There is a point at which Carly, the plucky heroine of new British dance movie, Streetdance 3D, is taken to a classical ballet (Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet) by her dance school mentor. Sceptical at first, she finds herself drawn in. As they leave the theatre, she marvels at how they managed to portray an entire tragic love story without words.

Lucky them. The rest of us have to endure what passes for a Streetdance script. Dance movies are not particularly known for ever exercising the best screenplay judges at movie awards, but Streetdance drags the genre down to new lows. It’s been concocted by someone who saw Step Up 2: The Streets, went on an all-weekend bender and then verbally vomited up his hazy memory of the least worst parts.

Normally when I review things that other people may not have seen, I either warn them of spoilers or try to avoid them altogether. There’s no point doing either here, as the template for dance movies is so rigidly adhered to that you know what’s going to happen even before you walk into the cinema.

First, a brief diversion into some of the movie’s good points. Filmed to take advantage of street dance’s incursions into mainstream popular culture, it uses the most visible proponents of that breakthrough – Britain’s Got Talent winners George Sampson and Diversity and finalists Fearless – as a means of attracting an audience. Nothing wrong with that: they are all charismatic performers.

Unfortunately, Diversity are particularly poorly served. Given just one dance number to showcase the group’s work, the poor direction and editing actively works against the impressive choreography. One almost suspects that the directors only had access to Diversity for part of an afternoon, shot what they could and desperately tried to cobble together a decent edit. If that’s the case, they failed.

Flawless, who reached last year’s BGT final before being beaten by both Diversity and Susan Boyle, get a much greater slice of the action. Here, they become reigning champions The Surge, the biggest threat to Carly and her ragtag group of young hopefuls. Meanwhile, Sampson is the plucky young pal who keeps on insisting that he’s good enough to dance with the gang, if only they would give him a chance. Do you think he might prove his worth by the end of the film? Do you? (He does.)

The use of 3D actually does work quite well in the dance sequences. It allows the choreography (principally by Kenrick Sandy and Kate Prince) to be closer to stage work, where the live audience take that third dimension for granted. In the aforementioned scene where Carly is transfixed by the classical ballet dancers, the director keeps the camera on her while balletic forms flit between her and us, suspended above the auditorium.

If only the characters were three dimensional. As it is, they struggle to be even 2D. Everywhere you look there are characters that give stereotypes a bad name: the surly European ballet teacher, the prissy ballet dancers who struggle to eat a whole stick of celery for lunch, the obdurate boss who has a heart of gold.

Some of the writing is just lazy, but some goes further and just becomes almost offensively laughable. We have a ballet school where students walk around in tightly knit groups who all dress alike (three girls in purple leotards here, two guys in black unitards there). Apparently nobody at the ballet school has ever heard of any other dance discipline. And one girl ends up sobbing because she’s been told she’s too tall for her Royal Ballet auditions, a plot point which gets conveniently forgotten when said auditions come around. Which, of course, coincides with the big street dance competition that the former ballet dancers are now all heavily invested in.

The dancing may be high quality – alongside the streetdancers, the ballet school cast include Matthew Bourne protege Richard Winsor and former Ballet Black dancer Hugo Cortes, who also impressed in the audition stages of the BBC show So You Think You Can Dance – but someone, somewhere decided that it really wasn’t worth bothering with a script to match. Early in the film, sandwich delivery girl Carly notes that the ballet rehearsals lack something, because the dancers aren’t emotionally connecting with the material. If only the creative talents behind Streetdance 3D had listened to their own lesson.

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2. Lucas Grabeel: Musical youth
3. Lessons learned

When choosing a film to watch at the local cinema yesterday, there was no way I was going to go and see Valentine’s Day on my own (maybe later, but not on the inappropriately-abbreviated V.D. itself). I’d heard so many dire things about The Wolfman that I’m in no great hurry to put myself through it, and I have no desire to sit through Avatar again. So I ended up finally seeing Sherlock Holmes, Guy Ritchie’s take on Conan Doyle’s private detective.

That the film itself is still showing, having been released on Boxing Day 2009, seemed just as surprising as the fact it’s taken me this long to see it. But now, after having watched it, I can see why — it’s an enjoyably entertaining romp. Robert Downey Jr. clearly revels in the absurdity of the character’s near super-human skills of observation, allowing him to play the role with the sort of deadpan humour he also brings to Iron Man’s Tony Stark.

Jude Law’s Watson is a younger incarnation of the character than we’re used to seeing, but it’s satisfying to see him written and played as an intelligent man, with the sort of fighting skills that a veteran of war would have and with an intelllect befitting the one person Holmes would be able to bear as a friend.

The main plot revolves around a quasi-Masonic cult obsessed with black magic rituals, with Mark Strong suitably chilling as an adversary for the cunning Holmes. Of course, this being a 21st century interpretation of the Sherlock Holmes canon, Professor Moriarty has a pervading presence, despite his being a much smaller part of Conan Doyle’s fictional world than common folklore suggests. Inspector Lestrade has a substantial role, too, of course, here being played by the wonderful Eddie Marsan — and the typical depiction of him as a bumbling policeman, while intact, has been given a couple of nice spins that play out well.

This being a Guy Ritchie film, women know their place, with just three characters to speak of. Blink and you’ll miss Geraldine James as Mrs Hudson. Kelly Reilly is a little too two-dimensional as Watson’s fiancée, leaving the lion’s share of female screen time to Rachel McAdams as the smart-witted thief to whom Sherlock is attracted, but who is working for someone else. It’s a character that doesn’t quite work, but one has to admire her ability to find the one exit from the sewers underneath the Houses of Parliament that emerges at Tower Bridge a couple of miles down river. And not only that, but which emerges at the top of the bridge. Still haven’t quite worked out how that one works, save to set up a dangerous location for the film’s denouement.

The film contains several of my gripes about the depiction of Victorian London, including the depiction of buildings which would have been new at the time as if they were in the same half-decrepit state they are over a hundred years later. For more noticably, all the printed materials, including several newspapers and flyposters, all use typography that is far too regular and cleanly printed. Hours of perusing The Stage archives from the period has convinced me that any depiction of headlines that fill the front page in perfectly rendered block capitals are as accurate as depicting the front page of the Daily Express with actual news on it.

Small points, I know, but in a film that does attempt to capture the spirit of the age, anything which jumps out like that detract from what is otherwise a fun period thriller.

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2. When brevity isn’t everything: The Guardian vs Twitter
3. The Tonight with Trevor McDonald Film Festival

I wasn’t sure whether I would like Did You Hear About the Morgans?, the latest romantic comedy starring Hugh Grant opposite the American actress du jour (in this case, Sarah Jessica Parker). Ultimately, though, it won me over with some winning performances and a script that, for the most part, avoids the syrup that weighs down most Hollywood romcoms.

The plot itself — separated New York couple Paul and Meryl Morgan are placed into hiding after witnessing a murder — is something of a cut-and-shut amalgam of Sister Act and, well, pretty much every NYC-based comedy. Both high-flying executives, the only way they can organise dinner to try and talk out their differences is through their personal assistants (Jesse Liebman and The West Wing/Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss, stealing every scene she’s in).

Whisked away to temporary witness relocation in the depths of Wyoming (which the snobbish Morgans seem to regard with the same stereotypical disdain as English scriptwriters heap upon Norfolk), they are put up by gun-toting redneck couple Marshal Clay Weeler (Sam Elliott) and his wife, Deputy Emma Wheeler (Mary Steenburgen).

Naturally enough, they’re fishes out of water and have trouble adjusting to the country way of life, although in short order they realise that the friendly community spirit has a redemptive quality. Things pretty much proceed at the pace you’d expect from a movie of this sort, and indeed there are very few surprises, if any, in the way the plot develops.

What does surprise, though, is the script. It’s not laugh-out-loud funny all the way through, but has a nice pace to it, with occasional bursts of one-liners or slapstick sequences that help offset the more serious discussions about the Morgans’ self-destructing marriage.

As a result, it feels a lot warmer and truer than most romcoms, almost like a mid-West version of Cold Feet. The final reconciliation is one exception, as the dialogue turns gloopily soppy without the witty undercutting that runs through the rest of the script.

Without giving too much away, there’s a “six months later” coda that works quite well — it at least stays true to the central characters’ personalities, rather than having two metropolitan types deciding they need to go completely native to be be fulfilled. But it’s rather a gentler end than I was expecting: I wanted the last line of the film to be a real humdinger, and it wasn’t.

Much like this review.

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Cross-posted to TV Today

I saw Paranormal Activity at the cinema this weekend. For those who haven’t yet seen it, or heard about it from the large amounts of online buzz around it, it’s a supernatural film shot on a single video camera (a la The Blair Witch Project).

With all the best horror films, it’s the slowly creeping sense of dread that can turn a good movie into a great one. For me, Paranormal Activity doesn’t quite have that — while there are some genuinely creepy moments in the film, the scenes in between are more about tedium than tension.

What really killed the film for me, though, was the thought that I’d seen the whole concept — a family home tormented by ghosts or demons — done so much better. By the BBC, in fact, in 1992’s Ghostwatch.

It’s descended into notoriety now, of course, because despite being pre-recorded and broadcast in the Screen One drama slot, its presentation — as a live studio programme with outside broadcast links to a suburban housing estate — led some to overlook the (frankly rather dodgy) acting, and believe they were actually watching a documentary. Actors Sarah Greene and Craig Charles, on the “outside broadcast” duties, were then best known for their TV presenting roles, and in the studio Mike Smith (Greene’s husband) and Michael Parkinson were certainly no thesps. Indeed, remarkably it was the studio TV presentation that was the most plausible element of the whole setup, with the conceit only exposed by the stiff and much more tightly scripted response of the studio guests.

Never repeated on television, the British Film Institute released it on DVD in 2002, the tenth anniversary of the programme’s broadcast (the DVD is now deleted, but you may be able to find second-hand copies online).

On the BFI’s website, they claim:

Seen today, following the advent of such tightly controlled ‘reality’ shows as Big Brother (Channel 4, 2000- ) and especially Most Haunted (Living TV, 2002- ), it is clear that the strong audience response Ghostwatch received at the time was due less to its dubious credibility as a factual broadcast than to the way that it tapped into audiences’ desire to be fooled, to be tickled by even the slightest possibility that a live broadcast could really go out of control.

Most Haunted (the creation, of course, of Greene’s fellow Blue Peter alumna, Yvette Fielding) does take the notion of fiction presented as fact to its most ludicrous extremes. Paranormal Activity is in no way as ridiculous — but as far as being creeped out goes, the BBC’s effort is hard to beat.

Below: a clip from Channel 4’s 100 Greatest Scary Moments talking about Ghostwatch.

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2. Mint statistics and a ’406 Not Acceptable’ error
3. The Laramie Project (DVD)

It’s such a shame when an injudicious choice of words overshadows the points that someone seeks to make. That’s what happened when, last week, The Guardian’s Hadley Freeman wrote an article for the paper’s G2 section about why Katherine Heigl would executive produce a film like The Ugly Truth after trashing Knocked Up, in which she starred opposte Seth Rogen, for being “a little sexist”.

The whole of Freeman’s piece makes some valid points — not that I agree with all of them. I liked The Proposal far more than she did, but I found myself nodding internally at this paragraph:

Hollywood romantic comedies have become the Primark dresses of cinema: disposable, crap and likely to make you wonder why you spent £10 on that piece of rubbish in the first place. It is tragically easy to see the thinking behind both Bullock and Heigl’s movies: “Hey! I’m a comic actress and I want a role that doesn’t involve me being a personality-free love interest, a shrewish wife/girlfriend, a hooker with a heart of gold, or a dumbbell. So why don’t we go back to the old school and make a Rock Hudson/Doris Day-type movie in which — and this is the real feminist kicker — I play the boss in the movie and he plays my subordinate. Amazing!” But no amount of sharp skirt suits can compensate for vibrating knickers.

But many of the comments attached to the article did not concentrate on the substantive points of Freeman’s article, but the headline. This is the part of the article which is least likely to have been written by Freeman herself, but would have been created by a subeditor. In this instance, it was given the headline

Even when they produce their own Hollywood romcoms, why do female actors still allow themselves to be humiliated?

Straight away, you can see the contentious element. Why “female actors” rather than “actresses”?

Freeman herself commented:

To all of you who are getting so exercised over the term “female actor”, take it up with the Guardian style guide.

…and later reiterated:

My goodness, the female actor / actress debate continues. As I say every flipping week it seems, take it up with the style guide. On the other hand, if that’s all most of you can think of to criticise here, my piece must be amazing.

And in Peter Preston’s media column in yesterday’s Observer he took up the cause:

Last week I was less than ecstatic about newspaper style books in general, and one in particular that saw a Hadley Freeman piece in the Guardian headlined: “The ugly truth about female actors in rom-coms”. Helen Mirren, female actor? Kindly leave the stage. And Hadley agrees with me. She’s blogged back to “all of you who are getting so exercised over the term” saying “take it up with the Guardian style guide”. Not with her, because she never wrote the two duff words; not with the sub-editor who wrote the headline and was merely following orders, but with the sacred book of ordained coinages.

Why do newspapers churning out hundreds of thousands of words a day - some of them as new as last night’s television or a blog from Tahiti - need to set living English in concrete blocks of disapproval?

Erm, let’s just look at the Guardian style guide, shall we? It’s easy to do, as it’s all online. Of the term ‘actor’, it says:

actor

for both male and female actors; do not use actress except when in name of award, eg Oscar for best actress.

One 27-year-old actor contacted the Guardian to say “actress” has acquired a faintly pejorative tinge and she wants people to call her actor (except for her agent, who should call her often). As Whoopi Goldberg put it in an interview with the paper: “An actress can only play a woman. I’m an actor – I can play anything.”

As always, use common sense: a piece about the late film director Carlo Ponti was edited to say that in his early career he was “already a man with a good eye for pretty actors” … As the readers’ editor pointed out in the subsequent clarification: “This was one of those occasions when the word ‘actresses’ might have been used

I’ve added the emphasis to the start of the final paragraph. Good style guides recognise that there are situations where the “rules” are not hard and fast. I think that the clumsy structure of the headline to Freeman’s article is brought about by one instance where common sense was not applied. Indeed, note how the article itself describes Heigl both as an actor and an actress, depending on the context.

In Preston’s example of “Helen Mirren, female actor?”, “Helen Mirren, actor” would suffice. The style guide says that is preferable to “Helen Mirren, actress”, and I would agree. Preston seems to have a chip on his shoulder about style guides, and uses this example to justify his own prejudice. The error, though, is not in the guidance, but in the dogmatic following of such guidance without recourse to common sense.

On a related note, we recently had a flurry of letters over the same wording in a news story on The Stage, which was headlined Female actors get less pay and shorter careers.

This is a different case, though — as the headline implies (and the opening paragraphs confirm) there is a comparison to be made between female actors and their male counterparts in the same profession. If the term “actresses” had been used to change the headline to Actresses get less pay and shorter careers, that implication is lost and a longer, clumsier headline would have been needed.

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2. Pussy problems, part 2
3. Stuart Jeffries’ pussy problems

Over the weekend, I saw two British science fiction films for the first time: Sunshine, directed by (the now Oscar-winning) Danny Boyle and Moon, directed by Duncan Jones.

I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to see Sunshine. It’s been out on DVD for ever: my copy was bought a while ago on impulse in one of those 3-for-2 deals from HMV or somesuch, and has lain in the original cellophane ever since.

That’s changed now, of course. And in a way it was the ideal weekend to watch it, as it provides a great counterpoint to Moon, which by some miracle actually made it to my local multiplex this week.

Both films wear their visual inspirations on their sleeves - Sunshine’s Icarus II has many echoes of Alien’s Nostromo, while Moon takes obvious cues from the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey. But, as with the best SF, it’s the human interactions that make the pieces work, and in both films the themes are simultaneously huge and intimate, both contemporary and eternal.

Sunshine asks us to consider the boundaries between the science of physics and the faith of spirituality as somewhat more blurred than we usually accept. For Moon, it’s a consideration of what makes us the person we are. I really don’t want to go into too much detail on either, as you really do need to go into both films without any forewarning of what’s to come.

Of the two, though, I think I prefer Moon. Sunshine, for me, veers from a claustrophobic character study to a more traditional action film — albeit one with a remarkable camera effect that emphasises the philosophical aspect of the film — while Moon retains its sense of creeping unease throughout, building the tension until the very end. Sam Rockwell gives the sort of performance that, if it were in a non-genre based drama, would be a shoo-in for awards.

Both films have faults — including liberal artistic licence with the laws of physics — but as examples of thought-provoking SF, they’re right up there.

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2. Tron 2.0, aka Tr2n, is now Tron Legacy
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If I was the sort of person who went to conventions, I think Comic-Con San Diego would be the one I would most like to go to. Somehow, over the last few years, it has become a major means of marketing all sorts of genre productions in TV and film to the fans.

Anyway, while I’ve been stuck in London, this year’s convention has been covering all sorts of things, from BBC shows being plugged (Being Human, Doctor Who and Torchwood - yup, Ianto’s still dead and staying that way) to sneak previews of the latest films.

Trocker and videoblogger charlieissocoollike got a press pass for this year’s convention from Disney, and has filed a report in his usual ebullient style:

Like him, I’m incredibly excited about the prospect of the Tron sequel — now, apparently, called Tron Legacy. Unlike him, I was actually born when the first film came out in 1982 — indeed, I had devoured the novelisation well before I got to see the film. Combined with a set of stills inserted into Brian Daley’s book and the occasional glimpses of footage in Disney Time, the version of Tron in my head is the one I still think of being as the original - the movie itself ending up as a big-screen facsimile.

What with computer graphics improving so much over the last 27 years, there’s every chance that Tron Legacy will be closer to that original version in my head. Here’s the footage shown at Comic-con: kind of a teaser trailer, if you will. I cannot wait.

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Not the Matthew Bourne version, nor indeed the play which continues at Leicester Square Theatre until August 2. No, this is the movie version, with Oscar Wilde’s novel being given the full Hollywood costume drama treatment, starring Ben Barnes, Colin Firth and some truly terrifying hairstyles:

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I must admit, I haven’t seen The Young Victoria on DVD yet, but I did see it at a press screening prior to its cinematic launch, as preparation for interviewing Jack Murphy, the movement director who choreographed the pivotal waltz scene in the film.

It’s a really good period drama, with a script by Julian Fellowes that just crackles all the way throughout. And with Miranda Richardson as a member of the royal family, it can hardly fail (if you’ve ever seen Blackadder or Poliakoff’s The Lost Prince, you’ll know what I mean).

Emily Blunt is superb in the title role, cleverly balancing the role of head of state with that of a young woman who, despite being aware of her responsbilities, yearns to be allowed some release. There’s one beat in particular where, after a particularly arduous affair of state, she literally kicks her heels back once in private in a way that is just joyous to watch.

Rupert Friend is every inch her equal, though, as the young Prince Albert who steals her heart. While the marriage is initially conducted for political reasons, it’s clear early on that it is a partnership based completely on love, and that’s something that is really beautiful to watch.

The ending is a problem, though, as I recall. It feels as if a disagreement between the couple is concocted to induce a sense of peril, and once it is resolved one is flung directly in to the “what happened next” captions that signal the end of the film. One is left wanting much, much more — which isn’t a bad way to end a film, I suppose.

The trailer is below; you can buy a DVD of The Young Victoria on Amazon.co.uk.

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1. Streetdance 3D: two dimensions more than the script
2. The Tonight with Trevor McDonald Film Festival
3. Civil partnerships: the fight’s not over

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Golly, is it that long since I last posted? Whoops. I’ve been quite busy over at TV Today, as well as implementing quite a few technology infrastructure changes at The Stage which nobody else will notice (other than a substantially faster web server with — touch wood — no regular outages). And lots of other stuff which I can’t talk about for various reasons.

Any way, I just wanted to post that the most depressing thing I read this morning was in an otherwise enlightening interview with Stephen Daldry in this mornings Guardian:

Sydney Pollack is seriously ill.

Terribly sad to hear. I can’t find other reference to his illness elsewhere on the internet, so I keep my fingers crossed that it’s something from which he can recover. His roll call of films he’s either produced, directed or acted in is mightily impressive, and includes some brilliant work.

And now as I post this I realise that my last post was about Kev passing away. Gosh, this is a fun subject to resume blogging with, isn’t it?

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As the marketing machine for Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials films cranks up, the website gives you the chance to discover what your daemon would look like. You start off by answering 20 questions about your own personality, after which your daemon is revealed. Rather cleverly, the type of daemon isn’t set in stone: for the next 12 days, people can answer supplementary questions about how they see you, and your daemon may change form as a result.

For the time being, my daemon Brienne is a crow. But who knows what she will look like after you’ve answered five questions about me?

Update: That was quick! She’s now a mouse…

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Last night, Jason and I (plus Jason’s friend Helen) went to an invitation screening of extracts from four films funded in part or in total by money from the National Lottery (either via the Film Council or the Arts Council for England). The screening is to become part of a future edition of ITV1’s current affairs programme, Tonight with Trevor McDonald, currently scheduled for Friday 19 November.

If any evidence was needed for the atrocious dumbing down of the ITV network’s current affairs output, last night provided more than enough. I have never witnessed such a brazenly manipulative attempt to wring the desired answer out of a group of volunteers masquerading as honest journalism.

We were given a large card ‘thumb’ each with which to vote after seeing the first 15 minutes of each film. Our voting was, we were directed, to be conducted along the following lines:

• Thumbs up if we would like to see more of the film, and we thought it deserved Lottery funding.
• Thumbs down if we didn’t want to see more of the film, and we thought it didn’t deserve funding.

As you can see, two distinct and unrelated opinions were being deliberately conflated. The only way you can justify doing so is if you take it as read that the only films deserving funding are ones that you yourself would enjoy. That’s not necessarily true. A number of us said so in various ways during the Q&A sessions after each film clip, but it will be interesting to see how much remains in the edited programme.

If I sound sceptical about the production team’s editing, it’s not without cause, I fear. After the second of the four films (Scottish Walter Mitty/Amelie wannabe, Janice Beard), presenter Jonathan Maitland asked for volunteers from the audience to talk about the film — requesting two people who had voted thumbs up, and two who had given the thumbs down. After recording two positive comments and one negative one, the team moved on to a woman in the front row who had voted negatively. She gave the quite reasonable comment that it wasn’t the sort of film that did anything for her, and quite possibly wouldn’t have gone to see it at the cinema. However, she said, she didn’t have any objection to it receiving Lottery funding, because it would encourage diversity and experience within the British film-making industry.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Maitland answered her comments with a brusque, “Thanks. Anybody else who voted ‘thumbs down’ want to say anything?” The implication was clear: that wasn’t the sort of reasonable comment they were looking for.

The third film received a unanimous thumbs-up from the audience; hardly surprising, since it was the critical and commercial success, Touching The Void. Maitland expressed surprise that the UK Film Council only funded that film to the tune of £350,000 when, say, Sex Lives of the Potato Men got £1 million. That, to my mind, betrays his lack of understanding of several points:

• documentaries - even those with dramatic reconstructions, such as Touching the Void - will have fewer overheads than a film which by its nature requires a larger cast, multiple locations, and all the ancillary costs that go with a full-scale drama;
• Touching the Void had its funding ‘topped up’ by the UK Film Council after arranging funding from third parties (Film Four);
• when this film was in the planning and funding stage, documentary feature films were not enjoying the resurgence they’ve seen recently (and of which Touching the Void has been a part) — meaning that any funding would have been considered a potentially greater risk.

There are always questions to ask about state subsidy of the arts, whether directly from Government coffers or via revenue generated by the National Lottery. However, I get the distinct impression that Tonight with Trevor McDonald won’t be asking them.

Out of interest, the National Lottery has distributed £16 billion of funding over the last 10 years through its various endowment bodies. In contrast, the UK Film Council has an estimated spend of just £60 million (PDF) each year. Just a small portion of that (£17m) is invested directly in feature film production (counting the Development Fund, Premiere Fund and the New Cinema Fund).

It will be interesting to see if Tonight mentions that its report is concerned with just 1% of annual Lottery spending. From what I’ve experienced, though, I doubt it.

Out of interest, the four films from which we were shown footage were:

• Sex Lives of the Potato Men
• Janice Beard 45wpm
• Touching the Void
• Body Song

Body Song is also available in an interactive form online (requires Shockwave).

Related posts:

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2. The dark side of Eurovision bloc voting
3. Sunshine and Moon

The death of 21-year old Wyoming student Matthew Shepard shocked America and the world. Beaten up by two youths, he was taken to the outskirts of town, tied to a fence and beaten mercilessly until the only part of him that was not covered in blood were the tracks of tears down his face. He died in hospital six days later, on October 12 1998.

The event rocked the small town of Laramie where Matt and his murderers grew up. For a while, the nation’s — indeed the world’s — eyes were upon a town with less than 25,000 residents. As part of the analysis, playwright Moisés Kaufman and a group of actors from this company, the Tectonic Theater Project went to Laramie and conducted interviews with the townsfolk. Out of those conversations came the play The Laramie Project, an adaptation both of the transcripts and the process of acquiring them.

As a stage piece, I’ve always felt the play was fundamentally flawed — with a small ensemble cast, each having to take on multiple roles, the mechanics of theatre tend to overshadow the horrors of the reality the cast attempt to portray. This was one of the main faults of the recent London performance, powerful as it was. And so, it was with some trepidation that I sat down to watch the film version, now available on VHS and DVD (to rent, and to buy from 7 July 2003).

The film was selected to open the 2002 Sundance Festival, and from its opening frames it’s easy to see that the medium of film has transformed the stage play into something far superior.

The play’s director Moisés Kaufman again takes the helm, making his debut into the world of film direction. Apart from two of the original Theater Project actors (who play themselves), each character is portrayed by a different actor or actress. This makes for a far more believable experience as a viewer, requiring less suspension of disbelief. Financial backing from US cable channel HBO means that the cast consists of some of the cream of American acting talent. The impressive roll call of actors includes Christina Ricci as a friend of Matthew; Janeane Garofalo as the first out lesbian professor at the University of Wyoming; Steve Buscemi as a car service driver who took Shepard to a gay bar in Colorado; Joshua Jackson as the bartender who served Shepard the night he met Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, the men who murdered him; and Amy Madigan as the police officer who was first on the murder scene.

Shot in a documentary style, Kaufman intercuts reconstructed events with his expanded acting troupe with genuine news reports surrounding the aftermath of Matthew’s death. Unlike the play, the lives of the residents of Wyoming comes to the fore, and the actors collecting the interviews become less of a focal point, which is as it should be. While it’s always apparent that these are actors working to a script — the speeches are all too measured, too contemplative, to convince anyone that they’re watching a documentary — there is not one performance that is anything less than solid. Special praise has to go to Madigan’s police chief, as she learns that her desperation to help the blood-soaked Matthew had left her exposed to the AIDS virus after hearing that Shepard was HIV-positive; also to Jackson’s barman, who plays exactly the right level of self-deprecating humour that shines through from the original transcript. James Murtaugh also puts in a chilling performance as the hate-filled Reverend Fred Phelps, who led his church into protesting at Shepard’s funeral and who has organised numerous protests at stagings of the play and the film ever since.

Not even the hardest of hearts could sit through this film with a dry eye. It is a powerhouse of a film that will leave you mourning someone you never knew, and determined to ensure that nobody receives the same fate as the young man that the world took into their hearts.

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Anybody who remembers the theme of the X-Men comics, or indeed the first film, will have noticed some obvious parallels. Here we have mutants, a section of the world’s population who are “different”, treated with fear, aggression and hostility by the world’s politicians. Fighting for their rights, two distinct movements spring up: one believes in working with the politicians, patiently trying to change their minds and embrace diversity, while another favours more direct action.

The allegory isn’t hard to spot, although it speaks just as much on issues of race and gender as it does on sexuality, but it fuels the whole X-Men mythos with a contemporary resonance that propels it into the leagues of truly great science fiction. And with the first film in what looks like becoming an ongoing franchise setting a high standard in terms of adrenaline-pumping action and great acting from some of the industry’s finest, X2 has a great deal to live up to.

Glad to say, for the most part director Bryan Singer delivers. Freed from the mountains of exposition about each character needed in the first film, there’s a sense of a much broader canvas here. Taking its cue from its predecessor (and, indeed, the comics on which the series is based), X2 concentrates on Hugh Jackman’s amnesiac Logan, aka Wolverine, and his struggle to recall his past, while simultaneously trying to cope with his growing attraction to Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) and the subsequent jealousy from Jean’s boyfriend Cyclops (a criminally underused James Marsden).

Given the large cast of the first film, it would be tricky enough to ensure everybody got a decent amount of screen time in the sequel. Yet X2 nearly doubles the cast of “regulars”, bringing in a range of new mutant pupils to the school established by Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart), and the brilliantly hammy Brian Cox as the villainous Stryker.

The film’s masterstroke, though, is the mysterious mutant Nightcrawler, whose daring attempted assassination of the US President in the Oval Office at the film’s opening sets a level of gob-smacking tension and wonder that subsequent scenes try, and nearly succeed, in matching. Under the layers of prosthetics, Scottish actor Alan Cumming delivers the standout performance of the film, no mean feat when pitted against the likes of Jackman, Janssen, Stewart, Ian McKellen’s Magneto and Anna Paquin’s Rogue.

Interspersed amongst the high-octane fight sequences are plenty of character moments, with a script liberally laced with charm and knowing wit. One particular scene will delight, as young mutant Bobby Drake (‘Iceman’) is forced by circumstance to ‘come out’ to his parents as being not quite like other boys. The deadpan reaction of his non-plussed mother (“Have you tried… not being a mutant?”) is just one of many gems that make X2 far more than an average beat-em-up blockbuster. While there’s nothing to compare to X-Men’s opening concentration camp sequence, the ending to X2 will have fans of the original comic with a tear in their eye and a smile of hope on their lips.

• Originally published on Gay.com UK

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• Originally published on Gay.com UK

Antonia and Massimo have been married for fifteen years, but are still very much in love. With no children and only a small circle of friends, their relationship is so intense that, when Massimo gets knocked down in a car accident, Antonia’s life falls completely to pieces. Neglecting her family and friends, her pain increases when she discovers a love letter to her husband written on the back of a painting called ‘The Ignorant Fairies’.

In her obsession to find out the identity of this mystery woman, Antonia is shocked to discover that her husband’s lover was, in fact, a man. Not only that, but Massimo and his boyfriend Michele had been together for seven years, creating a large network of close friends — an extended family that Antonia, despite herself, begins to find herself drawn into.

Thus, the scene for director Ferzan Ozpetek’s latest film is set. Le Fate Ignoranti is a powerful discourse on the nature of friendship and family, and what place love has when the boundaries between the two become less distinct. Antonia (played by award-winning actress Margherita Buy) travels a complex emotional journey, starting off completely resenting Michele (Stefano Accorsi) but gradually realising that she has more in common with him than she ever did with her husband. Still, she finds it impossible to stop grieving, and her palpable pain at seeing Michele laughing and joking — and finding possible new lovers — is gut-wrenching.

In less confident hands, Michele’s extended family could come across as a collection of hackneyed stereotypes: a prostitute, a male-to-female transsexual, a good-looking man who is struggling with his anti-HIV medication — the staple of many a poor gay melodrama. However, with Ozpetek (director of Hamam: The Turkish Bath) at the helm, and a cast of supporting actors that never hit a wrong note, the course of Antonia and Michele’s growing attraction towards each other remains completely believable, wholly involving and heart-achingly resonant right until the closing credits.

There are precious few films that, after one viewing, will encourage you to drag your friends along to see it again with you. Le Fate Ignoranti is one such film: a sweet, uplifting tale that stays with you long after you’ve left the cinema.

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