Dunkirk

Off to the cinema to see Dunkirk, a new historical drama in which thousands of British soldiers are trapped in northern France and they can't get home because every time they board a ship it explodes and sinks but they keep on trying and I don't want to spoil the ending but eventually some of them do manage to get home.

Who would have predicted that there would be a big-budget Hollywood film about Dunkirk? Hollywood is often criticised for portraying the entire world as an adjunct of the United States, but Dunkirk was filmed within a few hundred miles of the real-life location and has an all-British-Irish-French-Dutch cast directed by the mostly-British Christopher Nolan. The music is by Hans Zimmer, who is German, but it was all a long time ago and it wasn't his fault. He couldn't choose his parents.

Back in 1958 the British film industry produced its own film of the Dunkirk evacuation, which I admit that I haven't seen. It starred John Mills and Richard Attenborough, who are both dead and gone, along with the British film industry of yore, and yet Dunkirk exists. At a cost of $150m it's unlikely to make its money back at the UK box office. How will it do in the United States and China? The film has a clutch of recognisable stars but they either have small cameos or, in the case of Tom Hardy, they spend almost the entirety of the film wearing a mask. Why does Christopher Nolan insist on casting such a beautiful man as Tom Hardy and then making him wear a mask? There's nothing wrong with Tom Hardy's face, far from it.

Is Dunkirk any good? It reminds me a little bit of Mad Max: Fury Road, or Gravity. Some time ago Hollywood pondered the question of how to make a serious historical adventure film in the age of Michael Bay; Dunkirk is one possible solution, along with the likes of The Revenant and The Martian and Wall-E.

They belong to a new tradition of kinetic, visual adventure films that have minimal dialogue, the skeleton of a plot and an emphasis on physical acting. They are the distant ancestors of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Jacques Tati's Playtime. When done well they are transcendent works of pure cinema, but when done poorly the result is like listening to a friend describe one of his dreams, which was fascinating to him when he dreamed it, but boring over coffee. Dunkirk unfortunately has a split personality. The visual aspect is terrific. The 70mm format allowed the cinematographer to go ape with creative depth of field effects - a few shots are even out of focus - and if Dunkirk had more hardcore it would be a harrowing masterpiece. The problem is that director-writer-producer Christopher Nolan lost his nerve.

Technical Notes
I saw the film at the Science Museum, on an IMAX screen. It was shown with an aspect ratio of 1.43:1, filling the screen. The film was shot with 70mm film and then edited with a computer and printed out to 70mm again - the digital intermediate model that was common in Hollywood before all-digital became practical. The titles wobbled a bit but otherwise the picture was sharp and clear, with grain visible in only a couple of shots, and even then it might have been a computer effect. There was one film defect (a tiny insect appeared to have got into the projector).

The Museum had a Second World War-themed "here are the exits" introduction starring one of the Museums' employees, a game chap called Mario. The queue for the beer was too long to get beer, so I watched the film sober. The Science Museum isn't an obvious choice to watch a film, but it feels like an event when you do. You have to go up an elevator to the theatre, as if you were ascending to cinematic heaven, n.b. the rest of the museum is fab as well and if they want to give me free tickets I won't say no HINT.

Lost his nerve. Dunkirk has a schizophrenic quality. The shots of destroyers exploding and turning over are horrible, but the visual poetics are interrupted with character pieces that don't work nearly as well. It feels like one of those 1970s disaster films where a potentially fascinating disaster was used as the backdrop for little character cameos that added plot without amounting to anything. A lengthy sequence involving Cillian Murphy as a shell-shocked soldier goes nowhere and feels like something from a television drama. It's supposed to illustrate the civilian cost of the war, but it feels trite. A sequence towards the end of the film in which a group of squaddies requisition a boat was presumably written so that top-billed Fionn Whitehead and Harry Styles could do some acting, thus making them eligible for acting awards.

The talky parts; the film is never downright bad, although one brief scene in which Tom Hardy's fuel-starved Spitfire appears to shoot down a Stuka as if by magic is downright silly and at odds with the film's overall grim tone. At one point a soldier reads out Churchill's famous "fight them on the beaches" speech, but again this comes across like something from a television history dramatisation rather than the real world. The emphasis on the final part of the speech, in which Churchill voices the hope that the United States will enter the war, feels like an attempt to make the film sell in the United States.

What little dialogue there is treads a thin line between simple and simplistic. Top thesp Mark Rylance as the wizened captain of a small boat delivers a series of platitudes that put me in mind of the main characters from Raymond Brigg's When the Wind Blows - well-meaning but dim - which surely wasn't the intention. Kenneth Branagh spends the whole of the film standing on jetty looking worried, and my attention drifted to the moles on his chin. Can't he have them surgically removed? He's supposed to be a grim naval officer, but there's something too jolly about Kenneth Branagh for that to work. He stood out in the late 1980s because he was a refreshing throwback to the older style of extroverted, theatrical acting that had gone out of vogue in the 1960s; he feels out of place in Dunkirk because the film calls for a naturalistic style that he can't pull off. Furthermore his dialogue is numbers-heavy exposition, which much have been painful for him. The film does a surprisingly poor job of showing the huge scale of the evacuation - we see a couple of destroyers and a dozen or so small boats -leaving Branagh to essentially tell us, the audience, that 300,000 men were taken off, which again feels like something from a much older film.

Whitehead and Styles are newcomers to the screen, and most of the rest of the cast seem to have been picked for their faces rather than their names, and so the celebrity cameos feel out of place. Did the investors demand big box-office names for the post? A version of Dunkirk in which Tom Hardy and Cillian Murphy fought off the Germans all by themselves would have been ridiculous, but giving them smaller roles has the effect of drawing attention from the main characters. Again, it's as if Christopher Nolan lost his nerve.

All of this ill-will evaporates when the talking ceases and the action takes over, particularly when Hans Zimmer's score starts up. The music lifts the film up a notch. Zimmer doesn't stretch himself, but the familiar mixture of ticking clocks, chattering violins, and groaning bass notes amplifies the tension of incoming bombing raids to an almost unbearable level. At one point the score segues from dissonance into a version of Elgar's Nimrod, which should have been naff but was audacious enough to work. Nolan paces the film out by playing with the passage of time, freely cutting between events that take place at different points in the story; at first it seems like poor continuity but eventually it makes sense. The film is occasionally repetitive, and the Spitfire battles have a samey quality, but if the film had just been ninety minutes of stunning visuals and Zimmer's music it would have been much better.

Ultimately Dunkirk is a well-made kinetic action poem punctuated by unsatisfying specks of a lesser film, like a big tasty cookie dotted with flecks of poor-quality chocolate. It entertained me for its running length and will be an awesome 4K demo, and perhaps it will inspire other filmmakers to tackle British subjects that have been neglected by the cinema, but I won't remember it in the future as I remember The Revenant or Gravity.

Mental Notes
The review is over. Do I have any more thoughts? From a contemporary British perspective there's something jarring about Dunkirk. It has a bunch of older British actors wearing military uniforms, but they're the good guys. They don't order their men to open fire on unarmed civilians or burn down a native village. The officers aren't even portrayed as uncaring buffoons with stupid moustaches. This isn't necessarily a British problem - officers are rarely depicted positively in Hollywood films - but after decades in which British people are the baddies it is odd to see some who are not.

The film has attracted some criticism for its entirely white, male cast. As far as I can tell no-one has criticised it for ignoring the fat acceptance movement (none of the characters are overweight) or for ignoring issues that face the trans community. There is an argument that history as an objective record of events is impossible, because history is filtered through the recollection of the dominant class if not actively perverted by their censors, and there is an argument that even if it was possible to record an objective history it would be pointless to dig up the past unless it could be used in the present for a practical purpose such as increasing Labour's share of the vote.

There is an argument that racist white Britain will lap up Dunkirk because it reminds them of a past-time paradise in which Britain's cities didn't have those people. And there is an argument that it's wrong to show the film nowadays because it upholds the wicked rotten lie that Britain was mostly white until after the Second World War, and furthermore it will be used as propaganda for the Tory Party, etc. All of this will be fodder for other people's blog posts and a meal ticket for people who would otherwise be unemployed.

It struck me while watching Dunkirk that the mid-century British people depicted in their small boats were as alien to me as the Aztecs of Apocalypto or the Somali gunpeople of Black Hawk Down. London circa 2017 only has a few white people left, and I imagine that for the remaining population Dunkirk is basically science fiction, as irrelevant to them as Bollywood cinema is to me. Even for white people people my age the Britain of 1940 is a foreign land populated by foreign people who grew up in a completely different world, with a different mindset and different dreams.

At first I thought that the aerial battles were CGI, and that this was the first film ever with a CGI model of a Bristol Blenheim, but most of the aircraft are real. The German Me-109s are played by post-war Spanish 109s, which is noticeable because they have a more bulbous nose than the real aircraft. The Stukas and He-111 bomber are presumably CGI. The Germans are shown flying their 109s in tight formation with the bombers, but this didn't happen until a few months later during the Battle of Britain, and then only under protest.

The last of the British soldiers were evacuated on 03 June, Churchill gave his "beaches" speech the day after, and it wouldn't have been reported in the newspapers until the day after that, so it's unlikely that the closing sequence could have happened in real life.

Just before Tom Hardy miraculously shoots down a Stuka whilst gliding down to the beach there is a shot of Kenneth Branagh, and over his shoulder I could have sworn there was a brief glimpse of an aeroplane crashing down to earth. Perhaps it was a piece of debris.

I have never had the impression that the evacuated soldiers expected to be mocked as cowards; that doesn't fit the British psyche. "Thank God they're safe" would have been the attitude. They had five more years of fighting ahead of them, first in the deserts of North Africa and latterly in France and Germany itself. Over a third of a million British soldiers were killed during the war, coincidentally almost the exact same size as the British Expeditionary Force of 1940, but thankfully we had replacements. The survivors were rewarded with the NHS and Milton Keynes, so there is that.

Rogue One, 1979

Off to the cinema to see Rogue One, a new film from the mind of Hollywood wunderkind George Lucas. Eighteen months ago Lucas was a nobody, at least outside the United States, where American Graffiti was a smash hit. Now he is the saviour of cinema, and all because of one film. A charming space fantasy adventure that takes place in "another galaxy, another time".

Conventional wisdom had it that the top flicks of 1977 would be Airport '77, The Other Side of Midnight, and perhaps Sorcerer, but they failed to attract audiences, and Hollywood faced the real possibility of going hungry. George Lucas didn't save the day single-handedly - Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind and of course our very own James Bond were very popular - but few films have given Hollywood more cheer than Star Wars.

Two years later it is still a phenomenon. Toys based on the film's characters were the must-have Christmas presents last year and the soundtrack album remains a best-seller. George Lucas has talked about an epic "trilogy of trilogies", with Star Wars as episode four in a nine-film saga. He is currently working on episode five, and time will tell whether his ability will match his ambition. Star Wars told a complete story, but the characters were engaging and the simple good-vs-evil plot was a breath of fresh air in these cynical times.

On the surface it was a simple film, but it was also a bold experiment in post-modern cinema, a homage to the Flash Gordon serials of yore; a clever exercise in constructing a modern mythology out of plywood and plastic. Rogue One is an experiment too, but of a different kind. It is "a Star Wars story", a film that takes place in Lucas' science fiction universe but with a whole new set of characters.

Lucas claims that this gives him the creative freedom to tell stories that would not fit in the series otherwise. Personal stories, with a mature tone. With its "A" certificate Rogue One is noticeably grittier than its parent, although it's hardly A Clockwork Orange. If Star Wars was a compendium of fantasy clichés, Rogue One takes its cues from war classics such as The Guns of Navarone and Westerns such as The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (or in this case The Neutral, the Evil, and the Droid). A less charitable reviewer might point out that Rogue One is a quick cash-in designed to give 20th Century Fox another sip at the well, especially given Lucas' decision to self-fund his next adventure; but who am I?

With Lucas busy elsewhere Rogue One is directed by Briton Ridley Scott, famous for his television commercials. His only other theatrical film, The Duellists, demonstrated that he could imitate Stanley Kubrick on a tight budget, which is perhaps why Lucas gave him the nod. For Rogue One Scott has toned down his cinematic mimicry. His direction has none of Lucas' artistic flair, but he does a tremendous job at making the Star Wars universe seem real, especially given the film's reportedly modest budget. Each shot is lit with a wash of colour - blues and oranges predominate - and if the characters spend too much time running down corridors, they are at least visually interesting corridors. Despite the fact that there are no cigarettes in the distant universe of the Jedi, the sets are bathed in smoke, which if nothing else disguises the gaffer tape.

The producers have also shaved costs by filming the desert scenes in Spain, doubling for the planet Jakku, rather than Tunisia. Evil villain Darth Vader's moon-sized superlaser is stock footage from the original, and although there is one exciting albeit brief space battle, for the most part the action is earth-bound - or "planet-bound", because it is set in space after all. Gone too are the original film's distinctive light swords, and almost all of the hippy mysticism surrounding The Force. I miss The Force; Rogue One suffers from a lack of magic. Ridley Scott has talked of his distaste for supernatural deus ex machina, but Rogue One feels small, dare I say anonymous without Lucas' muddled spiritualism.

But what's it like? The film follows a band of heroic spies, who are sent on a desperate mission to capture the blueprints of the aforementioned Death Star. Peter Cushing returns as the villainous Moff Tarkin, although with Darth Vader presumably busy elsewhere the chief baddie is this time Designer Krennic, played with gusto by Oliver Reed, who by all accounts enjoyed himself immensely during filming, to the extent of joining the production in Spain, even though he does not appear in that section of the movie. Beyond Cushing, only Carrie Fisher returns from the original cast, in a sequence that cleverly matches the very beginning of Star Wars. I'm not sure if the little man inside R2D2 returns, or if they simply moved the prop around the sets with invisible strings.

What of our heroes? Much has been made of screenwriter Alan Dean Foster's unisex names; Scott likened the casting process to "throwing darts at a Ouija board", albeit that yet again the board appears to have been whites-only. The decision to give the film a female star - in a gritty war picture, no less - has been met with incredulity, but newcomer Debra Winger is convincingly weather-worn as wayward spitfire Jyn Erso. Only one year older than Star Wars' Carrie Fisher, she carries much of the film's emotional backbone, but perhaps inevitably she is still captured by a mini-villain (played by Omar Sharif, almost unrecognisable in a gas mask), and has to be rescued. Of her merry band of brothers Harry Dean Stanton stands out as an Imperial pilot who has been artificially aged under torture, while a bearded Tom Skerritt plays ruthless agent Cassian Andor, who develops a platonic respect for the supposedly inexperienced Jyn. And I stress platonic; in one amusing scene the film acknowledges the obvious age difference between them.

Of the rest of the cast Ian Holm has a neat turn as reprogrammed Imperial robot K2SO. It's curious that the clunky "mechanicals" in Star Wars are less advanced than Holm's convincingly humanoid robot - presumably another cost-saving measure - but his world-weary performance won me over. By now John Williams' score is almost a character by itself, but beyond a new theme for Tarkin and some desert music Williams' music is noticeably more spartan than the original (the famous Star Wars theme does not appear until the end).

Will children like it? The new cast are older the originals, and although the action sequences are plentiful they tend to follow the same basic formula. Our heroes journey to a local warlord, but are interrupted by Imperial stormtroopers and escape in the nick of time; our heroes attempt to rescue a key characters' father, but are thwarted in the nick of time; our heroes attack an Imperial installation, and actually do manage to achieve their goal - but to say any more would spoil the ending. Despite a first half that takes place in the desert Rogue One lacks the weather-worn aesthetic of the original, and of course the ending owes a lot to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Parents will have to explain to their children that sometimes victory has a high price. It will be interesting to see if the toys are as popular, given that fate of almost all of the characters.

Nonetheless, as both an experiment and a solid action film, Rogue One is a success. It convincingly demonstrates that the Star Wars universe can carry a film by itself. Of course it has strong immediate competition from Moonraker, which cost much more and has a lengthier space battle, but doesn't look any more expensive, and there is the looming threat of Paramount's Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Disney's The Black Hole, both scheduled for release later in the year. Will they spoil the public's appetite for Star Wars V?

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Off to the cinema to see the exciting but overlong science fiction adventure film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, starring top British thesp Felicity Jones as a lady spacewoman. Sometimes I feel sorry for American men; why can't filmmakers give them leading roles? The film also features a band of Rebel scum who will no doubt delight us once again in adventures to come, plus Peter Cushing, who is dead.

I saw the film at London's The Science Museum, in glorious IMax, almost a year to the day after seeing Star Wars: The Force Awakens at the same venue. Disney is now churning out Star Wars films on an annual basis.

Back in December 2015 Disney's share price was $107 per share. Now it is $104 per share, which suggests that financial professionals have a dim view of the Star Wars saga. The Force Awakens was a commercial titan everywhere except China. It was accompanied by a huge number of spin-off products, enough to fill my review with photographs; Rogue One's marketing has been relatively subdued. It is an official Star Wars product but is something of an experiment, taking place in the Star Wars universe but only tangentially involving the characters we know and love from the original films. It doesn't have an opening crawl or an episode number. The film was held back for reshoots, and several scenes that appear in the trailers do not appear in the end result; the film's ending sequence underwent a mass of post-hoc tweaking. Despite all this the result is generally seamless and, since I wrote the first draft of this review, Rogue One has done boffo business at the b/o.

Rogue One is a prequel set slightly before the events of Star Wars, the 1977 original that began the series. Back then writer-director George Lucas tantalised fans with his vision of a "trilogy of trilogies", but after continuing the saga with the classy Empire Strikes Back and concluding it with the competent but perfunctory Return of the Jedi, his filmmaking organs deflated. There were some half-hearted attempts to continue the series - some novels, a couple of television movies, a cartoon series - but in the wake of Robocop and Predator I remember that the Star Wars films felt very tame by the end of the 1980s.

Nonetheless children of my generation retained a fondness for it, and once we were in charge of the economy the Star Wars machine came to life again with some top video games and special edition cinema re-releases of the original films. Hollywood however is slow to act, and there was still a 32-year gap between Jedi and The Force Awakens. We will never know what kind of creative inertia or financial woes prevented Lucas from revisiting his pocket universe, and alas he is no more. In his absence Disney has grand plans to make up for lost time; in addition to Rogue One there is another film in the works that will tell the story of charming space smuggler Han Solo. I worry that over time every little detail of the franchise will be explored and then it will be boring.

If George Lucas had made Star Wars prequels, would they resemble Rogue One? It's impossible to tell. Perhaps it's better that the early history of the Star Wars characters is shrouded in mystery. We do not need to know how Darth Vader came to be evil, or how the Empire came to defeat the benign Republic; we can imagine it in our dreams.

BOXOUT: 70mm
If you're going to see a film, see the hell out of it. The Force Awakens was shot with old-fashioned film; Rogue One was shot with a special digital camera that has an unusually large sensor. They were both filmed in visualised in 2D and then converted into 3D by computers. The Science Museum screened Rogue One from a 70mm film print in 2D. This is fine by me. As I have probably said before, if God had intended for human beings to perceive the world in three dimensions, he would have given us an extra eye in the middle of our foreheads, which he did not.

In addition to being a top film critic and connoisseur of vintage motor cars I am also a terrific photographer, with a keen eye, a mind for technical detail, but more importantly an artistic soul; I have shot a lot of film over the last few years, and I have come to the conclusion that "the film look" exists but is less important than the hands that wield it, because it is just raw material that is overwhelmed by post-processing. There is no special magic. Film is just chemicals. Plan Nine from Outer Space was shot with film and so was I Love Lucy - shot by people who grew up with film, who knew film, who knew nothing other than film. With larger formats grain is not an issue; perhaps the only thing that film really has going for it is highlight retention. I'm not going to talk about the issue of frame rates, suffice it to say that if God had intended for human beings to see things more than twenty-four times a second he would have made our hearts beat twice as fast, and we would have a third ear in the middle of our foreheads.

On a giant Imax screen Rogue One looked generally superb. There were some obvious sharpening halos around high-contrast images; the grain in dark places was strangely muddy. This was especially noticeable at the beginning of the film, because it starts with overcast skies and dark shadows. I don't recall it looking better or worse than The Force Awakens. The 65mm format lends itself to creative depth-of-field effects; director Gareth Edwards has a habit of exploring scenes with selective focus, which is fascinating at first but wears off. The focus puller earned his pay. George Lucas also used the same trick - notably the Cantina scene in Star Wars - but perhaps because he had slower lenses it wasn't so overt.

As with The Force Awakens, the Science Museum had special Star Wars-themed bumpers that were naff but endearing and will be lost to time. A "turn off your mobile phone" animation with Darth Vader, and a "you are watching the film in 70mm" announcement by K-2SO, a robot. Thirty years from now people will wish I had whipped out my mobile phone and filmed these bumpers. Perhaps someone else in the (packed) audience did. The screening also had a trailer for Christopher Nolan's forthcoming Dunkirk, which looked and felt like a Star Wars film set in 1940. In the trailer some implausibly good-looking British people are menaced by an unseen enemy; there was a dogfight between some Spitfires and an Me-109 which ended with bally Jerry's kite being pranged right in the how's-your-father. He dickie-birdied, took a waspie, and then caught his can in the Bertie.

Rogue One has a darker tone than The Force Awakens. The battle sequences resemble a bloodless Saving Private Ryan, and there is a suggestion that the heroes are not so much idealists as fanatics. The tone reminded me a lot of the Star Wars video games, which have traditionally been darker and more cynical than the films. The internet will probably generate floods of slash fiction involving assertive butch Jyn Erso and simpering crybaby Rey, her counterpart from The Force Awakens, but although they are cut from the same cloth they belong in different universes. On a visual level the film maintains the series' mixture of fantastical elements and environmental verisimilitude, notably in an almost surrealistic, Magritte-esque shot in which a giant starship hovers above a North African market in much the way that bricks don't.

This sequence is set on a planet called Jeddah, which confused me, because Jeddah is a real place, isn't it? It's in Saudi Arabia. Beyond that the film begins with a short sequence in Iceland, which is very dark, and ends in the Maldives, which looks like a pleasant holiday destination, albeit that by the end of the film it is not so pleasant. An Imperial facility was shot in Canary Wharf tube station, on the Jubilee Line, as if to hammer home yet again the fact that in the Star Wars universe the British are the bad guys.

I've written before about the look of the Star Wars films, and I don't want to repeat myself. George Lucas wanted to show us a visually rich universe as it might seem to the locals; people for whom starships, robots, and aliens were commonplace. Rogue One's beauty shots appear just long enough for us to acknowledge them, not so long that they distract from the story. There is a strip of green in a landscape of burned rocks; an enormous fallen statue of what must be a Jedi warrior, almost too large to comprehend; a slow-motion sequence in which two enormous space vessels quietly collide with a third, generating a shower of debris reminiscent of Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity. The Star Wars films would not exist without special effects, but I hope that anyone who is given the job of directing a Star Wars film is told on Day One that the characters are king and effects are always a means to an end.

Beyond the science fiction visuals Rogue One gives us something else. Peter Cushing is back! And so is the 20-year-old Carrie Fisher (the 60-year-old Carrie Fisher is still with us). Which raises the question of whether Disney has a digital model of Carrie Fisher's 20-year-old body somewhere. Imagine the havoc that would arise if the model was leaked to the internet.

Daniel Craig is in films. Rogue One is a film. That's the connection. NB as far as I know Daniel Craig doesn't have a cameo in Rogue One. As far as I know.

What is the essence of a man? To what extent is Rogue One's Peter Cushing actually Peter Cushing? His vocal performance is delivered by actor Guy Henry, his face is CGI, and he is of course not supposed to be Peter Cushing - he is Grand Moff Tarkin, director of the Empire's sinister Death Star, a moon-sized weapon with a giant laser that can blow up planets. Disney owns the rights to the character's likeness but in the past this would have restricted them to churning out action figures and posters rather than full performances, and presumably Cushing himself was forbidden to dress up and act as Tarkin at conventions. All of these issues have been worked out in science fiction many years ago but it's actually happening now, to us, right now.

Alas the CGI used to generate Peter Cushing doesn't work. It almost works. It's a few percentage points from working, but it's still obviously CGI. As a human being I am genetically programmed to recognise faces; it's ingrained, it helps me survive in a hostile world, and I can tell when a face is wrong. The CGI wasn't bad enough to throw me out of the film, but from the instant Cushing appeared I was conscious that I was watching a CGI recreation. The problem is that Tarkin is a major character in the film, with more lines and I believe more screen time than for example Mads Mikkelsen's Galen Erso, who drives the plot but only appears in three scenes, or Forest Whitaker's drug-addled mood-swinging armour-wearing Saw Gerrera, who seems to be channelling Dennis Hopper from Blue Velvet. I am prepared to believe in Peter Cushing's resurrection, but not yet.

It is only a matter of time, computing power, and artistry before Peter Cushing lives again. And then, a few years later, the computing power will be available to everyone, not just Industrial Light and Magic, and we will use it for porn. Cushing will be ignored, and over time the torrents of his digital model will go unseeded, and fewer people will remember him, and he will finally die. You or I will have died long before then. Peter Cushing will outlast us. Let them resurrect Christopher Lee next. This train of thought has gone on long enough. Next paragraph. Also, the Imperial armoured personnel carrier that appears at one point seems to be based on the old Kenner Mini-Rigs. Next paragraph.

The Force Awakens was competent throughout but Rogue One isn't as good. In fact it has a couple of bits that are downright bad. Darth Vader appears again. His first sequence is superfluous and ends with a pun; Vader had a dry sense of humour in the first three Star Wars films, but he was not a comedian. Puns do not become him. It's a pointless scene that undercuts his next and final appearance, in which he is evil incarnate. It would have been far better to introduce him at the end of the film. Also, if I'm being picky, the suit looks wrong. The helmet is too big.

James Earl Jones is once again the voice of Vader, which raises the question of who will do the voice when 85-year-old Jones dies. But then again computers can simulate voices, and perhaps they have asked Jones to record all of the words in the dictionary with every possible emotion, in which case they can just create his performance in the editing suite. Vader's physical presence could have been CGI, but isn't; they used a man in a suit. Two men, according to the IMDB, but presumably not at the same time because Darth Vader is not a pantomime horse. Neither of those men were David Prowse. Of the original cast only Anthony Daniels re-appears, and only for a couple of lines. Princess Leia is credited as Norwegian actress Ingvild Deila, who perhaps only supplied the motion capture acting; the credits are vague on this matter.

Is the film any good? The Force Awakens entertained me and after a year I have fond memories of it, albeit that I rarely think about it. So much that could have gone wrong went right. The characters were winning rather than irritating, and if the film was staggeringly derivative of the originals it was at least executed well. Rogue One has a tiredness about it that upset me somewhat. The Star Wars universe is rich, deep, and wide, but with the exception of Empire, all of the films have involved a gang of commandos infiltrating a poorly-guarded Imperial installation in order to mess up the Empire's superweapon, and I'm getting sick of it. Wars, Force and now Rogue have the additional burden of introducing a new set of characters, and so the first hour is spent getting the audience up to speed.

Of course all the characterisation pays off in the longer term - after two hours spent with Jyn Erso and her chums I can't wait to see what they get up to next - but it's still a slog. This is one aspect where the Half-Life computer games are actually smarter than Hollywood; they begin in the middle of the action and slowly introduce the characters over the course of the story. Why can't the Star Wars films do that?

Rogue One tries to do this by showing us Jones' origin story and then skipping her action apprenticeship, but the film still has a very slow start. A lengthy subplot with Forest Whitaker's guerilla leader goes nowhere. He is set up as a Colonel Kurtz figure, a rebel whose methods are beyond the pale. He has a big psychic monster that gives people bad hugs. After a confusing introduction he turns into Forest Whitaker, e.g. a big blubbery sentimental guy. A similar thing happens with Diega Luna's Cassian Andor, who is essentially Han Solo as a spy; he is introduced as a stone-cold Provisional IRA type but quickly turns into a wuss and actually ends the film holding hands with a girl! I can't imagine the Provisional IRA holding hands with girls.

BOXOUT: Diversity
Beyond Rogue One's artistic qualities I am contractually bound to evaluate its cultural acceptability. Can you, dear reader, watch this film without feeling dirty and wrong? Do you need to picket cinemas that show it? As a white man I am much smarter than you, and you should pay attention to what I have to say.

The film has the standard modern Hollywood ethno-sexual mix, whereby the villains are white British people, the hero is a white English lady who nonetheless probably does not reject black cock, and she has a team of ethnic people who help her, led by a male hero from one of the major ethnicities - obviously not Chinese or Indian; in The Force Awakens the male hero was a black British gentleman, in Rogue One he is Mexican, thus satisfying both the audience of the southern United States and Spain. There is burgeoning romance between the white English lady and her ethnic friend, but of course they don't actually kiss or anything because that would be inappropriate for a film aimed at general audiences.

Thus the film manages to tick all the boxes while still being a cynical construction. Chinese people make up a large proportion of the world's human population but from Hollywood's point of view they are a tiny invisible minority that was, until recently, an acceptable target; the sheer economic power of China's cinema audience has caused Hollywood to change its ways, which is gratifying but also sad, because it lays bare the fact that in the human world power is the only thing that gets results, not goodwill or an innate sense of fair play. Furthermore the ethnic characters of Rogue One are still subordinate to the main cast, and the film's beacon of motherly wisdom is a white woman, who is in fact so white that I thought she was CGI at first. Genevieve O’Reilly plays lady politician Mon Mothma as if she had been told to literally become Bryce Dallas Howard.

The Force Awakens had a charming homosexual romance between Poe Dameron and Finn, but Rogue One does not attempt to engage with LGBTTQQIAAPO issues at all. Saw Gerrerra has a big fat slobbery pet monster that is presumably supposed to be a woman, but I'm not sure what the acceptable modern attitude is regarding women so I can't pass judgement on this. Obviously women who have not undergone a transition from male-to-female cannot understand LGBTTQQIAAPO issues and are thus the enemy - they didn't choose to be women, and so they are actually less valid as women than people who did choose. But then again women were our friends until recently.

K-2SO is written as a sardonic black slave, but he is sexually unthreatening on account of the fact he is a robot and thus does not have a penis. He does however rape another robot - in the head - and I imagine that C3PO would ejaculate buckets of robot cum all down his leg if they ever met. The presence of Forest Whittaker raises a separate issue that I like to call Peak Black. In the past, Hollywood was all-white, and then it become monochrome; black actors were allowed to have major roles from the 1950s onwards, culminating in the first two Lethal Weapon films, which killed off anti-black racism forever and made our two races one big happy family of brothers. However the other races were still treated as novelty jokes. I am old enough to remember the sword-waving Arabs, clumsy Indians, and zany middle-Europeans of Jewel of the Nile, Short Circuit, and Beverley Hills Cop, most of whom were played by Caucasians with hair dye.

But Hollywood has increasingly come to rely on international box-office receipts, and the economic power of foreigners has done far more to quash racism than the goodwill of do-gooders and left-wingers. If a thing is not taken with force it is not yours to keep. As a result of all of this, Hollywood is now prepared to give leading roles to the other ethnicities, which has had the effect of reducing the amount of roles that exist for black people. The hero has to be white, of course, and the villains are white British people because everybody hates us. I am British and I hate the British. We hate ourselves. Black actors are no longer an automatic pick for the white hero's ethnic friend, or the companion who dies first; they now have to share space with Chinese and Indian actors. Furthermore there is an uncomfortable truth at work. China is notoriously unkeen on black people, which gives Hollywood a choice between doing the right thing, or following the money. And it is a business.

NB Dunkirk is also problematic. The filmmakers take pains to highlight the racial diversity of the British soldiers but the fact remains that every single one of them was an evil racist, and furthermore they were probably Brexiteers. They were leaving Europe, after all. The problem with Dunkirk is that the subject is ideologically unsound and my recommendation is that Christopher Nolan is prosecuted, or at least forbidden from entering the UK.

Rogue One picks up after a slow beginning. The action sequences rely on implausible coincidences whereby our heroes end up in the same place as the villains, but this is par for the course with the Star Wars films. The Empire has access to the latest technology but its surveillance and security computer systems are less advanced than our own; time and again our heroes sneak into military facilities that are guarded less well than a modern-day data centre. In fact they end up sneaking into a military data centre - the Death Star's plans are stored on a Quantum Bigfoot hard drive - by essentially causing a distraction and dressing up as Imperial soldiers.

While I'm listing the film's implausibilities, why does the Empire need a tower of hard drives given that the same data is later shown to fit on a Toshiba SmartMedia card? The Empire seems amazed by the city-busting destructive power of the Death Star's laser, but surely they already have city-busting hydrogen bombs? Was the blind Jedi actually a Jedi, or a quasi-Jedi? Was there a contractual reason that no-one besides Darth uses a light sabre? Etc.

Dot dot dot does however pick up. The film builds to another one of those multi-stranded land-space-face-to-face battles a la Jedi, where there is a battle in space, a fight on the ground, and some character drama. It's a formula; a good one. As befits the film's darker tone the Rebel victory is bittersweet, but this just makes the climactic events of Star Wars seem even more satisfying.

Will they ever remake Star Wars? It has aged well, and the makers of Rogue One have tried hard to ease the transition from their film's final moments to the beginning of Star Wars, which takes place only a few minutes later. A few minutes for the characters, thirty-nine years for us, during which the language and technology of cinema changed dramatically. Rogue One throws in the crude CGI and cel animation of Star Wars, and of course the X-Wing fighters and Star Destroyers still look awesome, but some gaps cannot be smoothed over. The post-modern wipes, relatively static camerawork and stiff fights of Star Wars belong to a different era, as do the zooms, the 1970s-style sound recording, and the middle-aged actors. They all betray the gap between the two films.

Star Wars was also notoriously lily-white - even in racist 1977 people complained that there were no non-white characters. Even the whiteness has aged. The white people of 1977 were old-fashioned white people, tanned and weathered-looking; in contrast the white people of modern-day Hollywood are increasingly picked for their whiteness, and so although white people are no longer the overwhelming default race in Hollywood films, the white people that remain are if anything even whiter than the whites of times gone by. Does that make sense? Compare the weathered, gnarly white people of Jaws or Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia or The Wild Bunch with the pristine, soft white people of modern Hollywood - the likes of Jennifer Laurence, Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver and so forth. Casting directors are increasingly asked to provide white actors (rather than just "actors"), so they naturally gravitate to the whitest of white actors. This paragraph should really have been in the box-out above. I'll edit this review later on.

John Williams does not do the music this time although the score uses some of his old cues, notably the Imperial March. Given his uninspired work on The Force Awakens it's no great loss. I assume he is busy working on the next instalment in the series proper. The music was instead by Michael Giacchino, who was given a month and a half to write it after original pick Alexandre Desplat pulled out, which raises the possibility that Desplat has an alternative score lurking somewhere on his hard drive. Giacchino's main theme is generic but the incidental music is fine. None of it stands out - it doesn't even feel particularly Star Wars-y, but in my opinion this matches the grim tone of the film. A set of heroic action cues would have felt inappropriate.

My generation likes to believe that everyone has Star Wars in their blood, but generations of children have grown up without caring for the original films, and now we live in a world that has other countries such as China and India. They exist now, they are a thing, and over there in otherwheresville Star Wars was never a major cultural event. Rogue One itself has Chinese actors in two major roles, perhaps because The Force Awakens was not a great success in China; fifteen years from now there will be essays from young Chinese writers who decided to follow up their screening of Rogue One with Star Wars and Empire etc, who then became hooked on this mysterious world, or conversely were disgusted by it. As a white man writing in 2016 I am conscious that the future no longer belongs to me, that it will belong to others, and so on forever until we are all dead.

TL/DR Rogue One takes a while to get going. Howard Hawks said that a film should have three good scenes and no bad ones; Rogue One has one good long extended action sequence, lots of competent sequences, and a couple of stinkers. It is notable perhaps for its attempt to make the series even more gritty, although unless Disney decides to be brave and make an R-rated Star Wars film this idea is probably going to be a dead end. The film nonetheless answers one of the questions that has tormented Star Wars films for decades; who would win in a fight between X-Wings and AT-ATs? If X-Wings would win, why didn't the Rebels use X-Wings at the Battle of Hoth? Why didn't the Rebels put X-Wing guns onto their Snowspeeders? Conversely why don't AT-ATs have ack-ack? Does the Empire have self-propelled AA guns, or do they only use AT-ATs in situations where they have air superiority? If a portable rocket is capable of badly damaging an AT-AT, why don't the Rebels have more of them? Hmm? Hmm?

Nonetheless I eagerly await the further adventures of Felicity Jones and her band of chums. After building them up for two hours I can't wait to see what they do next, this happy band of survivors. What exciting missions they get up to in the next film, when they reappear, as inevitably they will after being in Rogue One. What will they do next?

Florence Foster Jenkins

Meryl Streep is a talentless old bag who surrounds herself with sycophants, idiots, and paid-for yes men. The syphilis she contracted at an early age has addled her brain. She has been celibate for decades....

...in the new film Florence Foster Jenkins, a historical comedy-drama starring Streep as Florence Foster Jenkins, a famously terrible popular singer of the early twentieth century. At a young age Jenkins aspired to be a pianist, but the syphilis she contracted from her first husband ruined her physical coordination so instead she turned to singing. As a singer she was uniquely awful, but she lived in a bubble where she never had to face up to her incompetence, and by middle-age she was irreparably damaged.

Aren't we all, eh? By middle-age we are all irreparably damaged. My only constant friend has been the bottle. The bottle has never let me down. It doesn't care if I don't shave or if my socks don't match. The tutors Jenkins hired were happy to take the money and go through the motions of helping her, even though she was a lost cause. After years of obscurity she came to the attention of the wider public very late in life. A recording of her voice made its way to the radio, and in 1944 she was given the chance to play New York's Carnegie Hall. The concert sold out.

Everybody in the audience knew she was awful but no-one wanted to spoil the joke, and thus the postmodern age was born. History books say that postmodernism began in the 1970s but they're wrong. It began in 1944 with Florence Foster Jenkins. While the civilised world was engaged in a genocidal world war, Jenkins demolished the foundations of Western art. It took a few years for the building to topple, but eventually it did, and it is but a short step from Jenkins to the likes of Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons.

Alas Jenkins was unable to capitalise on her fame, because two days after the concert she suffered a heart attack; a month later she died. She was 76 and had not been expected to live that long. Like The Shaggs and Wesley Willis she is remembered as a pure spirit in an impure world. What if she was right, and we are wrong? History portrays her as a guileless naif who meant no harm rather than a vain, conniving witch, and because of this people remember her fondly today.

Florence, Italy

But what about the film? Is it any good? It's slight. The comedy is mannered and low-key, the drama is perfunctory, and on the whole it comes across as the kind of filler that would have entertained audiences in the 1940s. The film's big drama sequence involves one character's attempt to buy up and destroy every copy of the New York Post, which is the kind of plot element that belongs in an old television sitcom. The film has no bad language, no nudity, and its vision of New York in 1944 is antiseptically clean.

It was actually shot in the United Kingdom, a cost-saving measure that almost works; sadly Jenkins visuals have neither the grit of Taxi Driver or the polished fakery of One From the Heart. The film is instead just bland. On a visual level Jenkins is a technically accomplished television movie. It will not be nominated for any technical awards. Streep has won several Oscars but probably won't win anything for Jenkins. The film isn't weighty enough to work as Oscar bait.

I can see how a serious, substantial film about Florence Foster Jenkins might go down. It would be three hours long, in black and white, and it would be relentlessly bleak and downbeat. Jenkins was a lonely, disabled old woman who was exploited by everybody around her. She had personal charm but no-one in the film seems to genuinely love her. Jenkins inherited a lot of money from her father, and I imagine that throughout her life she never once met someone who cared about her as a person. But isn't that true of everybody? It has certainly been my experience. Alcohol doesn't come to me because I love it, it comes to me because I pay for it. Jenkins had a choice between living in a fantasy world, or confronting the reality of her own impending ill-health and death, with only fakers and conmen for company. In that respect a film of Jenkins' life might resemble Terry Gilliam's Brazil, and that mental image is more interesting than Florence Foster Jenkins. At times the film seems to be willing to go down this route - we have glimpses of how Foster perceives herself - but it pulls back almost immediately.

The film also stars Hugh Grant. He is a failed actor more famous for the company he keeps than for his own accomplishments. In real life, as in his films, Hugh Grant always been overshadowed by women; he plays his role as someone who understands he is trapped in a gilded cage, but is prepared to put up with this because why the hell not. He has the air of a man who believes he will be Edward VIII one day. Does he really love Jenkins? His mask only slips on one occasion, but even then it just reveals another mask. Grant is superb in a certain type of role and is perfectly cast in the film. It's a shame that he is never given better material to work with.

Florence again - Olympus XA, Kodak Portra 160

The third leading role is played by Simon Helberg. He is an inexperienced, shy, but talented pianist. His character arc illustrates the film's biggest flaw; he begins as an inexperienced, shy, but talented pianist and remains so throughout the film. He has a mass of tics and is essentially the comic relief, but he doesn't change. None of the characters change. The film is simply a linear, uncomplicated portrayal of Jenkins' last few months on Earth, with no more ambition than that. There is a brief suggestion that Helberg's character might find love, and the film continually implies that he is a player of the pink oboe, but this goes nowhere. John Sessions pops up in a tiny role as a fat doctor. Whereas Meryl Streep wears a fat suit, John Sessions took the method approach to the problem of playing an overweight person. I admire his dedication.

The only other actor who stands out is Nina Arianda, who plays a blonde dame with classy gams. She's a massive stereotype but plays the role with gusto, and also her character looks fun to hang out with and I wish she had been in the film more. Rebecca Ferguson has the thankless role of Grant's girlfriend, who drinks heavily but comes across as a square and boring, which is odd because none of the alcoholics I have met were square and boring, at least not while drinking. I never knew what they were like when they were sober. They didn't like themselves when they were sober. That's why they drank. Sadly, some of them didn't like themselves when they were drunk, at which point where do you go? What is left when you realise that your dreams were shallow and stupid; when you realise that dreams are just flashes in the brain when you unconscious? Just flashes in a piece of meat.

The more I think about Jenkins the less it impresses me. The dramatic moments feel fake. At one point Jenkins is mocked by the audience, but an unexpected ally emerges who silences the critics; it felt fake. As if the filmmakers expected us to stand up and cheer as in the finale of Crocodile Dundee, but they didn't want to get their hands dirty with cheap Hollywood sentiment. Jenkins is a British film, and like all British films it has an air of sneering, unearned superiority about it, an unwillingness to descend to the emotional manipulation of Hollywood films, a sense that it deserves respect not because of its actions but simply because it is the member of an exclusive club, or the seventh earl of somewhere-or-other. This might be justified if Jenkins was unadulterated cinematic greatness, but instead it is empty and bland, like The Mission or The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill or Hear My Song or any number of boring empty failed British attempts to create prestige drama.

The glimpses we have of Jenkins' mental delusions of grandeur are hamfistedly unsubtle. And one thing bothered me. The film's villain is a reporter for the New York Post. The film is full of mentally weak people who are willing to be bribed into silence; the reporter is the only honest, incorruptible music lover in the entire film. He refuses to be bribed into silence, and yet he is portrayed as the villain. Grant's character attempts to intimidate his editor into having the review spiked, and the film doesn't have a problem with this. Imagine a version of All the President's Men in which Woodward and Bernstein are portrayed as a pair of humourless killjoys, and Nixon is a harmless old man whose fantasies made a lot of people happy, or at the very least entertained a lot of people.

Not Florence

That would actually be an interesting film. Of course, I'm exaggerating for dramatic effect, but a smarter and more interesting film of Jenkins' life would have dealt with this. Jenkins' life was a slow-building tragedy about a sad old woman who was exploited by everybody around her, until eventually the pillar of lies they built fell apart and killed her. Her singing was awful and her self-delusion was funny, but her life was not a comedy. Imagine a film of Wesley Willis' life that glossed over the abuse he suffered as a child and his paranoid schizophrenia. Even Rain Man dealt more frankly with the tragic aspects of its main characters lives than Jenkins.

The film suggests that the pursuit of a dream is worth dying for, but Jenkins' dream was a delusion; the dream she chased was the product of mental illness, and again this is a more interesting take on the material than Florence Foster Jenkins. I can't tell if writer Nicholas Martin or director Stephen Frears thought of all this and decided that it wouldn't fit in a crowd-pleasing historical drama. Martin is a television writer and Frears is a prolific, anonymous director mostly of historical dramas, who occasionally finds himself as the credited director on films that win awards. I assume they were hired because they could bring the material in on time and budget as cheaply as possible.

The film has one or two decent lines, neither of which I can remember, and one good shot that makes use of the cinema screen (Nina Arianda's character appears in a hallway while some drama goes on in the foreground), but apart from that the script and cinematography are anonymous. For a film set in 1940's New York none of the dialogue feels particularly of the period, but then again real-life 1944 probably didn't sound like the films of that era.

I'm waffling now. The drink has started to write my words for me go away. Florence Foster Jenkins is a perfunctory, dull film with solid performances from a couple of actors who can phone in this kind of thing. There's no reason to see it at the cinema. I went because this weekend it is summer in the United Kingdom, the end.

Roger Ebert: Life Itself

Off to the cinema, to see Life Itself, a documentary about top late film critic Roger Ebert. Roger Ebert loved the movies, and now there is a movie about him. He was never a major public figure here in the UK. I knew of him because the Internet Movie Database used to list his name at the top of their reviews. It was a distinctive name. For a long time he was unconsciously engaged in a war with top late German politician Friedrich Ebert for domination of Google’s search results for “ebert”.

Whereas Friedrich Ebert had no firm political convictions and became President of Germany at a terrible time, dying of appendicitis ten years later, having achieved nothing of substance, Roger Ebert loved films and had the good fortunate to become America's top film critic during a fortuitous period in cinema history. Life Itself shows us some of his early work as a student newspaper editor, and I'm sure that if Germany had offered him the Presidency in the 1980s (say) he would have done a good job. But that's enough of Friedrich Ebert and Germany. Begone, Friedrich Ebert. I will not write of you again.

Life Itself is directed by Steve James, who also directed the classic documentary Hoop Dreams. If you look up Hoop Dreams on the IMDB, Roger Ebert is listed at the top of the reviews (twice - he loved it); the same is true of The Godfather, Five Easy Pieces, The Princess Diaries 2, and of course Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, which is about a giant prehistoric turtle who can fly. He is the friend of all mankind, and enjoys nothing more than fighting gigantic evil bats. Ebert’s review is warm and funny, and he clearly enjoyed the film. This is one of the reasons why his writing appealed to me. He seemed to genuinely enjoy films. He didn’t sneer, and conversely he didn’t seem over-awed by highbrow art films, and even when the film was forgettable he always had something interesting to say.

In fact his reviews made me feel incredibly jealous, because they seemed effortless. This is something that Life Itself unfortunately doesn’t get across. For a film about a man who made his living writing about the movies, it has surprisingly little of his writing. I learned that he could knock out a review in thirty minutes, and that writers once used paper notepads, and that they dictated reviews down the telephone(!), all of which made me feel pampered and inadequate, but what inspired Ebert to write? What did he like to read? Hmm?

Nonetheless I can understand why the writing takes a back seat. During the section on Siskel And Ebert At the Movies we see some of... sorry, Siskel And Ebert AND the Movies, we see some of Ebert’s early television work, and because he was simply reading his newspaper reviews out loud the results were stilted and awkward. Prose that works on the page generally doesn’t work on the screen, and so the film rarely quotes at length from his writing. I’m not sure how Steve James could have surmounted this problem. Ebert doesn’t talk about writing in the film and we never learn where his ideas came from, or who inspired him. It feels wrong to rag on Life Itself for this, because it’s clearly supposed to be a celebration of his life rather than a penetrating examination of Ebert's motivations, but I was drawn to Ebert by the pieces on his website rather than his television appearances, and that part of his life feels missing.

But it would have been easy to turn the film into a crass run-through of his most famous quips, and to the director's credit Life Itself doesn't go down this route (there's nothing about how Ebert "hated, hated, hated" North, for example). At one point we see one of Ebert's friends reciting the last page of The Great Gatsby from memory, but it doesn't work. Firstly because it's hard to savour words if they're being delivered in real-time - each new line overwrites the last, so that you only remember the last line, albeit that Gatsby has a cracking final line - and secondly because there isn't time to adapt to the style. "Something commensurate to his capacity for wonder" feels fussy unless you’re attuned to Fitzgerald's writing. Without preparation it just sounds fussy.

Also, the last page has the word "breast" on it. Why were authors so enamoured of the word "breast" in those days? Characters were forever clutching things to their breasts; great passions erupted within their breasts; even when the characters were men, who don’t have breasts. Next paragraph.

Siskel And Ebert A... And the Movies was never shown on television here in the UK. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert belong to a great sweep of American television stars who were massive in their home country but obscure in Britain. Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Tina Fey and ninety per cent of the post-1981 Saturday Night Live cast are essentially names and faces that don’t mean anything. Ultimately it was the internet that made Roger Ebert mean something to me. Toiling away in an office with a computer I could surreptitiously read about American Splendor, Nine Lives, Undertow, films that were unlikely to go on wide release over here, or that wouldn’t be released for many months. This being the 2000s I could always have downloaded them, but I would never have cared about them without Roger Ebert.

Our equivalent was Barry Norman, who presented Film Night on the BBC until 1998. He was a familiar figure but I really can’t tell if he was any good as a film critic; he didn’t transition to the internet, and in any case I always felt that he was doing it as a job rather than because it was his life’s calling. Roger Ebert didn’t just review films for a newspaper, he organised film festivals, he gave talks on films, he even wrote a film once. It wasn’t a very good film, but it was great trash.

He also wrote the screenplay for Who Killed Bambi?, a movie starring The Sex Pistols as themselves. Sadly the film was never completed. The screenplay features a scene in which Steve Jones makes love with a groupie called Soo Catwoman while Paul Cook accompanies them on drums. There's another scene in which Sid Viscous berates Johnny Rotten for singing out of tune. I'm not sure if Ebert really "got" The Sex Pistols, but by God I wish that film had been made.

Life Itself shows Ebert interacting with his fans and generally communicating with the world via his MacBook. Ebert’s punchy, straightforward style transitioned well to the internet. I'm part of the first generation of people who grew up with the internet; I remember the pre-internet age of printed newspapers and magazines, but I can’t feel it. On the whole the internet has been a great boon for writers, but it has a terrible problem whereby there is not much diversity. Let’s ignore creed and colour and gender and nationality; the voice of the internet is young, almost uniformly young, so uniformly young that it doesn’t realise there are older voices. Roger Ebert had a wealth of experience and gave the impression that he had been around the block, and that he had nothing to prove; but whereas so many people would use this experience to moan about how the modern world is rubbish and that young people are stupid and shallow and nothing is as good as it was, he came across as a kindly uncle who still loved new films. Life Itself shows a man who was obnoxiously arrogant when he was young, but by the 2000s he had mellowed.

The film puts this down to the love of a good woman, his indomitable wife Chaz, who he met relatively late in life while they were both at Alcoholics Anonymous. And presumably the AA helped as well. Some people are happy drunks, Roger Ebert appeared to be a happy-then-angry drunk. He always looked to me like a perpetually-disappointed cat, but during the internet period his claws only came out occasionally, notably in his review of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigalo ("Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks") and his rebuttal to Vincent Gallo following his disappointment with The Brown Bunny. When he laid into a film it was entertaining, and perhaps because he had made a film himself it never came across as simple abuse.

Roger Ebert got the internet; he was one of us. He had no inherent bias against action films and sci-fi, indeed he resembled a typical sci-fi nerd, except that he was a Pulitzer-Prize-winning serious writer who hob-nobbed with blonde ladies at Cannes, and had Martin Scorsese’s mobile phone number in his mobile phone. Scorsese appears in Life Itself as one of the few Hollywood talking heads, along with Errol Morris and, very briefly, Werner Herzog, who is in the film because every documentary has to have Werner Herzog in it at some point. Despite coming across as a friend to all nerds Ebert was not however an ingratiating sycophant. Famously he engaged in a lengthy online argument on the artistic validity of computer games - his position was that they would never be "art" - and he attracted a great deal of flack for it. I agreed with the surface of his thesis*, but I felt that his reasoning was flawed and ultimately it struck me that, yes, for one moment he was an old man moaning that modern life is rubbish.

* A computer game of sufficient artistic merit to be presented as "high art" would no longer be a game; any more than Grayson Perry's pottery sculptures are presented as pots, or any painting is presented as an exercise in craftsmanship. Nobody cars how Joan Miro held his brushes. And although the likes of Vib-Ribbon, Shadow of the Colossus, Journey etc are visually stunning, nay breathtaking, or in the case of Vib-Ribbon intriguing, the same is true of a Boris Vallejo painting or Marilyn Lange's May 1974 Playboy centrefold. The effect wears off, and then it's just a pretty picture. Is there an emotion, a concept, an idea that only a computer game can get across? Is it possible for such a resource-heavy medium to foster a distinctive vision? I digress.

I saw Life Itself at the Curzon, Soho. Part of the appeal of the Curzon is interacting with the bar staff as you order drinks, because the bar staff are effortlessly hip, and for a moment you can imagine that you are effortlessly hip as well. Part of the appeal is sitting in the window with an opened MacBook, with the Apple logo blazing onto Shaftesbury Avenue, listening to people mock the new Sainsbury’s Christmas ad. It uses the 1914 Christmas Truce in order to sell cut-price chocolate. And part of the appeal is striding onto Shaftesbury Avenue at the end of the film. This being the Curzon you wait until the credits finish. As I casually strode onto the pavement I deliberately ignored the passers-by, the little people. I remember thinking how much I hated the little people and their small, tiny minds...

... and then a voice appeared in my head. It was Roger Ebert's voice, delivered via a speech synthesiser. "You learned nothing from this film", it said. "You are not the one." Life Itself points out that Roger Ebert was a populist. He was the best sort of populist. A Beatles-style populist. He loved films and wanted other people to love them as well. From a British perspective he struck me as the film world’s version of John Peel, if John Peel had tried hard to be a mainstream Radio One DJ. It's difficult to compare a radio DJ with a film critic, because their markets are fundamentally different (and John Peel was a unique case). Roger Ebert was fully aware that if he devoted himself solely to the study of obscure but excellent Japanese cop dramas he would no longer have an audience, and in those days if you weren’t on television or in a national newspaper... well, you could create a fanzine, but Roger Ebert wanted to be famous.

Consider the list a few paragraphs above - Nine Lives, Undertow, and add that that Crash (the 2004 Best Picture winner, although Life Itself shows Ebert reviewing the 1996 David Cronenberg film) and Lost in Translation and Juno. It's fashionable to sneer at these films nowadays, especially Crash, and I wonder if this is why Life Itself shows Ebert reviewing the Cronenberg movie. My recollection is that it was fashionable to sneer at Juno even when it was new. Yes, he liked Garden State as well.

Ebert is occasionally derided in hipster circles as a middlebrow, shallow man, akin to the sentimental painter Thomas Kinkade. I never had a handle on his tastes - I was drawn to the craft of his writing - but in my opinion Roger Ebert always made a good case for his choices, even if his choices have not aged well. I can accept a Roger Ebert who was sometimes barking up the wrong tree; I cannot accept an oleaginous cipher who is always correct. If Ebert had tried to tailor his opinions to match the prevailing winds there would have been no point to him. Most of the aforementioned films appear in his Best of 200X lists, not because he felt pressured to include them, or because he wanted to win the respect of fashionable people, but because he thought they had something good about them. Does this mean that his opinion was worthless? I believe he was right far more often than he was wrong.

Right and wrong are loaded words. During one clip of Siskel And Ebert, Roger argues forcefully that opinions are subjective, which is true. In theory a film is neither right nor wrong, good nor bad, it is simply a mass of cuts and edits and noises until someone views it; but, dammit, Deep Star Six is a pile of cack and John Carpenter’s The Thing is fantastic and anybody who thinks otherwise is wrong. Their opinion is theirs alone.

Life Itself generally doesn't try to place Ebert within the context of other film critics. Pauline Kael is mentioned, and there's a suggestion that Ebert was not interested in being Chicago's Pauline Kael. This mostly went over my head. Pauline Kael died when I was young, but her heyday had been the late 1960s and 1970s, at which point I had not yet been born. I have read some of Pauline Kael's writing and it didn't stand out at all. The opinions seemed arbitrary, she appeared to hold French directors in awe - France is much less mysterious and otherworldly if you're British - and there were no funny bits.

I keep saying that Life Itself isn't about this or that, why not describe the film? It's a documentary about Roger Ebert, interspersing scenes of his day-to-day life in the early 2010s with talking head reminisces of his life, plus photo montages set to readings from his autobiography. The format never really gets inside his head, and it's a shame that Ebert didn't make the film himself. The paradox is that although I would feel uneasy about such a film - what kind of man makes a documentary about himself? - I would pay money to watch it. Steve James famously didn't win an Academy Award for Hoop Dreams, in fact the film wasn't even nominated for Best Documentary despite near-universal praise (Roger Ebert wrote that "it gives us the impression of having touched life itself", which would be a good title for a film). This was a major scandal at the time. Neither Hoop Dreams nor Steve James appear in Life Itself, which has a transparent style and... I was going to write "feels as if they were on a tight deadline", but that goes without saying. They were on a tight deadline. Schedule. They had a tight schedule. I shouldn’t say deadline.

His day-to-day life. In the 2000s, early 2010s I assumed that Ebert wasn't all that ill, or rather I accepted that he was gravely ill but I couldn't feel how bad it was. And I assumed he had written a stockpile of reviews in advance, because his writing never faltered. In reality there was no stockpile. He was thoroughly professional; his writing never faltered. Looking back, it seems that all throughout the time I was reading his reviews he was ill. He was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2002, and although it was treated successfully I imagine that the fear never went away. In Ebert's case the cancer came back, and it eventually took away his jaw, and with it the power of speech and the ability to eat and drink. On the bright side, he could still write. If Roger Ebert had been the world's greatest trumpet player he would have had to retire. There is no bright side beyond that.

Life Itself shows Ebert struggling to get back on his feet after a nasty hip fracture. It's painful to watch. The fracture was the result of the metastatic cancer that killed him. He was 70 when he died. He had almost died once before, but good fortune gave us a short while to remind us of what we were about to lose. We never got to hear his opinion on The Hobbit. 

At least he lived a life. Hollywood raised its game in the 1970s and film criticism became, for a short while, big business. Film critics were respected, and on a commercial level Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide was a regular best-seller. If Roger Ebert had been born a few years earlier he would probably have spent his career as an editor or sports journalist (I can picture him as a sports journalist), and you or I would not remember him. Over the last twenty years the internet has broadened the pool old of writing talent, which has had the inevitable effect of making individual voices less dominant, which is perfectly natural; the days when a mass audience pored over Movie Guide are gone. It's easy to be nostalgic about the past. Here in the UK our Leonard Maltin was Leslie Halliwell, who wrote an annual Film Guide. Halliwell was famously dismissive of popular films from the modern era, which in his case mean anything post-1966. If Roger Ebert represented a positive vision of old people, a good argument in favour of keeping them around, Leslie Halliwell embodied all the negative stereotypes of old age. He was a dominant voice in British film writing for several years, and he was wrong. Time has been especially cruel to him. Not only is his work forgotten, his medium - film directories - has died off, replaced by the internet. And he has been doubly forgotten, because the internet is American, and although I have heard of Roger Ebert, who in America has heard of Leslie Halliwell?

Will Ebert be remembered in the future? It's a difficult question, the answer largely tied up with the fate of the films themselves. He seems to have reviewed every major film and tonnes of minor ones released in North America between the 1960s and 2012, so as a resource for 4K re-releases and promotional websites of the future he is invaluable. Ebert is an unusual case in that his reviews were often entertaining even if the film was dire. Especially if the film was dire. His review of the forgettable, forgotten 1996 gangster film Mad Dog Time has a timeless quality, not just for the quip about it being less interesting than watching a blank screen, but for the observation that it was "like waiting for a bus in a city where you're not sure they have a bus line". I wish I had thought of that line.

If you imagine bad films as rabbits, Roger Ebert will be their General Woundwort. And when there is a good film he will be their Frith. Yes, over time his website will be shut down and nobody will care what he had to say about Prizzi's Honor and The Great Muppet Caper, but the same is true of everybody, every film critic, the vast majority of writers. Ebert earned a crust, was married to a woman he loved (and who loved him), got to hang out with Russ Meyer, presumably got to see a lot of very large breasts, that's enough. It's a shame he couldn't have died older and less painfully, but two out of three is better than none.

When Douglas Adams died he left behind h2g2, an online encyclopedia published by the BBC. But h2g2 never amounted to much, and along with a clutch of similarly ambitious but ultimately unpopular digital initiatives the BBC abandoned it in the 2010s. After John Peel died there were several John Peel Days, and the Glastonbury Festival has a stage named after him, but I suspect that over time we will all drift apart. It happens to everybody. Ebert's television appearances diminished greatly post-2006 and At the Movies was cancelled in 2011, but his writing was sufficiently good and modern that it doesn't feel fusty and staid, whereas (again) I can't see Pauline Kael's work appealing to new generations. Her books are still in print, and people still buy them, but I suspect this is because she is among the set texts of university courses rather than because she has a great popular following.

Kael and Ebert belong to an era that will probably never exist again. During the 20th Century entire countries, whole cultures were united by shared mass media; television programmes, books, albums sold in the millions, and there was a mainstream canon that most people shared. Roger Ebert was part of that canon, but now culture is fragmented and even the greatest stars of the age have album sales and viewing figures that would have been very poor in the 1970s. If Ebert's work appeals to an ever-smaller niche, the same is, again, true of everybody.

The film taught me a bit about Gene Siskel. He died in 1999 and is even more obscure in the UK than Roger Ebert; it seems that he was a regular guest at the Playboy club during the pre-silicone era, and indeed the funniest moment in Life Itself is the word “boobs”. They were frenemies, working for rival Chicago newspapers, and the film has some priceless behind-the-scenes footage in which they lay into each other like an old married couple. Albeit that Ebert generally lays into Siskel, and putting on my amateur psychologist hat I wonder if this was a result of Ebert being depressed. Siskel and Ebert were driven by a lust for fame, money, glory and - yes - boobs, and we’re supposed to tut-tut at that kind of thing nowadays, and it would have been easy for them to come across as coke-addled monsters, and perhaps if I had known them in the 1970s I would have hated their guts, but with distance and time they now come across as charismatic men who meant no-one any harm. Mammals are naturally obsessed with boobs, there are solid biological reasons for that, and both Ebert and Siskel were mammals, and so I am.

Life Itself points out that Ebert was accustomed to loss. His father died when he was young, Siskel died long before he should have, Ebert himself realised during the 1970s that he was going to die if he didn't stop drinking. He went dry in 1979. Throughout the film his weight goes up and down, and although the film strongly implies that he suffered from depression for a long time it has to be borne in mind that his job consisted of sitting in a chair, writing (or sitting in a chair, talking). He enjoyed food enough to write a book about it, The Pot and How to Use It, and I have the impression that Christmas at the Eberts was a jolly affair.

Nineteen Seventy-Four

I feel at a disadvantage writing about Roger Ebert. He wasn't part my culture when I was young, and he won his Pulitzer Prize in 1975, a year before I was born. He apparently won it for the totality of his criticism during 1974, work I have not read. Fifteen years ago, if I wanted to read Roger Ebert's reviews from 1974, I would have been out of luck. Now I just have to Google ""roger ebert" 1974" and then abandon that and use the advanced search to restrict Google to the www.rogerbert.com domain with "1974" and... well, let's have a read.

(reads) Chinatown, Young Frankenstein, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Great Gatsby, Death Wish, The Godfather Part II. Blazing Saddles, that can’t be right. But no, Mel Brooks was on a roll in 1974. The year belongs to the pre-Star Wars era and thus the distant past, and some of those films are better than others, but I can see how a writer might relish them; Roger Ebert must have relished the chance to get stuck into Death Wish. For the record he grudgingly respected Chain Saw Massacre ("in its own way the movie is some kind of weird, off-the-wall achievement"), he was impressed with Death Wish on a purely technical level, although the review feels more of a plot summary than a proper critique, but having said that in 1974 it was presumably just another thriller.

Reading his reviews of The Sugarland Express and The Parallax View I'm struck by the limits of film criticism. In theory those two films have not changed in the years since, but the context around them has grown, and criticism is really all about placing something within a context. Ebert's piece on The Parallax View is straightforward and surprisingly short - just shy of 500 words - because of course he was writing for a newspaper and had limited space. Over time, films like Parallax and Get Carter (which he liked) have grown, and it's to Ebert's credit that he was willing to go back and re-evaluate them for his website many years later. I briefly worked as a computer game reviewer - not a critic, a reviewer - but it seemed futile, pointless. How can I evaluate something without the benefit of time? Sometimes passion fades, and sometimes it grows, and it's the passion that grows that matters most. It has substance in a trivial world.

He loved Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, was greatly disappointed with The Great Gatsby, loved Chinatown, loved Amarcord etc. I was originally going to quote from those reviews but they're straightforward and to-the-point, perhaps because he was writing about serious films that he wanted to treat with the respect they deserved. He seems to have had trouble ending his reviews, and with the exception of The Conversation they generally stop dead. Overall Roger Ebert circa 1974 seems reverent and a bit staid, but context etc. Perhaps he loosened up over time. Then again, his review of Zardoz is unmistakably him:

"Sean Connery wanders through all this with a slightly bemused expression on his face.  He begins as a barbarian given to distrust and childish impulses, but after he gathers all knowledge to himself (the movie is full of phrases like "gathers all knowledge to himself"), he turns into a sort of body-building Einstein who sees into the centre of the Vortex, deciphers the wisdom of the crystal, stimulates the Apathetics, makes love with a good-looking Immortal dame (she regains the knack), and finally turns into a fossil while the soundtrack milks Beethoven's 7th for all it's worth."

I have seen Zardoz. It is one of those films. Ebert's review is spot-on and encapsulates most of the film's appeal. Sean Connery really does have a slightly bemused expression on his face. Murder on the Orient Express begins in medias res, something which is quintessentially Ebert:

"There is a cry of alarm, some muffled French, a coming and going in the corridor.  Hercule Poirot, adjusting the devices that keep his hair slicked down and his mustache curled up, pauses for a moment in his train compartment."

At which point I’m hooked. The description of Poirot as a man scurrying about like a paranoid crab is another neat turn of phrase. Crabs are paranoid, aren't they? Everything wants to kill them or rip their legs out. That's why they developed pincers and tough shells, and yet they still die, in their millions, every year. Ebert opens his review of Lacombe, Lucien in much the same way. The same year he gave The Godfather, Part II three out of four stars; revisiting his decision in 2008 he concluded that he would not change a word of his review, arguing that although the first two Godfather films were collectively a masterpiece, II was less effective than I taken in isolation, which is what he had to do in 1974. But if crabs actually are killed in their millions, surely they aren't paranoid. Right? They're justifiably anxious.

NB. Ebert's website mixes contemporary reviews with retrospectives written in the 2000s. However I'm not sure where the contemporary reviews come from; some of them describe the film in retrospect, and so they might be drawn from material that was written later. But perhaps films were released in a more leisurely fashion in 1974, and it took months for them to reach Chicago. I just don't know.

Somewhere back there I was writing about Life Itself and not crabs. It's a simple, straightforward film that showed me something of Roger Ebert. Goodbye Roger Ebert. A full exploration of his life and times would be sixteen hours long and would place Ebert within the context of his times; it would be Easy Riders, Raging Bulls as a miniseries, and it will never be made.

I was lucky to catch Ebert's work during his final years, and he was a terrific writer. Now it's our turn. It's up to us and our younger siblings and children, and the gleams in our eyes. There comes a horrible time in a man's life when he realises that his heroes are all dead, or old, or sick. They ran up the beach and now it's your turn, your generation’s turn. And you look left and you look right and it looks hopeless, because you're a bunch of kids cowering in the shadows of giants. Giants who slew dragons in an age of fire.

But the giants were kids once, and you only see the shadow, not the man who cast it, and the dragons and the fire are shadows as well. I learned from Life Itself that when the pain got bad Roger Ebert wanted to die; but the pain never dulled his writing, because he had a soul of steel. His last piece, A Leave of Presence, begins by thanking us, and promises great things to come on the digital front. He thanked us. A day later he was dead. Someone else will have to go back, forty years from now, and make us want to watch The Tree of Life and Beasts of the Southern Wild one more time. And Gamera.

In his writing I only saw the shadow. Now the man is gone. The shadow remains.