Sam Downing

Sigh of relief, everyone: Monsters University is pretty terrific.

This was not a sure thing. Pixar can do good sequel: Toy Story 2 is one of the best sequels ever. And Toy Story 3 is even better than that. On the other hand: Cars 2.

Monsters University does not, luckily, reek of a sequel churned out to sell toys. It’s a worthy successor to Monsters, Inc. (which for a long time was probably my favourite Pixar film. Or at least up there at the top of the list. It’s almost impossible to choose just one favourite Pixar film). It’s entertaining. It’s smart. It’s funny – sometimes very funny.

A+ grade to whoever decided to make the sequel to Monsters, Inc. a prequel, because there’s really nowhere to go from Inc.‘s lovely final shot. University takes us back to Mike Wazowski’s (voiced by Billy Crystal – who didn’t annoy me even once, which says a lot about how good this film is) and Sulley’s (John Goodman) college days. The former is booksmart but lacks natural talent as a scarer; the latter is the exact opposite. They clash. They start to grudgingly respect one another’s talents. Eventually, they become best friends. Their relationship flows perfectly into – and from – Monsters, Inc.

This is unashamedly a “college movie”. The plot riffs on every Greek system cliche, packing in everything outsiders think of when we picture American colleges: parties, studies, fraternities, sororities, beautiful Ivy League-style campuses, no anxieties about how all this is being paid for. There’s a point near the end when it seems Monsters U will have a standard (and disappointing) college movie ending – the nerd underdogs triumphing over the frat boys. A surprise third act rescues the climax, moves it into unexpected, more interesting territory.

(Slight spoilers: It’s interesting that, though the film appears initially to fawn over the idea of college/university education, it turns out Mike and Sulley are college dropouts. Their success is because of their own hard work and skill at spotting opportunities, not because they have degrees. I don’t remember if that was addressed in the first movie or not, but there’s a nice parallel with the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world.)

See Monsters University on the big screen. It’s stunning. The things they’re doing with computer-generated animation these days are incredible. Every monster is a lush, furry, unique beast, bursting with energy and flexibility. They look like big walking Muppets. Preceding the feature is the short film The Blue Umbrella, whose charm is almost overwhelmed by its dazzle. Its rain-slicked city setting looks like a photograph brought to life.

Monsters University gives me faith that Pixar’s next sequel Finding Dory will be good. But… not as good as its predecessor. Pixar’s films have long been revered because they’re fresh, they’re inventive, they’re awesome – in the literal sense of that word. Very little about Monsters U feels awe-inspiring. Pixar has its formula – a very good formula – but doesn’t deviate from it. (This is why Cars has always bored me, I think – its story hits exactly the beats you expect it to hit, and nothing more.) University is enjoyable, polished, but it’s lacking the darker, rich adult subtext Pixar built its reputation on. Maybe that era is behind them now.

You’d write off The Bling Ring off as far-fetched B.S. if it wasn’t based on a true story. It’s a faithful adaptation – kind of worryingly faithful – of The Suspect Wore Louboutins, Nancy Jo Sales’ Vanity Fair feature that inspired it. The events the film depicts did happen, in actual real life: A team of high-school-age young women (and one young man) really did break in to Hollywood stars’ houses and steal millions of dollars worth of stuff. Paris Hilton really is dumb enough to leave her house keys under her doormat. And there really are people who do crazy things to copy celebrity lifestyles. You don’t even need to go to L.A. to find them.

Like the celebrity obsession it’s focused on, Bling Ring is scandalously enjoyable even though you know you should probably pretend you’re above it. It’s too tawdry, too proudly vapid not to like. When smiling sociopath ringleader Rebecca (Katie Chang) convinces her friend Marc (Israel Broussard) to break in to celebrities’ houses, it really does seem like a fun, comically easy thing to do – and not even all that criminal. We already feel entitled to know everything about famous people’s lives. The burglar bunch just takes that to the next logical step: They feel entitled to enter celebrities’ houses, lounge around on their furniture, pinch their things.

Which makes these characters – Rebecca and Marc are joined on their stealing spree by friends Nicki (Emma Watson), Nicki’s adopted sister Sam (Taissa Farmiga), and beachy idiot Chloe (Clair Julien) – assholes. They’re unquestionably assholes. Stealing is an asshole move. But their too-privileged victims, especially Hilton, have such vast quantities of stuff they can’t possibly miss all of it*. No wonder the bling ring doesn’t seem to think they’re doing anything immoral. Ultimately, you wonder if they are.

(*Hilton apparently didn’t notice anything had been stolen until hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of jewellery was taken from her. She allowed Coppola to shoot in her house and appears briefly in the movie, so apparently she’s not so dumb she doesn’t get the joke.)

Director Sophia Coppola seems ambivalent about it too. Bling Ring only has a plastic-picnic-knife-edge of satire. Coppola isn’t celebrating these thefts, but she’s not savagely condemning them, either. She’s detached from her characters*, occasionally sympathetic to them – a scene at the end has Marc marched into prison, wearing bright orange overalls and surrounded by hard-looking criminals, and it feels unfair. Yet it’s spliced with Rebecca excitedly asking police whether stealing from Lindsay Lohan has made LiLo notice her, and Nicki twisting her arrest and trial into some positive, The Secret-style affirmation of her actions. Assholes.

(*Bling Ring has that arm’s length, dreamy style of many of Coppola’s previous films. It’s best put to use in the wide-shot, single-take, beautiful and haunting scene where Rebecca and Marc break into Audrina Patridge’s house.)

Caveat: I think Watson is smart and talented and sooooo pretty, so I’m biased. But she steals (no pun intended, I swear) this movie. Her imitation of a sharply vacuous SoCal teen is perfect – whether it’s what actual SoCal teens are like is irrelevant, because Watson sounds how everyone outside that world believes they’re like. Her character is beautiful but graceless, and all the more repulsively compelling once you discover the privileged, zero-self-awareness things Nicki says are mostly direct quotes from the real-life socialite she’s based on.

(Interestingly, that real-life socialite, Alexis Neiers, was the subject of an E! reality show which wound up documenting her trial. It’s probably a good thing Bling Ring omitted that: The meta-ness of putting a character inside that reality TV, manufactured fame bubble of The Hills would have twisted the film back around on itself too far.)

I won’t be shocked if The Bling Ring inspires a rash of copycat thefts from viewers who see the glamour but miss the point. Hopefully Hollywood celebrities have learned to lock their damn doors now.

Dan Brown’s latest, Inferno, is juuuuust maaaaaddening.

Not because of the renowned Dan Brown-ness of it all. This is Brown’s fourth book starring fusty art historian Robert Langdon, and his formula is well-established by now: Historical secret, treasure hunt, global conspiracy, beautiful sidekick, mysterious baddies, famous landmarks, all wrapped up in some of the clunkiest writing that ever thunked its way through your eyeballs into your brain.

Oh god is it clunky. Reading Brown is like walking up wooden stairs wearing clogs two sizes too big. A hallmark of Dan Brown’s sentences is needless detail and shoehorned exposition and flat dialogue and weirdly jarring repetition of words and phrases within Dan Brown’s sentences. But… that’s the fun of reading Dan Brown, I guess. It’s not so-bad-it’s-good, it’s not a guilty pleasure, but the wooden hamminess is part of the game.

(Critics usually make fun of Brown’s prose, but what I think is more amusing – to the point that it’s endearing, almost refreshing – is his deep, sheer, unfathomable uncoolness. Dan Brown, bless him, is incredibly uncool. He is clearly passionate about historical trivia, but passion is the opposite of cool. His hero Robert Langdon is also incredibly uncool – he wears uncool loafers and uncool tweed jackets and a Mickey Mouse watch that manages to be the most uncool thing you ever heard of no matter how often Brown reminds us it’s a vintage collector’s timepiece blah blah blah. Langdon is like Brown boiled off the uncoolest parts of your dad and your uncles and poured them into a standalone nerd who’s so uncool he sucks all the cool out of his cool, Indiana Jones-ish adventures.

Nothing about these books is cool, not even ironically. It’s hard to say which bit of the book is most uncool, but it’s possibly Langdon’s flashbacks to lectures he’s given on Dante – way to jam in the subtle exposition, Brown! – in which his audience is rapt, laughing at uncool jokes and ooh-ing ant ooh-ing at uncool information.)

Here for your reading/LOL-ing pleasure is one example of Brown’s prose (which also includes bonus weird homoeroticism – like seriously I swear half this book is just Langdon remarking on classic statues’ penises for no reason):

(“Penile grip”? I have this long-running theory that Robert Langdon is actually super gay. Or at least super asexual. There are ceiling fans with more sex appeal than this guy.)

None of that stuff is what makes Inferno maddening. It’s maddening because the plot is a cheat. Brown is fond of reversals of character, where a goodie turns out to be a baddie and vice versa – think back to Teabing and Fache in Da Vinci Code – and that’s fine. Twists, and trying to spot the twists, are standard adventure-thriller elements. But the twist in Inferno is so convoluted, so artificial, so big-twist-for-the-sake-of-big-twist, that it’s just stupid. It’s really, really, italics-can’t-emphasise-enough-how-really-stupid-it-is stupid.

I’m going to spoil the plot of Inferno in an attempt to describe how stupid it is, so stop now if you intend on reading it fresh. (Even though I doubt it’s possible to give away the depth of the stupidity in a single blog post. Like the Matrix, you have to see it for yourself.)

So: Inferno begins with Langdon waking up in hospital, in Florence, with no idea how he got there – he has amnesia after a punk assassin attempted to kill him. With help from a beautiful doctor called Sienna, Langdon has to flee the assassin as well as a paramilitary team, who both work for a mysterious guy called “the provost,” the head of a shadowy organisation that’s helping a mad scientist billionaire unleash a devastating plague.

Got that? OK.

All Langdon remembers from before he got amnesia is that he was helping a beautiful older woman – who’s now been kidnapped and drugged by the provost – find the plague by following a series of clues based on Inferno, the first part of Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century epic poem The Divine Comedy, which the aforementioned mad scientist billionaire was obsessed with before he committed suicide. Cue treasure hunt.

Except! Nothing is as it seems! Sienna is actually the mad scientist’s lover and right-hand lady! The paramilitary team is actually working for the beautiful older woman, who’s the head of WHO! She wasn’t kidnapped and drugged – she just took too much anti-jetlag medication! (Of course!) The provost never tried to kill Langdon – he just tricked him into thinking the punk assassin tried to kill him, to spur Langdon into decrypting the Dante clues and finding the plague… instead of just asking him? And Sienna was recruited by the provost for all this… because reasons?

God, I don’t know. I can’t even describe it in a way that captures the epic ridiculousness of it. It literally makes no sense if you think about it even for a moment. It’s a textbook “why would anyone bother doing this then this then this then this when they could just do this?” dunderhead twist. You know that saying “audiences will believe the impossible but not the improbable”? It was invented to describe Inferno and how goddamn stupid it is: I believe a mad scientist would concoct a whole plot around Dante’s poem. I don’t believe all the other contrived B.S. that goes along with it.

I’m not trying to jump on the Brown-bashing bandwagon. Inferno‘s other flaws are forgiveable: The classical Dante work it’s based on mostly feels like window dressing on Brown’s work, and not an integral part of the plot like Leonardo was in Da Vinci Code. Big Issues like overpopulation and transhumanism are flatly discussed by flat characters. Those missteps don’t make the book any less readable – and in spite of his aforementioned clunk, Brown is pretty good at doing readable. He knows how to make a cliffhanger that will make you go, “Oh man this is so silly but I must keep reading now and for several more hours.”

(Inferno‘s best cliffhanger: “Sienna went pale. ‘Don’t tell me we’re in the wrong museum.’ ‘Sienna,’ Langdon whispered, feeling ill. ‘We’re in the wrong country.’” YEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHH.)

But a dumb thriller has to be the right kind of dumb. Inferno almost is. But that one stupid twist makes it stumble, and it never rights itself.

Gone Girl is one of those everyone-is-talking-about-this-so-I-guess-I’ll-check-it-out-too books. Happily, it’s not one of those crazy-popular books you read with one hand turning the pages and the other batting away the unholy stench of shit reeking from the pages. This is a bestselling thriller that is actually pretty thrilling! Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its problems.

Spoilers (of the utterly-plot-ruining-so-watch-out variety) follow.

This much you know from the blurb on the back of the book: Golden boy Nick Dunne meets golden girl Amy Elliott. They hit it off. They wed. Then everyone goes sour: Nick loses his sweet job as an entertainment writer for an Entertainment Weekly-type magazine*, Amy’s trust fund is wiped out by her flaky parents’ financial mismanagement, the two move back to Nick’s decaying-middle-American-shithole hometown, their marriage starts to break down. On their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy disappears from their home. The crime scene suggests a violent struggle. The police immediately suspect Nick – the husband is always guilty, right? – except we know he didn’t do it. So what has happened to Amy?

(*Author Gillian Flynn was also formerly an entertainment writer for Entertainment Weekly. Which is probably just a crazy coincidence.)

Last chance to back out if you don’t want any spoilers. And this really is one of those stories you should experience spoiler free.

Halfway through her novel, Flynn completely upends it. Amy hasn’t been killed by some violent, mysterious man. She’s staged her disappearance as an Old Testament God-level revenge against Nick for cheating on her with a younger women. On the one hand, it’s fiendishly clever: Gone Girl immediately becomes something much more compelling, much fresher than the “missing woman” story we’ve been led to believe it is.

On the other hand… something about the twist flattens the story into two dimensions, and it’s less compelling. Suddenly, Nick’s increasingly misogynist feelings towards Amy (and our increasingly complicated feelings towards him) are brushed aside – hey, the reason he hates his wife is because she really is an actual literal psychopath. Hey, of course Nick is the good guy again, because even though he cheated on Amy, she really is lying, manipulative, hate-filled* and through-and-through horrible. Which is kind of a shame, because in its first half the book frequently cuts to the heart of what it is to be in a relationship with devastating clarity, the kind of clarity usually reserved for those times when you wake up at 3 a.m. and remember your death is coldly inevitable, only to turn Nick and Amy’s marriage into more conventional cat-and-mouse spy-versus-spy stuff.

(*Seriously, there is a lot of woman-on-woman use of the C-word in here.)

That said, Flynn mostly succeeds in keeping the momentum up in the second half of the book, as Nick starts plotting to get Amy back and Amy starts plotting to outmanoeuvre Nick’s plots and Nick starts plotting to outmanoeuvre Amy’s plots to outmanoeuvre Nick’s plots… and so on and so on. It whips up and up and around itself until it all finally collapses in the last few ludicrous pages, as the plot fizzles out with a whimper – Amy (who’s also an actual literal murderer by this point in addition to being an actual literal psychopath) manipulates Nick into taking her back and falls pregnant with his artificially inseminated kid, and Nick accepts because he relishes her mindgames and wants to protect his unborn kid… or something.

I bet most people will finish Gone Girl with a “Seriously – WTF was that dumb ending” expression. But it’s a pretty entertaining ride getting to said dumb ending. Any writer who can get you to keep turning the page even as your scoffing eyebrow creeps ever higher up your forehead has pulled off a pretty good trick.

(Spoilers follow.)

Oh boy this is a stupid book.

I honestly don’t mean “stupid” as an entirely bad thing – I like plenty of things which are “stupid”, and there’s nothing guilty or ironic about my affection for them.  I mean “stupid” as in, Clockwork Princess is unashamedly romantic and melodramatic and hand-wringing and bosom-heaving. And if that’s what you’re reading this series for: fine. You’ll love this final instalment. Everyone’s paired off neatly, more or less, and everyone gets a tidy ending. Hurray.

I guess I’m more about plot than romance, though, and the plot is disappointing. For starters, it’s thin, so thin the novel’s sharp-clavicled cover model would look at it and be like “Seriously, eat a sandwich, plot”. But it seems weightier than it is because half of every page is devoted to characters ruminating on the exact same problems they were ruminating on a chapter ago. (“I love Tessa but Jem loves Tessa, woe!” “I love Sophie but Sophie is a mere servant girl, woe!” “Gideon tricked me into wasting scones, woe!”) There are whole pointless chapters you can just glance over without losing the thread of the story – which is a hallmark of Clare’s work, and not a great one.

It’s the resolution to the plot that’s most disappointing. (Book, I am disappoint.) Clockwork Angel and Clockwork Prince told us that Tessa, our immortal heroine, has mysterious powers unknown even to her, which make her vitally important to the cunning plans of Mortmain, our villain. Well, Mortmain seems to do a pretty good job building an unstoppable army of robots without relying on Tessa, and even after finishing this book I’m still not clear on exactly why he needed her so badly. (Something to do with using Tessa’s shapeshifting ability to make her transform herself into Mortmain’s dead father, so Mortmain can access dear old dad’s memories and make his automatons even more powerful. Or something. Like, is that all.)

And the ending just feels so… easy. Tessa is torn between her love for two best friends, Will (who’s beautiful and arrogant and less of a dick than he seems) and Jem (who’s beautiful and kind and suffering from a fatal illness that will kill him any day now). She ends up with Will, but not because she has to make any sort of sacrifice or choice: Jem – impossibly, implausibly nice Jem- goes and joins an order of immortal monks (… kind of), despite saying early on that he’d never do that, freeing her up to marry Will. Easy. But then, after a century or so, when Will’s long dead, Jem leaves the order and hooks up with Tessa anyway. Even easier! So she ends up with both of them. The cake is both had and eaten.

And Mortmain is defeated pretty easily, because Mortmain is a dull villain who’s evil mostly just because he’s evil (another Clare hallmark), much as Clare tries to flesh him out with a backstory. He exists because someone needs to be working to destroy Tessa and Jem and Will and the rest of their demon-fighting Shadowhunter friends, right?

I kind of feel bad coming down harshly on Clockwork Princess. It is what it is. It’s not terrible. (And it’s a lot better and more inventive than the increasingly over-the-top Mortal Instruments series, which this Infernal Devices series precedes). Other people will read this book for much different reasons than I did. And those people will probably like it a lot better.

Previously: Clockwork Angel, Cassandra Clare; Clockwork Prince, Cassandra Clare

I read The Ruby in the Smoke at Christmas – and immediately regretted not having the rest of the Sally Lockhart Mysteries at hand. (Apparently they’re only available as ebooks in Spanish, and no habla espanol or whatever)  They’re those kinds of books: Once you’re in the universe, you want to stay in it.

The second instalment in the series, The Shadow in the North, picks up Sally’s story several years after the end of Ruby. She’s a successful financial consultant with a taste for mystery, which flares up  when a client of hers loses all of her money to a ruined company whose misfortunes seem to have been predicted by a spiritualist. Dun dun!

Pullman built a sinister, grubby Victorian London in Ruby, and it’s an even darker place in Shadow. There are deaths – of major characters, who you’d expect to survive in any other series because most writers wouldn’t have to balls to kill off them off. The only “safe” character is Sally, and even she’s only safe from death. She’s a plucky, smart, ballsy, admirable heroine, so the risk of her falling victim to some worse-than-death fate that would crush her spirit is a big one.

The third book, The Tiger in the Well, is about such a fate. While the first two books are about Sally rising above the sexist goons of the time, in Tiger those goons are actively seeking to crush her. A powerful and mysterious force conspires to take from Sally everything that she’s built up – her business, her home, her family – but not by killing her. Her shadowy enemy is taking away everything by twisting the law, which didn’t give much of  shit about women back then, especially unmarried ones with children.

There’s an explicit theme of men hoarding power over women and using it to oppress them. “The real Big Bad is institutionalised sexism,” etc etc” Of course not all the penis-havers are nefarious tosspots. The male heroes – Jim, Sally’s closest friend; Fred, her on-off paramour; Daniel, a political journalist she encounters – revel in her strength and the opportunity to share power with her. Shadow and especially Tiger are explicitly feminist books. Their plots are deliberately pulpy, riffing on penny dreadfuls, but the themes of social justice – not just for women, but for immigrants, Jews, the poor – lend their storylines a real heft.

The Tin Princess departs from the first three books (if the differently arranged title didn’t clue you in). For starters, Sally hardly features at all. The focus is on Jim; Adelaide, a street urchin last seen in Ruby; and Becky, who’s recruited as Adelaide’s maid after she suddenly marries the prince of the tiny European kingdom Razkavia and becomes its princess.

The trio sets out for Razkavia, wedged between Germany and what would become the Czech Republic. Political intrigue follows. Scandal follows. Regicide follows. Razkavia is just an important a character as London was in the first three books, and it’s beautifully realised: Pullman’s descriptions of it are so vivid, his history of it so rich, that a couple times I almost looked up “Razkavia” on Wikipedia to double-check it never actually existed. Too bad, then, that this is one of those books let down by its ending: The story is exciting and thrilling until the last couple of chapters, where it all kind of just peters out.

Previously: The Ruby in the Smoke, Philip Pullman

iPhones screens are fine for reading Agatha Christies and Dan Browns and Stieg Larssons – page turners. They’re no good very bad for reading anything that demands actual attention. Anything that has long, dialogue-free paragraphs. Anything that has lots of charts and tables and diagrams. A book like, say, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel.

I tried reading this for the first time a couple of years ago, when I was travelling around Europe and reading books on my iPhone while stuck at airports and in trains and on tour groups. I got maybe a quarter of the way through before discovering that, no matter how high you jack up the font size or the line spacing, some books just aren’t made for reading on a 2.5 by 4.5-inch* screen.

(* I know those aren’t the exact technical specification dimensions of an iPhone screen. I don’t care.)

I vowed at the time I’d get back this (Pulitzer Prize-winning!) book. And you know when you want to look back and congratulate your past self for making a sensible decision? Like, “Nice work going to bed at a reasonable hour last night, past self, so I’m not inhumanly exhausted today!” “Nice work not binging on pizza and chocolate biscuits, past self, because I am looking super skinny right now!” This is also one of those times. Guns, Germs and Steel is one of the most ambitious, convincing and accessible non-fiction books I ever read. Nice work buying it to read later, past self!

Diamond’s work focuses on resolving a simple question: Why do some humans from some parts of the world have so much more than other humans from other parts of the world? To put it less politely: Why did mostly white societies end up conquering non-white societies, and not the other way around? Diamond removes the racial element from the answer. White people dominated other races because they developed “guns, germs and steel”, and they developed those things because of (spoiler alert!) lucky geographical accidents – not because some races or societies are inherently more sophisticated. The course of human history boils down to chance. No shit, right?

I know academic-types who’ve read Guns, Germs and Steel, and enjoyed it, but objected to the flaws in the reasoning. You don’t have to be a genius to see Diamond’s thesis is packed with generalisations, and glosses over the exceptions. That’s kind of unavoidable when you’re a 500-page book examining tens of thousands of years of history. Read something else if you want careful detail and not broad brush strokes. If you’re a regular person seeking an entry point into anthropology, linguistics, biology, and a bunch of other scientific disciplines – read this book.

So before I saw Quartet I kind of had this idea it’d be The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel 2: Marigold Returns - a pleasant but blandly conventional, mostly forgettable comedy starring Maggie Smith that you won’t really enjoy unless you’ve drawn up a will and started paying attention to funeral insurance commercials on afternoon TV.

But: My impression of Quartet was wrong! It is not bland. It is lovely. Like Marigold was ho-hum maybe because it was a film about old people whose problems didn’t really extend beyond being old (same goes for gay films that navel-gaze at Homosexual Themes, as if they’re all that preoccupy homosexuals). Whereas Quartet is a film about old people – cute, charming old people – whose problems are timeless.

It’s set in a retirement home (which, OK, not so timeless), but not one that’s all grim loneliness and dusty blankets and fogies staking themselves good spots at the staring window. Beecham House is the most awesome retirement home ever! It’s a posh English mansion and the residents are jolly good former musician sorts and the staff are tasty young bits of crumpet. You want to be in this retirement home when you’re decrepit.

The residents include Reg, Wilf and Cissy (Tom Courtenay, Billy Connolly and Pauline Collins), retired members of an operatic quartet renowned for their rendition of a Verdi classic. Smith is Jean, the fourth member of their quartet, who moves into Beecham House. Hey, say Wilf and Cissy, how about the quartet reunites to perform that song everyone likes? Except Jean refuses to perform because she’s afraid of embarrassing herself because she’s old, and Reg refuses to perform with Jean because they used to be married and she cheated on him. Will they put aside their arguments and put on a show that will raise enough money to save the cash-strapped Beecham House?

Yes. Of course they do. Obviously.

Quartet is not trying knock you down with any weighty themes, or seed an aggressive fear of ageing in your heart. (If you want an aggressive fear of ageing seeded in your heart, watch Amour. Oof.) It just wants to let you know: Hey, isn’t an appreciation of art a nice thing to have, at any age? And isn’t it kind of nice to grow old if you’re surrounded by loved ones and doing the things you love?

The “Growing old does not mean abandoning your passions” theme is doubled up by Dustin Hoffman, who directed Quartet. It’s the first feature he’s directed and he’s 75! Plus many supporting roles are played by actual former musicians who are now very elderly. So watching this film makes me feel like becoming ancient might not be so bad, as long as I end up in a luxurious retirement mansion surrounded by brilliant peers where no one ever seems to wet themselves by accident (fingers crossed).

Also: Michael Gambon is in this too, basically playing the fruity old queer version of Dumbledore. Like in half his scenes I swear he’s just recycling his old Dumbledore costumes. It’s pretty fantastic. Also: yes I’m aware that Dumbledore is technically the fruity old queer version of Dumbledore. Shut up then look at this adorable picture:

Aww. And now watch these wise words about Maggie Smith:

What a captivating, enthralling, terrific book!  The Ruby in the Smoke is the kind of adventure I’d tentatively describe as “ripping”. (But not if it makes me sound like a dick?) As I read this I crossly thought: “Why wasn’t a book like this around when I was a child?! What a rip!” Later on I discovered it was published in 1986, when I was a (very small, still-several-years-from-learning-to-read) child: “… oh.” At least I got to enjoy it as a manchild an adult.

Here are some things that make Ruby a great book. One: Its heroine, Sally Lockhart, who is clever and resourceful but not easily reducible to adjectives like “plucky” or “feisty”. Two: Its dirty and sinister Victorian London-setting, which is crawling with crims (…? Is that era-appropriate slang? Is “crims” the sort of thing a late-1800s London resident would say?) and opium dealers and other grubby reprobates. Three: Its complicated and cunningly told mystery, which scuttles from the eponymous stolen gem to Indian mutinies to Sally’s dead father to frightening crime matriarch Mrs Holland.

And: It is written by Philip Pullman, who wrote the His Dark Materials trilogy. And basically everyone who’s read those books thinks they’re awesome. (Well unless they’re Catholics or religious-types or whatever I guess.) He cleverly keeps readers guessing about whether the puzzle will have a supernatural resolution or not. Finding out is a lot of fun.

One strike against the series: It isn’t available as e-books. (Well – they’re available as e-books in Spanish. And my Spanish is, how you say, muy inelegante.) Isn’t that annoying.

Afterwards I watched the BBC adaptation which stars Billie Piper as Sally (and Matt Smith as her friend and ally Jim. It was his first TV role! And it’s kind of weird seeing him in this because Jim is only about 13 in the books and Smith was like in his early twenties when this thing was filmed). It’s pretty good! And well cheap on iTunes.

I like how so many reviews of The Hobbit include a synopsis of The Hobbit - like, der, it’s about a hobbit. And as if is there is anyone who doesn’t know already it’s about a stumpy fellow named Bilbo Baggins who goes on a quest blah blah magic ring yada yada dwarves and elves flim flam dragon.

The true reason it’s unnecessary to summarise the plot of this film is: there isn’t one. Sure, there’s lots of events. Lots of action. Lots of exposition. But no plot. This stems from splitting up J.R.R. Tolkein‘s slender children’s book in three greedy Hollywood-machine money-over-art films, which means a straightforward storyline about going there and back again doesn’t even get there.

Despite this you will go see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, because you liked The Lord of the Rings. And you will think The Hobbit is… fine. It’s not like this is some impossible-to-endure colossal failure of cinema that will skim off the top of your soul and feed it to wargs or direwolves or whatever. There is plenty of stuff to like. Martin Freeman is charming as Bilbo. I could watch Ian McKellen act out scenes from Gandalf Sits Quietly For Three Hours Without Speaking Or Moving (spoiler alert: this is the plot of the third instalment). Cate Blanchett, why are you so beautiful. The dwarves are well cast – some of them are even nice to look at. (Attractive dwarves! Can you imagine!)

It’s just that The Hobbit is as cynically padded as you think it’s going to be. This is evident from the very first scenes, where Ian Holm reprises his role as Old Bilbo to explain to us that he’s writing down his adventure for his nephew Frodo, and then Frodo actually wanders onscreen all like “Whatcha doin’ there, Uncle Bilbo? It’s me, Elijah Wood, from those LOTR movies! Here I am for a bit!”, and then Bilbo explains that he’s writing down his adventure for Frodo to Frodo, and then they talk about Bilbo’s upcoming 111th birthday party (HEY THAT’S FROM FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING GET IT), and Old Bilbo fusses around some more why is any of this stuff in the movie can the unexpected journey please begin.

The entire movie is like this. (The dwarf musical numbers you might have read about in other reviews aren’t as mortifyingly long as I was dreading, but there are two of them, both within about the first 45 minutes, so.) Like remember, back when Peter Jackson and co. weren’t just pumping out movies just to make money, how they wisely cut that awful Tom Bombadil shit out of FOTR? The Hobbit is like they kept that shit in – then shovelled in some more. Saruman (Christopher Lee) and Galadriel (Blanchett) pop up in Unexpected Journey because, hey, why not? (I get why they added Galadriel, actually. Without her the film would be 100 percent sausage-fest.) Some wizard chum of Gandalf’s called Radagast (Sylvester McCoy) zooms around on his bad-CGI sled pulled by bad-CGI rabbits to warn everyone about Sauron’s comeback. I half-expected Aragorn to saunter onscreen and make some “Darth Vader built C3PO”-type meta-reference – everything else is crammed in there.

All this bloat really steals away any urgency from the story. The dwarves want to reclaim their home mountain cave from some dragon who’s taken it over*, but so what? In two-and-a-half hours they hardly get anywhere on completing their quest. I can’t imagine taking a kid to see this, unless kids’ attention spans are suddenly magically enormously long.

(*Remember how the dwarves were the least glamorous characters in the first LOTR trilogy? Like everyone wanted to be Legolas and no one wanted to be Gimli? Well, The Hobbit is focused almost entirely on Gimlis – 13 of them, few of whom I felt I got much of a sense of – so if you don’t like dwarves, it’s T.S. for you.)

Serious question: I’m pretty sure I’ve heard Jackson say he’s doing an extended DVD cut of this movie. How. This is already an extended cut. Watching an extended-extended cut honestly sounds like a tedious chore – I’d rather they release a contracted DVD cut with all the filler chopped out (it would run for five minutes). I have no idea how he’s going to spin two more movies out of what little plot remains, even with all the Middle-earth backstory tacked on, but I have a feeling it’s going to feel ”thin. Sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”

In addition to splitting The Hobbit up into three movies, Jackson filmed it at 48-frames-per-second. As far as I know it’s the first feature that’s been filmed this way. Boy I hope it doesn’t catch on. The very best you can say about the effect of the increased frame rate is that you get used to it, eventually. At first it’s super jarring – because it just doesn’t look like a film. It looks like a video game cutscene, or a cheaply done reenactment from a dodgy pay TV crime doco, or a showroom-floor television with those dreadful motion enhancement settings jacked up to max.

Probably future generations of cinemagoers will look back and laugh at how us primitive 2012 audiences recoiled from The Hobbit‘s boosted frame rate, like we look back and laugh at those bozos who leapt out of the way of projections of trains rushing right at them. Well: cram it, future generations. 24fps looks better. 24fps looks like a movie. 48fps looks… plastic and artificial. The computer effects look like computer effects. The stunning New Zealand landscapes* look like IMAX tourism commercials, and not in a good way. The actors clash with the beautifully painted vistas behind them. You should actually go see The Hobbit at 48fps, just to witness its effect yourself.

(*Hilarious joke: How can you tell The Hobbit is filmed in New Zealand? Because New Zealand will tell you. Again and again.)

The first LOTR films worked so magnificently because it’s so easy to get lost in them and forget you’re watching a movie. The Hobbit never stops reminding you it’s a movie, that it’s padded and bloated and strange-looking, that its Middle-earth is built with green screens and computers. It’s not the epic disaster some critics are making it out to be. There are some good, solid, enjoyable scenes – especially Bilbo’s confrontation with Andy Serkis‘s Gollum (which, of course, goes on twice as long as it needs to). But there’s just not a lot of magic here.