Recently in Film Category

Or probably, more like fifteen. I've been searching for this film ever since I saw it on Stay Tuned a long long time ago, and today, I finally found it. Moral drama ahoy!

I finally got around to watching Control tonight, and I must say that I'm conflicted. It's a well-made film, certainly, but I don't think it was half the film that 24 Hour Party People was. I guess, perhaps partly what's going through my head right now, partly because I think New Order are the better band overall, but I've never really bought into the Curtis Myth fully. And the film does nothing to help me, either; instead, it's an hour and a half of Curtis treating his wife like dirt, feeling a little remorse, and the killing himself. Obviously, it's a gross oversimplification, and the drugs cocktail he was on was probably a big contributing factor to some of his behaviour, but still.

(I also was a teensy bit peeved at the constant mocking of Bernard Sumner, especially when Martin Hannett snaps at him in the studio while the genius Curtis was recording. Seeing as how Sumner turned out to be Factory's unsung production hero, it seems a little harsh here. Also, Hannett is never actually mentioned by name, which is a shame considering how important he was to the Joy Division sound)

It did look wonderful, though. There's a scene just after Debbie has the baby, where Ian stands outside a hospital corridor that struck me as quietly beautiful. And I did like the scene at the end; Sumner, Hook, and Gretton are sitting in the pub, desolate, where they're joined by the other two, Morris and a girl who's supposed to be Gillian. A new order just waiting to be formed...

BBC One is showing a shortened version of Helvetica tonight. Worth the license fee all by itself (perhaps). And for those of you wondering just how a documentary about a font could give way to such a warning…you haven't met Erik Spiekermann yet...

Up the WGA! I'm actually quite impressed; there hasn't been a television strike on the same level in this country since the ITV strike of 1979, and I was all of two months old back then. Again, I was young (nine) during the last WGA strike in 1988, but I have this feeling that UK networks weren't quite so exposed as they are currently. Though if it causes Sky One to have troubles after spending so much money to poach Prison Break, I will enjoy a hearty laugh.

Hurrah for Jon Stewart, as ever.

(Also, I love the idea of John Oliver as union rabble-rouser. I want Scargill-inspired shorts when you come back!)

And all this for eight cents…

The Young Ones: Complete Series One & Two. Contains Subterranean Homesick Alien for the first time since 1992.

This has been your SOTCAA post of the week.

I will be so much happier when our generation has got over this little phase. Please, no more bad 80s cartoon adaptations. I beg you.

(and Jason Lee? Shame. Shaame!)

PETER BAYNHAM HAS BON JOVI HAIR.

Also: James Cameron. Didn't you watch the start of Titanic?! Remember what happened to Geraldo!

Penelope Cruz has killed every ostrich in California for her dress.

Why must The Winslet be spoiled by Gervais? Why? WHYYY?

Leo's long sulk is over! He's king of the world! Or something. I am on very little sleep, I warn you.

PETER BAYHNAM ALL OVER ABC! Take that, Lee, Herring, and the Armistice!

ATTACK OF TEH CUET! The kids are soooooo sweet. BUT! IT'S HAPPINESS, CHILD!

I've been watching some of The Prisoner in the last couple of days, after getting the series very cheap from Play. I've never actually seen it before, and while I still think the premise is fantastic, the series itself is a little lacking sometimes.

Part of the problem is that the order of the episodes makes no sense. In some stories, Six appears to have been in The Village for months, knowing his way around, but at others, deep into the series, it's like he only arrived yesterday, meaning it's difficult to get any idea of progress. This is partly because the original broadcast order of The Prisoner is not the intended order of the series, but at the same time, there doesn't appear to be any canonical order which solves the problem. Which is a pity, as with a prison breakout show like this, some degree of continuity would be nice (especially with the revolving Number 2s. one of whom makes his second appearance before he makes his first!).

Putting all that aside, it is mostly enjoyable; sometimes it strays too far into the realm of indulgence, but again, Six himself is woefully inconsistent. At times, he seems to have almost superhuman intellect, whereas at other times, he's as thick as two short planks. Take the episode Many Happy Returns, for example. Six wakes up to find The Village abandoned and derelict. Knowing a good thing when he sees it, he finds a cat and builds a boat, sailing off into the sunset. After decking a couple of German gunrunners and depending on the kindness of knock-off Romany gypsies, Six finds himself in London. Now considering that he used to be a spy, that after resigning from his job he was kidnapped and placed in The Village, you would think that he'd know that London isn't safe for him. But no. Firstly, he goes back to his old house, where we discover that while he can resist all sorts of torture, Six is vulnerable to fruit cake and little sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Then, in a fit of stupidity, he goes back to his old workplace to try and track down The Village's location. One guess as to what happens when they find it. After that, you do lose sympathy with him somewhat.

So far, then: deeply flawed, but I think it's probably worth following it through to the very end, although I'm told that the final episode is almost complete gibberish.

Apologies; Roy's wedding and my being ill left the blog hanging somewhat.

But what have I been up to in that time (aside from being in bed and at a wedding, natch)? Well, watching television, mostly. For September is here, and that means the beginning of the new American TV season. Tens of new shows on the airwaves, many of which won't last the month, and old favourites returning as well.

I'm no longer in America, sadly, but thanks to the magic of BitTorrent and a sister who can find almost any torrent that you care to name, we're able to get most of the shows less than a day after their broadcast (not quite the heady days of 2003 where I was downloading 24 and Buffy on the UNC network a full day before their TV airing, but still quite impressive nonetheless).

The upcoming week brings us Veronica Mars and Gilmore Girls (I spent the summer watching all six seasons of Gilmore, so you could say that I've become a fan), but the past week saw the return of the greatest police show to ever grace television, plus a pilot that brought smiles to everybody in our house.

The Wire is a TV show that, like the city it's set in, offers no concessions to newcomers. The dialogue is a mixture of swearing and obscure Baltimore slang, the most likeable character is either a drug-addled heroin addict called Bubbles who indulges in a vast array of petty thefts and misdemeanours, or a womanising, arrogant American-Irish cop that can't help but screw his life up, and, while a season is only thirteen episodes long, they contain enough material for a full 22-ep run. And you never know when something you saw in, say, the first season, will become important in the fourth. It is harsh, it is dour, and it is Baltimore.

Two of the episodes have been shown on HBO so far (three if you have access to HBO On Demand, but the torrenters appear to be avoiding encoding those); the focus of this season is slightly different this time around, because of the events of the end of Season Three. This time, it's about the future. The next generation of drug pushers being cajoled into their designated careers, a school that's about to open to the new term, and the fight for control in both the drug corners of Baltimore and the mayor's office. Sadly, there are no happy endings in this city; candidate's Carcetti original optimism fading away as he realises that every morning he "wakes up white is a city that ain't", and most of the children accepting Marlo's drug money to buy new clothes for school, as his men hide bodies in abandoned homes. It's not going to be pleasant, but it won't be anything less than compelling.

You have a friend. A friend who, to be honest, you love. They're exciting, challenging, funny, witty, and seem to be why the sky is blue in the morning. And then, just as you think that things are going to be this way forever, the pair of you are separated in an inevitable, but still heartbreaking manner.

That would be the end of season four of The West Wing.

Then, a few years later. You've kept in touch, the spark is still there, but it's not quite the same. And then. And then. The reunion.

Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip.

Possibly the best TV pilot I've ever seen. For those of us who cursed the last few years of Sorkin-less West Wing, the title cards, the cast, even 'Snuffy' are all guaranteed to raise a smile. An initial screed broadcast on live TV decrying the FCC and the TV networks' fear of groups like the PTC broadens the smile. The banter and the chemistry between Bradley Whitford and Matthew Perry turns the smile into a grin, a grin that remains fixed for the rest of the programme. It's Sorkin at his most earnest, applying West Wing-style grandeur to a comedy show. Which might seem a little silly. Unless you've seen Sports Night. It's good to finally have him back.

(And, as an aside, Russell T. Davies needs to have both of these shows slapped in his face after these comments. Why is he so afraid of failure? Why is convinced of his audience's stupidity?)

Next week: prepare for my Gilmore-related meltdown as I now how have to watch it from week to week. Especially after what happened at the end of the last season.

I never thought I'd see this out on DVD. Hurrah for HBO.

(also, the greatest TV show of the past decade is coming back next month!)

I do feel like I've been neglecting the blog in the past week. I offer my humble apologies; it's not as if I've been lacking for ideas, but I just haven't had the time to write anything, giving that I've been watching season 2 of Gilmore Girls any time that I can. But! Here's what you've missed so far:

• A guide to the HMV sale, pointing out that if you're interested in picking up back catalogue from either New Order or Madonna (or both! Go crazy!), then the current sale is good news, but for everything else, it's a rather familiar line-up of titles.
• How I fell in love with Radiohead's Talk Show Host again.
• A discussion about Doctor Who and how, aside from last week's slight mis-step (I don't mind if it attempts to do something different. In fact, I'm glad. I would just prefer it not to end up being rubbish, that's all), the second half of this series has been quite strong. That would lead into talking about Fear Her, and how the show is really good when it's using children for maximum creepy effect (see also: The Curse of Fenric; the only thing I really remember about that story is the hot goth vampire girls killing Nicholas Parsons because his cross wouldn't work without belief).
• Part one of an occasional series on Albums That Don't Quite Suck As Much As People Say, which I will save for another time.
• A worrying post about how I hope I don't crawl into my shell when meeting everybody for the Shimura Curves gig tomorrow afternoon
• A selection of YouTube TOTP links, including Tiffany (she had such a formative effect on me, it seems).
• How Opera DS could be the greatest thing in the history of mankind. And possibly treekind as well. Oh, sure the trees look innocent and, well, stumpy, but behind our backs they've already invented faster-than-light travel and made an alliance with our eventual Squirrel Overlords.

So there you go. I hope you forgive me!

While I was in America, watching a Norwegian Dance Theatre video (um, yes), Christa recommended that I watch The Red Shoes, which, as a Powell and Pressburger film, I believe probably features a host of sumptuous and glorious Technicolor (a belief that she has affirmed). So, upon arriving home, I went looking around the Internet trying to order a copy. There's a Region 2 release, but it comes via Granada, so the DVD is probably shot from an old Betamax copy they had lying around the warehouses in Manchester. However, there's also Region 1 Criterion edition. Oooh. As a film snob as well as a Mac snob, I decided I'd plump for that version.

But! Disaster! I went to PlayUSA, added it to my basket, and went to the checkout. At which point, the site complained bitterly that I had 'ordered a music DVD which cannot be shipped to UK addresses'. Now, I'd heard that for some reason (I believe RIAA-inspired), Play was no longer shipping concerts or music video DVDs to these shores, but The Red Shoes is neither. So I sent them an email. Their reply was a little confusing, as it confirmed that they don't ship music DVDs, but also that they no longer ship some 'music-related' DVDs.

I went back to Play, filled my basket with Singin' In The Rain, West Side Story, My Fair Lady, and Grease. As soon as I hit the checkout, the site removed them all. Musicals are not welcome in the UK, it seems.

It's a little bizarre; I'm wondering where they draw the line? Why is a film with a soundtrack allowed through, but not a musical?

In the end, I ordered it from CD-WOW instead. They don't seem to have a problem with letting the British get their hands on 'music-related' DVDs. Hurrah!

(I'll do my best to avoid spoilers, but I'm going to be talking about the differences between the comic and the film, so if you haven't seen it, I'd avoid this entry for now)

Firstly, we shouldn't be under any illusions. V For Vendetta, the comic, is not a flawless masterpiece. As one of Alan Moore's early works, it is hamstrung by the structural constraints placed on its serial in Warrior, coupled with the final book being written several years after the first two (because of Warrior's demise). Even the setting of the original story is a little suspect, a failing Moore acknowledged in the introduction to the graphic novel edition and during interviews around the same time - "We had supposed that it would take a nuclear war to make England veer towards fascism. In the end all it took was giving people the right to buy their own council house." Despite all this, it's still a powerful polemic, as subtle as a bag of hammers in places, and as subtle as a scalpel in others.

Ever since the film was announced, fans of the book have been worrying about it, especially since early rumours indicated that the film would be set in "an alternate reality where Germany won World War II," which would have rather undermined the whole point of the story. Oh, and then there was V's introductory speech, which consisted of him saying a lot of words that began with the letter V.

The bad news is that the speech is still in there, although thankfully, it doesn't crop up again. The good news is that the WWII rumour was just that, and in fact, the Wachowski brothers have updated the story to reflect today rather than 1982. Instead of a nuclear war, we have a bioterror event that leads a Conservative MP to form a new party, Norsefire, which eventually wins Parliament (the book implies the slight collusion of the Royal Family; the film gives the new leader the dubious title of High Chancellor, suggesting that the WWII rumour may have come from an early draft of the screenplay).

Moore and Lloyd's version is very working class, capturing the grimy nature of Britain in the early 1980s. By contrast, the film is middle-class; instead of back-breaking and poorly-paid work at a munitions factory, Evey is a seemingly well-paid PA at the British Television Network. Some have said that this weakens V's point, as most of the characters seem to have reasonable lives, but I don't think it does. After all, if you weren't a Jew, you could get on quite well in 1930s Germany, and you could turn a blind eye to some of the measures that were going on around you. As they did.

Some of the changes don't work - I felt that V's television broadcast was pointlessly altered from Moore's more intelligent version, and I was sad that the lack of CCTV camera meant we didn't get the little girl's "bollocks!" scene in all its glory (it's partly in there, but it's not quite the same). Also, the removal of Fate means that the film has a few extra plot holes (how did V manage to send all the parcels? How did he set the trip in the police file for Finch to find?). Finally, the Shadow Gallery seemed a little pointless - as the censorship of Britain was much less restrictive than in the original (and while I love that Cat Power track, it didn't have the same resonance as "perhaps the term Tamla Motown" is familiar to you? Obviously not. Hardly surprising, I suppose. After all, they eradicated some cultures more thoroughly than they did others.")

No punches are pulled in the torture scenes; if anything, they're worse than the comic, borrowing images and devices from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Valerie's letter is also handled better than I thought it would be, and the change in Gordon's character, played by a film-stealing Stephen Fry, results in a much stronger connection between Evey and him, at the expense of some of the father issues explored in the book.

The finale has come in for quite a lot of criticism, and I have to confess that the touch of magic realism at the end didn't quite work for me, and I yelled at the screen (for which I apologise) for the American-centric suggestion that the Army can be relied upon to have honour (having watched The Plot Against Wilson this week, it's obvious that we can't. And if he hadn't been killed by the INLA, I would imagine that Lord Mountbatten would have played a large role in the original comic). I'm willing to forgive them a bit, though, as producing a blockbuster film that has that ending in today's climate takes some courage.

So, did I like it? Well, I feel a little compromised by knowing the book. The trailer promises an action-packed film, and this really isn't (much to the consternation of some in the theatre). At the same time, some of Moore's ideas about Anarchy have been watered down or removed to make the film simpler - at one point a supermarket is held up by a robber shouting "Anarchy in The UK!", which is followed by a Cabinet briefing on "the chaos", sidestepping V's explanation in the book of the difference. Having said that, it's still a very interesting message for 2006: "Governments should be afraid of the people."

Why did they have to get somebody who I'd like to watch? *grumbles about work*

Easily the third best film ever!

(behind Transformers: The Movie and WarGames, obviously)

…we love you. But if we ever meet you, we're going to hurt you.

You may have seen this, but still! The Shining as if directed by Nora Ephron!

I have a dim recollection of talking to somebody who edited all of Schindler's List down to three minutes, and then set it to Transvision Vamp's Baby I Don't Care. Which is probably better, for sheer crassness, but this is funny too.

Why does it hurt when my heart misses the beat?

(Aside: SOS Titanic. Now, admittedly, as it's the same event, I'm sure that some crossover was inevitable, but I swear, Cameron stole several shots from that for use in Titanic. But in this version, David Warner lives!)

The problem with Charlie & The Chocolate Factory is that it's actually a fairly boring story; Charlie finds a Golden Ticket (after a too-long process of looking for the ticket and not finding it - thankfully the film cuts out a small part of the book here), turns up to the factory, and then does very little while the rest of the children vanish. Charlie is then declared the winner and gets the factory. The only thing that holds the book and other versions together is how fun the ride is; seeing all the sights, watching the other children get their comeuppance in spectacular ways, and just how crazy Wonka can be.

So, happy to report that Johnny Depp's Willy Wonka is madder than two boxes of frogs. Lots of wonderful, trippy designs, odd Oompa-Lumpas who go metal, psychedelic, and funky at the drop of a hat, and the cotton wool room. The four of us who went to see it (Laura, Naomi, Hannah, and myself) spent most of the time giggling at the silliness. Not bad, then; a couple of annoying niggly niggles (why use 'dollars' when it's so clearly set in Britain? Why change Mike Teevee so he's actually clever now?), but fun.

Oh! And includes a cameo from The Actor Kevin Eldon. Which is why I laughed when nobody else did…

Sarah Vowell is my new hero. Let us all worship at her feet…

In this story about Peter Jackson suing New Line Cinema for underpaying him for his work on The Lord of The Rings trilogy (wherein the central part of the complaint is that New Line / Warner Brothers sold off rights to the spin-off materials to its subsidiary companies at lower-than-market value):

But Mr. Socarides said some lucrative rights did not go to Time Warner companies. The pay television deal went to Starz, not Time Warner's HBO. He added that the "Rings" book trilogy remains with Houghton Mifflin, which is not a Time Warner subsidiary.

Because obviously, New Line had the right to sell those rights on…I'm sure the Tolkien estate might have had a few words about that…

Quick spoiler-free review of Batman Begins: not too bad, but still a fair way short of the Animated Series' Mask of The Phantasm. Still, worth seeing for Gary Oldman's fantastic portrayal of Jim Gordon; he should have been in it more (at the expense of Katie Holmes. No harm to her, but her character was superfluous to the film).

Anyway, off to Germany tonight. Not sure if I'll have an Internet connection, so I might be gone a few days. Talk amongst yourselves!

Someone! Please! Tell Richard Curtis TO STOP! Enough with the "See! Politics! Feel! DAMN YOU! Now, a shy Englishman joke!" sledgehammer. It stopped being amusing a long time ago, and now it's just embarrassing…

Oo-er!

George Lucas is not a good director. Or scriptwriter. Maybe he was once; many speak of THX-1138 and American Graffiti was some affection, but twenty years without directing a film has taken a heavy toll. Revenge of The Sith is full of pacing errors, clunky dialogue, and an over-reliance on CGI.

That being said, I really enjoyed it.

Won't talk too much, for fear of giving away spoilers, but my favourite moments? The rather moving "Order 66" montage, completely stolen from The Godfather but still effective, "I have the high ground!" and what came five seconds afterwards, and the cuteness of The Phantom Menace returning with rather horrifying results (you don't see anything, but it's easily the darkest scene in all six films). Even Lucas's ham-fisted attempts at political commentary (a sample: "This is how democracy ends, then. To thunderous applause.") amuse - at least he's trying. He's not good enough to get there, and yes, perhaps he should have got someone else to help with the script, but at least it's not just making a toy commercial (the actual idea of the new trilogy is fairly strong, and more complex than the first three, but Lucas's failings mean that many of the subtleties are lost amongst the action scenes).

It's not going to change your mind about the series; if you hated it before, you'll really hate it after this, but otherwise, it's a good ending to the new trilogy.

PLUS! YODA AS JOHN MCLAINE! "Come out to Dagobah, we'll get together, have a few laughs!"

You spend so long without British sci-fi being around, then it all comes at once! This weekend saw the transmission of the most-anticipated episode of Doctor Who so far, Dalek, and the release of the film version of Douglas Adams' The  Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Madness! Insanity! The Conservative Manifesto! (ahahaha. Ha. Dies)

Dalek was mostly awesome. A few clunky lines, but worth it to see the Doctor completely losing his head over the Last Enemy. "YOU-WOULD-MAKE-A-GOOD-DALEK!" and "I-AM-ALONE!" Choice Dalek dialogue! Okay, so yes, The Power of Love saved the day, but still, a great episode, and I'm loving the Damaged Doctor approach this series is taking…

The Guide is surprising both very faithful to the source material and completely contradictory, a rather Adams-like quality. Many of the jokes from the book are transferred straight to the screen, although some ended up being a little mangled in the translation. In an attempt to give the story a plot, there's a dodgy kidnap-and-rescue plot inserted with the subtlety of a Vogon invasion fleet, but it does give rise to the swat jokes, which are probably one of the best visual gags of the film. Oh, and Love Conquers All again — it's definitely not as cynical as the books.

The Guide itself is underused. Stephen Fry's voiceovers, coupled with Flash-like animations for the Guide entries are easily the highlight of the film, even if they haven't changed very much from the book/radio versions. There's something wrong with the rest of the cast, though. Martin Freeman's Arthur Dent is inconsistent and bland, Bill Nighy puts on a Bill Nighy performance, that, with the addition of a few bad jokes, appears to be identical to the one in Love, Actually, and I'm still trying to work out why John Malkovich is even in the film. Mos Def mumbles quite a bit, but him, Alan Rickman, and Zooey Deschanel (Almost Famous! that's where she's from!) give the best performances in a very messy film that ambles around aimlessly. Like the book, it has little plot, but unfortunately, it doesn't quite have the charm and playfulness of Adams' earlier version.

Oh, except for one scene involving the Infinite Improbability Drive…

But first: Channel 4's 100 Greatest series. I mean, really. Now, it's not a innovative format, but it could be good. Perhaps if they chucked out the 'annoying comedian of the moment' linking clips, beat the graphic scriptwriters over the head with a grammar guide explaining the difference between 'its' and 'it's', and dropped the sneery tone that all the talking heads seem to have ("Oh, it was crap, wasn't it? Mind you, I did spend every afternoon watching it" – there's no need to be ashamed of your childhood), it could be a fun programme. Say, chop the list of featured shows to 50, get rid of the Internet voting aspect, and actually talk about the programmes themselves instead of bringing up the Captain Pugwash myths yet again. In tonight's 100 Greatest Cartoons, there was some lovely moments, including seeing footage from David Jason's voice recording sessions on Danger Mouse, and what I think may have been the first broadcast on British television of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles opening sequence. Yet, instead of attention being called to these things, it felt that they were just thrown in because Channel 4 could get the rights cheaply, and they'd extend the running of the show by a few minutes. In the end, it just becomes another couple of hours dedicated to laughing at the past. Which sucks.

(And no, I wasn't just annoyed that Transformers was dismissed in thirty seconds. The cartoon series wasn't all that good, at least in the writing, but it could have stood to have a little more discussion about say, that it was one of the first major toy-tie-in cartoons, that it still runs to this day in a modified form, and hell, considering the tone of the show, you would have thought that as the film features characters swearing, it would have been a easy choice to have a stand-up comedian saying "they SWORE? In a kid's film? WOW!")

Anyway! The Oscars 2005! The organisers have revealed themselves to be big Youssou Ndour and Neneh Cherry fans, as tonight's telecast is on a seven-second delay (I'm so sorry). The PTC has the FCC on speeddial, just waiting for Chris Rock to come on-stage, and celebrating that it may soon become cheaper to start a nuclear incident rather than show parts of the body on broadcast television. Yay progress!

To be honest, I'm not sure about tonight's ceremony. For a start, I haven't seen most of the nominated films, so I don't really know what I want to win (except for Best Animated Picture - if Shrek 2 beats The Incredibles, then there really is no justice in this universe). It'd be nice for Kate Winslet to pick up an award, but there's no chance of her doing so. The films that are going to win tonight are Million Dollar Baby, The Aviator, and Ray. We know this because they won all the other awards, and the same people vote for the Oscars as the SAG awards. Plus, the changes to the format are irksome. It sounds nice to say that some people will not be given their Oscars on the stage to speed up proceedings, but what this means is that the winners of Best Make-Up, Set Design, and other backroom categories won't have their moment, because the organisers wouldn't dare to do the same for the Best Actor award, would they? And I liked those speeches by the winners of the smaller awards; they're always more personal than the winners of the big categories. So boo to that.

(And what's the deal with having Beyonce sing three of the nominated songs? Why can't Minnie Driver sing her song? It just doesn't make sense)

And every year, I forget that there's the annoying "Countdown" bit beforehand. Look! people walking inside! How exciting!

And already, I miss the BBC. Adverts are also quite annoying.

I think I can hear the PTC dialling already. But indeed, the "imagine you work at the Gap, and your till is $90 trillion short" routine was funny.

Best Art Direction! And the first change - all the nominees are on stage. What happens to the losers? Oh they just get to clap while the winners get their Oscar. The losers have disappeared. Dropped through a trap door, I guess.

Okay, starting here: The Give Renee Zellweger A Chip Foundation! Because she looks terrible. Empire Records, dear! You looked absolutely fine before - and scary with losing all that weight. And, as predicted, the Supporting Actor award is in the old format, because you can't mess with the stars, can you?

Eh? Why were they playing the Star Trek theme when heading out to a break?

Robin Williams thinks he's hosting. But no worries, because The Incredibles won Best Animated Feature! Aww, Brad looks very awkward. But sweet.

Best Make-Up! Cate Blanchett is at the back of the hall, where all the nominees are sitting together, and the winners get to go to a small microphone to deliver their speech, because they're not good enough for the stage (Lemony Snicket won by the way).

Beyonce's first song of the evening is in French. And would probably sound better if the original singer was doing it…

Okay, that may be the funniest Oscar segment in a long time

Scarlett Johansson: This year's Science/Tech awards, or "We send a beautiful girl to mock the geeks" Party.

Edna Mode! EDNA MODE! EDNA MODE!

Best Supporting Actress: Cate Blanchett.

Oh, and Best Documentary: Fahrenheit 9/11 was ineligible because it was shown on TV during 2004. No clips from the documentaries this time, just the winner: Born Into Brothels (hurrah! As Super-Size Me irritates me a lot: surely it's not rocket science to think that eating junk food exclusively for a month is incredibly bad?)

Mmm, Kirsten Dunst…oh, and The Aviator wins Best Editing.

THE SINGER OF THE COUNTING CROWS HAS A HUGE SPIDER ON HIS HEAD! SOMEBODY TELL HIM! BEFORE IT CONSUMES HIS BODY!

it's always fun when they let drunk actors in for the British bits…

Best Adapted screenplay! Sideways get its consolation prize for being popular with the critics.

Best Visual Effects, and boy does Zhang Zyi look uncomfortable up there. Spidey 2!

Having people dedicate shows to "The Troops" is odd. You wouldn't get Stephen Fry giving a shout-out to the British Army during the BAFTA telecast, would you?

Al Pacino looks like he's spent the past week living on the street. Giving Sidney Lumet the Lifetime Oscar. Pauline Kael is rolling in her grave. Morgan Freeman is not going to let go of his Oscar. For Anyone. (and hey, Kael may have hated him, but I like Serpico and Network!)

Oh, how much money would we give to have Jay-Z be behind the Phantom mask?

"Comedy Superstar Jeremy Irons!"

Best short: Wasp. PTC reaching for that speed dial. If they understand British…

Best Animated Short: Ryan

Best Cinematography (presented by the lovely Kate Winslet): The Aviator, meaning that Passion of The Christ isn't getting anything tonight.

It's a good thing that nobody actually watches the inbetween bits. So far, nasty works about the Daily Mail, and a very drunk Will from Will and Grace.

Best Sound Mixing: Ray

Best Sound Editing: The Incredibles!

Best Documentary Short (Natalie Portman's dress is ugly): Mighty Times: The Children's March

I guess Rock isn't too enamoured with the changes either. Anyway: Best! Original! Score! Finding Neverland!

Martin Scoresce gets to hold an Oscar. "Yes, Marty, you can hold it. BUT YOU'RE NEVER GETTING ONE!"

Josh from the West Wing ducks. Yo-Yo Ma plays the Death List.

Puffy? What's he doing there? Please, no more Beyonce. Please.

Prince is going to speak! Prince! Prince! Although it seems he doesn't really want to do it…Best Song: The Motorcycle Diaries! Someone tell Collin!

Sean Penn has a sense of humour failure live on stage. It. Was. A. Joke. Annnnd best actress goes to: Hilary Swank. Boooooo. I expect a reissue of The Next Karate Kid soon, people.

Incidentally, where did they find the woman Oscar presenters for tonight? They appear to be seven feet tall!

SNIPPETY-SNAP, Rock!

Best Foreign Picture: The Sea Inside

Best Original Screenplay: Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind! Yay! Charlie Kaufman!

The women from Desperate Housewives have been drinking. Quite considerably. They look as if they're going to jump Jamie Theakston at any moment.

Best Actor: Jamie Foxx

Johnny Depp is wearing a Gonzo fist tie-clip, which is pretty cool.

Best Director: Clint Eastwood. The Academy: making Marty cry. Every. Single. Time. Although he did laugh. I guess they want him to be like Kubrick…

Best Picture: Million Dollar Baby. Boo again.

So, the Curse of Marty strikes once more. Boo and hiss, even if The Aviator wasn't his best film.

Right, off to bed.

Wait, there's an hour missing from The Avengers? The petition for a director's cut begins here!

(and hurrah! There's at least one other person on the planet who agrees with Bonnie and myself about this film!)

And, in case you were wondering, my top five films of 2004:

1. Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind
2. Before Sunset
3. The Incredibles
4. Main Hoon Na
5. Collateral

(There are a few films, like Sideways, Finding Neverland, and so on, that I never got around to seeing, unfortunately)

(an honourable mention for The Motorcycle Diaries, if only because I'll always remember watching it!)

And! Music-related things I'm interested in that are coming next year!

• The Johnny Boy album. I know it can't be as good as You Are The Generation…, but I have to believe.
• The Magic Numbers. Supposedly building up a following from spectacular live performances, they currently only have a 7" single out, Hymn For Her (it's very good), but a full album is coming next year
• New albums from Saint Etienne, New Order, The Flaming Lips, and *whisper* Oasis. Yes, yes, I know, but I still hold out hope they'll come good. Despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Today, then: a bootlegged copy of The Star Wars Holiday Special. Broadcast at Christmas on CBS in 1978, it has never been shown legally anywhere ever again. Only bootlegs exist, and George Lucas is on record as saying "if I had the time, I'd get a sledgehammer and destroy every copy in existence." This, then, is scary territory indeed.

We begin; the first unsettling thought - they didn't even splash out for the title scenes, instead having a cheap-looking "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away" slapped on-screen.

"introducing chewbacca's family" with his son lumpy. HIS SON LUMPY.

It's a wookie situation comedy! Lumpy is carving an x-wing. I'm really hoping for subtitles. But no. It's the family life of a suburban wookiee family. And even wookiees aren't allowed to eat between meals. Please tell me it isn't an hour and a half of wookiee noises.

Aww, they miss Chewbacca.The little one is excited about something. They're playing things on the holographic table.and right about now, you realise just why this has been erased from the official history. THEY'RE WATCHING A HOLOGRPAHIC CIRCUS. While a synthesiser is horrendously abused in the background. NO KITTY IT'S MY POT PIE! Lumpy is Cartman, I've decided.

Ooh, is that the plot coming back? Oh god, it's Luke. Mark Hamill seems to be wearing a lot of make-up. "Come on, Marla, let me see a little smile!" It's a wookiee! How can you tell!?

We're now in a shop. It's like Clerks! For The Imperial Guard Who Has Everything. But the shopkeeper is a Rebel spy! With a sophisticated code of "It was made by hand. SOLO!" And now Imperial shaving techniques.

Oh dear, back to the wookiess again. Star Wars cookery? "Bantha Surprise?" The horror. And it's not being played for laughs, it really is a whole cooking segment. And the cook has three arms.Make that four.

Back to Han and Chewie for a bit of action, stolen from the original film.

The Empire has declared the Wookiee planet under martial law. Perhaps they saw the cooking segment. Now the wookiees are getting presents from the shopkeeper. Lumpy seems to have got an Atari 2600. And another has been strapped into what looks like an electric chair, but it's apparently some sort of virtual reality device. PEOPLE ARE SWIMMING THROUGH SPACE. A virtual woman is now sweet-talking the old wookiee. I'm sure this is against the law, and just plain ewww. And now she's singing. Complete with dodgy 1970s compositing effects to duplicate her across the screen. Really, mere words can't convey how creep and sick and wrong this scene is.

Now onto C3PO and Princess Leia. I'm sure Carrie Fisher's drunk. She almost tripped over when walking across the set. Amd I don't want to know what a wookie-ookie is.

Han and Chewbacca have landed on the Wookiee planet! But no! Stormtroopers have taken over Chewie's house! But they're pacifying the troops by letting them watch Jefferson Starship. One of whom seems to be singing into a lollypop. But the guard is digging it! I'm hoping for a Stormtrooper hoedown by the end. When it ends. Oh,sweet blessed relief will soon be upon us.

And now a cartoon? A rather odd cartoon, in which character models seem to be a rough guide, rather than something to be adhered to. Boba Fett! Who…doesn't act like any other incarnation of of Fett that we've seen before. Oh, it was a double-cross. And the animator didn't like Harrison Ford's face. Wait, was that supposed to be an ending?

Imperial dudes wrecking the wookiee's house! It's a heartbreaking moment; Lumpy's bantha toy has been broken in two by Empire forces. Those scumbags. And now he's watching an instruction video. A freaky instruction video; making a transmitter has never been quite so scary. Or long and drawn out.

Bea Arthur as a bartender! No, just no. And now she's singing. I am never going to get rid of the mental scarring.

SHOOT HIM! SHOOT THE WALKING FLUFFBALL! Han saves the day! Lots of hugs.Ford has this look of "PLEASE! SOMEBODY RESCUE ME FROM THIS TERROR!" But Han has now gone, so we're left with the wookiees. Oh please, no. wookiee on wookie action!

All the wookies are walking through space into a ball of light. And R2D2 and C3PO have turned up. With no explanation. Oh, and here comes everybody else. CARRIE FISHER HAS JUST BROKEN OUT INTO SONG. KILL US NOW. THEY'VE DISCOVERED WORDS TO THE STAR WARS THEME. This has gone beyond strange and into the stuff of nightmares.

I will say, though, that it makes The Phantom Menace look like The Godfather in comparison…

Bowling for Columbine was a film about a man struggling to find reasons for a tragedy, ultimately becoming more bewildered than when he started. Fahrenheit 9/11 is one note repeated over and over, a focused rage at the Bush Administration and what it has achieved in the past four years. Moore uses every trick he's learnt from his previous documentaries, incorporating pranks, selective editing, humour, and horror. The first post-title scene is astounding; even though the footage has been seen across the world thousands of times before, he manages to find a new way of presenting the attack on New York, a way that makes the terror of that day as immediate as it was then. From then on, the film takes a rather conventional, chronological view of things, detailing the Bush family's connections to the bin Laden family, the flights out of America when all others were grounded, Afghanistan and how consultants to US energy firms ended up running the country, how the US government raises the terror warning level seemingly at a whim, and the evils of the USA-PATRIOT Act, which was passed despite most Senators not even bothering to check its contents.

The documentary saves its biggest impact for the second half, focusing on Iraq. However, it does so by almost completely ignoring the question of whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or not (save for a few pre-September interviews with Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell). Instead, it opens with the bombing of Baghdad, the green flares of exploding bombs blasting against night-vision cameras. Then, Moore shows us the results. Women and children covered in napalm burns. Dead US soldiers burnt, dragged along the streets and then hanged from a bridge. We didn't see this. I didn't see this, when watching the news in America. We were given a clean war, a war of embedded journalists and computer-generated maps. We didn't see this.

Finally, it looks at the US military. How the soldiers started out as gung-ho, CD-playing video gamers, but ended up bitter, disillusioned, and frightened. For this section, Moore returns to Flint, Michigan, to see the effect of war on his home town, resulting in scenes that make you want to break down and also fill you with a burning rage.

You should see it. Yes, it's completely one-sided, flawed, biased, and slanted. It has to be. When you consider that up to now, the only real critical news-based look at the Bush Administration is on Comedy Central, that the White House Press Corps decided to leave most of the tough questions to Helen Thomas, and that Fox News has done as much to conflate Al-Qaeda and Iraq as President Bush, this film is the only possible response. And its box office revenues suggest that people would like to hear something other than a regurgitation of government spin. This film isn't the whole truth, but it's a challenge to our media to start doing their jobs once more.

Michael Moore:

I don’t agree with the copyright laws and I don’t have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people as long as they’re not trying to make a profit off my labour. I would oppose that,

Jack Valenti, outgoing head of the MPAA:

I don’t think there’s really a single actor or director in the world who does not believe that if you don’t combat piracy, it will devour you in the future.

All those BitTorrent-enabled, here's a link to a camcorder version. Personally, I'm waiting until it goes on release over here later this month…

The city would never have fallen if only they'd given Orlando Bloom a bow and arrow in the first act…

Um, if Disney said this back in 2003, then why are we only hearing about it now? Something seems odd.

(And it's not like this will stop a US release. When the same thing happened to Kevin Smith's Dogma, the film was quickly snapped up by another distributor. So I don't think it's quite as bad as the article sounds, although it is discouraging, if not surprising, that Disney are blocking the film)

While the Star Wars fans go nuts over this announcement, I'd like to point out that this wonderful film is available to buy once again this April:

Things you should probably know about Return of The King:

It begins in a way you least expect. The battles are as spectacular as usual, but there are a few bits of dodgy CGI. The elimination of Saruman is a bit of a blow, but the battles make you forget about all that. Those of you who feared that Arwen was going to swamp the trilogy will be happy, and those of you who wanted certain endings will be also. Minas Tirith looks incredible. It is as good, if not better than the first two films, although there's a few gaps which will no doubt be filled in when the 4+ hour version is released next year.

If you see this early in the day, you will have a group of annoying kids sitting in front of you, who will spend the entire length of the film talking/throwing sweets/jumping on bottles/listening to music on their personal stereos. A Special Place in Hell is reserved for these people. Oh, and Orlando Bloom has attracted a cheering section. There may also be people who wear elven cloaks.