"Do You Like Scary Movies?"

I like scary movies and so too do Kim Newman and Mark Kermode, so it was great fun to hear them discussing the genre last night at the BFI, as part of the promotion for the release of the new edition of Newman's book, Nightmare Movies. The original edition of the book ran up to Apocalypse Now whereas the new version ends with There Will Be the Blood, partly, it seems, because the final line in that film is, "I'm done."

Kim Newman and Mark Kermode at the BFI

Newman started off by claiming that he preferred Exorcist II to the original, which almost caused Dr K to walk out. Defining the horror genre isn't always easy with so many subgenres (scary Japanese girls, vampires, torture porn, and so on) and, as Newman said, a horror film doesn't necessarily have to be scary. He, of course, is fairly immune to the tricks of horror directors by now, although jumped five times during the screening of Insidious (he and Kermode both agreed that the film was generally poor).

And while he isn't a big fan the endless sequels in the Saw and Hostel franchises (he prefers the "running through the woods" sub-sub-genre of torture porn to the "sitting in a chair" category; the former are inherently less boring), he doesn't think they're necessarily worse films than a lot of the films he loved in the 1970s and 1980s. The difference is that enough time has passed now for him to feel nostalgia for the latter. That said, in a show of hands from the audience, very few people were prepared to admit liking Sucker Punch (I think it was Sucker Punch; if not, it was another recent and much derided movie), which may have been the most frequently dissed film of the night. Do horror movies sometimes go too far? They're supposed to go too far, says Newman, who likes the fact that they aren't always mainstream, and for him, they only go too far when they become boring.

After the discussion, they showed a rarely screened film called Let's Scare Jessica to Death. "I could have chosen a film I love like Night of the Living Dead or Halloween," said Newman, "but most of you have probably seen them and if not, they are easy to get hold of." Let's Scare Jessica, meanwhile, hasn't been shown in the UK for over 25 years. In the film, the eponymous Jessica has just been released from a mental hospital and she and her husband move to a farm in the countryside with their friend Woody. In the house, they find a hippie drifter type called Emily, and then mysterious things start happening but are they real or is she still a bit crazy?

Newman likes the film because whenever someone tells him that "X is the scariest film ever," he can ask whether they've seen Let's Scare Jessica ( usually they haven't) and because it contains many of the classic horror film elements: drowned ghost brides, vampires, zombies, isolated houses in the countryside. The print we saw had a strange pinkish tone to it and judging by the high-pitched, feedback-like sounds that are played throughout the film, you might wonder whether Let's Give Jessica Tinnitus might be a more appropriate title. It was pretty scary, although I was bracing myself for more scares than there actually were. Not the most conventional of ways to spend the evening of the royal wedding but there were at least several bride dresses...

Waity Kate, the 1509 Edition

I always enjoyed history lessons but for me, the kings-and-queens part was my favourite. Economic history was fine and political history OK but it was the personalities of the powerful, the calibre of the kings and the quirks of the queens that interested me most. That said, I wasn't watching a certain royal wedding this morning because my interest wanes somewhere in the 17th century.

Just over 500 years ago, for example, another wedding took place between another Catherine and another royal. Like Kate Middleton, Catalina de Aragón had to change her name to Catherine (probably spelled Katherine) to make it more suitable for a queen or future queen of England, and like Kate Middleton, Catherine of Aragon had been awaiting the marriage for a number of years. Catherine originally married the eldest son of Henry VII, Arthur, Prince of Wales, in 1501.

The youngest daughter of the formidable Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, whose marriage created, temporarily, a united Spain, Catherine was a powerful bargaining tool and her marriage to Arthur was supposed to ensure that England maintained a strong alliance with the Spanish against those pesky French. They married at St Paul's and then, like Prince William and the new Duchess of Cambridge, returned to live in Wales (OK, technically, it was Ludlow). Catherine and Arthur were about the same age but Catherine is said to have shared a dance with Arthur's younger brother Henry, a more outgoing, fun-loving lad, who never expected to be king.

But then of course Arthur died, leaving Catherine stranded in Ludlow as the Dowager Princess of Wales. Henry VII was unwilling to return her dowry (which was probably already spent) and Catherine's parents were too busy with Spanish concerns to sort out her return. And then Isabella died, leaving Castile -- the richest Spanish kingdom -- to her eldest daughter, Joanna (called "the mad" but she was probably just really very sad about the death of her husband, Philip "the fair"), with Ferdinand still ruling Aragon. This meant Catherine's value in the marriage market had dropped. Henry VII, whose wife died the year after Arthur and who was, by this time, nearly 50, contemplated marrying Catherine himself but to her probable relief, this never quite worked out.

When Henry VII died in 1509, his son Henry became Henry VIII and Catherine's lingering in this cold foreign kingdom finally came to an end. Henry VIII had to get a dispensation from the Pope to marry his brother's widow, which was, of course, to come back to haunt him ten years later, but the couple were married in June 1509. The wedding ceremony was a quiet one in Greenwich Church but Catherine's coronation in Westminster Abbey, a few weeks later, drew huge crowds. Catherine became immensely popular, which, again, caused trouble for Henry when he wanted to divorce her, and although she was five years older, she and Henry made an attractive couple: Catherine with her attractive, petite figure and auburn hair, and Henry, tall, athletic and handsome. Unusually for the time, it seemed to be a love match, but you can never quite imagine the strains that a failure to produce a mail heir can cause...

It took Henry seven years to get his annulment, which was issued in 1533. Catherine died three years later having spent much of the last 20 years of her life as she had spent those long years at the turn of the 16th century -- alone, abandoned, hoping. But her popular support was never supplanted by any of Henry's subsequent queens and given what happened to most of them, maybe Catherine didn't fare so badly...

It Shouldn't Happen To a Vet

The selection of films showing at the cinema at the moment isn't great and I probably wouldn't have bothered going to see Water for Elephants had I not got a free ticket. Unlike most of this evening's audience, I'm not a Robert Pattinson fan (although to be fair, I haven't seen any of his films) and based on the trailer, I decided the film looked very corny but quite fun. This turned out to be a fair assessment of Water for Elephants.

As the film opens, an old man stares through the rain at a circus. Two circus folks think he has escaped from a local care home and they take him into the office to wait while they try to get him home. It turns out, however, that he used to work at a circus. The circus dude is skeptical at first but less so when the old man claims to have worked for the Benzini Brothers circus -- famed for causing The Worst Circus Disaster of All Time back in '31. Oh, and the old man was right in the middle of the disaster and can tell the circus dude all about it...

Flash back 80 years and the old man's younger self bears a striking resemblance to R-Patts. His name is Jacob Jankowski, the hard-working son of Polish immigrants, who is just about to take his final exams for  Cornell vet school when he finds out that his parents have been killed in a car crash and his house repossessed. He hits the road -- or rather, the rails -- and hitches a ride on a train, which turns out to be a circus train. The circus in question is run with an iron fist by August (Christoph Waltz), a charismatic but cruel despot, who grudgingly agrees to take R-Vetz on as the circus's vet. R-Vetz's first act is to recommend that the star attraction -- a horse named Silver Star, who happens to be ridden by August's wife Marlena (Reese Witherspoon) -- be put down. August would prefer to "get a few more shows" out of the horse before it dies but R-Vetz shoots it anyway, while Marlena tenderly strokes his head (the horse's head that is).

R-Vetz almost loses his job but then August acquires a new star attraction, an elephant named Rosie (played by Tai, who is the best thing in the film, along with a cameo from James "Thomas Cromwell" Frain). He also loses his heart to Marlena. But we've already seen how cruelly August treats the animals, so what will he do if he thinks he might lose his wife to this Cornell drop-out? Well, it's perfectly easy to guess given that the film is entirely predictable.

The trouble is that there wasn't much chemistry between Pattinson and Witherspoon and I didn't really care whether or not they had their happily ever after. On the other hand, I was much more interested in finding out whether Rosie survived her master's cruelty and The Worst Circus Disaster of All Time. Rosie is awesome. Visually, the film is stunning, so in all, it isn't a bad film, but it's not great either.

Sean Penn was cast as August but dropped out, Scarlett Johansson turned down the role of Marlena and Andrew Garfield auditioned for the part of Jacob. Although I think Penn is a good actor, Waltz did a great job in Water for Elephants, so I wouldn't have substituted him; nor Witherspoon for Johansson. But I would have really enjoyed watching Garfield in the lead role and I'm sure I would have been rooting for a Jacob-Marlena happy ending if he were playing Jacob.

Spoiler alert.


The real problem I have with Water for Elephants is that it is too straightforward. Here's what happens: some of August's angry employees let all the animals out of their cages during a show and the ensuing stampede, panic and fall of the big top lead to the ruin of Benzini Brothers. August is about to suffocate Marlena with his bullhook when Rosie breaks free from her chain and, almost comically, kills him off and so the happy couple can run off into the sunset. They work for another circus (and later a zoo), have five children and keep Rosie and assorted horses in their ranch.

I expected that when we finally flashed forward to the present day, there would be some nice twist. That the circus dude realises that the old man is delusional because his story doesn't add up, for example. But no. Marlena and Jacob really did live happily ever after until her death a few years earlier. It's not that I'm opposed to happy endings (well, not really) but throughout the film, we are told that everything about the circus is an illusion -- it's all for show and nothing is real. So, are we supposed to accept this jolly little tale about triumph in the face of tyrants at face value? Sadly, I think we are. This is why I don't normally watch films with happy endings; they just bring out my cynical side.

Orages and Sunshine

Technically, there haven't yet been any orages in London today although there was plenty of heavy rain after hours of sunshine. I'd been planning to spend much of the day reading and sunbathing in Regent's Park but it started to cloud over, around four o'clock, I decided to have a wander through the shops instead, this being the last day of my Lenten shopping ban. After I had resisted final temptations from Top Shop, Uniqlo and, of course, Anthropologie, the heavens started to open, slowly at first with sporadic but heavy drops.

I ducked into the World of Cine and went to see Oranges and Sunshine (at last), hoping that by the time the film had finished, the rain would have stopped and I could walk home. Sadly, it was even worse when I got out so I sprinted to the tube. It was still extremely warm and muggy, so it was almost possible to believe I was in Miami instead of London. The area by the ticket gates at Piccadilly Circus was absolutely rammed with people and I was worried there would be a long queue to get on the Bakerloo line but instead, people just seemed to be milling in an incompetent manner upstairs.

As for the movie, it was good, hard-hitting stuff, with solid performances from Emily Watson and Hugo Weaving. The organised deportation of thousands of British children to Australia isn't exactly light-hearted, bank holiday weekend fodder but then I rarely go for light-hearted films anyway. I was expecting the ending, at least, was going to be fairly uplifting but then, as Watson's character Margaret Humphreys (the Nottingham social worker who discovered the deportations in the 1980s and brought them to public attention) puts it in the film, "there is never going to be this one cathartic moment, after which everything will be OK."

The Meta Remains the Same

I've written before about my fondness for Scream, which was my favourite film for a number of years. Its sequel, Scream 2, was OK, and the Kevin Williamson-less Scream 3 was pretty dire. I've therefore been rather apprehensive about the release of Scream 4; after all, the film barely warranted a sequel, let alone a fourth part. However, I read that director Wes Craven only agreed to return if there was a decent script so I thought there was some hope, especially with the three main actors from the original trilogy -- Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox-Arquette and David Arquette -- reprising their roles of victim-in-chief, nosy reporter and bumbling police chief, respectively. I don't intend to reveal the ending in this post but as ever, some spoilers may follow.

I'll start by saying that I enjoyed Scream 4. It was the first film in the series that I watched in a cinema -- not least because I wasn't old enough to see the others (which were all rated 18) when they released. That Scream 4 is gorier than the others and is only rated 15 in the UK says a lot about how film classification has changed during the 11 years since Scream 3 came out. I was a little nervous about watching the film in public as I didn't really want to embarrass myself by shrieking or otherwise being a wuss. I needn't have worried; partly because I'm less wussy than I was in the 1990s and partly because watching the first three Scream films gives you a lot of clues as to when you need to brace yourself for impending fright.

The film is set ten years after Scream 3 and Sidney Prescott (Campbell) has returned to her hometown of Woodsboro to promote her new book about how she survived and came to terms with having been nearly murdered on multiple occasions. She is staying with her cousin Jill (Emma Roberts) and her aunt Kate (Mary McDonnell) and of course, pretty much as soon as she returns, a new wave of anonymous phone calls from movie-loving, ghostface killers, followed by brutal stabbings, begins. Dewey Riley (Arquette) is now Woodsboro sheriff and is married to Gale Weathers (Cox), who is becoming bored with small-time life, having hung up her reporter's notebook and having run out of inspiration for any more books.

As ever, there are plenty of potential suspects ("everyone's a suspect," as Randy put it in the original Scream). There's the deputy sheriff, who has the hots for Dewey and seems to be bitter because Sidney wasn't her buddy at school; there's Jill's Billy Loomis-esque ex-boyfriend Trevor, who sneaks in through open windows, skulks around, and generally acts suspicious; there's Sidney's greedy PR, Rebecca Walters (played by Alison Brie, AKA Trudy in Mad Men); oh, and of course, the new generation of film geeks, Charlie (played by a Culkin) and Robbie, who run the film club ("one rung up from the glee club") and host the Stabathon, an annual movie event/party where they play all the films in the Stab franchise (the first three of these films within films are based on Weathers's books about the events in the first three Scream movies; the latter four are pure fiction). Robbie also walks around with a video headset, live-streaming his life to the internet. Because we've got beyond the point where it is no longer suspicious for a 17-year-old boy to have a cell phone.

But Scream 4 is all about meta. There are plenty of callbacks to the earlier films, especially the first one, but because this new generation of teens have all watched the Stab movies, they know the rules for surviving a horror movie. The characters sometimes point out the similarities -- oh, hey, because this person was murdered at this point, if we do X next, we'll be safe. Other times, these repetitions of dialogue or action are just left for the viewer's enjoyment. And I do think that unless you've seen at least the first Scream (and preferably also the second film), you probably won't be interested in Scream 4. The whole premise of the film is based around in-jokes -- of course, it was years after I watched Scream that I first saw most of the horror movies it was poking fun at and I still loved it, but I do think this sequel, or "reboot" ("Screamake," as one of the characters puts it) is different. It's still fun, it's still clever but it's really not that scary. The killings haven't evolved very much and the teens aren't that interesting.

The middle portion definitely dragged but the opening and ending were great, particularly the opening scene. Two pretty girls (including Aria from Pretty Little Liars; I guess Mr Fitz was grading papers that night) are sitting around watching TV; one of them is complaining about a Facebook stalker and then they get a phone call from Ghostface asking to whom he is speaking. After a little back and forth, they are both murdered. But then we pan out to see that these events are the opening scene of Stab 6, which is being watched by another pair of pretty girls, who complain about ridiculous horror film franchises with pointless, endless sequels and zero originality. Then one girl stabs the other. Oh, but wait, this is the opening of Stab 7, which is being watched by two more pretty girls, who are summarily killed by Ghostface. And yes, they are killed for real in this crazy Woodsboro world -- Ghostface's first victims in Scream 4. As Gale Weathers-Riley puts it, "How meta can you get?" The unmasking of the killer(s) is also nice, with more comparisons made by the Scream 3 characters to the final "bloodbath" in Scream ("if I'm character X from Stab, that makes you character Y").

Without the return of Sidney, Gale and Dewey, Scream 4 would have been pretty crappy. The characters in the opening sequence (both those in the Stab films and in the "real" Woodsboro) talk about the Saw franchise, among others, complaining that you don't get any character development before the torture porn commences. Of course, this is also true for them, but it's also true for the other teenage characters in Scream 4. You don't really get to root for them like you rooted for Sidney and you don't really care when they get bumped off. Apparently, if Scream 4 continues to do well at the box office, there will also be a Scream 5 and Scream 6. Whether they'll be any more creative than the, er, Facebook/Twitter killers of Stab 6 and the time travel of Stab 5 is another matter altogether...

Between the Gares

After all of the building work and all of the fuss, the St Pancras Renaissance hotel has reopened. Well, sort of. Technically, the bar manager said, they aren't open until May 5, but the Booking Office Bar was awfully busy this evening for a place that hasn't officially opened. It was standing room only, in fact, although to be fair, there was a fair bit of standing room. My bus journey into work takes me past the hotel so it was nice to finally have a drink there this evening after tracking its progress for so long.

A Victorian Manhattan and a Cosmopolitan Daisy

The inspiration for the drinks listed on the pretty cocktail menu comes from the 1870s, when the hotel was opened in its original incarnation, and includes "a range of Victorian and contemporary punches" -- my Cosmopolitan Daisy (gin, orange curacao, lemon juice and raspberry syrup) was a little too hot pink to be too Victorian but it was very fruity and pretty potent. The Victorian Manhattan (sweet vermouth, whisky, sugar syrup, angostura,curacao, lemon zest), meanwhile, was darker and less sweet -- much more suitable for William Rackham than for Sugar. At £7 a pop, they're also pretty reasonably priced for this part of NW1. We were also served a small pewter tankard of what I think was salted/flavoured popping corn, which was tasty and toothsome.

The bar itself, which is, of course, in what was once the booking office, is high-ceilinged and airy, with the same red-brick walls you can see on the building's exteriors and a view of trains departing from St Pancras for Paris or, at least, Sheffield. In a part of town where you usually have to choose between grungy pubs and overpriced gastropubs, the BOB is a nice addition. I'll just have to remember to book next time, if I want to enjoy one of the comfy-looking booths.

Strangers on a Train

I first saw the trailer for Source Code at the same time as the one for Limitless and for another high-concept, action/thriller for lads and immediately dismissed it. Jake Gyllenhaal is on a train with Michelle Monaghan but he doesn't know who she is or whom she thinks he is and then the train blows up. Then we see him in the same scenario but with slightly different details. Lots of explosions, lots of confusions and a big kiss between the two leads. I filed the film under "only if I get a free ticket" and moved on but then I found out it was directed by Duncan Jones, who directed Moon, which I loved, and decided it was worth a second chance.

Fortunately, the trailer doesn't give anything much about the way (apart from that Gyllenhaal and Monaghan will, at some point, kiss. The film itself is much better. It starts off the same as the trailer -- Jake awakens and thinks he is a military helicopter captain called Colter Stevens but a woman he discovers is called Christina (Monaghan), sitting opposite, calls him Sean Fentress and indeed, his driving license confirms this; the reflection in the bathroom mirror confirms he doesn't look like Colter Stevens (i.e. Jake Gyllenhaal) either. He wanders around trying to work out what is going on and then eight minutes later the train blows up. I think it's worth going into the film not knowing any more than that but there may be some spoilers in the rest of this post...


When he wakes up, Stevens finds himself in a small, stark compartment with a computer monitor, which begins to carry out memory tests on him. Eventually, a woman in military uniform (Goodwin -- played by Vera Farmiga) comes on screen and tells him that a train blew up earlier that morning on its way to Chicago, killing all the passengers, and that they know that the bomber's next target is much bigger -- all of Chicago. Through some fancy technology that (thankfully, perhaps) isn't really explained, Stevens can be sent into the body and mind of anyone who has only eight minutes to live (or, technically, into the body of someone who is already dead for the last eight minutes of his life). They assigned him to the body of the teacher as their physical and mental resemblance was strongest and he has to find out who the bomber is so they can stop the next super bomb. And they're going to keep sending him back in until he succeeds.

Naturally, Stevens has plenty of questions; for example, the last thing he remembers is being in a helicopter in Afghanistan so what the hell is going on? Goodwin is keen to get a wriggle on, however, as they don't have much time. It takes Stevens quite a few attempts to get the hang of this body-jumping thing. He finds out he'll die after eight minutes even if he gets off the train and that although minor things can change in each rerun, he can't change the past -- the only goal is to alter the future. He can't save the people on the train, for example, because they're already dead, including the lovely Christina, for whom he falls in steady, eight-minute chunks. But how can she be dead when she feels so real? As Bruce Springsteen might say, "We're livin' in the future, but none of this has happened yet."

Further plot developments mean that Stevens might not just have to save the city of Chicago but also himself as he struggles to find out where he goes between the reruns or why no one will give him any information or call his father with whom he had a fight while he was in Afghanistan. Goodwin's boss, who owns Source Code, is even less helpful and warns his underling not to be too lenient with Stevens; they have lives to save. And Stevens realises that dying over and over and over again isn't all that fun; maybe it would be better if he was permanently dead. It reminds me of a ghost story Papa used to read us from what may have been The Young Oxford Book of Ghost Stories (possibly "The Last Bus"), which involved a girl (or some children) who turned out to have died a horrible death some time ago but have to keep on reliving the death over and over again. "I/we have to keep on dying," she explains to the narrator.

In any case, I liked Source Code a lot and although some of the logic and timelines behind what happens might not exactly be flawless, they don't make much less sense to me than most of quantum physics... I was very engaged for the whole film and even felt quite emotionally attached to Stevens' developing relationship with Christina. I was expecting to be made jump by the regular train explosions but it's a much subtler thriller than that, with interesting ideas and definitely a clever scenario for the character to be in -- like in Moon, the protagonist is confined to limited geographical areas and is also emotionally isolated from others. In Source Code, of course, Stevens is all alone while surrounded by several hundred people. Who are already dead. I think I need some more coffee. Or maybe just whatever the guy in Limitless had...