Two recent DVD releases from the BFI offer up some rarely seen treasures.

The Exiles is a short documentary from Kent Mackenzie, released originally in 1961, and depicting the lives of a group of young American Indians over a 24 hour period. Set in the Bunker Hill area of Los Angeles, the film was three years in the making for director, writer and producer Mackenzie and it captures the ebb and flow of a densely populated area of the city that was home to retirees, immigrants and the transplanted Indian exiles that are the focus of the film's themes.

This is a stunningly photographed black and white gem, recently restored by UCLA, that makes visual poetry out of the faded and delapidated area, lit by neon and marked by a rootless down and out atmosphere. At the centre are a group of friends and their intertwining paths during the course of one night as they go out drinking, dancing, fighting, gambling and eventually to congregate above the city and reconnect with their tribal customs.

It opens with a slightly dislocated sequence of photographs of North American Indians by Edward Curtis accompanied by a sombre voice over that suggests this is going to be a dry, dusty piece of documentary. Don't let that fool you because The Exiles brims with life, buzzing with sights and sounds and captures something of the lives of these urban immigrants, their cramped living conditions and the antagonistic relationships between men and women, wives and husbands.

We follow Homer, Yvonne and Tommy as they attempt to come to terms with the unfulfilled promise of the American dream and the rather sordid and faded reality that's actually their lot. Yvonne spends her time fetching and carrying for her husband Homer and then whiles away her hours at the cinema, at a friend's house or gazing into shop windows at goods she will never be able to afford.

Homer hits the bars with Tommy and gets up to no good, joining a card game thinking he might get lucky. Some of the guys pick up a couple of girls and take them on a hair-raising drunken car journey down the Third Street tunnel next to the Hill's funicular rail station and there's a tense rest stop at local gas station where one of the girls refuses advances from one of the guys and they abandon her.

There are bar room brawls as the frustrations of such makeshift lives spill over. They all drift in and out of darkness, lost and with apathy towards any attempt at advancement. This is carried by the monologues on the soundtrack, naturalistically regaling us with their interior thoughts and feelings. The film also has a curious non-naturalistic edge to it because pretty much all of the dialogue was re-recorded separately and then looped painstakingly back onto the film. There are noticeable disparities between the movement of the characters mouths and the dialogue that add an almost dream like, slightly time-shifted quality to the narrative.

It's also a vital record of an area of Los Angeles that no longer remains because civic redevelopment in the 1960s cleared the areas that were deemed eyesores and it offers the first stirrings of a new American cinema, born out of both a documentary tradition that harks back to Humphrey Jennings and anticipating the naturalism of the French New Wave and the work of Cassavetes. Added to this is a great rock soundtrack from The Revels that underscores the fag end of the 1950s depicted here.

A gritty and moving odyssey through the marginalised communities of the area, with searingly beautiful photography, the BFI two disc release is packed full of extra features:

• Four shorts directed by Kent Mackenzie including Bunker Hill, A Skill for Molina, The Story of  Rodeo Cowboy and Ivan and His Father 
• Commentary featuring Sherman Alexie and Sean Axmaker
• 2008 theatrical trailer 
• Los Angeles Plays Itself, extracts from Thom Anderson's film
• Opening night panel discussion at UCLA (audio) 
• Last Days of Angels Flight - short film by Robert Kirste 
• Bunker Hill: A Tale of Urban Renewal - short film by Greg Kimble 
• White Fawn's Devotion - thought to be the first film directed by a Native American
• Charles Burnett and Sherman Alexie on the Leonard Lopate Show (audio)
• Sherman Alexie interviewed by Sean Axmaker (audio)
• Stills Gallery
• Downloadable PDF files of Kent Mackenzie scripts, thesis, press kit and film notes.

The Exiles (BFI - Region 2 - Cert 12 - BFIVD853 - Released 15th February 2010)

In stark contrast comes The Pleasure Garden, a short film made by bisexual American poet James Broughton and shot in the grounds and ruins of the Crystal Palace Terraces. Known to many as the father of the independent West Coast cinema, James Broughton's career spanned 40 years, beginning in 1946.

This short film, made in 1953, is a lyrical, poetic depiction of a group of eccentrics living a seemingly idyllic life in the ruins, freely doing as they please. They cycle, run races, pose as statues and act out their true desires. Then a sombre figure, Colonel. Pall K. Gargoyle, a funeral director by all appearances, played by John Le Mesurier, and his equally censorious Aunt Minerva, arrive at the park and apply their deeply conservative moral code to all the liberal freedom around them, slapping up forbidding notices to stop all the fun, throwing people behind bars, forcing bland traditionalism to replace surreal liberalism and modernism.

The muse is released and freedom restored by the carefree Mrs. Albion, played by Mesurier's then wife Hattie Jacques, who uses her magic scarf to free minds and hearts.  Passion, desire and happiness return to the gardens and the Colonel, his Aunt and their repressive laws are sent packing. The characters find love and inspiration in the gardens, artists find their muses, repressed women find the men they're looking for and modernism and freedom of expression triumphs.

It's as odd as it sounds and is a visually surreal, Cocteau-like stream of consciousness that rather strangely and symbolically depicts the struggle of a modernist Britain attempting to emerge from the wreckage of war and the mill of conservative tradition. It's a bohemian vision that chimes with the emerging counter-cultural forces that were already about to shape the 1960s and is a sweet ode to untrammeled desire.

Photographed in gorgeous black and white by the legendary Walter Lassally, (he would go on to work with Lindsay Anderson, who briefly pops up here in a cameo role, and the Free Cinema movement and become a key figure in the British New Wave of the 1960s) the film won the Prix de Fantaisie Poetique at Cannes in 1954.

Its statues springing to life, people sitting in trees and surrealist misfits will not be to everyone's taste but it still weaves a magical spell in honour of the Pleasure Principle.

There's also a fascinating short documentary The Phoenix Tower, made in 1957, that charts the construction of the BBC's Crystal Palace Television mast. The film was used for colour test transmissions for BBC2 back in 1964 and it's a lovely historical record for those interested in the engineering behind its construction. The illustrated booklet also contains a history of the Crystal Palace, review and notes.

The Pleasure Garden (BFI - Region 2 - Cert U - BFIVD831 - Released 15th February 2010)

BBCHD - 21st February 2010 - 9.00pm

Opening with the now familiar pre-titles flashback sequence, we find ourselves in London 1941 and witness the first encounter between Ivan and Daisy. A fantastic scene that exposes the reasons why they eventually partnered up, with Ivan suggesting to Daisy that she will always have thwarted ambitions if she stays with the humans, challenging her to seize danger and become indestructible. A reflection, in effect, of the terrible revenge that she encourages Mitchell to carry out later in the episode.


Toby Whithouse is back as writer and you know that major sections of the story arc are about to shift into place because this is the penultimate episode of the series. As Nina walks back down the street she left at the beginning of this series we know she's there at Kemp and Jaggat's behest and that a trap is about to be sprung. Great to see Sinead Keenan as Nina and back as a major cog in the series' plotting. Her chat with Annie is intercut with George waking up in his new home as Annie reveals to Nina that he has moved on and found someone else. Also, take note of how concerned George is about what time it is when he does wake up, at breakfast with Sam and Molly and then Nina's mention of the full moon because it's a little signal of how Whithouse is going to turn George's world upside down by the end of the episode.

Russell Tovey and Sinead are, as ever, great together and their first get together in the kitchen is bristling with wariness and anger. Love the bit where Nina explains that she's met people who might have a cure. 'For what?' ask George,  'Cystitis, what do you think!' snaps Nina. Even though George isn't convinced about 'the priest and the mad scientist' and their cure, he decides to meet them with Nina. He's seemingly over Nina and there's a sense here that he's just humouring her, fearing that if she stays around his personal life will get too complicated. That this will be in ways that he doesn't know about yet is already suggestive of the overall structure and purpose of the story.


Mitchell picks through the devastating aftermath of the bomb at the funeral parlour, finding Daisy grieving over the death of Ivan. He believes that it was payback for the death of the Chief Constable and is still unaware of Lucy Jaggat's treachery and her part in Kemp's plans. A great set up where the audience knows more than the characters and there's a building sense of expectation and dread in what will happen when Mitchell eventually catches on. Daisy is not convinced and doesn't think it was the police.  She is aware of a recent shift in the balance between humans and vampires and tells Mitchell the humans are fighting back. Just like the war in which she met Ivan, she's now in the middle of another conflict, seeing Mitchell as a potential replacement for Ivan and as a rallying figure. She wants results and she's going to use Mitchell to get them.

George tells Mitchell of Nina's return and the alleged cure but, amusingly Mitchell's too busy rubbing himself (be still my beating heart) with cologne samples in magazines to recognise the threat. He also thinks Lucy's disappearance is simply down to the fact that he told her he was a vampire. The tension between the main characters innocence in the face of what's going on around them and the escalating threat from Jaggat and Kemp is brilliantly handled and I'm sure many of us were shouting at the telly at this point. This is further emphasised by Lucy apparently believing that Mitchell died in the bomb blast. Will she therefore play a pivotal role, out of pure guilt and her affection for Mitchell, in reversing what Kemp has in store for the three friends? This tragic inevitability is exactly what the series needs after two weeks of somewhat treading water.


Annie and George just think the meeting with Kemp and Nina is a bit of a lark and there's some lovely ribbing between the two characters before George lets their visitors into the house. But the tone completely shifts from George's undisguised mockery to his sense that Kemp might be onto something when he states that with each transformation the wolf gets stronger and this manifests itself in George's life in the period between changes.  This is something George is very aware of even though he finds the whole religious dimension to Kemp's solution rather hard to accept, especially when Nina herself equates their curse with 'Satan's miracles'. Like us, George finds it hard to understand how even Nina could fall for it all and their later animosity is very hard to stomach. The rebound of this is George's rather impetuous offer to marry Sam. Sadly, we all know it's going to go hideously wrong.

The pivotal moment arrives when Mitchell discovers Lucy's betrayal through the interrogation and murder of the coroner. Mitchell is transformed from a character we've admired for his restraint into an avenging demon as he and Daisy go for full out retaliation. It ushers in a final act that sees not just a reversal of Mitchell's nature but also the disintegration of George's new world and Annie's misguided capitulation to Kemp (after he contacts her through his trained psychic) where she thinks he'll help her cross over and she'll escape the boredom of her limbo existence. The hurt unleashed on the three characters is colossal.


Poor George undergoes a hideously humiliating public transformation at the school's parents evening because the clocks went back the previous night and his timing is out by an hour. It's a striking, brilliantly filmed sequence as he stumbles through the school and out into the streets, the camera in permanent close up on his bewildered, fanged face as the world lurches drunkenly around him. His screams of panic and desperation fade into a scene of a packed commuter train coming to an unscheduled halt and the sounds of an attack over the guard's intercom. Daisy and Mitchell have arrived and the resulting slaughter is horrific. The reveal of the blood spattered carriage and the torn up, disemboweled bodies is one of the most chilling sequences the series has ever done.


Annie submits to a tedious attempt to exorcise her. It fails because she needs a door to pass over. 'Did we bring a door?' asks the psychic of Kemp just as a partly transformed George bursts back into the only real refuge he's known. Annie is able to use her powers to calm him enough to get him into the cage. Kemp implores her to see him because he offers that he can help her and George. Sam is devastated and now understands that 'this is the thing' that George brings to their relationship. Molly however is terrified so much that George is reduced to tears, knowing that this chapter of his life, this desire to be normal, is over unless he attempts Kemp's cure.


Whithouse pushes Annie and George into their respective positions with Kemp whilst also redefining Mitchell in relation to them, turning him a disturbingly lascivious, sensual animal who insults them both but then warns them to stay out of the cities because they won't be safe much longer. As Annie and George leave the house to join Nina, Kemp and Jaggat, she looks back and pronounces 'we're not coming back here again, are we?' This is Whithouse foreshadowing the big changes that will come with the next series.

A doom laden episode that literally brings the shutters down on the series format thus far with a choral mass on the soundtrack and the characters sealed into Kemp's laboratory ('welcome to freedom' utters Lucy Jaggat). At the same time, Mitchell finally learns that Lucy is one and the same Professor Jaggat that Annie and George have offered themselves to. It really couldn't get any darker than that, could it?

Official site

Nora Ephron's film sort of sneaks up on you and plants a big, warm kiss on your cheek when you're unawares. It's a deceptive creature. On the face of it, I have to admit that the ingredients simply aren't the kind of fare I'd normally go for. It has a whiff of chick-flick rom-com and it's only the presence of Meryl Streep that urged me to give this a spin. I also had vague memories of the world famous chef that she plays and, although I couldn't confirm it, I'm sure some of Julia Child's shows played here in the UK back in the early to late 1970s. I do recall that tall woman with the piping voice warmly offering up her mastery of French cuisine.


Here we have two stories merged into one. We get the biographical backstory of how Julia Child, with her husband Paul, arrive in post-war Paris and of how she attempts to fill her time as the wife to a man who works in the diplomatic service. First she tries making hats, then she tries learning bridge and then finally she fixates on learning to cook. She enrols in the Le Cordon Bleu school but also finds that she can't track down a French cook book in English, written for an American readership. She becomes an expert chef and, inspired, decides she's going to write the cook book she's been longing to find. So begins an odyssey spanning decades until she finally publishes Mastering The Art Of French Cooking in 1961.

As this story unfolds it is woven into a parallel narrative about Julie Powell. Julie spends her days dealing with traumatic phone calls about the aftermath of 9/11 in a Lower Manhattan Development Corporation call centre near Ground Zero. She and her husband Eric move into an apartment in Queens, New York and to give her life some semblance of purpose she decides to cook her way through all 524 recipes in Julia Child's classic cookbook during a period of one year. Furthermore, she decides, after her husband encourages her, to blog about the experience. The blog attracts a following and eventually opens up a new career for Julie.


What makes this simplistic set of stories work is the way that Ephron effortlessly shifts between the two, capturing beautifully the romance between Julia and Paul in a picturesque Paris of the late 1940s and 1950s, and the modernist love story between Julie and Eric. One is about a woman coming to terms with her selfhood after the horror of the Second World War and the other is about a woman finding meaning in her life after the city she lives in is devastated by a terrorist attack. These two incongruous stories merge together in a film that is warm and funny and, yes, romantic without straying into sentimental slushiness.

The love between Julia and Paul is very movingly transposed to the screen by Streep and an equally brilliant Stanley Tucci. Streep and Tucci also physically get across how much Julia and Paul enjoyed their sex life and whilst much of Julia's struggles to learn to cook and write her bestselling cookbook create the humour of the film there are two scenes in particular that are particularly moving in describing their childless marriage as a troubling, tragic scar on Julia's psyche. Streep suggests it very briefly in a sequence where Julia and Paul are walking down a Parisian street and pass a woman with a baby in a pram and where Street uses physical and facial movements to convey her regret and then later more overtly when her sister Dorothy (Glee's fabulous Jane Lynch in a glorious cameo) announces her pregnancy and Julia breaks down at the news.

 
Streep is amazing in this film. She gets Julia's physicality spot on with capturing that slight awkwardness inherent in a very tall woman and her vocal intonations too with that piping, lilting staccato inflection. She also conveys Julia's zest for life perfectly and the performance sparkles and flashes off the screen whilst opening up the woman's generous heart and spirit. It's a triumph of character acting.

I have to praise Stanley Tucci too. It's a clever man who can hold his own next to Streep and still emerge with a beautifully nuanced performance as the thoroughly supportive Paul. He's dapper and sophisticated and is subtly gorgeous. A charming creation and wonderfully endearing for most of the film but Tucci also captures the anxiety and frustration when McCarthy calls Paul to a UnAmerican Activities hearing and he's grilled about his work as a diplomat in China and Ceylon and thus bringing their idyll in Paris to a close.


Amy Adams is sweet without being too saccharine as Julie and her relationship is slightly more tempestuous with husband Eric, an appealing performance from Chris Messina, as he begins to resent her every waking hour tied to her blog and readers instead of him. Inevitably there are culinary disasters along the way that provide many amusing moments and triumphs that are wholly uplifting too. Adams and Messina work perfectly together and similarly to Julia and Paul the film mirrors Julie and Eric's passion for cooking and eating. They are ably supported by Mary Jane Rajskub (24's Chloe O'Brien) as Julie's friend Sarah.

Post war Paris and the Child's apartment are recreated in beautiful detail and provide a lush, romantic contrast to the cramped quarters that Julie and Eric live in on the edge of New York, a locale that's unglamourous and refreshingly devoid of the usual emblems of the city that pop up in films made on location there. The food that is cooked and consumed throughout the film will have your mouth watering and is sumptuously photographed. It's quite simply a delightfully sensual film, passionate about life, loving, writing, cooking and eating that manages to avoid what could so easily become sentimentality and cliche. Bon appetit!


The 1080p picture quality is very fine, vibrantly bursting with detail and colour. A lovely transfer that emphasises the luxuriousness of the Child's idyllic life in post-war Paris and captures the tougher, gritter qualities of modern New York. The Paris set sequences really do benefit from the glossiness of the picture but it also copes admirably with the darker, night time scenes in the New York apartment with deep, inky contrast. The DTS-HD Master Audio lossless 5.1 track matches this with a satisfying ambient soundscape, clear and crisp dialogue and a light score.

Special features

Audio Commentary: Not the best effort from writer/director Nora Ephron as her comments tend to be infrequent and often just simply reiterate what we're seeing on the screen. A real shame because she's an accomplished director and writer and I would have liked more anecdotes than we actually get here. 

Secret Ingredients: Creating Julie & Julia (28 min) This is a very nice 'behind the scenes' featurette and in its short running time manages to cover lots of background on the writing, casting, directing and designing of the film. It even looks at how the food was prepared and cooked on the set. Footage of the Paris shoot, including the transformation of a street for the film, interviews with the cast and with Ephron, insights into the photography and performances are all major plusses here.


Family and Friends Remember Julia Child (48 min)  Definitely the best thing in the special features package here. A lengthy biography of Julia Child as seen from the viewpoints of her many friends, relatives and colleagues. It also firmly emphasises what an impact Child made on culinary culture in America and looks at her stint on television. It thoroughly exposes the real Julia Child to show what a warm, giving, funny and lovely woman she was. As the story moves towards the death of her husband Paul and her own decline, the documentary becomes a very moving testament to her achievement. It will make you cry.

Julia's Kitchen(23 min) Fascinating and absorbing examination of how Julia Child donated her entire kitchen to the Smithsonian Institute. It examines how the team catalogued and then took apart the thousand piece kitchen and painstakingly transfered it to the museum.

Cooking Lessons(23 min) A couple of excerpts from one of Child's many TV series, poaching eggs and making Hollandaise sauce with Jacques Pépin. Alas, it then turns to other chefs demonstrating their own recipes.I would have preferred more extracts of Julia's shows, personally.

movieIQ “Julia’s Recipe Collector” - collect and email your favorite Julia Child recipes while watching the film!

Julie & Julia (Sony Blu Ray - SBR55320 - Region B - Cert 12 - Released March 8th, 2010)

Much has been said about designer Tom Ford's debut as a director, A Single Man. Many have criticised the former creative director of Gucci for simply turning in a two hour fashion spread that is all style and little substance. A little disingenuous because, whilst there are moments where Ford does allow himself some overindulgence in creating the slick images of the film, he triumphs in visually cocooning what must be one of the most remarkable performances from Colin Firth I've had the pleasure to see.

Based on the 1964 novel by Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man examines a day in the life of an ex-pat English Literature lecturer George Falconer. Falconer is still grieving over the loss of his partner of 16 years, Jim, in an horrific car crash and as the grief physically becomes too much to bear, he considers suicide, believing that his life is done and there's no point in hanging around. The film follows him, almost dreamlike, through the events of the day: lecturing on Aldous Huxley to his students, clearing his desk on campus and his safe deposit box at the bank, fighting off the drunken advances of his British girlfriend Charley and encountering student Kenny, who is clearly obsessed with George enough to get his address and follow him to a local bar.

As this loose narrative weaves together Ford peppers the film's landscape with a number of hallucinatory visions and searing flashbacks. Here, we see how George first met Jim in a crowded beach side bar; how they shared their lives with Jim envying the dog's life of their terrier; a dreamlike vision of George kissing the dead Jim, which opens the film, as well as bizarre encounters with his neighbour's children.

The film's major concerns, and they were Isherwood's too, are about middle age, loneliness and fear of rejection and how life is simply something you can't plan, where your days are at the mercy of fate and the ticking away of time. What Ford also seems to be saying is that no matter how immaculately you design your day to day existence, it's simply a stylish smokescreen to obscure the raw, gnawing anger, self-hatred and self-pity that most of us are cursed by in our moments of weakness. For all the slick, Madison Avenue gorgeousness that Ford bathes the film in, George's material existence rings false when all that George needs is to feel wanted again by another human being.

Behind this brittle glamour are a number of interesting cultural observations too. The film is set in 1962 and makes it evident through the use of radio and TV broadcasts that much of the fear beneath the sheen of the Californian sunshine and post 1950s American dream is being driven by the Cuban Missile Crisis and a potential nuclear holocaust just around the corner. A neighbour's paranoia about not having built a nuclear shelter provides a humourous and ironic vision too and George's rant about fear to his students acidly summarises this and other concerns too.

1962 saw a culture on the cusp of huge changes in America where the dying days of the 1950s were giving way to teenage counter-cultural movements, the death of the dream with Kennedy's assassination. Certainly George and Charley emphasise that the reason they came to California was to live the bohemian 'dream'. However, they both feel it is slowly turning sour and hanker notions of returning to London where ironically changes in culture and society were likewise undergoing a massive revolution.

Ford's film can therefore be seen as paean to capitalist extravagance, a love of the exquisite materialism of the time (in houses, cars, interior design, clothes, men and women) but it also strongly acknowledges their shallowness in the face of a spiritual beauty, realised both internally by the characters, George, Kenny and Jim particularly, and by the ever changing qualities of natural light, colours, the landscape and the ocean. When Kenny and George go skinny dipping it's a point in the film where George sloughs off the overly designed materialist baggage of his life and his internal crisis and wantonly embraces the raw power of the ocean, the moonlight and the physical qualities of the naked male body. The fact that he nearly drowns perhaps indicates that he isn't quite properly equipped to embrace the spontaneity of 'silliness' or just simply letting your guard down. Likewise there is the roseate hue of a sunset as George picks up James Dean clone Carlos outside a liquor store and the jagged cliffs of Vasquez Rocks used in monochrome flashback to Jim and George sunbathing.

George's loneliness and his determination to commit suicide also provides some delightfully black humour too and one gets the feeling that Ford is prepared to mock the visual sheen of his film when George struggles to find a solution to shooting himself that won't leave his brains splattered over the immaculate decor of his Frank Lloyd Wright inspired house. After various attempts at positioning pillows, standing, and then falling over, in the shower it would seem appropriate to zip himself inside a huge sleeping bag in order to do the deed to his elegant satisfaction.

There is also much codification of the fear of 'invisible minorities' too. Dramatically it's underlined in the key flashback where George takes a phone call to inform him that his partner is dead and that the family have excluded him from the funeral. The whole trauma is played out on Colin Firth's face with the mask of English reserve crumbling into hot tears and a dizzying dash through the pouring rain to Charley's house. Ford simply lets Firth have control of the scene and lets the camera absorb a deeply moving distillation of emotions. The soundtrack as he montages quick cuts of George falling into Charley's arms, grief stricken, is the rush of the pounding rain. It's incredibly evocative, bristling with controlled rage against the homophobia from Jim's relatives and engulfs us in the primal torture of sorrow.

Firth's career best performance is the heart of the film and he manages to avoid plunging it into misery by giving George a typically English irony about his situation. What else could befall him as he plods through his day? He takes it in his stride and the only distractions, the perfect moments he talks about, are those where he is engaged by the smoldering Carlos (a stunningly beautiful debut from model Jon Kortajarena) and Kenny, all fresh face and piercing eyes (a sweet and charming Nicholas Hoult). Matthew Goode is also perfectly fine as Jim, in playful and effervescent contrast to the stoic George. The other major performance here is Julianne Moore as Charley, all piled up hair, Dusty Springfield make-up, pink Sobranie cigarettes and Cardin style dresses. The fact that she brings the self-absorbed and self-pitying Charley out from behind this confection is testament to her skill where others less talented might have been suffocated by the characters's outward appearance.

Throughout Ford emulates the likes of Hitchcock - patently obvious in the scene between Carlos and George where they are parked in front of a huge billboard advertising Psycho and in the Herrmann-esque strings of the soundtrack score that echo the equally obsessive tone of Vertigo - and the pulsating sexual tensions and clipped close-up iconography of faces and objects belonging to Almodovar.

There is also a deft handling of colour in the movie with it reflecting George's internal feelings as the day progresses in moments where he affirms life then bursting into more saturated hues whilst the rest tends towards the bluer and greyer. As he talks to a colleague, briefly two bare chested young men play tennis and the screen is filled with close ups of their glowing, tanned bodies gleaming with sweat, symbols of George's desire, before the scene quickly drags us and George back into silvery conformity.

Some seem to have found the film depressing but it's quite the reverse. The message of the film, that life's riches aren't necessarily found in blatant materialism, is summarised in the conversation between the sexually ambiguous Kenny and the older George in the beach side bar where they discuss the present and the future. George believes 'Death is the future' and that if you're not enjoying the present then there's not a lot to suggest that it'll get any better in the future. Kenny simply says 'the thing is, you just never know' and to illustrate he says, 'Just look at tonight' as an instance where George could never have known that Kenny would walk into his life. However, just as George sees a glimpse of those riches, fate has one more irony up its sleeve for him.

Unmissable. Firth is amazing and there are rich, deep themes beneath the slick surface of Ford's immaculate vision.

A Single Man (Cert 12A. Released February 12th 2010. Directed by Tom Ford)

BBCHD - 14th February 2010 - 9.00pm

The Devil was designed for temptation. He can be charming and clever. And exciting. And Mitchell can be those things too because he was made in the Devil's image, just as you were made in God's.

I like it. The three of us. It's us against the world.

Well, I don't want to be against the world anymore. 

The sixth episode and it really is clear that the production team don't know what to do with Annie. If indeed they have now put the 'death's door/men with ropes and sticks' idea to bed then they've shot themselves in the foot. Because it is conflict that drives the characters forward and whilst Mitchell and George actively move the overall story arc forwards, Annie is used either for a bit of tragi-comedy nonsense (the ghost baby) or the tragic reflection on and brief exploration of the afterlife concepts that the show has set up. But each time the series does this, the sub-plots are closed down, Annie gets upset, recovers and then they set it all up for her again in the next episode. Annie needs to become integral to the main story arc and the last two episodes have pushed her further away from that.


Characteristically, the episode opens with a flashback to London 1972. Basically this shows us a younger Kemp, a priest, whose family is attacked by vampires. Leaving his wife for dead, their actions give us a long overdue insight into why Kemp is so determined to eradicate the supernaturals, particularly the irredeemable vampires. Kemp's unshakable faith and Lucy's moral conflict over her relationship with Mitchell is a very powerful force running through the episode. It also forms the pivot around which the shattering climax operates. The episode offers further complex moral and theological questions about the interchangeable nature of good and evil. Much of this keys into the praxis of hysteria around Christian Fundamentalism and the continuing fear around 'otherness' - where those queer or 'non-natural' minorities as symbolised by werewolves, vampires and ghosts.


George is planning to move out and is house hunting much to the changrin of Annie. Annie wants everything to stay the same and believes something good has come to an end. The love lives of Mitchell and George, on the surface at least, suggest that this may well be the case and director Charles Martin underlines the possible future loneliness of the house with that lingering shot of the empty, battered sofa. The audience, however, knows better and can see that the relationship between Lucy and Mitchell is likely doomed as she plots with Kemp to blow the vampires to pieces with a bomb in the funeral parlour and that Sam's daughter Molly will scupper any plans George has because she knows he has a secret and will demand he reveal his true identity to Sam. Then, of course, there is Nina and we haven't seen Kemp's plan for her and George play out yet.


George is already bluffing his way round his monthly transformation by offering that he have to duck out Molly's parent-teacher evening because he's going tobogganing with Mitchell. He may have convinced Sam and whilst we've all been there, trying to put some flat-pack Ikea monstrosity together, swearing in front of the kids, we don't expect them to play 20 questions around the subject of tobogganing. Molly catches him out and a symbolic time bomb is set off counting down to when George will finally be forced to admit his 'otherness' to Sam.  


As these storylines gather pace, Annie goes off to explore and see what good she can do for the world. I did enjoy the sub-plot about her assisting Alan Cortez, the psychic who's lost his power to listen to the spirits trapped in limbo and waiting to go through death's door. The idea that there is a troupe of them following him around is a nice idea and there is plenty of comedy to offset the darker plot elements of the George and Mitchell stories. It reaches its climax when Annie's mother, Carmen (a superb performance from Jacquetta May), turns up at the theatre, wanting to achieve a kind of peace with her daughter in the afterlife. It's a very moving storyline and fleshes out Annie's family background but it's self-contained and doesn't go anywhere.


Love the fact that Ivan has most of the local vampires on his Twitter feed and uses it to gather the clan at the funeral parlour to hear Mitchell's announcement that he will no longer lead them. Unwittingly, Ivan lets Kemp's henchman in on the false assumption there's been a gas leak. And we all know what that means. As the clan gathers and Mitchell tries to persuade Ivan to take over, the bomb planted by Kemp goes off. It's a suitably exciting climax to an otherwise fairly weak episode. This action will of course lead to the final showdown between Mitchell, Lucy and Kemp. Judging by the trailer for the next episode it also includes Kemp using Nina to reel in George too. It's all to play for now.

Official site

BBCHD - 7th February 2010 - 9.00pm

"We've gone through the looking glass, Mitchell. And all those qualities, those qualities we had when we were human - mercy, for example - such a commendable quality in a man, such an indulgence now. Becoming a vampire doesn't change the personality. It liberates it. A vampire is the only truly free man.

That little scratch of conscience. That's a lie. That's not who you are. "

An attention grabbing blood spattered orgy that resembles the Manson killings of the late 1960s opens the episode and offers us a flashback to Mitchell's association with Herrick. In London 1969, the two vampires have been having a little fun and it's definitely the morning after the night before. It's great to see Jason Watkins back as Herrick and his return brings a welcome injection of very black humour to the episode. Picking his teeth, he explains to Mitchell that he will have to clean up because Herrick doesn't get on with the leader of the London vampires, 'Yeah, but their head guy and I...we don't erm...I sort of killed his mum'.


There's a great montage that follows, of Mitchell rushing round the flat, getting rid of bloody sheets, scrubbing down walls and running the hoover over the floor, matched with the jaunty lyrics of Hermans Hermits 'I'm Into Something Good'. A sequence that works on a couple of levels as the surrealism of a vampire cleaning a flat after a night of debauchery with several girls crashes into the irony of the lyrics that will indicate that Mitchell will soon discover he isn't into something good and an innocent story of boy meets girl is an abrupt contradiction to the two dead girls that Mitchell hoovers round. And then, as he makes his escape, Mitchell meets Josie. Or rather he hides out in her flat and keeps her prisoner.

Now, if you'll remember, Josie was the old friend who was in hospital in Episodes Five and Six of the first series and sacrificed herself to save Michell after being staked by Herrick. Picking up her story adds a great dimension to the flashback sequences, telling us how they met and how Mitchell, even then, was on the brink of controlling his blood lust and forming friendships that didn't depend on 'turning' them. By far the strongest plot running through the series at the moment, Mitchell's story has been developing very well over the last few weeks. It's a bit of a shame then that some of the equally good work with both Annie and George is rather frittered away this week.


Last week's very strong Annie plot is this week substituted with an annoying bit of fluff with her and a ghost baby. It's an interesting concept but it's ultimately one that doesn't move Annie's story on any further and I have a nagging feeling that the writers don't know what to do with her. Yes, it's very sad that she has to hand the baby back and that she's no longer in a position to have children of her own but it just underlines her status as a ghost rather than adding a new dimension to her or carrying forward a plot. Lenora Crichlow handles the comedy of it all very well but she's more than just a comedy foil and deserves better material, as we saw last week in the terrific story with Sykes.


George also seems to be behaving rather uncharacteristically. The series has failed somewhat to convince me of his relationship with Sam. His recovery from Nina seems rather rushed and this episode seems to suggest that he's so smitten with her that he's prepared to chuck away his friendship with Mitchell. It's very dramatic and well played, it has to be said, but it's not being true to the characters and is forcing them to react against type in difficult situations simply for the sake of drama and not for the actual development of characters. We know George overcompensates much of the time but I wasn't convinced with the whole sub-plot suggesting he was about to abandon Mitchell because he'd met Sam. In the end I think this is just a means to an end and we'll find George having to decide between Nina and Sam and making some earth-shattering decision to let either one go or even die. Or is that too obvious?


Still, we now know he's lost his job (well, inevitable after beating up the boss last week) and is desperate for stability and hence his clinging to the hope of moving in with Sam. Sam can see how desperate and rushed it all feels and quite rightly gets him to see that. I loved Sam's curmudgeonly daughter who, very truthfully within the complex life of her single parent, must strongly approve of the men her mother meets and gets involved with. I'm sure most kids feel the same way in that situation. George's efforts, buying magazines ('a free make up kit? Why don't you just put me on the game and be done with it' she retorts) and the sandwiches he prepares for Molly both particularly being rejeced, also result in some amusing situations.

Far, far stronger is the dilemma that Mitchell faces. Chief Constable Wilson now wants him to kill a convicted paedophile ('it's affirmative action time') as part of the deal he has with the vampire community. However, Mitchell reminds Wilson that he's clean and will not do it. However, Wilson persists and when the man is released on bail ('should be home by now, watching Tracy Beaker with a box of tissues' suggests Wilson) he once again asks Mitchell to kill him. This time with the caveat that if Mitchell refuses he'll sever his connections with the vampires and expose them, round them all up and burn them all. 

He visits the paedophile and there is an interesting allusion to Mitchell's vampirism when the man declares 'Every time I think I've beaten it. It doesn't die. It doesn't stop'. Mitchell forces him to go to the police and reasons with him that he'd be safer in prison than he is outside with Mitchell trying to kill him. He doesn't kill him because he's still clinging to his desire not to kill and to lead by example. He returns to Wilson and adamantly tells him the deal is off. Wilson argues that there is a natural order to all things (perhaps referring back to Herrick's notion of humans as 'Darwin's children') and that Mitchell is upsetting it.

Wilson, again like Herrick, argues that Mitchell's sudden morality is not what he is, little knowing that at least since the 1960s, and his meeting with Josie, Mitchell actually is a vampire with a conscience. In a final, very disturbing scene, Mitchell chooses to kill Wilson as this seems his only way of reinforcing his abstinence and his desire to see all the vampires do the same. This is contrasted with a similar situation in 1969 where Mitchell is ordered by Herrick to kill Josie. Then, he covers up the fact that he didn't kill her and now, he murders Wilson and hates himself for it.


The double edge to this is that he turns to Lucy Jaggat whom he presumably feels will protect him, little knowing she's under orders from Kemp and has a huge stake next to her bed, ready to extinguish him. He confesses his vampire status to her and his truthfulness complicates her own feelings for him even though she already knows what he is. The episode closes with her poised to stake him but relenting and finally taking up the responsibilities of Josie who similarly offered herself as protector, someone to help him beat the addiction. 'Save me', he begs her in very much the same manner that he begged Josie back in 1969. This is signposted via a montage of him and Josie kissing together and similarly him and Lucy kissing, with Jefferson Airplane's 'Somebody To Love' on the soundtrack. Again, the lyrics of the song underline the relationship between Mitchell and the women. It perfectly sums up his search for succor.

A good episode, particularly in developing the Mitchell storyline, but one which uses Annie merely as the comedy foil and presents a somewhat uncharacteristic George, prepared to dump his two friends and move out of the house. Well directed by Kenny Glenaan who gives us two exceptionally good sequences at the top and tail of the 55 minutes that bring alive Mitchell's dilemma with superb use of music on the soundtrack and whose confidence with the visuals is improving with some great wide angle and low angle shots coupled with interesting lighting and grading.

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