Mark Kermode on Sex and the City 2

When former Trotskyite film critic meets Sex and the City 2 on BBC Radio 2's film review show...

Kermode: I should say right at the beginning of this, you're not going to get a rant about this... My expectations were low, and I have to say they were met. It's ghastly. I've spent quite a lot of time in the last week trying to figure out exactly what it is that is so ghastly, and putrid, and vomit-inducing about Sex and the City 2.

[There follows a 5 minute dissection of the film's plot and themes, including its "horrible" portrayal of women.]

Kermode: I'd like to move this on from sex war politics to class war politics... Firstly, you are meant to be engaged with these characters who are stinking wealthy and consumerist beyond your wildest dreams. The main one, the one played by Sarah Jessica Parker, appears to write books, although we never actually see her write; every now and then she goes and sits down and does a little bit of fiddling around. She lives in an apartment with her husband, who in order to be funding this apartment is probably an arms dealer. It's never really discussed where all their money is coming from. And she gets cross with him because at one point he buys her a massive flat screen television, and she's cross that he hasn't bought her a bit of jewelry. And then, because their relationship is a little bit on top of each other, she goes back to her other apartment, which she's just kept on. She has a whole other apartment.

Okay? So they have one lavish apartment, massive television, huge amounts of wealth, massive amount of clothes, walk-in wardrobe that you could put a family in, then she goes off to another apartment that she hasn't been bothered to sell because we're all so wealthy, and then she moans and complains about how awful her life is, and isn't this difficult, I really have to get away from all this...

The point is, why do I care about this character? This is a character who has so much money, so much wealth, that, actually having two apartments, she's still, "Oh god, it's so hard, so difficult, I'm having problems with my relationship." The defining moment for me is: she goes to this hotel which is $22,000 a night, okay, but she's getting it on the free. When they arrive, each one of them is given their own personal exotic flunky who then waits on them hand and foot... At no point does anyone say, I'm sorry, this is just ghastly beyond belief, this is horrible...

The unacceptable facelifts of capitalism

So what happens is, at one moment the flunky she has been given points out that actually he can only go and see his wife once every couple of months because the airfare is expensive. And you expect this to be a moment when she suddenly realises that the ghastly wealth she's living with has a consequence, that there are people around who have less money. But no! This is used as a moment so that she can go, "Oh yes, I have to be away from Mr Big sometimes as well, therefore..." And you're going, I can't believe you have done this! You stinkingly wealthy consumerist, dripping with gold, shoes, blah di blah di blah - he doesn't have enough money to go and see his wife, and what you see in this isn't horrible, staggering inequality of just corpulent, filthy lucre, but "Oh yes, we both have the same issue, which is to do with being apart from our loved one." Point number one, okay?

Mayo: This is the old Trot at the barricades, isn't it?

Kermode: I'm sorry, this is. This was the point at which I starting going, [sings and beats chest] "Then comrades, come rally..." Sorry, okay. As for the rest of them-

Mayo: What was that?

Kermode: That's the Internationale.

[There follows another 5 minute rabid dissection of the film's political and racial offensiveness.]

Kermode: Essentially, the message of the film is this: feel sympathy for people who are disgustingly wealthy, and so digustingly wealthy that they not only don't notice having a spare apartment, not only don't notice losing the income from a job, not only don't notice that one of the people they're employing is so poor that he can only afford to go and see his wife once every three months, not only that, but are also imperialist American pigdogs of the highest order when it comes to cultural imperialism. I mean honestly, I tell you, it's one of those things where you just think, this is a satire, right? ... On the class war politics, it is the most-

Mayo: Yeah, we get the point.

Kermode: Don't say it like that!

Mayo: You did say, "I'm not going to rant", and that was about ten minutes ago.

Kermode: It is just - it is consumerist pornography, it is an orgy of just dripping, you know, just dripping wealth that made me want to be sick.

Mayo: Well, as many listeners have said, if that wasn't a rant, then what is?

Talking with Ukrainians

Scene: Tarquin is in the kitchen with Ukrainian Butchers 1 and 2. Ukrainian Butcher 1 notices some washed tin cans on the drying rack next to the sink.

Ukrainian Butcher 1: [Picks up tin can.] Why you put this here?

Tarquin: So I can put it in recycling.

Ukrainian Butcher 1: [Points at recycling bags.] In there?

Tarquin: No, that's just for plastic and paper. I have to take this to the supermarket.

Ukrainian Butcher 1: They give you money?

Tarquin: No. I just take them and throw them in a big bank.

Ukrainian Butcher 1: [Stares at Tarquin in incomprehension.] Why?

Tarquin: Because it's good to recycle.

Ukrainian Butcher 1: [Points at waste bin.] Why not in there?

Tarquin: Um, because less waste is better. It's good to recycle things.

[Ukrainian Butchers 1 and 2 stare at Tarquin in total bemusement. They exchange a comment in Russian.]

Ukrainian Butcher 2: You have good family, yes?

Tarquin: What?

Ukrainian Butcher 1: Wait, wait.

[Ukrainian Butcher 1 takes out mobile phone with built in Russian-English translator. Awkward silence while he looks up a word and shows the translation to Tarquin. The word is "upbringing".]

Ukrainian Butcher 1: You have good upbringing, good family, yes?

Tarquin: Well, I suppose so, yes.

[Both Ukrainian Butchers laugh.]

Iron Man 2

Being at something of a loose end last night, I went to see Iron Man 2 with Moogdroog, Vlad and a friend of Vlad's. After picking up Vlad and friend from the city (drunk and five minutes late, as usual)*, we stopped by Moogdroog's place and went to the shiny Vue multiplex outside York.

I didn't have high expectations of the film. The first Iron Man was amusing and distracting enough, but to give a meaningful judgment I suppose you need to be a comic book fan, which I'm not; it had explosions and fighting with enough of a trace of wit and irony, at least, to keep it from turning into Transformers. I don't remember much about it to be honest.

This sequel is pretty much more of the same. Lots of special effects, some of them impressive. There were two really good things about it: Robert Downey Jr himself, and the part where psychotic Russian evil genius Mickey Rourke strides onto the Monaco Grand Prix race track and smashes all the cars to bits with his lightning whips. And while the story is uninspired, the dialogue and performances manage to keep enough life in it to last till the end credits.

On the down side, Scarlett Johansson is wasted as a hard-as-nails-and-improbably-sexy-yet-ice-cold female special agent ninja Black Widow. The role is probably necessary as a gender counterbalance to the leering playboy sex-pest that is the central character, but it's not exactly one of Johansson's most challenging roles. Gwyneth Paltrow spends most of the film looking like she's about to cry or be punched in her simpering face. And then there's the product placement, but that's par for the course these days.

I thought the real problem was that I ended up feeling rather sorry for the main villain, Rourke's Ivan Vanko. The poor guy had a really tough upbringing in Siberia with his disgraced and exiled father, and all he wants is to exact revenge on Stark, whom he blames for his family's fate. He cobbles together his homemade power suit from what looks like tin cans and bits of twine before smashing up Stark's orgy of wealth and privilege at Monaco. He never really stands much of a chance against the resources of his nemesis, who spends most of the film strutting about like the self-obsessed wanker he is.

I couldn't tell if the film's apparent celebration of fascistic militarism was supposed to be ironic or not. The movie starts with Stark landing on a stage surrounding by fireworks, a huge American flag and a team of dancing girls in hotpants.

Subtle

Jon Favreau is no Paul Verhoeven, that's for sure. The camera pays a little too much attention to the girls not to be salacious. Stark is a great character largely because he is a wanker: born into the millionaire lifestyle like Bruce Wayne, minus the brooding self-importance and tortured emo double-life, plus an unhealthy dose of the arms industry. But are we seriously supposed to identify and sympathise with Stark on this level? Isn't the character of Ivan Vanko, the poverty-stricken underdog driven mad with desire for vengeance, much more tragic and sympathetic? When he isn't killing innocent civilians, I mean.

Spot the wanker

Spot the underdog

Spot the dog

* I mean Vlad was drunk and late, not me.

Ridley Scott's Robin Hood

I have made three big mistakes in my life. The first was riding my bike into a ditch full of nettles when I was eight. The second was taking Media Studies for A Level. And the third was going to see Ridley Scott's Robin Hood.

Russell Crowe was interviewed on Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's BBC radio show last week and said that Scott wanted to make a new film about Robin Hood because it was ripe for reinvention: once Mel Brooks has made a parody of a particular genre or story, you know it's time to move on. Which is fair enough, I suppose, except that the tale of Robin Hood has been reinvented so many times already...






... there can't be many places left to go with it. Still Ridley Scott, being the cinematic genius he is, has found a new direction which nobody else has dared attempt. He's turned the classic tale of Robin Hood into a cock-eyed shambles.

It's a bold move, and sure to be controversial. Russell Crowe does his part with a remarkably incompetent attempt at a "regional" English accent which meanders quite happily across the Irish Sea and back again several times in each sentence. He and Cate Blanchett also somehow manage to take one of the great historical romances and sap all life out of it. The dramatically pivotal moment when Robin says the line "I love you, Marian", he may as well have been talking to his horse. The rest of the cast isn't bad, but so uninspiring there's nothing much to say about it.

The big problem is just that the film flails about all over the place, perhaps because three writers, three producers (including Crowe) and four executive producers is waaaay too many cooks in the kitchen. I won't be spoiling anything if I say that Robin Hood isn't actually declared an outlaw until the last five minutes of the film; in fact I'll be sparing you the agony of spending two hours wondering when the real story is going to start.

See, I always thought that the story of Robin Hood was about an outlaw who lived in a forest and stole from the rich to give to the poor in the face of tyranny. Very simple, very iconic, which is why it's always been so popular.

Ridley Scott thinks that the story of Robin Hood is about some common archer called Robin Longstride who fought in Richard the Lionheart's army, got put in the stocks, then escaped and pretended to be a knight in order to get back to England to fulfill the dying wish of Sir Robin of Loxley that he return his sword to his estranged father in Nottingham, who then decides to pretend that Robin Longstride is his son, even though he looks nothing like his son, largely in order to contrive some narrative excuse for romantic awkwardness between Robin Longstride and Robin of Loxley's widow, Maid Marian (who isn't a maid at all, since she is a widow), and by some moronic coincidence it turns out that Robin of Loxley's father actually knew Robin Longstride's father, whom Robin Longstride has forgotten about, and says that he was a political visionary who wanted common rights for all men, then Robin Longstride (still pretending to be Robin of Loxley, mind) has some flashbacks in which he remembers the murder of his father by a bunch of soldiers and realises that he is from Barnsdale, and decides to become a great general and hero of the common man by shouting at King John, who then promises to sign the Magna Carta if they all join him to defeat the French invasion, which they do, but then all the people cheer Robin Longstride (who at some point has gone back to his true identity) instead of him, so he gets mad and refuses to sign the Magna Carta after all and declares Robin Longstride an outlaw. Then, just as it starts to get interesting, the film ends.

Basically you pay to watch 140 minutes of exposition. But there's plenty of additional retardation thrown in to keep you exasperated and/or amused.

1) Robin Longstride and his boring bunch of wanker friends decide to pass themselves off as knights after Robin says, "There's is no difference between a knight and an ordinary man except the clothes he wears." Now I'm sorry, but no. It worked in A Knight's Tale because that was a comedy. In this film it is just dumb. For one thing, the knights whose clothes they steal were Anglo-Normans and would have spoken French. Could a modern English yokel pass himself off as a member of the French elite by donning a beret? I think not.

2) British people laughed at Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves because the film had Kevin Costner land at Dover and walk in one day to Nottingham via Hadrian's Wall. In this film, an entire fucking army gallops non-stop from Nottingham to the south coast via what looks like the Lake District or Snowdonia.

3) The beach set-piece battle at the end is stupid. Having hundreds of horsemen charging through the surf looks impressive in the trailer, I admit. But really, the battle is such an obvious attempt to make a medieval version of Saving Private Ryan's D-Day scene that I was laughing through most of it. They have the same frenetic, handheld style, the same blue-grey washed out colouring, even some shots are almost identical, except with bows and arrows instead of machine guns.

French coast, 1944

English coast, 1199

4) The stupidest moment in the entire film is when Maid Marian, being a modern, liberated twelfth-century woman, turns up at the final battle riding a war charger in full armour and proceeds to hack her way through the French army, because, as we all know, medieval warfare was nothing more than sitting on a horsey and waving a sharp thing around at random. By this point I wasn't even surprised to see Friar Tuck also in the fray. My standards of logic had fallen so low that seeing a middle-aged, overweight, drunkard clergyman slaughtering professional soldiers made perfect sense.

It's a pity, because a couple of weeks ago I went to see a largely ignored historical film by Alejandro Amenabar (director of The Others) called Agora, starring Rachel Weisz. It was a dramatisation of the life of Hypatia, who was a pagan female philosopher in Alexandria at the end of the fourth century, a time when it was a bad idea to be a pagan female philosopher anywhere. The film chronicled her earnest pursuit of reason and scientific truth while the world around her was being torn apart by bloody street fighting between pagan mobs and militant Christian monks.


Agora was trying to be intelligent and interesting, and mostly managed to do both. It also had something useful to say about the nature of religious conflict. It got a mixed reception because critics thought it was too highbrow, which it wasn't, provided that when you go to the cinema you're prepared to have one or two brain cells excited instead of having all ten billion numbed into oblivion by explosions and punches and stabbings and penis jokes. All of which Robin Hood has in abundance. Thanks, Ridley, for lowering the collective IQ of western civilisation another couple of points.

Offa's Dyke Path (part 1)

I injured my back sledging in January, and then managed to tear my gluteus maximus by limping about for a few days without a walking stick, a mistake which left me more or less bedridden for a month while the muscle tried to stitch itself back together. But being stuck in a flat and unable to hobble any farther than the corner shop without insufferable pain did at least remind me that having fully mobility is, after all, a very Good Thing not to be taken for granted.

So during my temporary crippledom I decided to set myself a target for recovery, and a lengthy hike seemed a nice idea. I needed one which would fall neatly within the two-week window between finishing in Vienna and starting a new job in York; it couldn't be too harsh, and somewhere close to home would be best.

Offa's Dyke Path fit the bill: 182 miles from Prestatyn on the north Welsh coast to the Bristol Channel, roughly following the border through the hills and valleys of the Welsh Marches. Best of all, Offa's Dyke is an early medieval earthwork built by the Mercian King Offa to keep out (or at least annoy) the Welsh, so I would gain medieval nerd points by walking along its length.

On the Mayday bank holiday weekend, a few days after I returned from Vienna, I went up to Prestatyn with Moogdroog and a few siblings and together we rambled the first 27 miles. On the third day Gem and I continued south with Fin the Dog (who had to go home on the fourth day, sadly), reaching Knighton, just over halfway, on the sixth.

Here's a musical slideshow thing...