girl has clashed with the personality that got him there. But for the long periods that he and Chewie are being action heroes, it has the feeling of a videogame tie-in: see the Iconic Characters do the Thing You Know Them For! Tag along, and press some switches at the right time to help them!

I’m glad that ended here, and with a moment that felt brave and galling: he’s finally forced to be vulnerable in the last way he wants to be, and is brutally punished for it.

Comments: if your comment mentions anything that happens in the film, please start it with [This comment contains spoilers for The Force Awakens] – that’s intentionally long so the spoilery bit won’t show up in the sidebar excerpts here. I’ll also turn on comment moderation for a while, to be safe, so your comment won’t pop up right away.

When you look at them, you immediately want to see it. I wanted to see it so much I wrote it.

This is just a short script – I outline some conversations instead of filling them in, and it moves very fast. It’s not quite a traditional heist movie format: I liked the idea of a small lady-heavy team, so I kept it focused on those three, in five acts. James specifically likes the way heist movies trick both the characters and the audience, so I did aim for that.

James based the two women on Jackie Onassis and Emma Peel respectively, so I’ve nicked those first names for simplicity’s sake. I’m calling the fella Henry. The main thing I left out was Emma’s guns: I felt like if she shot anyone, some of the levity I love about this visual style would be lost.

All the images in this post are by James Lopez, including this sweet title card – left to right, that’s Emma, Henry, Jackie.

1. MUSEUM – NIGHT

A catsuited thief (EMMA) slips into view, deftly evading elaborate security.

She distracts a guard with a coin and slips past.

She arches and flips through a moving rows of lasers.

She cuts a hole in a bullet proof glass case with a fingernail gadget, and snatches the huge pink diamond inside.

As she turns to flee, she bumps into a towering security guard (BEN).

Behind him a man in a smart grey suit and glasses (HENRY) steps out.

Henry: Going somewhere?

Emma: Monaco, if possible.

He smiles.

Henry: I’m afraid it’s a fake. The real diamond doesn’t arrive today, I just wanted to see if our security was up to it.

Emma: Oh, I knew that. I’m here to test it! And boy, do you have some work to do.

Henry: Nice try. But you’re right – you came closer than I thought anyone could. What would you say to a job?

Emma smiles.

2. MANHATTAN RESTAURANT – DAY

Henry is sat at a table, sipping coffee across from an empty seat.

An expensively dressed woman (JACKIE) joins him to discuss arrangements for the display of her diamond over breakfast.

Henry is formal and deferential, thanking her repeatedly for her generosity in letting his museum exhibit the stone.

Jackie seems just as eager to please, almost flirtatious, and is thrilled by the high drama of his story about catching a thief.

They argue over the bill, both insisting on paying, and end up leaving the full amount each.

As they turn away from each other to get up, both wince at what they’ve just spent.

3. MUSEUM – DAY

Emma, dressed in an ill-fitting borrowed security guard uniform, explains her security ideas to a sceptical Ben.

Emma: See, guards are great, but they make your job too hard.

Ben raises an interested eyebrow. Emma’s obviously thought about this, and is getting enthusiastic despite herself.

Emma: I got past you with a coin. Now that only worked because the rest of the security was so lousy – if you put in some nice steel bars around that rock, no way I get through those before a sharp guy like you knows what’s up.

Ben nods, and is about to ask something when Henry and Jackie walk in.

Henry introduces Emma and Ben, and lets Jackie inspect their plans. Emma has drawn herself stumped by metal bars, being caught by Ben.

Jackie loves the deadly high-tech laser beams, and suggests more of them.

Jackie: Couldn’t we get rid of these ugly bars and give those poor guards the night off if we had enough electronic security?

Emma opens her mouth but seems unable to express how much she disagrees. Ben frowns.

Henry is torn – we can tell he prefers Emma’s idea, but wants to keep Jackie happy. He agrees to try it.

Emma: Oh please! I jumped through those lasers like a well-dressed gazelle!

Jackie: But that was because they were moving back and forth, wasn’t it?

Emma: Yes! So I ducked the first one and then-

Jackie: Well, if we had more, couldn’t they just cover the whole corridor at once?

Emma looks at her, mind blown.

Emma: Oh you monster.

4. JACKIE’S APARTMENT – NIGHT

Jackie enters her small apartment excited, twirling. She drops her bag and jumps on the bed, then winces at how hard it is.

She looks around, deflated. The place is tiny. She takes her wedding ring off, and goes to the closet. It’s empty.

Sighing, she goes to a laundry hamper. She picks something out, sniffs it, and wrinkles her nose.

5. LAUNDRETTE – NIGHT

Jackie, self-conscious in a nightie, loads a hamper of clothes into a washer.

She puts coins in the detergent machine, and comes up 5 cents short.

She reaches for her pockets, remembers what she’s wearing, then rummages among her clothes.

Rummages.

Comes back empty. Sits down on a dirty bench. Starts to cry.

1. MUSEUM – NIGHT Lasers everywhere. A shadow creeps up to them.

As she emerges into the glow, we see that it’s Jackie – wearing high heels and an expensive and restrictive black dress.

She walks up to the first set of lasers, touches the handprint scanner next to them, and the whole grid shuts down.

She walks nervously up to the glass case, heels echoing, and twists her wedding ring round to touch it to the glass.

Through the glass, we see a huge figure.

Ben clears his throat.

Jackie stands up straight, hides the ring, smiles innocently.

7. MUSEUM LOUNGE – NIGHT

The lights flick on to reveal Emma sleeping on the couch. She sits up and shields her eyes from the light.

Ben sits Jackie down next to her and waits. Emma is baffled. After an awkward amount of time, Henry comes in, gets right to it.

Henry: Why on Earth would you want to steal your own diamond?

Jackie explains. She’s getting divorced, and her husband will get everything. But the diamond’s insurance policy is in her name – if it’s stolen, she gets its full value.

Henry sympathises, and agrees not to press charges as long as she goes ahead with loaning his museum the diamond.

He shakes his head and goes to leave. Something occurs to Jackie.

Jackie: Did you put on aftershave to come out here and arrest me?

Henry: … Did you just try to rob a museum in that dress?

Jackie: It’s the only black thing I have!

Henry: Hm.

Jackie: Hmph.

He leaves. Ben leaves, locking the door.

Jackie and Emma sit side by side on the couch wordless for a while.

Emma sniffs.

Emma sniffs Jackie.

Emma crinkles her nose.

Jackie: I know.

8. MUSEUM LOUNGE – DAY

The TV is on, showing static, Emma and Jackie are sat slumped against each other on the floor. Henry walks in.

Henry: Right!

Emma springs into a combat pose, sending a technical manual for a safe flying across the room. Jackie starts, upending a bowl of snacks.

Henry pauses.

Henry: Right! Obviously we need to rethink security. Emma, we’re getting your cage.

Emma looks delighted.

Henry: Jackie, we’ll keep your lasers, but obviously we’ll have to take you off the security list – no offense.

Jackie brushes herself off.

Jackie: Oh, none taken.

Ben walks in.

Henry: Only Ben and I will be authorised to deactivate any security measures. And Ben, I’m doubling your budget – get new guards here for the last day of the show tomorrow.

Ben looks delighted.

Henry: No-one – no-one – is getting to this diamond.

9. MUSEUM – NIGHT

Lasers everywhere. A cage. No guards yet.

A shadow creeps in. As it steps into the light, we see it’s Henry.

He’s about to deactivate the laser grid when a white glove comes out of the shadows and taps him on the shoulder.

Emma: Going somewhere?

Henry: Oh! I wasn’t, er… wait, what are you doing here?

Emma: Following you. There’s no point, you know. You’d never get through my cage.

Henry: I was just…

Jackie steps out of the shadows.

Jackie: (Brightly:) I’m here too! What are we doing?

10. MUSEUM LOUNGE – NIGHT

Jackie: What?! Why were you trying to break into your museum to steal my diamond?

Henry’s about to answer, but Emma interrupts.

Emma: You know, don’t you? (Off Jackie’s blank look:) That it’s a conflict diamond?

Henry: A conflict diamond?

Emma: (Less sure:) Isn’t that why you’re stealing it? Because it was mined by child labour and sold to fund a criminal warlord?

Henry and Jackie look at each other.

Henry: Er, well yes, that’s obviously the main reason. But I was also doing it for Jackie.

Jackie: (melts) Awwww!

Henry smiles awkwardly. Emma looks sceptical.

Henry: And… (hardly worth mentioning but…) I might know a buyer.

He looks at them anxiously, gauging their reaction. Jackie’s hardly heard him, still beaming from the reason she likes.

Emma’s frown turns slowly into a wry smile.

11. MUSEUM – DAY

Emma: If we’re doing this, we’re doing it for the right reasons. We keep only what we need, everything else goes to charity. Agreed?

Henry and Jackie: Agreed.

Emma: Good, so the problem we’re going to have-

Ben walks in. Everyone goes quiet.

Emma: (failing to sound natural:) So you see, Jackie, bars are like lasers, but made of metal! Which means you can’t turn them off!

Jackie: (much better at faking it:) I see!

12. MUSEUM LOUNGE – DAY

Emma: So the problem we’re going to have is that we just spent three days installing security measures to stop every way in we could think of. Even if I could get past all of Ben’s new guards, Henry’s the only one who can deactivate Jackie’s laser grid.

Henry: And I’m as stealthy as a cow.

Jackie: Well, you don’t have to sneak, you’re the curator. You can just walk in and turn them off, can’t you? Say you’re testing.

As they talk, Emma sketches their ideas on a big blueprint of the museum – throwing the sheet away every time they reject an idea and drawing the next on a fresh one.

Emma: So then the question is, how do we distract the guards while the grid is down?

Henry: They’d be watching it like hawks – nothing’s more important to them than a potential security breach.

Jackie: So we give them another breach. I’ll sneak in just then, and get caught.

Henry: That’d work, but we can’t let you get caught. Insurance investigators are vultures – if they find out you tried to break in on the night the diamond vanished, they’ll never pay out. Ben wouldn’t tell them, but any of the new guys might.

Emma: I can. Afford to get caught, I mean. I’m on the first flight out of here when this job is done, so I don’t care if I’m wanted in the States.

Jackie: (seeing where it’s going) Oh! I can’t… I couldn’t actually do the stealing part. I’m as stealthy as a socialite!

Henry: Maybe you don’t have to. You two are the same height, the same build… Jackie, you’re a hairdye and a catsuit away from making a very convincing Emma.

Emma’s smiling at the idea. Jackie grabs her by the shoulders, eyes wide.

Jackie: Can I borrow a catsuit?

Emma: Oh, so you think my whole wardrobe is just a bunch of catsuits?

Jackie nods, still excited.

Emma: … Yes, you can borrow one of my catsuits.

Henry: So that just leaves the cage. Any chance you suggested that because you secretly have an easy way to bypass it?

Emma: (ashamed) No, sorry. It’s just what I’ve always thought museums should do. Even if we could get the keys, it’s a two man job to lift that thing, and cutting through it would take hours. I don’t know anyone who could get past that without raising the alarm.

The three of them just think for a while.

Cut to later, they’re still thinking. Emma starts to draw something, then scribbles it out. Henry holds his chin.

Cut to later. Jackie starts to say something, but stops. Henry hasn’t moved.

Cut to later. It’s getting dark. Henry hasn’t moved. At last:

Henry: … yes you do.

12. MUSEUM – NIGHT

Guards, lasers, cage. Henry walks in through the main entrance.

Henry: Good evening, gentlemen. This is a surprise inspection, carry on as normal.

He walks around the room, peering at each guard suspiciously, pretending to check their identities against a clipboard.

Back at the entrance, we see two Emmas slip in and hide in the shadows either side.

The one wearing earrings – Jackie – looks to the other. Emma gives her the nod, and they slink off in different directions.

Henry reaches the laser grid. We see Emma’s silhouette flipping expertly between light fittings above.

Henry turns off the laser grid. Jackie knocks over a display case.

At the almighty crash, every guard turns to see Jackie doing a rather slow roll into the shadows.

Emma slips through the grid as they move to arrest Jackie. Henry waits to see her make it through, then turns it back on and joins the guards.

Henry: I might have known! I’ll take care of her, guys, you get back to your patrols.

He marches Jackie off in cuffs.

13. HENRY’S OFFICE – NIGHT

Henry shuts the door and gets the handcuff keys from his drawer.

Henry: (mock dismay:) Oh no, how did she get hold of the keys to her handcuffs?

He uncuffs her. She rushes to the window and releases the catch.

Henry: She’s getting away somehow! This’ll certainly explain how she manages to steal the diamond later tonight!

He walks over and helps her open it all the way.

Jackie suddenly stops, turns, grabs him by the tie and pulls him into a kiss.

Then slips out and drops down to the grass.

We watch her running off over Henry’s shoulder. After a moment of stunned silence, he calls after her:

Henry: She used her feminine wiles!

Henry sits down, his expression confusion and happiness.

He picks up the phone and puts on his serious face.

Henry: Ben, it’s Henry. Emma got away, dammit. (We don’t hear Ben’s response) Yeah… hey, head down to the diamond room – I wouldn’t be surprised if she tries again tonight.

14. MUSEUM – NIGHT

Emma’s pressed against the wall on the diamond’s side of the reactivated laser grid.

In her hand, she’s clutching the huge, pink diamond itself.

The grid turns off, and she runs in – only to bump straight into Ben.

Emma: God dammit! How did you know?

Ben says nothing.

Emma: Alright, fine, here’s the diamond. I hope you appreciate the fake I left, it’s one of my best.

Ben looks at the cage, then back at Emma.

Emma just holds up a key and shrugs.

15. HENRY’S OFFICE – NIGHT

Henry’s on the phone.

Henry: You’re kidding. Alright, leave her with the guards, and put the rock back before you do anything else. Oh, and bring me the fake – I’d like to see if it’s as good as mine.

16. MUSEUM – NIGHT

Ben hangs up and hands Emma over to two waiting guards.

Another guard joins him to take the diamond back.

Ben unlocks the cage, and with great effort, the two of them lift it off.

Ben takes the fake off its velvet cushion, and puts the real one back.

He inspects the fake for a moment, gives it a dismissive sneer and pockets it.

Cut to the cage being locked in place.

Ben and the other guard walk off-screen, back to the guards holding Emma.

We hear a series of blows and grunts, then boots sprinting away.

17. HENRY’S OFFICE – NIGHT

Henry’s on the phone.

Henry: You’re kidding. Are you alright? … Thank God. But why on earth would she steal the fake?

18. MUSEUM – DAY

The diamond sits in its case, but now the museum is flooded with people. Jackie, dressed expensively again, strolls through them to inspect her diamond.

She looks at it for a long time, frowning.

Jackie: (loudly:) This is a fake!

Gasps. Muttering. Security descend.

Cut to an examiner, surrounded by police, inspecting the stone.

Examiner: Yup, that’s quartz.

Cut to insurance claim papers being filled out and signed.

Cut to insurance investigators interviewing Henry, Jackie, Ben.

Cut to insurance papers being stamped: APPROVED.

Cut to divorce papers being signed.

Cut to:

19. AIRPORT – DAY

Emma, barely recognisable in expensive clothes and sunglasses, is waiting.

Henry approaches. Emma pretends to check a clock, then walks towards him.

She passes him a small black velvet bag as they pass, neither saying a word.

She boards a flight.

Henry takes a seat on a bench, and a woman in white, sat behind him, speaks without turning round.

Jackie: Can I see?

Henry hands her the bag. She opens it. She gasps.

She hands it back immediately.

Henry looks inside. It’s a rock – literally just a rock.

There’s a note. He reads:

Henry: "Sorry, couldn’t be sure you’d do the right thing. We’ll find our own buyer. Love, Emma… and Ben?"

He finally looks round at Jackie.

Henry: BEN?

Henry at a payphone. Dials. Waits impatiently.

Henry: Ben? … Well when did he leave?

Henry back on the bench, sat next to Jackie now, shaking his head.

Jackie: Ben!

20. UNKNOWN BUILDING – DAY

Ben, in a smarter suit than usual, talking security with Emma.

They’re nerding out about ways to transport cash in local currency securely.

Cut to an exterior shot to show the front of their building: "Diamond Trust Children’s Refuge"

21. LAVISH CHARITY BALL – NIGHT

Jackie is finishing a speech on stage, about discovering her diamond’s awful history and using the insurance money to help with the problem.

The applause dies down as she returns to her seat, next to Henry.

He squeezes her hand and smiles. They both look perfectly happy for a moment.

Then Henry thinks of something, and frowns slightly and shakes his head.

Henry: Ben?

Which is fine, because it’s funny. Helena Bonham Carter is charming as the queen mum, Geoffrey Rush has some fun with the class difference, and Colin Firth shows an entertaining disdain for aristocracy and also swears and sings.

It’s nothing to do with grades – the title’s a nod to The Scarlett Letter. It’s about a girl who gets a false reputation for sluttiness, and decides to wear it with a corset and a Hawthorne reference. Accordingly she’s funny, smart, and like an unprecedented proportion of the characters, likeable. I’ve never liked so many people in one film before. This is her dad:

It wants to be an eighties feelgood movie – explicitly at times – but is slightly too knowing and witty to feel like one. So instead it just references them, somehow incorporating Say Anything, Ferris Beuller’s Day Off and the Breakfast Club into its ending.

The biggest laugh, though, was not a clever reference to anything.

Quiznos guy: Try the honey mustard chicken at Quiznos!
Olive: Not now, Quiznos!
Quiznos guy: You’re a slut.

The fact that it’s about the founding of Facebook, which I’m aware is controversial but have no actual knowledge of, is ideal. “I will feel like I’m being informed about something I’m interested in,” I thought, “and be unable to refute any liberties the film takes with the truth, allowing me to enjoy it entirely.”

Yep, that happened.

The last Sorkin film I saw, Charlie Wilson’s War, was good but didn’t really have his stamp on it. Given that this is also a book adaptation, and also based on nonfiction, I figured that would be the case again. It’s absolutely not: the film opens on a conversation in a bar that would be utterly tedious if it were written by anyone else.

“Since we started on the topic of Final Clubs, I think I may have missed a birthday,” Zuckerberg’s girlfriend says, some way into it.

About a series of painful lawsuits, it doesn’t seem like an immediately funny topic. But right from the start, Sorkin finds masses to sink his teeth into: Zuckerberg’s morally bankrupt hot-or-not project, his withering dryness in the discovery sessions, his inability to stand in the same room as a Carribean themed party showing a loop of Niagara Falls.

And it’s strangely exciting. Knowing the world-changing degree to which the idea will ultimately explode makes their early celebrations of “600 members!” and the selling point of “exclusivity” tantalising to watch. And makes the ethics of the transgression all the more important.

As the film depicts it, Zuckerberg’s deception makes him absolutely guilty of something, and something we instinctively feel should undermine Facebook. But rationally, what’s shown in the film doesn’t constitute intellectual property theft. It’s just a sort of extreme breach of contract. If you had to convict him of anything beyond that, it’d be several counts of – as the film eloquently puts it – “trying really hard to be an asshole”.

Painting the whole thing as an attempt to impress an ex-girlfriend is mawking it up a little, but at the same time I do buy the frowny nerd rage it entails. Eisenberg does a great impression of the kind of balled up neuroses that really do drive a certain type of genius to do something spectacular with his good ideas. Whether that’s a hint of authenticity or just good acting, I don’t know.

I rewatched Blade Runner recently, because it came up a lot when I asked for visual inspiration for my game. Almost everything about it is still brilliant, except the main character. I’m not sure how I’ve never noticed this before, but Deckard is an idiot.

He’s given all the information he needs on a plate, nothing bad happens unexpectedly, and every lead falls into his lap. He has photo ID of everyone he has to kill, he’s told about their physical strength, he has a gun, they’re all unarmed, and he’s legally allowed to shoot them dead in public. Yet in every case, he lets them get into a hand-to-hand fight with him that he can’t win, and the only way the film can even keep him alive is for his targets to suddenly stop fighting or get killed by someone else.

Here’s a summary of his encounters with all of the replicants he’s apparently the only one good enough to kill. Stills from FilmGrab.

1. Snake Lady. He fails to convince her to let him check her dressing room, gets in a fight with her, loses and is nearly killed. The replicant stops short when she hears voices approaching, and runs away. Deckard shoots her.

2. Leon. He fails to recognise Leon until it’s too late, gets into a fight with him, loses and is nearly killed. Another replicant shoots Leon for him.

3. Rachel. He tells her she’s a replicant, forces her to kiss him, then helps her evade capture.

4. Pris. He fails to recognise Pris because she is sitting still, gets into a fight with her, loses and is nearly killed. Pris takes a break to do some acrobatics and he shoots her.

5. Roy. He fails to shoot Roy, loses his gun, gets into a fight with him, loses, runs away and nearly kills himself. Roy saves his life and then dies of his own accord.

Tony called it “the Matrix for grown-ups,” which I like. Because it’s important that this isn’t just smart, it’s cool. It’s exactly the film you’d want from a guy with the brains to make something as convoluted as Memento, and the flair to make an action film as spectacular and compelling as The Dark Knight.

I’ve never really seen anything that keeps my higher brain functions chewing on new ideas the whole way through, while still being a ferocious and stylish action film. This guy should be a director or something.

There’s a lot to spoil, so everything from here on out is hidden until you’ve seen the film and clicked here.

Even before it won the best documentary Oscar, this apparently brilliant film about the slaughter of dolphins was in the “Will watch” file. But actually, it should have been in the “Ooh, lasers!” file. Or at least the “Ooh, midnight stealth missions with an international team of specialists using thermal optics to dodge guard patrols and infiltrate an enemy compound with geographical fortification to plant hydrophones and cameras disguised as rocks” file. Because there’s honestly not much in that one yet.

You’ve probably already heard that it’s brilliant, and it is, but don’t assume as I did that means ‘brilliantly important’ or ‘brilliantly depressing’. It’s actually a hugely exciting piece of film from the opening credits to the end, revolving around the bizarre story of the man who captured and trained Flipper. That show sparked a global fascination with Bottlenose dolphins that led to the macabre events in a well-hidden cove in Japan, and the climax of the film is his own mission to infiltrate that cove and record what happens there.

It’s simultaneously an amazing biopic, a tense espionage thriller and a fascinating expose of the Japanese government’s cover-up. And giving a shit about dolphins is optional – the story’s compelling enough without empathy to drive it.

Craig Mullins’ extraordinary BioShock 2 tribute art: ‘1959’. The first image in years to immediately become my desktop background at home and at work. I love that he can make such a concealed place feel spacious and calm, and it makes me want a game where we see Rapture in its glory – even if it has to be without the people. He’s a concept artist who’s worked on Halo, Fallout 3 and one of the Matrix films.

Hard On, by Withered Hand. The name would have put me off, but this came up on shuffle when I was going through Said The Gramaphone’s songs of the year. I love the friendly advice tone of the lyrics.

Amazon customer reviews of a steering-wheel mounted laptop desk: everyone’s a comedian, most of them pretty good ones.

Man earns every World of Warcraft achievement: I won’t link it, but this was one of those strange stories where the only thing about the story isn’t true, and the people reporting the story all know it isn’t true. If it were mainstream sources, you’d assume it was ignorance. If it were the guy himself, you’d assume it was mendacity. When it’s disinterested parties who know their stuff, you can only imagine its borne of some kind of news desperation. It’s okay, guys, there’s plenty of news out there that actually did happen! You could report that! Long story short, he hadn’t got every achievement: a bug caused his total to be reported one higher than it is. The story therefore becomes: …

The Onion named Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind their film of the decade. An interesting choice – it would have been easy to go with There Will Be Blood without really thinking about it. They also make a good case for their equally surprising #2, another film I love. My list would be Memento, Serenity, Adaptation.

Just Cause 2 Vehicle Stunts Trailer: on top of everything else, I’m really excited by how good Just Cause 2 feels – the first game was only really fluid when you were parachuting. Here vehicles seem to have that same smoothness and momentum. Watch for the awesome jump at 2m52s.

Just Cause 2 Island In Chaos Trailer: Worth it for what he does after the end titles.

Jonty explains the London Underground’s mysterious Inspector Sands. I love codes.

Star Trek Online gives you ridiculously good in-game stuff for pre-ordering at various places. The worst use of game content and development time – as bribes to take sides in the puerile retail wars. Got me so annoyed I started an argument about it, which’ll be in the next issue of PC Gamer.

IGN’s Rogue Warrior review: “the hit detection is extremely hit or miss”.

A Claptrap in a tux. I just like this shot. I still haven’t played any of the Borderlands DLC.

Andy Dufresne is tweeting the Shawshank Redemption in first person, in order. “Oh dear God.” is a common update.

There really is a gnome of Noam Chomsky. Sad news via @icouldbeahero.

LightBox’s Trent Polack finds there’s a thread on the Avatar forums to help fans cope with the depression of returning to the real world after the awesomeness of the movie.

Cute but dark short by a Pixar animator, via Waxy.

roBurky notes that Calvin and Hobbes did the ‘where’s the future?’ joke everyone’s been driving into the ground back in 1989. As an eight year old, I don’t think I was actually tired of it then.

@ex0’s stupendous Captain Forever ship: like a flying cathedral made of rainbows and pain.

Facebook is now the size of the entire internet ten years ago. The average Facebook user spends 55 minutes on it a day.

This might not even be the eleventh best film of the year, but it’s fresh in my mind so it’s going here. It’s a denser, more convincing version of the Mr And Mrs Smith premise: spies in love, associated trust issues. The corporate espionage theme somehow makes it cooler than the usual CIA/NSA/MEH, and the intentionally confusing time structure is fun to unravel. It also marks itself out as a superior con flick with its ending, avoiding both the ‘smug’ and ‘makes no fucking sense’ traps most of the rest of the genre falls into.

Having said that, for those who’ve seen it, once The Thing is acquired, why does The Person put suspicion on The Other Person, and how does the latter get out of it?

Supporting Role goes to Giamatti for a spectacularly frothing take on a very Ballmer-like CEO.

I had kind of hoped that one of my favourite writers adapting one of my favourite children’s books might mean some kind of story or content would be added to it, but it still works for the same reason the book does. It knows exactly what a weird young boy wants to do, and supposes a place where it can happen for a while. The arbitrary nature of the conflict and turmoil feels a bit pointless in the new book, Egger’s novelisation of his own script, but on-screen it doesn’t especially need a point: it’s wonderful madness to watch, and the emotions are impactful even if their causes are randomised.

Every review I’ve read of this is entirely about whether it works as a kid’s movie, which misses the more important question: is it a good Wes Anderson movie? Yes! One of the best! The characteristic awkward pauses, wonky comic timing, lame heroics and quiet psychosis all work marvellously with the inherent creakiness of hand-made models, the shitty dancing and scary eating.

Supporting Role goes either to rat, for being amazing, or Michael Gambon for: “You wrote a bad song, Petey!”

Blessed with the advantage of never having read the comic, I was able to wholeheartedly enjoy this. It’s fun to see superheroes in a vaguely real world, where people are assholes and politics matter. The mask-off moment is tough to handle well with any vigilante, tougher still when he’s as vicious, gravelly-voiced and enigmatic as Rorschach. But here it’s done with a disarming lack of ceremony, and the casting of an awkward, freckly weirdo is perfect (says an awkward, freckly weirdo). More generally, that awkward freckly weirdo is perfect: when he finally gets his ‘face’ back, it’s almost a relief – he’s more terrifying without it. His quivering facial expression in the final scenes defies adequate description.

It was a traumatic year to be a kid. Four of my ten favourite films were kid’s movies with disturbing, disgusting, upsetting or inappropriate content. Coraline is about a girl seeking comfort in another dimension where she can have everything she wants if she lets them REMOVE HER EYES and REPLACE THEM WITH BUTTONS. Jesus fucking Christ. Happily, it’s disturbing in even more inspired and wonderful ways, and it’s one of the most deliciously weird films outside of the cult.

“In Britain we have a saying… It’s difficult, difficult… lemon… difficult.”

Just around the time District 9 is getting a little too dark, a little too painful and unpleasant to watch, someone flicks a switch and it transforms into a spectacular and fun action film. Some say that lets it down, for me it saves it. I have no interest in the allegory and I was about to genuinely not like this film for taking itself too seriously, and as if by magic it stopped.

I’ll just say what I said earlier in the year: I thought it was going to be primarily about madness, and I’m glad it wasn’t. I thought it wouldn’t make sense, and I’m glad it did. I thought nothing would happen, and I was glad I was wrong. It’s not a twist film; the quirk occurs early and almost casually. But it keeps dodging expectations by straying close to clichés is has no intention of treading in. That makes it feel natural rather than contrived.

A film made specifically for people who, like me, get irritated with the protagonists of zombie films for not having seen any zombie films. The protagonist of Zombieland – a World of Warcraft player – has seen some zombie films. He knows how they get you, and has geekily sensible rules for how to avoid it. There’s that, and there’s a general sense of fun: the reason zombies are such a mainstay is they combine an empty-world fantasy with an acceptable-violence one, which are two cheap and exploitative ways to have irresponsible fun without becoming morally compromised. Zombieland actually gets it, and gears its whole mood around the guilty positives.

You know when people say “I’m not ashamed to say I cried”? I’m ashamed! Of course I’m ashamed! It’s pathetic! My only excuse is that Pixar have some witchy way to key into my emotions in a matter of seconds. That didn’t trigger the waterworks, despite an early death: sad things never do. It was when, towards the very end, a private discovery puts the old guy’s whole quest in a new, happier light. They cynically stashed all that sadness in my headspace all the way back in the intro, just so they could pull the plug and immasculate me at the last minute. Twats.

I don’t actually like Star Trek very much, the original series. And this is the same characters even earlier, so not much positive bias going in. But I love this, partly for making retro sci-fi feel impactful, fantastic and exciting, but mostly because of Kirk and Spock. I never cared for the insufferably unstoppable alpha-male Kirk and the nothingy Spock. But by pitting the two as fierce rivals, they’ve revitalised both characters: Kirk’s still cocky, but he’s not always right and he doesn’t always get his way. Spock’s still dry, but there’s real steel beneath it now, and you feel like he gives a damn. [Spoiler warning] Ultimately in their struggle Kirk gets the command, and Spock gets – or rather always had – the girl. It’s a surprising twist, which is exactly why it makes the characters work: there’s no longer that dull inevitability.

Also I really like the way the phasers have a disc that swivels when switching between stun and kill.

Anyone see anything good I missed?

Is a sci-fi multiplayer shooter out this week, extremely like Battlefield 2142. Battlefield 2142 was awesome, and so is this. You literally dive into the battlefield from orbit, with no parachute, then pound each other with raucous guns and squabble over objectives.

I like it because you can design your own class in a powerful and elegant way, choose where to drop down and angle your descent, and the dynamic missions that pop up are clear, fun and varied.

Enemies get dynamic missions too, and in one round they were coming very close to capturing our intelligence. I’d died, so chose my custom Assault Sniper class, and picked their intel capture point to drop in on. I smacked into the ground just as the intel carrier reached the walkway leading to the capture point, and knelt there nailing him with sniper shots as he ran toward me until he buckled. It occured to me afterwards that I was the final boss in some AI dude’s epic quest to take our intelligence across this huge warzone. Sorry AI dude! Boss fights suck!

Aside: I got to see this game at an event in Texas once, and ran into the developers in the hotel the next morning, on my way out from breakfast. I asked them how they felt the presentation went, which is a stupid thing to ask developers because that’s exactly what they want to know from you. So they invited me to sit down and tell them.

Previously I knew them only as the guys responsible for a FEAR expansion so drab I openly mocked it on this site (sorry!). But after my oat bran French toast stuffed with maple banana cream-cheese with them, I was left with the impression that they were smart, fun guys who play all the games I play and have most of the same loves and gripes about them. I’m really pleased to see that actually comes out in their game.

Is a film released in the UK this week about aliens living alongside humans in Johannesburg. It’s unusual in that the aliens are powerless: only the workers survived their accidental arrival, and they don’t have the wit to stand up for themselves. It’s also unusual in that the protagonist is both dorky and unsympathetic. He’s a smiling bureaucrat who goes about his unpleasant task with equal parts relish, cruelty and incompetence.

The horrors that befall him, initially satisfying, soon become hard to watch, and the whole film threatens to become darker than its slightly flimsy premise warrants. Mercifully it stops short of that, and instead explodes in a giddy celebration of slapstick ultraguns and splattery comeuppance. The gritty unease of the first half sets off the geeky indulgence of the second satisfyingly, mixing moods and genres and smart and dumb in ways we rarely see, but should more often.

Aside: Mark Kermode said this week that all good sci-fi has to be a metaphor for something, make a point about reality. He’s an idiot. District 9 wilfully draws parallels to social rifts in Johannesburg, but like much good sci-fi, does it to add potency to its alien imagery, rather than say something about the source. You don’t need to replace black people with aliens for us to recognise cruelty and oppression.

Is Bletchley Park, which became known in wartime as Station X partly because it was the tenth wireless communications station established, and partly because if they went around calling it Bletchley Park people might realise it was in Bletchley.

It’s where the first programmable electronic computer was invented, not to crack the Enigma code but the Lorenz cipher, a much harder encryption that no-one seems to have heard of.

It’s also where the war was won, a good two years earlier than it otherwise might have been, thanks essentially to mathematicians there being better at maths than the Germans thought anyone possibly could be. The ability to read communications they assumed were undecipherable was such an enormous advantage that the Allies had to pretend they didn’t have it. They’d send scout planes to locations they already knew contained German fleets, just to give the Germans a feasible explanation for why they were about to be destroyed.

Kim and I went there last weekend. It’s falling apart. They can’t afford to maintain it, and no-one’s willing to help. Some thieves stole a German Enigma machine from there a while back, wrongly assuming that the site of one of Britain’s greatest contributions to humanity would have government money to pay the ransom. They couldn’t. The thieves gave up and posted the machine to Jeremy Paxman, who returned it with what we must assume was an expression of some bemusement.

Aside: This week the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown capitulated to an online petition by coder John Graham-Cumming for the government to apologise for sentencing the man primarily responsible for breaking the Enigma code to chemical castration for being homosexual. I don’t follow my own country’s politics closely enough to be conversant in the many reasons I should hate Gordon Brown, but the slimy, repulsive way he or his writers attempted to turn that apology into an excuse to boast, bafflingly claiming that he’s ‘pleased and proud’ to have to apologise for our country’s mutilation of its hero, is officially one.

• I thought it was going to be primarily about madness, and I’m glad it wasn’t.
• I thought it wouldn’t make sense, and I’m glad it did.
• I thought nothing would happen, and I was glad something did.

It’s not a twist film; the quirk occurs early and almost casually. But it keeps dodging expectations by straying close to clichés is has no intention of treading in. That makes events feel natural rather than contrived, which is disarming.

Also on the positive side, it’s awesome.

Despite being an English word in front of a Belgian placename, the title manages to make this sound like ponderous French arthouse cinema. Really, they should have called it: In Fockin Bruges? Wit You?

Because it’s very much not ponderous. It’s a comedy thriller about two hitmen forced to bide their time in a quaint European city while awaiting further instructions. It’s fantastic. The funniest film I’ve seen in ages, including Wall-E and the last Futurama one.

Situational comedy apparently means unfunny, often grave situations with gags inserted forcibly into them, but In Bruges exmplifies what the term ought to mean: comedy that derives almost solely from the volatile absurdity of the situation. There’s one scene in particular where you have no idea if you’re about to witness a murder, a suicide or a manly heart-to-heart. And later, one of my favourite mid gunfight conversations between antagonists, taking the crown from the bit in Grosse Pointe Blank where Dan Aykroyd offers to sell John Cusack an ammo clip.

I think the film’s a little mean towards its short guy, and the ending felt just a tiny bit too inevitable before it happened, but the latter is more than made up for by the last line. Colin Farrell’s an unexpectedly adept comic actor, but Ralph Fiennes steals it utterly as the frothing London crimelord.

Wall-E

I didn’t believe the people telling me this was incredible, was wrong yet again. It is. Not so much for Wall-E himself, as the bizarrely affecting romance between him and Eve (or Eva, as Wall-E seems to say it). I don’t find robots cute and I almost never like romance, so the story had some serious work to do to win me over, but it accomplished it within about thirty seconds of the pair first appearing on screen together. Eve blows things up! That’s all I need to see to get invested in this love story. Some scenes just made me beam.

It’s my favourite Pixar film, beating the Incredibles partly by being about robots, and partly because I’ve always resented the message of the Incredibles. You know that central line, where the kid complains that at school they’re always being told that everyone’s special, “But that’s the same as no-one being special at all.” Oh yeah, you’re right. People who aren’t genetically superior aren’t special. And it’s about time normal people were seen for the interchangable, expendable drones they are compared to you mighty ubermen.

The Dark Knight

I enjoyed this a lot, but I did find myself sitting there thinking “Why aren’t I more invested in this? Why don’t I care?” I cared throughout Batman Begins, and that had a lot more flaws and downtime than this. I think it’s because, while they’re both ideas movies, the first film just had one idea: fear. Batman’s origin is all about fear, the plot was all about fear, and the villain was the embodiment of fear. Dark Knight is about whether people need a white knight more than a dark one, but its main feature, the Joker, doesn’t have much to do with that, so it doesn’t feel as focused.

I’ve heard a few people have mention that it feels stretched to include the two villians, usually with the caveat that they do realise it was necessary. I don’t think it strictly was: I think there could have been a movie entirely about Batman and Two Face, with the Joker just an unseen spectre in the background, teasing for a film of his own to crown the trilogy. Of course, this is the worst suggestion ever, given the circumstances regarding one of the cast necessary to enact it.

The other thing I liked about Begins was that it explained Batman to me, because I honestly didn’t know what he was about. And I thought the Dark Knight was explaining the Joker to me – because again, I’ve never felt I got him – with the line “Do I look like a man with a plan?” But then every caper he pulls is a masterpiece of proposterously convoluted planning. The bit that did paint an evocative picture of him was the best scene of the film, with the line: “I enjoy dynamite, gunpowder, gasoline. You know what they all have in common? They’re cheap.”

I give your film the worst grade imaginable: an A minus minus! Futurama will probably never be bad, but this lacked spark in exactly the way Bender’s Big Score didn’t. There’s a difference between fan service and what plays more like fan fic. The plot is entirely about a single, weak conceit that doesn’t really work as a joke, and makes no sense as a serious plot element. The drama is lazy, mean-spirited stuff that falls back on the character’s clichés, then takes them to out-of-character extremes for the sake of laughs that never come. A highly spoilerific example will appear if you hover over this image:

There Will Be Blood: I’m not sure I could say I enjoyed this. People who haven’t seen it keep asking me what it’s like. What’s it like? It’s a masterpiece. It’s an extraordinary piece of cinema, a phenomenal performance, a work of art. Did I like it? No, not really.

I’m just not that interested in cinema, or performances, or art. I was gripped all the way through, and as critics have said, what’s exciting about it is that you have no idea where it’s going. But by the end – which is macabre, surreal, comic, and utterly sick – I just thought “Oh. Nowhere, then.”

No Country For Old Men: This I did enjoy, a lot, but I still choke on my popcorn whenever someone calls it the Coens’ best. Are we talking about the same Coens? The Fargo, Lebowski, Fink, O Brother, Hudsucker Coens? Maybe there are other Coens.

Again, it’s extraordinarily cinematic and artistically beautiful in a whole set of ways I don’t care about. What I did love about its direction was the fetishistic attention to detail: the sweeping black scuff-marks on the police station floor from the cop thrashing as he choked, the burn-splatters around close-range gunshot-wounds when they’re stripped bare for treatment, the way one character’s fate is only communicated to us by whether or not another checks the soles of his shoes.

It’s also probably the most excruciatingly tense thriller I’ve ever seen – there are long scenes where you know precisely what will happen, but not precisely when, and I felt like I lost years of my heart-healthy life to each.

What I liked most about it was that it felt like how a thriller premise would play out in the real world: the major plot events are determined by brutal, random chance that doesn’t bias the hero or villain, and when a character dies, it’s not always a poetic defeat at the hands of his nemesis.

But unlike most of its fans, I didn’t think the ending was profound or interesting. I get it. I got it a while back. I got it from the title of the movie. I didn’t need the credits to roll on some absurd symbolic chin-stroking introspection to tell me what the point of the film was.

Gone Baby Gone: This absolutely deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the above two, but rarely is. It’s a noir private-detective thriller starring Casey Affleck, who is a dramatically better actor than Ben in both sense of the word; and directed by Ben, who is a dramatically better director than actor, again in both senses.

It revolves around a missing child, and the length and breadth of dilemma they mine from that scenario is alarming. It culminates in a decision so tough that you’re left with no idea who you’re rooting for, even as it tears all the good guys apart. That’s the hardest part of noir to achieve: true moral ambiguity, a situation so sticky it’s no longer clear who’s doing the right thing. Gone has a resolution of sorts, but it’s so hard won that it feels sobering rather than victorious.

Charlie Wilson’s War: Very much liked this, but given that it was written by Aaron Sorkin and prominently featured Seymour Hoffman, I’d expected to love it. Hoffman is superb – a whole film about his character rather than Hanks’ would have been magnificent. I just didn’t care all that much about Wilson’s private life, or Roberts’ character’s subplot, and those took up a lot of the running time.

Knocked Up: This is the only one I did see last year, twice in fact. It’s the funniest I’ve seen in ages, and emotionally honest with it. The premise is cheap – “Ha ha what if an ugly guy got you pregnant? Lol.” – but then the film never flinches from the awkward, unhappy consequences of that.

It pays for that poster by having to tackle a really hard question: what do you do if it’s not working out but there’s a kid? And it doesn’t dodge it by having them magically turn out to be soulmates or by killing off the baby (you laugh, but it’s been done). It actually gives an answer, comes out and says “This unhappy compromise is slightly less unhappy than the other unhappy compromises.”

Also, lol. Jack and Jill – the network executives who alternately congratulate and neurotically demean Katherine Heigl’s character – are worth the ticket price alone. And the weird, slight-too-friendly relationship between Seth Rogen’s character and Paul Rudd’s – the only real soul-mates of the film – just gets funnier and funnier. There’s also a lot of good relationship philosophy, meditations on chairs, a fantastic performance from a kid, and the seriousness of Steve Martin vehicles. In fact, quotes:

“Marriage is like a tense, unfunny version of Everybody Loves Raymond, only it doesn’t last 22 minutes. It lasts forever.”

“Oh, Matthew Fox? The Lost guy? You know what’s interesting about him?”
“What?”
“NOTHING.”

“Where do babies come from?”
“Where do you think they come from?”
“Well. I think a stork, he umm, he drops it down and then, and then, a hole goes in your body and there’s blood everywhere, coming out of your head and then you push your belly button and then your butt falls off and then you hold your butt and you have to dig and you find the little baby.”
“That’s exactly right.”

Dan In Real Life: I don’t even know why I saw this, the best I’d heard was that it wasn’t as bad as it might seem. That’s true; it’s wonderful.

It’s so damn hard to make me care about a character, let alone root for them, but Dan (Steve Carrell) treads a tightrope between pathetic victim and jerk that just about keeps him clear of either – a rare feat.

Each time it builds excruciating emotional tension, it doesn’t so much diffuse it with humour as release it in a controlled explosion. I’m sure most of the things I laughed weren’t funny at all, the script just has an uncanny knack for poking me in the ribs when I’m most vulnerable.

Like Knocked Up, it takes a really tricky mess of plot points and doesn’t shy away from picking a line of best-fit through them, but its unflinching acceptance of the consequences of that doesn’t hold up all the way to the end. There’s just one, brief, tired old trope for resolving a love triangle that they roll out towards the end to keep everyone happy, and it does marr the otherwise impressive awkwardness of the whole ordeal.

Bee Movie: What the hell? Why did everyone tell me this sucked? I caught this on a plane, because one person of five had told me it was ‘okay’. It was great! I laughed ten times more than I did during Ratatouille, none of the characters were anything like as annoying, and it was actually rather original. There’s a bit where Jerry Seinfeld bee flies repeatedly into the same pane of glass about ten times before stopping, looking at it for the first time and muttering, “Oh that is just diabolical.”

Enchanted: I really thought I would loathe this, and I didn’t. It’s about a Disney princess who comes to life, so you can imagine what else was on the plane that I ended up watching it. But it’s sort of almost halfway charming. All I’d seen before was a clip of that awful “That’s How You Know” song on the Oscars, which Once rightly pounded into the dust and snatched the award from. But when that number actually came around in the film, with the slightly absurd way it starts, and the reggae buskers – I tried not to smile and was unsuccessful.

Futurama: Bender’s Big Score: if you’ve seen Score and felt that it’s a little heavy on the fan-service – hi. I’m one of those fans it was servicing, and it did it very well. I didn’t need that much Leeloo, and the songs were needless and clumsy, but other than that it was joyous.

I’m the sort of fan who gets an enormous kick out of the new theme tune, the triumph of bureaucracy, the explanation for how Gore lost the election, the obsessive retconning of the pilot episode’s pivotal moment, the cyclic timeline mathematics and the titular payoff at the very end. Speaking of the theme tune, have you heard the 1967 original? It’s surprisingly awesome.

“Are you free?”
“You have no idea.”

Dexter Season Finale: the only thing wrong with this season of Dexter (apart from the unaccountable soap-opera interlude that was Rita’s mother) is a certain character lapsing into a hideous crazy-stalker stereotype. But the finale got so much mileage out of the mess this created that I can almost forgive it. The scene with three people and a large black bag was almost unbearable to watch. More spoilerific discussion should probably go in the original comments thread.

But yes, fantastic. The leadup to this over the last handful of episodes is the best Dexter has ever been, and Dexter is itself near-perfect television.

“Let’s see if the best bed in Kaer Morhen can hold us!”

The Witcher: broken sexist porno that’s coming up in a lot of game-of-the-year lists, and got huge review scores everywhere but with us. You play a badly scarred grey-haired old man in leather trousers, to whom a procession of identically-shaped redheads surrender themselves sexually after three lines of astonishingly bad dialogue. Post-deed, you are awarded an achievement souvenir card showing the girl naked, just in case you didn’t already feel like a pathetic mysognist.

Somehow it’s even more wretched than the despicable Leisure Suit Larry games – the last of which revolved around date rape. The fact that Larry’s love interests even needed to be date-raped before they’d sleep with the idiot hero automatically makes them stronger characters than the Witcher’s.

It’s not that I can’t imagine what people see in the Witcher – I haven’t played it through, maybe it gets amazing after four hours of insufferable dross. I’m just appalled at what they can ignore. The huge script cutbacks before release have been achieved by simply deleting swathes of lines, so conversations are riddled with bizarre, glaring holes that not just make for abysmal fiction, but in many cases render events truly incomprehensible.

“Laurent ran guns for the resistance.”
“Which resistance?”
“He won’t say – apparently they didn’t win.”

Ratatouille: I hate to be down on such a sweet film, but I’m so tired of that nervous kid cliché and the angry boss who’s supposed to be funny because he’s short. Brad Bird has uncharacteristically little to add to those grating, ancient stereotypes, and the central conceit is just surreal.

The premise is a rat who can cook, and a kitchen boy who cannot, but the film has no workable idea for how the two can collaborate. It ends up inventing a physiological mechanic so utterly nonsensical that it’s downright creepy to watch.

The rat and dough physics modelling is fantastic, and it made me laugh perhaps twice, but it’s so far from the spark of The Incredibles.

Duke Nukem Forever Trailer: after ten years of development, the first movie of the incarnation that’s actually likely to be released has come out. It features no dialogue until, at the end, protagonist Nukem stands up and says, essentially, “I want to shit on you.”

I am at a loss.

Right, that’s it. If Transformers isn’t any good on Sunday, I’m giving up on fun-but-dumb films altogether – I no longer enjoy them. I didn’t like the latest Pirates of the Carribean, I hated Die Hard 4, and last night even Harry Potter left me cold. My brain just doesn’t have enough to do during these, which is really saying something given that I enjoyed Gerry, a film where the memorable quotes page on IMDB constitutes the entire script, and the only two characters have the same name.

So I either think about other things entirely (is this seating arrangement socially optimal? Almost, I decided), or pick holes. That CGI object isn’t correctly synced with the actor’s hand. The next line is going to be “Something to fight for.” Emma Watson can only act during even-numbered minutes of the odd-numbered Harry Potter films.

When I read the same story in book form, I cared about everything. And really, it’s a story that suits cinema better than literature in a lot of ways – the fizz and crackle of wizardly battling comes across very poorly in text. But this director’s concept of being faithful to the book seems to be checking all the subplot boxes, which is impossible to do well in under six hours. So the three most affecting elements of Phoenix are all glossed over with almost comic brevity. Those being:

• Delores Umbridge’s torture: I thought the actress here was great at portraying her syrupy strain of institutionalised evil, but the real potency of the character comes from the horror of what she makes Harry do. He has to claw her words in his own flesh over and over and over again every night, writing in blood over his scar tissue before it can heal. It’s the repetition that’s galling – that’s why it’s such a wonderfully fiendish play on the familiar punishment of ‘doing lines’ – but in the film we see him do it once. Misses the point, dissolves the horror, defangs Delores.
  
   

• Neville Longbottom becoming more than comic relief: after mocking his idiocy for four whole books, Rowling adds a streak of genuine tragedy to Neville, and a sad little stirring of redemption. It’s an easy pluck of your heartstrings, but a resounding one. Here’s how this story is told in the film:

  (Neville Longbottom is standing in front a wall looking at a newspaper clipping that shows a photo of his parents. Harry joins him)
  Neville: Hi Harry my parents were killed by Bellatrix LeStrange after she tortured them for information I’m proud to be their son but worried that I won’t live up to their good name thanks bye.
  

  Fin
   

• Harry’s increasingly conflicted relationship with Snape: the entertaining thing about Snape as a villain is that he isn’t one, he’s just an extremely unpleasant good guy. Or so Dumbledore insists, and since he’s virtually God in the Harry Potter universe, we tend to trust his word over even Harry’s judgement.

  In Phoenix, Snape is the only one able to teach Harry to defend his mind from Voldemort’s invasive telepathy, an arrangement they both resent enormously. But also a great device not only to force Harry to see Snape as a good guy, but to let both of them find out the truth about each other.

  

  By repeatedly invading Harry’s thoughts, Snape quietly has to face that most of his conspiracy theories about Harry have been wrong. But when Harry inadvertantly gets into Snape’s mind, he has to face that more or less every disparaging thing Snape has said about Harry’s father is true, and a lot worse besides. This is a huge deal, a genuinely quite brave twist, and the most devastating thing that’s happened to Harry so far. His only reason for enduring the increasingly horrible things life puts him through is this dream of living up to the example of his parents, and avenging them.

  We do get the moment of discovery itself in the film, inside Snape’s mind, but it’s topped and tailed: it happens almost immediately after the lessons are started, so we get nothing of the way Harry and Snape’s relationship has changed, which is probably the most interesting thing in the book. And we get nothing of the aftermath, which is easily the most important thing in the book.

It feels like they think fans are more interested in seeing every subplot paid lip-service than in any of them being done justice. I could be entirely happy with a film of Phoenix that left out all three of my favourite things about the book, if it just did anything else well. If it just had some downtime, some of the day-to-day stuff that lets you get to like the characters before they get knocked around, I’d care.

The fun of Harry Potter is never the plots, it’s getting to live in their world for a bit. It’s enduring the Dursley’s long enough at the start of each book to be relieved and excited to get back to Hogwarts and his friends. It’s butter-beer in Hogsmeade, non-plot-critical Quidditch. This ruthless, workmanlike cramming the films are so hellbent on is wrecking the magic.

Visually it’s marvelous; another adoring tribute to the universe that matches my imagination beautifully. The effects guys really do care about doing everything justice, and they’ve got the creative juice to manage it all and more. That just makes it more irritating that they’re still using directors who waste it incompetently, when in Alfonso Cuaron they’ve already found the guy who can give the rest of film the character its effects already have.

It’s depressing to think that in my life, I will never write anything as funny as this logo. What the hell is it? The first thing I thought when I saw it, once I’d dried my eyes, was “What does the R stand for?” If the oblique angles that make up 95% of this image are supposed to represent the digits of 2012, what’s this:

It’s so typically British to have the only bit we could be proud of – that it’s in England – written in all-lower case seventies sci-fi script on the underside of something that might once have been a two.

Also hilariously dismal and quintessentially British is the ad they made to capture the spirit of these Olympic Games. It shows shining examples of the heights of excellence that the British spirit can achieve: a woman who’s managed to slim down to a mere fourteen stone, a disabled boy who can now ride horse without falling off more than three times, and a mother who, when she really tries, can cycle almost as fast as an OAP-buggy. It ends by speculating that she might one day be good enough to hand a bottle of water to a real cyclist. To sleep, perchance to dream.

This is why this is not the post about season finales. Instead, it is about these things:

Pirates of the Caribbean 3: Dead Man’s World Of End-Sparrow. In one of those things that didn’t really happen to me much when I worked in a warehouse building skateboards, I was taken to a preview screening of this on Wednesday in a stretch limo with free champagne, which I did my level best to pour on the editor of Disney Girl magazine. It is, I thought, ‘okay’. I would stretch to ‘quite good’ if this was the first one, but it lacks so much of the fun of the second that I find it hard to recommend. Particularly since everyone hated the second.

The first one was the zombie pirates one, and was good because it was breezier and funnier than you expected. The second was the fish pirates one and was great for its absurdly long, wildly overdone, bloody-minded physics-driven set pieces on gorgeous tropical islands. The third is about a big book of rules and some crabs that look like rocks.

None of them make a whole lot of sense, and I don’t recall what actually happened, plot-wise, in any of them (at the start of 3, everyone is alive and roaming around, so I assume nothing of import happened in the last two). But the third one doesn’t use its license to be absurd to do anything very fun. All the spectacular bits are just ship battles, which we’ve seen in some depth before.

I actually love ship battles, but they can’t hold my attention for long in dumb films. The reason they’re exciting is that they’re so physical – you can see the cannonballs, you can see which bits of the ships they smash, the damage is all evident and so the outcome is believable. In dumb films, such as this one, captains are idiots and the hero’s ship wins because it’s made of magic.

At one point a billion-strong armada retreat from two enemy ships, because they destroyed the flagship (because, for no reason, the captain couldn’t decide whether to fire or not). John, who loved it, argues that this is normal film logic, but the whole setup for the scene is “They can take this guy, but what do they do about the billion ships?” It’s hard to enjoy a dumb film about naval combat, politics and trickery if you’ve ever seen Hornblower, which was eight non-dumb films about naval combat, politics and trickery, with characters it is possible – nay, easy – to like.

Aside: Geoffrey Rush is still such a watchable pirate. While Depp’s drunken eyebrow-work on Sparrow gets tiresome, Rush can still just say “Arr” or a sentence of the form “X be Y”, and I am immediately happy.

Score: okay.

The reaction to my Galactic Civilizations 2 War Diary: which has been surreal. This is a ten-thousand word account of a single match of an expansion pack to a little-known turn-based strategy game with poor graphics, and no-one seems to mind. It’s not the hits or links that it got, surprising as they were, but the extraordinary comments. I just read someone saying- well, I’ll quote: “My brother and I would read the blog, then get together to discuss what he was doing right, what he was doing wrong, and what he needed to do to win.” This makes me feel amazing.

I like very much that I work on a magazine where I’m allowed to give stupid ideas like this a try. I did most of it at home or after work, but only because I love writing this kind of stuff so much. I had some New Years Objectives this year, one of which was to write something that got the same kind of reaction as my report on the Eve Online assassins – which has always frustrated me by being better-received than almost everything I’ve written since. This got a different kind of reaction altogether.

Comments at PC Gamer
Comments at Joystiq
Comments at the GalCiv site
Comments at Kotaku

Facebook: it’s like social networking, except that I like it. I’m on everything – MySpace, LiveJournal, Blogger, Twitter, WordPress, Technorati, Tumblr, Flickr, Last.fm – but Facebook is the only one that seems really smartly designed in terms of how it connects you to people. It’s good at knowing what you’ll find interesting about what your friends are up to (almost anything), so the main news feed you get from it is incredibly fast-flowing and rich in interesting goings-on.

Now I have to watch TV.

It’s the 1978 remake I’m talking about, with Donald Sutherland, Leonard Nimoy and a very young and very excellent Jeff Goldblum. It is a strange concept to me that a movie released before I was born could be a modernisation of something even older (were eyes even invented before then? Mine weren’t), but from what little I know of the original, it doesn’t seem like a remake the way they do them today. It’s darker, truer to its premise and closer to the original novel than the first film version, almost a de-Hollywoodisation by comparison.

Oh, I should probably explain why I’m suddenly talking about an incredibly well-known 1978 classic sci-fi film. Er, it was on TV last night. And I hadn’t seen it before, and thought I should, even though I rarely like old films, and I even less often like old films that are considered classics. Classic seems to mean ‘no longer any good’. I have some classic cheese in my fridge.

But I was amazed by this, and more importantly horrified by it – I think more so than at the Ring films. The cultural touchstone it spawned was about this idea of everyone going about business as usual, but somehow not being themselves, lacking emotion. That’s not very scary. It doesn’t get scary until so many humans have been replaced by ‘pod people’ that the humans are trying to blend in with the pod people rather than vice versa.

People have to pretend to be people pretending to be people. The film is never explicit about how many have changed, partly because the ambiguity is part of the menace, but there is a distinct turning point. Because from that point on, whenever a pod person discovers a human in public, they point at them and scream.

It feeds on two potent psychological tricks that don’t get used enough: firstly, that there’s nothing more horrifying than something that’s absolutely horrified of you. And secondly, the scariest images are also the most absurd – and potentially comic.

I came across an incredibly spoilerific screenshot from the film while digging out the image above (which is not spoilerific – it never happens in the film), which captures the most brilliant, horrible and chilling moment, but just looks hilarious out of context. It’s hard to imagine a more modern film daring to do something so easy to mock, but Body Snatchers leads up to it gradually and creepily, so that when you’re actually watching it (alone, or with people who can shut the hell up), it’s terrifying.

There’s also an extraordinary scene where pod people hatch all around Donald Sutherland as he sleeps in a deckchair outside, all born adult but malformed, and they’re oddly convincing. They make odd noises as they hatch, but not the bland sci-fi squelching almost every other film involving aliens succumbs to. It’s remarkable what a difference that makes – these things were done with puppets thirty years ago, and they’re creepier than any CGI I’ve seen.

Then there’s the dog thing. I have no earthly idea what the dog thing is all about. The film is otherwise very consistent, and even corrects some nonsenses of the original. Then there’s a dog thing, and it’s sudden and unexplained and utterly horrible, but again, probably just funny out of context. I would think if you have seen the film, it would have been a long time ago, so I’d be intrigued to know if anyone remembers the dog thing.

I use Amazon.co.uk’s DVD rental-by-post thing, which is one where you can keep the DVD as long as you like while you’re subscribed. This is good because they can’t have Primer back yet. After watching it, I spent forty minutes reading Wikipedia’s superb dissection of the film’s nine distinct timelines, featuring eleven iterations of the two main characters and a flow chart, then I watched it again with the director’s commentary on. Then I watched it again. Craig raises the objection that something ought to be comprehensible to the human mind on first viewing, and it’s true that this is not. I have a certain amount of time for enjoyably dumb films, but to me this is what entertainment should be: something beyond you, not pandering to you, something that both needs and deserves to be explored and understood.

It’s written by, directed by, produced by, scored by, edited by, partly filmed by and stars a former engineer who’d never written, directed, produced, scored, edited, partly filmed or acted in a film before, for $7,000, with a crew of six and only one trained actor. Its creator’s mum and dad supplied the food. And after watching it, you have to wonder why anyone needs more than that to make a film that doesn’t call for any particular special effects, because none of it really shows. It’s set in real locations which are free and appropriate, mostly with available light which makes it look realistic, and most of the people are people rather than actors, which makes them more convincing because actors don’t act like people anyway. It took two-hundred and fifty-six people and five million dollars to make Memento, a similarly stark and intricate film, and I’m not sure why.

It helps that Primer is about a couple of hi-tech engineers who run a tiny electronics business from their garages on top of their day jobs. In case the thing about timelines earlier didn’t give it away, it’s about time-travel. But it’s unique among time-travel movies in being almost entirely convincing, in about three ways:

1. If time-travel is ever discovered, it will be discovered like this. In Primer it’s a side-effect of a tweaked version of an existing type of machine, and they almost don’t notice it does it. It’s only by chance that one of them stumbles across the fact that the Weeble whose weight they’ve been successfully reducing has accumulated six years’ worth of mildew in its brief time inside. A long and quite slow-moving chunk of the film leads up to this in a very natural way, and the cautious excitement of intelligent nerds making something work is so well-invoked that I found myself quite thrilled when just they got this high-temperature superconductor to work at all, let alone travel through time.

2. This actually makes sense. It effortlessly explains all three usual objections to time-travel scenarios: a) Why haven’t we seen travellers from the future already? The furthest these machines can take you back is to the moment you switched them on. b) Why don’t you appear in empty space when you come out in your destination time, given that your starting point was elsewhere on the Earth’s orbit? You stay physically within these machines as you travel back in time, and you do travel back in time rather than teleport to a specific earlier point: you live backwards in the box while the rest of the world lives forwards. And c) Whatever you do in the past will already have been done in the past, removing the reason for you to have gone back in the first-place. Here, changing the past changes the past of the timeline you’re now in, which is no longer the same as the one you came from. It’s still useful because you can live in this new one, and your self here is planning on getting in a time-travel box which will remove him from it.

3. It’s not glamourous. They don’t whoop and jump around the room when it works. There’s no montage where they win the lottery and get drunk. It’s a hard, weird process to go back: you have to spend as much time as you want to travel inside an argon-flooded coffin, and there are side-effects. These guys try it for six hours a day, make measured profits on the stock market, and carefully isolate themselves from their contemporary dupes.

The plot itself is focussed exclusively on the use of these devices and the relationship between the friends who invented them. There are wives, children, friends and an outside character who plays an enormously important role later on, but none of them get more than a minute of screentime, and we never even find out why the outside character does what he does – simply because the two friends themselves don’t either. That level of focus is essential to detail the incredibly dense web of events that unfold over just a few days of traditional time, and probably only a week or so from the perspective of the most time-travelled character (whose identity would be a huge spoiler at this point).

But! Bank holiday weekend films can end on a high note! 25th Hour, 10pm, on BBC Two. Profoundly worth watching, primarily for the hilarious DEA agent duo. But also because of Ed Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman and The Other Guy as horrifically mismatched friends. It’s mildly well-known for Ed Norton’s character’s reflection’s racist rant about New Yorkers, which is riveting in the same way as a car accident.

I have to stop writing now, or the film will actually start before I post this, and the one person who would otherwise have seen this between now and it being too late would not in fact see it at all, and it would be too late.

Edit: That DEA Agent search in full:

AGENT CUNNINGHAM
Maybe it’s your posture. Posture’s very important.

AGENT BRZOWSKI
No, it’s this Castro convertible. It’s very uncomfortable. It’s kinda… kinda lumpy.

MONTY
Get it over with.

AGENT BRZOWSKI
I just don’t understand. It looks like such a nice sofa. How much did you pay for this sofa, Ms Riviera?
…
Maybe it’s the padding.

AGENT CUNNINGHAM
Ho yeah, could be the padding.

AGENT BRZOWSKI
Probably the padding. Yeah, there’s something lumpy in here, Mr. Brogan.
…
Sheeeeeeeit.
You know, it’s a good thing I found this? It’ll make your sofa much more comfortable to sit on.

Opera is rubbish. Space opera is only mildly better. No-one turns out to be anyone’s father in Serenity; royalty are not involved. There isn’t even a struggle between good and evil, and it has characters instead of charicatures. That, vaguely, is why it’s better than Star Wars.

I’m sorry, I love sci-fi, I happily endure the trashy bits and the awful acting, and lightsabers are awesome; but ultimately, I like things that are actually good. I prefer to genuinely enjoy something than keep my tongue in my cheek. Specifically, it was when I was crying, laughing and biting my fist at the same time that I decided Serenity is better than everything else.

The crying bit was the only one that owed itself partially to the preceding series – no-one could watch the film and not like Wash by that point, but for Firefly fans he’s an old friend, and his loss is absolutely wrenching; all the more so for being completely unexpected (sorry, people who ignore spoiler warnings). Usually when a character dies on-screen I’m praying we’re not going to be insulted by some flimsy device to bring them back or pretend it didn’t happen – revealing it to be a cheap trick to toy with an emotional involvement it never earned in the first place. This was the first time I was hoping for one of those, however dumb – it was the first time I’ve cared more about the character than the film itself.

Probably the most audacious part of Wash’s death isn’t the permanent loss of by far the best character, it’s that you’re laughing when it happens. If the surprise death in LA Confidential is jarringly sudden, it pales in comparison to this. Wash dies mid-gag – a good gag at that – and immediately after doing something brilliant. It’s cruel, but it’s not callous or cynical writing – it’s an acknowledgement that main characters don’t automatically get fifteen seconds of extra life after fatal incidents, that they don’t always go out sacrificing themselves, that the timing isn’t predictable. Violent death is quick and horrible.

There’s barely a minute’s grace before the jokes start again. It ought to feel incongruous, but then the humour was never flippant to begin with – most of the jokes revolve around the fact that they’re all going to die almost immediately. It was always a diversionary device for the characters with the funniest lines, so it’s never more appropriate than in the wake of a tragedy. As ever, it’s Wash’s inherent reasonableness and Jayne’s nihilistically pragmatic approach to machoism that compete for the most laughs, and you have to wonder again why no other sci-fi is anything like this funny.

The tension – the fist-biting bit of my emotional cocktail – is partly down to the stepping up of the scale of the story. Firefly was always about a bunch of fugitives trying to stay off the radar and make money; Serenity is the first time their story has spilled over into something affecting the whole universe. The personal scale of Firefly’s plots was part of its charm, but Serenity proves that a plot which connects that to the truly epic can be even more seductive. And the perfect link between the two has been very carefully set up throughout the series: River. It always made it clear that she was significant in some way, finally discovering this significance – and its magnitude – brings Serenity’s universe into focus.

The Alliance isn’t cosmetically unlike Star Wars’ Empire, but the context is crucial – in Serenity, the Rebellion’s already been quashed. There’s no war, if you don’t like them you just have to stay the hell away from anything resembling quality of life. And though the Alliance is the bad guy, it’s not the only one, and in the intro to Serenity you actually get their perspective (and it’s not that much less reasonable than the outlook of a patriotic country today). When the crew’s ploy forces the Alliance to face their figurative demons literally, both Mal and his nemesis lament the loss of innocent life – an unpleasantness other sci-fi feebly avoids with clones, drones and aliens.

That nemesis is another application of the fierce intelligence with which Serenity hacks away at sci-fi convention. An empire is led by bureaucrats, not a samurai and an electric pensioner. The guy you send to capture a sensitive target is your best black ops man – neither a freelancer nor a government official. Someone who is actually employed to do this sort of thing, and ruthlessly, spectacularly efficient at it. He’s stylish, certainly – the killing of the scientist in his first scene is one of the most macabre screen assassinations in memory – but it’s an elegant application of necessary force rather than a superfluous flourish. And when it comes to killing everyone the targets have ever known, that luxury is dropped without hesitation. Like every good agent, his violence is committed in a passionate belief in the cause, and the same understanding of the necessity of secrets, under-handedness and technically illegal operations that a real spy needs. This guy reassures his victims that they’ve lead a virtuous life before he executes them. He’s not evil, not even cruel, just ruthless.

It’s also brilliantly refreshing to see an a bad guy who, when the girl sneaks up behind him during the hero-nemesis fight, turns round and kicks her really hard. Nemeses are sick of getting knocked out with vases! If you keep doing that shit, women of action films, they’re going to have to hit you quite hard!

It’s not just rare for sci-fi to be this intelligent, it’s rare for something this intelligent to be so emotional. Memento and LA Confidential, though unquestionably cleverer than Serenity and utterly gripping, never put my engagement with the excellent characters to use in making me feel things. Or at least, what they made me feel now seems vague and academic compared to the wonderful trauma of watching Serenity. It has brains, heart, and space zombies.

To celebrate I have worked out how to make Firefox realise I have an RSS feed, so that little orange broadcast icon should appear down the bottom. You can add it at as a Live Bookmark, or cram this link into a feed reader. You can even feed that feed to your personal Google page.

I am excited. We are about to get hit by a tsunami of amazingness, and I don’t see it stopping before the end of the year. Next month sees the return of Lost and The OC – the two most addictive programmes ever – and finishes off with the release of Serenity, the film of the third-best series ever, and a pretty much guaranteed entry into my elitist top films list. October is FEAR month, and given that I’ve now played the bizarrely early demo through about thirty-six times, I see myself getting lost in that pretty hard. Somewhere in that interim Hitman: Blood Money and Call Of Duty 2 are both due, but take that with a pinch of salt until you hear it from someone who knows anything. Contracts left a bitter taste in my mouth, so excitement over Blood Money is running low, and Call Of Duty 2’s promise is basically that it’ll put you through living hell, but both are bound to be an experience. I feel like I am owed Dreamfall fairly soon, but I don’t know where that’s coming from.

Let’s hope all that happens before mid-November, because in all probability subsequent events will be rendered irrelevant. I will not be playing other games for a few months. For the purposes of that claim, ‘reality’ counts as a game. I am waiting, of course, longing for sweet, sweet Oblivion. Which has Wonder Woman in it.

Stars: Naomi Watts (American version of Ring), Laura Harring, Justin Theroux (apparently an Irish bad guy in the second Charlie’s Angels film).

Plot: a partially failed actress is dumped by the girlfriend who got her the few roles she ever had, for a man, and hires a hitman to have her killed. In her grief and guilt, she tries to reimagine her life in Hollywood with showbusiness gloss, but her dreams are haunted both by reality and terrifying symbols of death and dementia.

Why It’s Great:

• The plot is more complex than the top two films combined in some sort of really complex way: it’s probably not possible for a human mind to grasp it on first viewing, and because of that it – like any David Lynch film – has been made artistically beautiful enough to work as a rationally unintelligible surrealist piece.
• Dream is entangled almost inextricably with reality.
• Dozens of ingenious crossovers and quirks crop up once you make sense of it.

Genre: forget about it.

Stars: Nicholas Cage, Nicholas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper (the homophobic dad in American Beauty).

Plot: tempting to say ‘forget about it’ again, but I’ll give it a go: a woman writes an article about a guy who steals rare orchids from nature reserves. The article is very popular, and a publisher asks her to adapt it into a book. She does, and calls it, like the article, The Orchid Thief. The book is very popular, and a producer asks screenwriter Charlie Kaufman to adapt it into a film. He tries, but can’t capture what he likes about it, and obsesses over his failure, ultimately writing first the entire history of the Earth, then himself, into the plot. Meanwhile, his admiring, friendly brother Donald takes up screenwriting himself, after attending a quicky course on it, exasperating his brother by coming up with lower-brow ideas typical of modern cinema and seeking Charlie’s approval. It’d take me about another paragraph of that size to explain the rest of the plot, then two or three more to qualify how much of it is actually true, and that the film he’s writing is in fact the film he’s in, which evolves dynamically as he, the character in it, makes decisions about how to save the screenplay he’s writing from either pretentiousness or never being finished. Instead, I just told you the plot of the plot summary I’d write if I was going to write the rest of this plot summary, but I did it rather cleverly within the plot summary itself, so perhaps I should have included the plot of the above plot summary before the plot of the rest of the summary, which doesn’t exist. I think I’m sooo goddamn clever.

By the way, I wasn’t just mocking myself there to mirror the relentless self-deprecation that consumes Charlie Kaufman when he realises what he’s done, I really do think what I did there was pathetic. If I wanted to mimic his self-deprecation, I’d do something like… well, see the last section called ‘Something Like…’

Why It’s Great:

• Well, check out the plot.
• Nicholas Cage – I’m so confused about how I feel about Nicholas Cage now that I can’t even remember how I used to; was he the annoying guy who always seemed to choose great films, or was he the basically decent actor who always got stuck in awful ones? Now that he’s been in Bringing Out The Dead and this, and I realise I really do like Con Air, I think I just plain like him. He’s fantastic in this, as both Charlie and Donald Kaufman, who spend a lot of time on screen together. You can’t make yourself believe for a second that they’re the same person, even though no attempt is made to distinguish them appearence-wise, beyond their wearing different clothes. The two roles would make a good litmus test for actors in general – can they make two identical-looking characters unassimilatably different? He can, and it’s a spectacular film, so he must be good.
• It’s hilarious. Not just Charlie’s self-loathing and Donald’s awful ideas, but the insane turns it takes toward the end, and the whole absurdly self-referential interaction between plot and genre.

A Quote: “Oh my God, I’ve written myself into my screenplay.” “That’s kind of weird, huh?” “It’s self-absorbed, it’s narcissistic, it’s solipsistic, it’s pathetic! I’m pathetic! I’m fat and pathetic!”

Something Like… Oh my God, I’ve written myself into my plot summary. It’s smarmy, it’s arrogant, it’s demeaning to the film, it’s pathetic! I’m pathetic! I’m stupid and pathetic!

Genre: uh… romantic hitman comedy?

Stars: John Cusack, Minnie Driver, Dan Ackroyd, Jeremy Piven, Michael Cudlitz, Alan Arkin (Catch 22), Joan Cusack, Hank Azaria.

Plot: a hitman is hired to do a job in his hometown at the time of his ten year high-school reunion, and on the advice of his psychiatrist decides to attend and try to reconcile with the girlfriend he abandoned for a decade without a word, and maybe not kill anyone for a while.

Why It’s Great:

• John Cusack.
• Both the electronic score by Joe Strummer and the all-eighties soundtrack are fantastic in their own rights, -and- brilliantly used. I Can See Clearly Now makes the opening credits and first scene unforgettably cool, and later on Mirror In The Bathroom accompanies a fight scene brilliantly.
• Assassination is inescapably appealing, and several of the gunfights are great – especially the final one, which features a frying pan.
• You’ll notice a second Cusack in the cast listing – there are actually four Cusacks in it altogether. I haven’t worked out who Bill is yet, and Ann’s appearence is very brief, but Joan is brilliant. She often plays significant roles in John’s films – even playing his character’s sister in Say Anything – and no-one cries nepotism because she’s really, really good.
• Jeremy Piven is always great, but this is his best character ever. I know you haven’t heard of him, but he was in the horrible Very Bad Things, and you’d probably recognise him if he was pointed out to you. Some of his quotes aren’t the best on paper, but when he says them, the “Ten years!” and “I was looking for a little validation on my life, but I guess I came up short” lines are some of the best in the film, and it’s a film of great lines.

Quotes:

Waitress: What would you like in your omlette?
Blank: Nothing in the omlette, nothing at all.
Waitress: Technically that's not an omlette.
Blank: Look, I don't want a semantic argument about it, I just want the protein.

Grocer: Easy there, chief. I don't see hollow-point wound care on the menu.

Paul: I'll see you at the 'I've-Peaked-and-I'm-Kidding-Myself' party.

Blank: Debi's house.
Paul: Kinda crept up on you, didn't it?
Blank: No, you drove us here.
Paul: ... Yep.

Clips: school.avi (2MB)

Genre: psychological thriller.

Stars: Guy Pearce (apparently in Neighbours at one point), John Pantoliano (the traitor in The Matrix), Carrie-Anne Moss.

Plot: an insurance claims investigator loses the ability to form new memories when he’s hit from behind during a struggle with a man he finds raping his wife, and tries to track down the second man with notes, tattoos and the help of a suspicious policeman friend. Half of the scenes are shown in reverse order, so that the film ends in the middle of its plot’s timeline.

Why It’s Great:

• The actual plot is astonishingly complicated and mind-blowingly clever.
• The intricate and beautiful scene-splicing interacts with the web of deceit and confusion brilliantly, unpicking it lie by lie.
• The two main characters are superbly written and are acted so compellingly that I still find them fascinating now, having seen it at least eight times.
• The fact that every scene starts with you having no idea what came before it mimics the protagonist’s condition cleverly, unravelling the plot in all the right backwards steps without keeping you in the dark about anything he knows.
• Although the themes are dark and even chilling, the atmosphere is mainly just exciting, and the dialogue and even plot are hilarious in parts.

Timeline:

Quotes:

Lenny: (running) Okay, so what am I doing? (Seeing another man running) Oh, I'm chasing this guy. (The running man opens fire) No, he's chasing me.

Genre: noir thriller.

Stars: Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe, Kevin Spacey, Danny DeVito, James Cromwell, David Strathairn, Kim Basinger, Ron Rifkin.

Plot: three Mexican kids are arrested for a coffeeshop massacre, but neither the straight-arrow arresting officer nor the violent colleague he hates so much think the case has been solved. Meanwhile, a reknown but low-ranking cop with ties to a popular TV show investigates a smut lead he can’t work out, but which he’s starting to think is connected.

Why It’s Great:

• Not only is it based on a James Ellroy book, it’s a superb, Ellroy-esque version of it – despite not being written by James Ellroy. Ellroy himself commented, in very much his own words, “I can’t fucking believe it.”
• Ellroy-esque means mind-bogglingly complicated, subtle and dark. Typically for him, LA Confidential hinges on human weakness and corruption, scandal, drugs, ambition, revenge, hollowness, regret, and anger.
• The three leads and James Cromwell are incredible – the best performances I’ve ever seen from him or Spacey, both brilliant at their worst. The idea of different personality types coming together in the face of a greater evil is hardly novel, but their personalities are so profoundly convincing that it still feels like a revelation. It also helps that the moment Crowe and Pearce realise they’re on the same side, Crowe is in the middle of beating Pearce’s head against the corner of a filing cabinet. In the end, it’s a friendship that arises when it becomes clear they don’t have time to hit each other anymore. And it only becomes jovial when they’re both convinced they’re going to die.
• In fact Cromwell is probably the star of the film, as the brilliantly conceived Captain Dudley Smith, the only common thread in the three books and perhaps Ellroy’s biggest character. His key moment in the film – you know it if you’ve seen it – is extraordinary cinema.
  The 40’s LA atmosphere is impeccable, and the whole thing has an amazingly sylish elegance.
• The action is so expertly directed, so immediately gripping and volatile, that a simple hotel shoot-out makes The Matrix’s lobby scene look pathetic. These are gunfights that respect the fact that line-of-sight means death for one or the other party within a second. Death is vicious and sudden. Every shot has a serious, brutal consequence.

Quotes:

Scandal-Rag Journalist: Patchett's what I call 'twilight': he ain't queer and he ain't red. He can't help me in my quest for prime sinuendo.

Coroner: Stomach of the week from a motel homicide: the unemployed actor had frankfurter, french fries, alcohol and sperm.