Glossybox January 2012 - a Brighter Shade of Pink

My January 2012 Glossybox finally showed up this morning. Technically, it wasn't late as Glossybox warned us before Christmas that they were taking a longer break over Christmas and so we might expect a later-than-usual January box, but I have had one eye on the post tray at work for the past week or so. Before I get into this month's box, you can read my reactions to the December Glossybox here; I have now used all five of the products, including the Bionova eye wrinkle treatment, and I like them all a lot, although I probably won't be repurchasing any of them (I love the nail varnish but it was a nightmare to remove, as glittery polishes often are).

As for January, here is what I thought. This month's boxes were a pretty hot pink colour (also known as Birchbox pink), which I prefer to the usual Glossybox shade of pale pink. Apparently, this is because this month's box is a pink-themed Valentine's Day special (presumably because by the time next month's boxes arrive, V-Day will be over).  The products were wrapped in tissue, sealed with a pink heart sticker and wrapped in grey ribbon--oh and with a piece of pink Glossybox rock. Once again, I received five products and although I liked and will probably use them all, I didn't love any of them.

1. Eyeko Skinny Eyeliner in black (full size). I usually wear midnight blue or charcoal grey eyeliner but it's good to add a black one to my collection. The long handle makes it easy to apply, especially for people like me, whose hands are less than steady. I found the pencil a little harsh on my eyelid but then I'm used to super-smooth liners, like the Big & Bright Eyeliner from Bare Minerals. £9.50

January 2012 Glossybox

2. Clarins Extra-Firming Night Cream (15 ml). I'm very fussy about the facial moisturisers I use during the day (they must contain SPF and I must like the fragrance and texture), I don't have the same issues with night creams. I usually use a cheap Simple cream, topped up with posh hand-me-downs from Maman or samples. This Clarins cream smells a little like sun cream--not enough to bother me--and doesn't feel too heavy for my combination skin. I would definitely take this with me when travelling. £48 for the 50 ml full size.

3. Clarins Extra-Firming Day Cream (15 ml). Like #2 but for daytime use. The fragrance is similar to the night cream and although it absorbs well into my skin, I'm not wild about the texture. I would use this if I was wearing a tinted moisturiser with SPF or if I had run out of my moisturiser of choice (Philosophy's Hope in a Jar SPF 25, sadly not available in the UK) but it's not really my thing. £46.50 for the 50 ml full size.

4. FAB Body Moisturiser (2 oz). FAB stands for First Aid Beauty and I don't know much about the brand, although I have seen it before, either in John Lewis or, perhaps, in a previous beauty box. According to the card that comes with the box, I am supposed to have received FAB's body wash, which would have been much better. For years, I didn't really use body lotions and now, I have a stockpile of them, so another one wasn't really necessary. This feels nice, though, so I will probably start using it now until it runs out. £13 for the 8 oz full size.

Top (L-R): Murad primer, FAB body moisturiser, Clarins day cream, Clarins night cream. Bottom: Eyeko eyeliner.

5. Murad Hybrids Skin Perfecting Primer - dewy finish (5 ml). This might be my favourite product in the box. I haven't worn it on my face for a whole day but I tested it earlier and it blends smoothly into my skin. If it can indeed "ignite a radiant glow" on my face, as promised, while minimising my pores, I will be sold. £29 for the 30 ml full size.

The total value of the products in this Glossybox is about £46 (each Clarins sample is worth about £14). Their value to me will be less than that if I'm only using the products for the sake of it, but this month's box is definitely worth a lot more to me than its £12.95 cost.

Overall rating: 3.5/5. There isn't really much to complain about in this Glossybox as I can and probably will use all of the products. As I mentioned before, though, there wasn't a real stand-out product for me, and it is a slight shame that there were so many moisturising products in the box when my beauty cabinet tends to be best stocked in that area.

Me, Myself & Martha Marcy May Marlene

Sean Durkin's first feature film, Martha Marcy May Marlene, is deeply unsettling, tense and compelling. Lead actress Elizabeth Olsen, in her movie debut, plays Martha (also known as Marcy May and, more rarely, Marlene), a troubled young woman who, at the start of the movie, is seen escaping from a cult and returning to live with her estranged sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and Lucy's husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) at their lavish lake house. We don't yet know why she has decided to leave or why the cult members appear to have let her go, but as Martha spends more time with Lucy and Ted, it soon becomes clear that although she has physically escaped, she is still deeply traumatised by what happened.

The full story of what prompted Martha to join this idealistic but violent and sexist group in the first place remains uncertain--we just know why she was vulnerable (her mother had died, her father had abandoned her and Lucy was at college). But through a series of Martha's flashbacks and dreams, a bigger picture of what happened to Martha develops. The leader of the group, Patrick (John Hawkes), is charismatic and compassionate. He makes the group members feel special and although they tend to share their bodies with all the others, the women are all happiest when they are sharing Patrick's bed. The cult is very anti-materialist and they are trying to be self-sustainable, but this means only eating one meal a day, in the evening, and even then, the women are only allowed to eat once the men have had their fill. Initially, Martha likes life on the farm but the more time she spends there, the more she must contribute: she must help indoctrinate a new recruit into the cult's activities, including a horrific initiation ritual, and, later, she must help the group with their night-time escapades, which become increasingly violent and extreme.

Lucy and Ted want to help but Martha won't let them in. She doesn't tell them about the cult, making up a lie about living with a boyfriend upstate and trying to act normal. But she doesn't really understand how "normal" people behave any more. She asks inappropriate questions (on spotting her sister's wedding ring: "is it true that married people don't fuck?") and she enters Lucy and Ted's bedroom while they are having sex because she is upset. She says things that, as the film progresses, we learn she has been trained to say. "I am a teacher and a leader!" she tells Lucy fiercely at one point. Patrick, it transpires, has drummed this into her head. She hears noises at night and is constantly afraid that the cult will come and "rescue" her and potentially hurt her family. She confuses dreams and reality, calling Lucy "mom" at one point, and "Katie" (one of the cult members) on another occasion.

Martha can't trust her sister enough to let her in but nor does Lucy really understand her sister. On the day she picks up Martha from the bus station, having previously taken a hysterical phone call from Martha, it is obvious that something isn't right but when Ted asks Lucy if her sister is OK, she says that Martha seems fine. Later, Ted and Lucy don't seem to know what to do with her and as her behaviour becomes even more erratic and troubled, instead of getting her to talk to a professional, their solution is much more radical. And if Martha can't depend on her family, on whom can she depend?

Martha Marcy May Marlene is all about the power of identity. Patrick takes Martha's name ("I think you look like a Marcy May") and then her virginity as part of the "cleansing process." He takes her individuality too and her preconceptions. But after she leaves, she struggles to reinvent herself as the girl she used to be and is left pretending to be someone she isn't and someone she doesn't want to be, which makes you wonder whether she is any safer with her sister and Ted than she was with Patrick and co. Elizabeth Olsen is great--all cheekbones and big blank eyes. Ambiguous endings are fairly standard in this kind of film but for this one, it felt appropriate. I was certainly gripped to the bitter, chilling end and it took a good few minutes for my heart rate to slow back down, as I imagined what might have happened next.

"The Motive Is Always Money"

The last three Steven Soderbergh films I saw were Contagion, The Informant! and Ocean's Thirteen. They were both good and they were also very different. In his latest movie, Haywire, he borrows a little from the Ocean franchise (stylistically, at least) and a lot from Joe Wright's Hanna. The result is an action-packed (but not too noisy!), tightly edited thriller that doesn't take itself too seriously but entertains throughout its 90-minute duration.

Gina Carano, a former mixed martial arts fighter turned actress, stars as Mallory, a freelance black ops soldier who discover she is being played by her boss and ex-lover Kenneth (Ewan McGregor). Several other big names prop up the title cards--Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas and the darling of everyone (except the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, it seems), Michael Fassbender. Mallory is sent out on a mission in Barcelona, supposedly to rescue and safely deliver a Chinese prisoner. On her return, Kenneth convinces her to take another job in Dublin--easy work, he says, and all she will need to do is pretend to be the wife of a British spy (Fassbender) at a party, wear a dress and look pretty. But then she finds the body of the Chinese prisoner at the party and in his hand, he is holding one of her brooches, and, smart cookie that Mallory is, she realises she is being set up.

What follows is the fast-paced, city-hopping, parkour-filled journey of Mallory seriously kicking ass as she tries to seek vengeance on and gain her freedom from the guys who have wronged her. The story is told partly through flashbacks, with more details being added to scenes we have already seen when Mallory finds out what really happened. Carano has a few IMDb credits to her name but this appears to be her first big role in a feature-length film and she is good and manages to pull off that tough-but-vulnerable balance. We don't see as much of the other actors but McGregor is convincingly dodgy ("the motive is always money," he says, seeming surprised that anyone could think otherwise), and although Banderas didn't quite bring out his Puss in Boots voice, screentime with him is rarely a bad thing (exception).

Unlike Hanna, with its pumped-up Chemical Brothers score, Haywire is a cooler affair, with the score reminding me a lot of Ocean's Eleven in places (not surprising given that David Holmes worked on both films) and, unusually for this genre of film, quietening down during chase sequences and fights. This is a proper action film with a lot of fights and some great stunts but it's a lot less in-your-face than most other films in the genre. Perhaps Soderbergh is trying to appeal to the teenage-girl market (which could also explain the strong female lead). And if you're a purist when it comes to this genre? Fear not: judging by the trailers, there are plenty more traditional action thrillers on their way.

Who's Afraid of Brooklyn Bridge Park?

Roman Polanski's new film Carnage starts with a fight between two 11-year-old boys, but it is the boys' parents behaviour that becomes increasingly childish as the film progresses. Carnage is a middle-class farce--a comedy of ill manners--adapted for the screen by Polanski with Yasmina Reza, based on the latter's play, and with strong performances from the four lead actors (Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz and John C. Reilly). Apart from a distant shot of then boys' fight in Brooklyn Bridge Park at the beginning and a similar shot at the end, the entire film takes place in the apartment of one set of parents, which makes sense given that the film was adapted by Polanski and Yasmina Reza from Reza's play Le Dieu du Carnage. Carnage is very funny but it's also very uncomfortable to watch in places as relations between the two couples rapidly deteriorate.

As Carnage opens, Penelope Longstreet (Foster) is typing an official document on her computer, aided by her husband Michael (Reilly) and by Nancy (Winslet) and Alan (Waltz) Cowan. The Cowans' son Zachary has, it seems, hit Ethan Longstreet with a stick, knocking out a couple of teeth. The parents think they are doing the right thing by talking things over among themselves rather than, say, issuing lawsuits, but they can't even agree on the right verbs to use in the document ("armed with a stick" vs "carrying a stick" is debated). Still, Penelope seems to think she is doing the Longstreets a favour by being so tolerant and forgiving. The couples don't have much in common. Nancy is an investment banker and her husband works in big pharma and fields a call on his BlackBerry about once every three minutes for the duration; Michael, meanwhile, owns some kind of hardware store and Penelope is an art-loving writer. The Cowans can't wait to leave but every time they try to do so (sometimes making it as far as the hallway), they end up starting--or being drawn into--another "discussion" with the Longstreets.

Tensions rise, apple and pear cobbler is consumed, accusations are made, expensive scotch is drunk and the BlackBerry is broken. And that's before we get to the projectile vomiting! At times, there seem to be temporary peace treaties; other times, the men ally together against the women. In any case, the sense of a proportionate reaction to a small fight between their sons is lost early in the film and the rest is taken up with four conflicting personalities, who can't help but desire to defeat and destroy one another. Carnage is reminiscent of Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf? in this respect.

This film could have been a fairly sharp, funny, sort of interesting perspective on the mores of modern, middle-class American, but the chemistry between the four main cast members really take Carnage up a notch. Waltz, as the big pharma director who has more important things to deal with than worry about whether his son was right to hit another kid (namely a nascent PR crisis), and Foster, who plays the sanctimonious mother who wants to be seen to be easy-going and tolerant but who is actually incredibly martyred and uptight, are the stand-outs. But Winslet, whose character really comes into her own after the scotch has been brought out, is also very funny.

Mama Can't Buy You Love

This week is obviously the week for dominant, controlling mother figures in the movies. On Tuesday, it was Vanessa Redgrave playing the formidable mother of the title character (Ralph Fiennes) in Coriolanus; today, I watched the equally formidable Judi Dench as the mother of J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo Di Caprio) in Clint Eastwood's new film J. Edgar.

I knew very little about Hoover before I saw the film. I knew he had founded the FBI (although not that he ran the bureau and the Bureau of Investigation that preceded it for nearly 50 years) and I remembered a little from Public Enemies but otherwise, I went into J. Edgar with a blank slate. And I don't think I'm much clearer on the real Hoover now, even after a two-hour movie, but that may be due to the controversies that emerged during his later years and after his death. Yes, he may have championed forensic science, fact-based investigations and the concept of a national crime database, but did he also lie, overstep his jurisdiction and rub a number of important people--including various presidents--up the wrong way? Eastwood's film tries to portray both Hoover's achievements and his personal and professional failings but this paints quite a confusing picture.

The movie opens in the early 1960s and Hoover (still played by Di Caprio, heavily swathed in prosthetics) is looking back on his career as he talks separately to two people from the FBI's PR department (actually, one of them may have there for another reason; either I missed that bit or it wasn't clear). First, we see the bright young Hoover being singled out--for his work ethic and his lack of interest in dating or starting a family, as much as for his ideas--by the Attorney General and promoted to the position of director of the then Bureau of Investigation. Through the older Hoover's memories, we see some of his triumphs--heading up the operation to arrest John Dillinger, tracking down the man he believed was responsible for the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh's soon and increasing the power and the remit of the FBI. Of course, we are seeing all of this through Hoover's eyes and, it seems, he may not be the most reliable narrator--we know he likes to be in the spotlight and to take credit for things that may not be entirely his own achievements.

Early in his career, Hoover hires Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), a young, smartly dressed but somewhat under-qualified chap to whom he has taken a shine. This begins a deep but often difficult life-long friendship and, the film, suggests perhaps a closer relationship than that. Trouble is, Hoover grew up in the shadow of his aforementioned controlling mother, with whom he still lived until her death when he was in his forties. The relationship seems Oedipal at times but more than anything, his mother wants him to succeed and to bring glory back to their family name. She wants him to get married because it would look good and when he tries to tell her that he doesn't like dancing--especially not with women--she reminds him what happened to a kid they knew who was "daffy" and who ended up killing himself. After his mother's death, we see Hoover trying on some of her clothes and jewellery but this felt more creepy and Norman Bates-like than a representation of his repressed sexuality. Nonetheless, Tolson is still there with Hoover, right until the end of the movie; he died three years later and the two are buried close together in the Congressional Cemetery.

Di Caprio is excellent in this film and Hammer puts in a decent performance too, even though the prosthetics the older version of his character wears seem less realistic than Di Caprio's and are pretty distracting. I haven't even mentioned Naomi Watts's role as Helen Gandy, who was Hoover's secretary for over 50 years. As usual, Watts was good, though I didn't realise it was her until the end of the film! The structure felt clumsy: we keep jumping back and forth and then back a bit further and then further into the future. I'm also still unsure as to what we are supposed to make of Hoover at the end of the film: that he is a complex character with both good and bad in him? If so, this is fair enough, to some extent, although it would have been nicer for the film to come slightly off the fence, one way or another, and for the direction to be a little clearer.

Caffeine Crisis

I've been pretty tired this week and unfortunately, my sleepiness seems to have coincided with a series of unfortunate coffee events. This photo illustrates what my desk at work looked like this morning. Clockwise from left: my favourite coffee mug from Joe in New York; the plunger from my Bodum French press inserted into the boss's Bodum filtre Belgique coffee mug; someone else's tea mug; my broken French press; the filter part of the boss's Bodum caffeination device; Papa's KeepCup* from the Missing Bean (Oxford's only independent espresso bar).

Because I am lazy, I use my Nespresso machine to get my first caffeine hit before I go to work. If it wouldn't feel too indulgent and if the machine were quieter, I might have bought a Nespresso for work too. Instead, I got one of Bodum's three-cup French presses (their "cups" are tiny because this makes a good mug-full of coffee), which produces pretty good coffee, especially when I'm plying it with a particularly nice blend of ground coffee (I usually buy from the Espresso Room). However, at work we regularly get emails from the facilities department warning us not to let a single coffee ground fall down the sink. As such, I get quite paranoid about emptying the coffee grounds into the dustbin and some mornings, when I haven't yet had enough coffee, I am rather too brutal with my poor little French press.

Earlier this week, I broke another French press, cracking the glass on the bin. As the crack was near the top, I tried making my coffee anyway, putting less water in, but of course, when I poured the coffee, it leaked all over my desk. The following day, I borrowed my boss's Bodum filter. I knew my coffee wasn't ground correctly for this coffee maker but I didn't expect the water to just fall straight through into the cup, taking only a tiny amount of coffee with it. It looked like black tea and tasted awful but I drank it anyway. This morning, I made myself an espresso first thing and then made myself a longer drink (I'd call it a dry cappuccino, although it's what you get if you order a double macchiato in Caffè Nero or similar) in the KeepCup to take with me on the journey into work. This tasted nice but didn't quite provide the second caffeine hit I'm used to.

As you can't replace the glass beaker in the French press model, I will now have to buy another French press. But perhaps I would be better off buying a steel version that I can't break with my super-strong arms. These are, of course, more expensive but given that I've got through two French presses in 18 months (or maybe a year), the unbreakable version might make better sense. And yes, I realise this post could have been tagged #middleclassproblems...

*I've been admiring the KeepCup for a long time. I like the design, they come in lots of different sizes and you can choose your own colour scheme. I haven't bought one yet though because I didn't think I would use it. I mainly drink macchiato in espresso bars but I'm not going to carry around a plastic cup in my bag just in case I decide to buy a coffee. As a commuting tool, however, it might work for me--especially on those occasions when I can't make coffee at work.

The Churl with the Dragon Tattoo

Of course Ralph Fiennes picked Coriolanus for his directorial debut and of course he didn't consider anyone apart from himself for the title role and of course he cast Gerard Butler on account of the latter's "great personal charisma." I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to see the movie but decided it was better to sit through two hours in the big screen at the BFI Southbank than to have to endure three-plus hours in a theatre at some later date. So, what did I think of the film? Well, I didn't hate it and although I found myself almost drifting off during some of the more complicated politics in the middle, I persevered and thought Fiennes did a decent enough job with a crap play. Some spoilers follow.

Fiennes plays Caius Martius Coriolanus, son of the proud feisty Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave), husband of the ethereally beautiful Virgilia (Jessica Chastain), father of a kid who get about two lines of dialogue, and friend of Menenius (Brian Cox). And he will totally have his vengeance on the people of Rome, who turned on him and exiled him soon after his moment of glory.

Fiennes' Rome is contemporary and is supposed to be any-city but it definitely has a very Balkanesque feel to it. As the film opens, the Romans are at war with the Volscians, led by Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler), and Caius Martius proves his prowess on the battlefield, capturing Corioles and earning the name Coriolanus, having added two new scars to the 27 he already has. He is soon elected consul but his political rivals, including Sicinius (James Nesbitt), aren't best pleased and manage to turn the masses (who have never been Coriolanus's biggest fan) against him, forcing him to flee the city. For the first half of the film, we see Fiennes' unflinching, pale blue, Snape eyes staring impassively from his blood-drenched face. During his exile, he grows some hair and a beard and cleans his act up and goes to find Aufidius, begging his old enemy to let him fight with the Volscians against Rome. Aufidius is suspicious at first but eventually agrees to take Coriolanus on as a partner in his attempt to take Rome.

The Romans find out about this development, mainly from the BBC News 24-like news coverage from "Fidelis TV" (presented by Jon Snow!), and send Menenius to try to talk Coriolanus down but to no avail ("this Martius is grown from man to dragon," he says--with a tattoo to match, it seems). Luckily, Mommie Dearest is more persuasive, telling Coriolanus to think of his wife and his soon and the children, goddamnit. And because he clearly has something of an Oedipus complex, he agrees to a peace treaty between the Romans and the Volscians. Aufidius, who has been standing around uncharismatically, has been won over too, "Yeah, OK. I was totes in tears too," he says. But before the ink on the peace treaty is even dry, Aufidius starts to think that he has been gazumped by his rival and sets his goons loose on our anti-hero (spoiler: he has more than 29 scars by the end of the film). "Dude, I thought you agreed with my momma," Coriolanus complains. "No, dude, you tricked me," says Aufidius. "It's all those long words you keep using. And that crazy old-fashioned slang. I can't keep up, man."

The first half of the movie is very violent but as with many Shakespeare plays, the final act is very talky and drags a bit. Butler's performance was mediocre and Chastain didn't have very much to do other than stand around looking pensive and trying to find the way of Grace; Redgrave, however, was excellent and Fiennes was convincing as the unlikable, arrogant Coriolanus. The screenplay contained only dialogue from the original play and this worked well, in general, other than seeming to confuse Gerard Butler at times. Fidelis TV, which pops up to update us throughout the film, was a clever idea but I found it a bit distracting--a little like a cross between Private Eye's Nursery Times and Brass Eye; besides, Baz Luhrmann used a TV newsreader to play the prologue in his Romeo + Juliet. Coriolanus is not a cheerful film and it's not really my kind of film, but if you like explosions and/or Ralph Fiennes, you will probably love it.

Dance Anthems Is Dead, Long Live Dance Anthems!

I've written before about my former love of dance anthems (pronounced dance anfems, of course) but a random conversation in the office earlier this week about late nineties and early noughties dance music sent me back to my dance/trance playlist on iTunes. I used to own hundreds of these songs, most of them bought as CD singles, but on reaching university and embarrassed by my teenage taste, I deleted most of them from my computer and chucked the CDs. Since then, I've been slowly re-acquiring some of my old favourites.

For years I listened religiously to Dave Pearce's Dance Anthems on Radio 1 on Sunday nights, which was great because they tended to play a lot of the same songs week after week and there wasn't too much D&B, which I disliked even then. Yes, you had to put up with all the listeners who had been "having a wicked weekend, largin' it in Basingstoke" calling in with their requests for shout-outs for their Basingstoke buddies. I probably tuned in to the show a few times while I was at university and had assumed it was still on in the same slot but alas! It turns out that the programme was shunted onto Radio 6, to which I have never knowingly listened, and then finished altogether last spring. Alas!

I can't even listen again to the last show but they did include the playlist and I'm pleased to note that it seems hardly to have changed since I last tuned in: a nice little opener from Armand van Helden (which, I seem to remember, often opened the show), and then Liquid, Delerium, William Orbit, Matt Darey, Rui Da Silva, Paul van Dyk, Energy 52, Underworld, Push, Mauro Picotto and Rank 1, they're all there. And with the exception of the latter, which I have just re-acquired, every single one of the songs I've just listed is still on my computer (or on my computer again), proving my point about the repetition.

Anyway, in the name of nostalgia, I've put together a list of my top five dance anthems (this is all relative, of course; only the top two get four-star ratings in iTunes):

1. Silence (radio edit) -- Delerium ft Sarah McLachlan
2. Insomnia -- Faithless
3. Liberation (For an Angel) -- Matt Darey
4. Angel -- Ralph Fridge
5. 9 pm (Till I Come) -- ATB

Forgotten gem: I had completely forgotten about the Rank 1 song, Airwave (surprisingly, given that the song is also extensively sampled in another trance tune I did still have called True Love Never Dies), but after listening again to the radio edit, I conceded that either this or Café del Mar by Energy 52 would be my first reserve.

"What Is Right Can Take on Multiple Interpretations"

When I saw the trailer for J.C. Chandor's film Margin Call a few weeks ago, my first reaction was, not another movie about the evils of capitalism. To be fair, the two most recent such films were both documentaries and one by Michael Moore, so I decided to give Margin Call a shot, not least because with Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany and Jeremy Irons, it seemed to have a fairly solid cast.

The movie centres around a crucial 24-hour period in the life of a Lehman Brothers-like investment bank. It's Manhattan in 2008 and the shit is about to hit the fan, or, as CEO John Tuld (Irons) more delicately puts it, "the music is about to stop." At first though, we just see some suited ladies coming in to the bank, taking aside various employees to talk to them. Initially, I thought they might be the feds but it turns out they are consultants brought in to fire a lot of employees, including Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), who is somewhat concerned about some important data he has been working on. He is ushered from the building by security but before he leaves, he manages to hand over a data stick to one of his analysts, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), telling him to "be careful." Sullivan looks at some of the models, staying late to finish off what Dale started, and the news isn't good: the company is holding some very dodgy positions in sub-prime and other crappy mortgages.

He tells his buddy Seth (Penn Badgley) and Dale's boss Will Emerson (Bettany), and slowly the message of "we're screwed" passes up through trading director Sam Rogers (Spacey) and two risk senior partners (Simon Baker and Demi Moore) to Tuld himself, as they try to decide what to do. The only real option, though, is to sell as much of their dodgy holdings as possible the following morning before their clients and the other banks realise something is up, a move that will probably kill the traders' careers because the people they screw over will never buy from them again and will, of course, tell all their friends.

Even though you know what's coming, the film is suspenseful and engaging, partly because we grow to care about or at least sympathise with some of the characters, although others are more stereotypical caricatures. Sullivan is a handsome and well-intentioned if sometimes naive former MIT propulsion expert ("so you are a rocket scientist"). Number crunching is the same wherever you do it so you might as well try to make some more money, he says. He's a nice, hard-working guy, though. Spacey's character Rogers is also big on doing the right thing, although clearly his job is his whole life; as the film closes, we see him trying to bury his just-deceased, much-loved dog in the garden of his estranged ex-wife. His world has just collapsed and he doesn't even have anyone to tell. Emerson is more ambiguous: he seems quite cold and ruthless throughout, not really caring that Dale and the others had to lose their jobs as long as his own was safe, and talking about spending a large chunk of money on booze, drugs and strippers and billing it all to clients. But when asked if he can be relied on to lead the troops in selling the bad holdings if Rogers chickens out, he just says that he's sure Rogers will do the right thing. "What is right can take on multiple interpretations," warns Jared Cohen (Baker), one of the characters on the greedier, self-aggrandising side of the spectrum.

Then there is Seth, who is a 23-year-old analyst, who is obsessed with money (he is played by Penn Badgley, who also plays Dan Humphrey in Gossip Girl). He is the kind of guy who asks his boss--and his boss's boss--what their salaries are and diverts a 1am search for his former boss to a strip bar. He's the kind of guy who watched Wall Street on DVD for the first time while at university in the mid-noughties and decided that Gordon Gecko was exactly the person he wanted to be when he grew up (I should know; there were plenty of guys like that at St Jocks'). Needless to say, when he realises he's probably going to get fired--despite his solid performance for the company and all his help during the 24 hours from hell--and goes to the bathroom to cry, we don't feel very sorry for him. "This is all I've ever wanted to do," he tells an unsympathetic Cohen.

Overall, then, there are good and bad eggs in this company, just like in every other company. Margin Call manages to convey this effectively without too many detours into the characters' personal lives. A scene involving Sullivan and an ex-girlfriend (played by Meryl Streep's daughter) was apparently cut from the final version, perhaps to keep this tight focus. With good performances from Spacey and Irons and, to a lesser extent, Bettany, the film is definitely worth checking out--if you haven't already seen enough movies about the banking crisis, of course.

Lady Day

I went to see The Iron Lady yesterday, even though I suspected I might not like it, which is unusual for me. The reviews have been decidedly middling but I figured that there is a good chance Meryl Streep will win the best actress Oscar for her performance as Margaret Thatcher, so it was worth seeing even just on that basis. As it turned out, the reviews were mostly right: Streep is very convincing as the Iron Lady and Jim Broadbent is also great and very funny as Denis Thatcher, but Phyllida Lloyd's movie felt like it was somehow missing the point, or, at least, missing the interesting parts of Thatcher's life.

Part of the problem is the framing device: an ageing, present-day Thatcher is suffering from some form of senile dementia and having hallucinations of her long-dead husband. She is supposed to be finally sorting through and getting rid of her husband's belongings and while she does so, she looks back on her life and career. This framing device would be fine if it simply opened and closed the film but it felt like almost half of the movie featured the present-day Thatcher, rather than focusing on her rise to power and her successes and failures as Prime Minister. We did get to see some of the latter but it was mainly portrayed through a series of brief snapshots: "oh, I want to be an MP"; "oh, now I've got kids"; "oh, I think I'll run for leader of the Tory party"; "oh, let's take back the Faulklands." As such, the portrait painted was highly superficial and almost seemed to trivialise many of the events. The director may have said that the film is really about ageing but if you wanted to make a film on that subject, surely you didn't need to choose Margaret Thatcher as the central character.

I am, technically, a child of the 1980s but I'm too young to remember most of it and my knowledge of British politics after the 17th century is shockingly bad. The Iron Lady is definitely not the film to see if you want to know more about Britain in the '80s. My other problem is that I didn't recognise most of the politicians and so unless they were mentioned by name, I had no idea who they were, although clearly they were supposed to be recognisable. As I say, there were some brilliant performances in The Iron Lady but overall, the movie was poorly structured and too shallow for my taste.

On the subject of ladies, however, my parents were in town and we managed to get last-minute tickets to see The Ladykillers in the West End. I haven't seen either versions of the movie and wasn't sure quite what to expect but it was a great production. Peter Capaldi was excellent as Professor Marcus, and the other actors were good fun too, including James Fleet (trivia: the actor who played the father of his character in The Vicar of Dibley, Gary Waldhorn, was sitting behind us in the audience). The set design was also fantastic, consisting mainly of the interior of a crooked, spiral-staircase-filled house, which rotated to reveal the front of the house, next to King's Cross Station (cleverly, for a scene involving a robbery, small, remote-control toy cars and trains were driven on tiny tracks up the side of the house, getting around the problem of portraying an action-packed car chase). The Ladykillers was definitely much more fun than The Iron Lady...

The Mission Remains the Same

I watched the first of the revamped Mission: Impossible movies on the back of a school bus somewhere in Benelux. The small screen didn't really do it justice (I mean, Tom Cruise looks small enough on an IMAX screen) but it was entertaining enough--more so to my 14-year-old self than episodes of Yes, Minister, sanctioned by my history teacher, anyway. I never bothered to check out M:I-2 or M:I-3 (and it doesn't seem like I missed much) but as I had finally caught up with my cinema to-watch list, I decided to give the fourth film, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol a shot, despite there being too much punctuation in its title.

IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has been set yet another impossible mission: proving his innocence in the face of damaging allegations made by a range of women from hotel maids to journalists. Oh, wait, that was the other IMF. What really happens is that he busts out of a Russian prison, with the help of his crack team of feisty Jane (Paula Patton) and geeky Benji (Simon Pegg). In a recent botched mission, the IMF lost some valuable nuclear launch codes and must now recover them from a mad Scandi physicist (Michael Nyqvist, not looking much like Mikael Blomqvist) before he brings "peace" to the world through the medium of nuclear war. To make things more challenging, the IMF has been implicated in an explosion at the Kremlin, triggering Ghost Protocol, which disavows the team and means they have no help and no back-up and are going to have to work jolly hard if they are going to save the world and, more importantly, their reputation. Along the way, they acquire the services of government analyst William Brandt (Jeremy Renner), who makes even n00b Benji look like an experienced field agent.

If you like big explosions, cool gadgets and impressive stunts (Cruise reportedly did his own stunt work on the scene where Hunt scales the tallest building in Dubai using only a pair of 50% functional Spidey gloves), you won't be disappointed with M:I - GP. There are no great surprises and not much great acting but the plot certainly ticks along and Pegg definitely gives the stand-out performance, although he also gets the best lines. As for Cruise, he mainly runs around looking all serious, although I find it hard to take his running style seriously. Overall, M:I - GP is a solid, if not particularly special or otherwise outstanding, action thriller.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Take 3

Much as I enjoyed reading Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and, to a lesser extent, its two sequels, I was wondering how much more time I was willing to invest in the franchise. I watched all three of the Swedish movie adaptations, the first of which was very good and the last two were simply good. This adds up to nearly 2,000 pages and over seven hours of screen time. The Swedish movies were, I thought, well-edited, cutting out many of the unnecessary and/or over-complicated sub-plots and, crucially, the excruciatingly detailed background information about the ins and outs of the Swedish legal and political systems, and making the movies watchable and edgy, if sometimes rather ordinary, thrillers.

But then along came David Fincher, who decided the world needed an English-language version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I like many of Fincher's other films, especially Zodiac and The Social Network, and I thought that if anyone could produce a creative adaptation of the book with an interesting new angle or hook, it would be him. Actually, though, Fincher's TGWTDT is a lot like Niels Arden Oplev's. It's still set in Sweden, the characters all speak with vague Scandinavian accents, and Stockholm is still very dark, cold, rainy, snowy and monochrome. Even Noomi Rapace reportedly turned down the opportunity to reprise her character Lisbeth Salander in the Fincher version because she'd already been playing Lisbeth for three years and couldn't face acting out the same old stories.

This isn't to say that I didn't enjoy the new film. As with its predecessors, it was long (2h40) but didn't drag and didn't get bogged down in the heavy research component of Lisbeth and journalist Mikael Blomqvist's investigation. Blomkvist, played here by Daniel Craig, who deigned to gain a little weight to remind viewers that Blomkvist ain't no Bond (not that this stopped him sporting some extremely brief briefs in several scenes). He still wasn't slubby enough for Blomvist and I would probably have preferred to see Michael Nyqvist reprising his role. Rooney Mara was excellent as Lisbeth, a brilliant but troubled young hacker with a penchant for piercings. Mara brings a hint of frailty to the role, whereas Rapace's portrayal was definitely harder. In this film, the character of Lisbeth remains a cipher, to a large extent (if Fincher decides to remake the second and third films, her character and her background will become more central to the plot). She and Blomkvist don't meet until about halfway through and even then, when they try to find out what happened to the niece of a wealthy industrialist who disappeared 40 years earlier, they tend to work separately, taking a very occasional break together in his bed.

TGWTDT 2.0 is not a bad movie, then; I enjoyed it a lot. It's just not especially necessary and I wouldn't recommend that anyone who has seen the Swedish movies goes out of their way to see the new film. But if you are new to Lisbeth Salander (or have just read the books), Fincher's new adaptation is a dark, well-paced, action-packed thriller and is definitely worth a watch. Trent Reznor's score fitted especially well with the mood of the film, the opening credits looking and sounding a lot like a Nine Inch Nails music video--unsurprising given that Reznor founded the band and Fincher directed one of their videos.

A Year in Leaps

I have now officially given up on the idea of compiling a list of my favourite five songs of the year. In 2011, I added about 50 new songs to iTunes, of which only ten were released in 2011. For what it's worth, my favourite was, by a long shot, This Ain't No Hymn by Saint Saviour, which I've played over 60 times since October.

Far more worthwhile is for me to rank my top five leaps of the year. 2011 has been a great year for leaping and although I managed to whittle down my favourite leap photos down to a list of 12 fairly easily, the final cull was harder. Some of the leaps that didn't make the top five included: my current blog header, taken on Christmas Eve in Cannes; my leap-in-a-birdcage in London (best use of a supposed art installation); and my reconstruction of the original leap outside the Louvre in Paris. Now, here are the top five:

1. Highest leap -- Atlas Mountains, Morocco. This was definitely my highest leap--in terms of altitude, anyway. Our tour guide was highly amused by the fact that I would insist of jumping for the camera at every available opportunity, despite having a horrible cold.

2. Highest leap II -- New York City, USA. This photo, taken on the High Line in June, made good use of one of the benches to give me some extra height. Bonus points for retaining some of my modesty.

3. Earliest leap -- Nowheresville, UK. Not bad for six-thirty in the morning! This was taken at the very end of my college's May Ball in June. St Jocks' famous bridge was all decked out in college colours so it was too cool a photo opportunity to pass up.

4. Coldest leap -- Cannes, France. Cannes was actually very sunny and fairly warm this Christmas. However, this leap was taken shortly after a very cold and extremely brief swim in the Med, so it was lucky we got the photo in one take.

5. Narrowest leap -- Stockholm, Sweden. Mårten Trotzigs Gränd, the narrowest alley in Stockholm, provided the setting for this leap. It was quite hard to jump safely (hence the spirit fingers) but I liked the way the perspective came out.

I considered taking a leaping photo every day in this leap year but leaps are quite hard to capture well using a self-timer so I decided to can that idea but I may still highlight one leap per month. In the meantime, happy leap year, everyone!