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 — Scream 4 Review

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 curaçao, 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, curaçao, 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 — Source Code Review

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 Dad 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...

A Double-Edged Sword

It was by chance that I got hooked on books about the Sweet Valley twins at the age of eleven. On the way to Scotland on holiday, I signed up to join a kids' book club in a Durham bookshop. A few months later they sent me a copy of a book from the Sweet Valley Kids, one of the spin-off series from the main Sweet Valley High books, in which the perfect, blonde, identical-twin heroines (anti-heroines?) Jessica and Elizabeth are aged seven. This series was far too young for me but I discovered Sweet Valley Twins, in which the girls are twelve, and then later Sweet Valley High.

They were silly and predictable with mediocre writing, and I could get through a book from the Twins series in about an hour and it took me about two hours to read a Sweet Valley High book. Some of my first experiences with the interwebs involved ordering as many of these books as Dad would let me in a single pop from the American Book Center in Amsterdam, circa 1995, and every time Dad went to the States, I would give him a shopping list of the books to buy and I would constantly scour second-hand bookshops looking for rare titles. 

The books are now stowed safely in a trunk in my parents' loft but they'd probably be more upset than me if the books got thrown away; after all, they had invested serious time and money in my collection.

The last book was published about ten years ago but this week, Sweet Valley Confidential has been released — a sequel in which the twins are now 27 (wow, they're finally the same age as me!) and all grown up. 

The reviews haven't exactly been positive; Monica Hesse in the Washington Post's Lifestyle blog describes the new book as, "less like a sequel and more like fan fiction." I can imagine. I've read the first chapter and it really sounds like it's trying too hard to be all contemporary. I should know. When I was 13, for English class we had to put together a creative writing portfolio and my short story component (well, more of a novella in my case) was at least partly inspired by a pair of twins who look identical but act like polar opposites. I got an A+.

Anyway, as Hesse points out, who is the audience of Sweet Valley Confidential? Tweens and teens probably won't want to read about some ancient 27-year-olds and besides, SVC would look embarrassingly tame compared with the likes of Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars. Of course, the former fans on the 1bruce1 community who love to hate the series will probably take a look at the books but no other twenty-somethings will really want to read the new book...will they?

Anyway, I will probably be able to see for myself as my parents are in New York at the moment and they went to see Francine Pascal (the creator of the series) read from the new book (Dad even asked a question, although I hope he said I was a former rather than current fan...), and I imagine they'll be bringing me back a signed copy. But it will have to wait until I've finished a Len Deighton trilogy, the new Jo Nesbo, The King's Speech, All We Wanted Was Everything and A Favourite of the Gods. Maybe longer.

Keira, Peggy and a Pair of Sliders

I'd been wanting to check out Spuntino, Polpo's newest baby sister (and with seats only at the bar and barely any standing room, it's pretty tiny) since Daily Candy wrote about it and as I was heading to the theatre in Panton Street tonight, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. There are no bookings, no phone and no menu (not online, anyway) and even though it was only 6.15 on a Wednesday when I showed up, there was already a queue. It was lucky I arrived early because by the time E arrived, the line was practically out of the door and when we left at 7.23, it was well out of the door. We had to wait about 25 minutes for our chance to perch at the bar but it was worth the wait and the food came quickly.

Unlike Polpo and Polpetto, Spuntino has a strong New York flavour to its Italian small plate dishes. I went for the lardo crostini with caperberries and a ground beef and bone marrow "slider." The sliders are probably the best value food on the menu and they're very tasty too. You get a mini-burger/meatball in a brioche bun with assorted condiments. With a few other plates (or maybe some frites) this dish could satisfy my burger cravings. 

E went for a duck and (something cheesy) salad, which was pretty tiny so she ordered her own slider. Sadly, I had to give the Prosecco a miss but I'll definitely be back to sample the puddings (Nutella pizzetta? Sì, per favore) — and when I have more time. Kudos to the staff, though, who managed to get us seated, watered and fed in time to (just about) make it to the Comedy Theatre.

I saw the 1962 movie version of The Children's Hour earlier this year and this evening, I saw the play, starring Keira Knightley in the Audrey Hepburn role (Karen) and Elisabeth Moss as the Shirley MacLaine character (Martha). Watching the film, you might think of it as a very stagey movie but actually, I think the pacing of the film worked a lot better than in the movie. With lengthy scene changes, the play tended to have very long scenes and Knightley and Moss didn't have a lot to do in the first half, where they were largely out-staged by Bryony Hannah playing the odious Mary. Ellen Burstyn, playing Mary's grandmother, was good fun, although Carol Kane, who played Martha's aunt, was a little over the top even for a luvvie.

The drama really ramped up in the second half and Moss was excellent — everything about her from her voice to her expressions to her body language were completely different to when she is playing Peggy in Mad Men. Keira, meanwhile, was also pretty good, although her accent faltered from time to time (all of the cast seemed to be aiming for non-rhotic accents so I assume the play is set near Boston or New York) and she seemed to be going for the wrong Hepburn — at times, she seemed as though she was parodying Katharine Hepburn. While Audrey played the role of Karen in a very cool, understated way, Keira was loud, angry and aggressive and with that distinctive Katharine Hepburn New England twang. This was a little distracting.

I am, of course, tainted by having seen the movie first because although I really enjoyed the play and felt the acting was good, the structure of the movie felt better suited for telling this rich, interesting story. It was easy for me to fill in the gaps in the play, based on what I knew from the film, but I suspect I would have felt less satisfied with the play if I hadn't seen the film.