MULTIGLOM

O DEATH WHERE IS THY STNG?

2012-01-23T11:32:00.000+01:00

This is the saddest story I know. It is the story of how I became addicted to an uncontrolled substance. My social life has suffered; while under the influence, I am incapable of coherent conversation. At critical hours of the evening, I will let the phone ring rather than risk disrupting my daily dose.

Only my closest friends are aware of the extent of my dependency. They regard me with a mixture of pity and contempt. It wouldn't be so bad if it were something hip, like heroin or cocaine, but the monkey on my back is so infra-dig we're embarrassed about mentioning it in public. Star Trek: The Next Generation is not a subject one likes to bring up in polite society. I am only now emerging from the closet in the hope that my confession will give heart to others who might be similarly afflicted.

One of the symptoms of this dependency is the way you fly into a howling rage whenever people make jokes about pointy Vulcan ears or being beamed up by Scotty, but please note the words Next and Generation, because we're not talking about classic Star Trek here — that's strictly for socially-challenged dweebs in anoraks. The Next Generation, however, is The Twilight Zone, Inspector Morse and LA Law all rolled into one. In fact, I would like to propose it as a contender for Best TV Series ever.

How did this happen? Like all addicts, I started off thinking I could control it: a snort of "warp factor" here, a shot of "subspace" there, and all of it strictly for recreational use. But I had reckoned without the persistence of the pushers: every weekday The Next Generation is screened on cable not once but twice nightly. I would slump on the couch after a hard day's toil, switch on the telly, and there it would be, boldly going. And, before I knew where I was, I would be boldly going, too.

It is considered socially acceptable to be hooked on classy sitcoms or prestigious detective dramas, or the latest instant-cult import from the Twin Peaks school of dirty surrealism. It is even permissable to dip one's toes into the world of soap. But a series in which the actors wear badly-fitting Baby-Gro and recite lines like "Set phasers on stun"?

Yet this is a show that has everything. Like soap opera, it draws on a comforting line-up of familiar characters. It's just that one (Worf the Klingon) has what looks like a giant melted Mars Bar implanted in his forehead. Another (Geordi the blind engineer) wears 24th-century novelty Ray-Bans, and another (Data the android) has queasy white skin and a flapful of flashing lights in the side of his skull.

Like the best drama, this one poses a full complement of ethical dilemmas; it's just that some of these involve the ins and outs of Klingon succession, or Romulan intrigue, or whether the rights of the individual should be extended to computer viruses. It offers carte blanche. Anything goes in outer space. One episode might be about Captain Jean-Luc Picard's disastrous love-life (his strike-out rate is almost as bad as Don Johnson's in Miami Vice). The next might have Dr Beverly Crusher kidnapped by terrorists, or the Enterprise repeatedly blown to bits in a time-warp.

I realised things were getting out of hand when I caught myself plotting to steal the life-size cardboard cut-out of Picard from a display in my local SF bookshop. My addiction is so advanced that I get a lump in my throat each time I hear the opening credits, with Patrick Stewart intoning the immortal words: "Space - the final frontier..."I am so far gone, there's now no character on whom I have not had a sexual crush, and that includes Worf (very big, Worf) and Counsellor Deanna Troi, the busty Betazoid with empathic powers ("I am sensing immense anger"). I find myself wistfully wishing that I, too, were on board, earning Captain Picard's trust.

But am I ashamed? Hell, no. On the contrary, I am proud to hail from a planet that shows itself capable of producing such a work of popular art. Its very tackiness - that innate sense of human superiority coupled with a conscientious effort to see things from the alien point of view, not to mention those uniforms - is what makes it great. If this is the sort of TV that is educating the masses, we can rest easy in our beds, for seldom has there been pop culture so life-affirming and morally sound. But what I like best is that it's not that life-affirming or morally sound. Four centuries hence, war and hunger may have been abolished back on earth, but the United Federation of Planets still gets to beat the crap out of the Romulans, the Cardassians, the Borg, and anyone else whose ideology isn't up to snuff. So suck on that, you twentieth-century earthlings, and — in the word(s) of Captain Picard ordering warp speed - "engage".

This article was first published in GQ (UK) circa 1992, just after my very first cable TV connection.

PARADISE PLAZA & HELL MULTIPLEX

2011-12-16T22:34:00.007+01:00

At the end of every year there are so many Top Tens that I get bored even thinking about reading them, with the result that I hardly ever get as far as compiling my own. But just the other day, while being subjected to the same brain-numbingly bad cinema commercials I'd already sat through about 200 times, I jotted down my favourite films of the year. I started out trying to limit it to ten before thinking, what the hell, this is MY list and I can do as I please.

Here, then, are the films that will be showing in PARADISE PLAZA, on a nice big screen in a soundproof cinema where no-one talks, texts or rustles (or indeed commits any of the sins listed below). Tickets will cost no more than 5 euros, and I will be able to sit down in the front row without first having to brush bits of popcorn off my seat.

13 ASSASSINS

For its slow build-up to an exemplary extended battle scene, for making me care about the characters, for its refusal to succumb to contemporary action movie fads or fashionable irony, for enabling me to see things from the point of view of a completely alien and archaic set of feudal values.

ANIMAL KINGDOM

For its fabulously doomy and portentous credits and music, for making me gasp in shock at least three times, for Jackie Weaver as the matriarch who's all the scarier for being so unceasingly bright and perky, for scary Ben Mendelsohn, who's capable of anything. This is what James Gray's films ought to be like, but never are.

THE ARTIST

For making me laugh and cry and putting me in a happy mood, for Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo and the tapdancing, and for the clever and adorable Jack Russell. Lovely. The backlash should be starting around...now.

BLACK SWAN

For being the best ballet horror movie since Suspiria, for the body horror (ouch that hangnail!), for the hair scraped back into tight ballet buns, for a full complement of crazy chick performances from Natalie Portman, Barbara Hershey, Mila Kunis and Winona Ryder, for demonstrating that leading female characters can be fucked-up fruitbaskets, just like male ones.

CONFESSIONS

For the slow-burn opening, for the sheer unpredictability of its Heathers meets Battle Royale plot, for the bomb blast, for the "endless, senseless, graphic violence against children" (as one imdb commentator put it), for film-making so thrilling I didn't want to take notes in case I missed a second of it.

THE GUARD

For making me laugh out loud more than any other film this year, for the Charley Varrick reference, for Brendan Gleeson and Mark Strong.

HORS SATAN

For being creepier than most of today's so-called horror movies, for making me able to watch people walking quite slowly all the way across fields without getting bored, for making me worry what was going to happen next, for the freakiest sex scene of the year, for the extraordinary Alexandra Lemâtre (not pretty, but you can't take your eyes off her), for all-round services to cinematic weirdness.

MELANCHOLIA

For giving me goose pimples, for Kirsten Dunst knocking it out of the park in her best performance since Interview with the Vampire, for putting an optimistic spin on the End of the World, for the Wagner, for the paintings, for the family gathering from hell, for Udo Kier, for Lars, for the ending.

SNOWTOWN

For making Animal Kingdom look like a comedy.

TAKE SHELTER

For Michael Shannon and Shea Whigham - together again! - for Jessica Chastain, impressing me at last, for the nightmares and for all-too-accurately reflecting my anxiety-cum-phobia about the weather.

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY

For immersing me so thoroughly in the world of early 1970s-going-on-1950s (I had a holiday job in a Civil Service office in the early 1970s, and it was EXACTLY like this), for Tomas Alfredson's hypnotic directing, for Hoyte Van Hoytema's elegant cinematography, for Dino Jonsäter's razor-sharp editing, for Maria Djurkovic's amazing production design, for all the performances but especially that of Gary Oldman (even acting with the back of his neck), for the witty soundtrack, for miraculously avoiding anachronisms and for finally - after all these years - persuading me to start reading John Le Carré.

TREACLE JR

For Aidan Gillen and Tom Fisher, for the kitten, for making me feel for a character who I started out thinking was going to be unbearably annoying, for the exemplary, instinctive, spot-on directing of Jamie Thraves, one of the best film-makers that Britain has to offer. I still don't understand why Cry of the Owl didn't get a proper release. Give this man money to make more films, for heaven's sake.

THE YELLOW SEA

For the political underpinnings, for (after a slow build-up during which I nodded off a bit) the non-stop action, for having the most stabbing and slashing of any film I've ever seen in my life, for being just as violent and nasty as I Saw the Devil without any of the tedious misogyny, for not being quite as much as a downer as The Chaser, for actually being quite funny in places - especially that scene with the hotel room and the axe.

I also liked: Insidious, The Awakening, Kill List, Kaboom, Rango, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Source Code, Thor, Captain America, Rundskopf, Quartier Lointain, Post Mortem.

So you've had your fun, and now you must pay the price. You're on an elevator to hell, going DOWN to:

HELL MULTIPLEX!

HELL MULTIPLEX is a marathon tram journey away on the other side of town, located in the middle of a windswept shopping and fast-food chain restaurant complex reached via a carpark where you don't feel safe after dark (yes Kinepolis in Heysel, north Brussels, I'm talking about YOU). Tickets cost no less than 19 euros (including 3-D spex) and en route to the auditorium you will be required to stand in at least three queues while each time being forced to listen to shrieking adolescents and/or pretentious film buffs talking utter rubbish right behind you.

To get to the auditorium where the film is showing, you must first negotiate a labyrinthine series of claustrophobic corridors, all knee-deep in small bawling infants. If you want to go to the toilet you'll have to pay 40 centimes, and then be forced to stand in another queue because two out of the three women's cubicles are Out of Order, and then the floor of the cubicle is wet and there are no hooks from which to hang your coat and bag.

The auditorium stinks worse than the toilet, and you will need to brush bits of popcorn off your seat before you can sit down. The performance will be preceded by clown mimes who move among the audience, pretending to pluck coloured lights out of your ear. You will then be treated to a trailer you've already seen about ten times, for a movie starring Vince Vaughn that nobody wants to go and see, followed by twenty minutes of commercials - young people snowboarding or surfing or abseiling while drinking fizzy drinks, ads for gas-guzzling vehicles which have the gall to pose as non-conformist or green, interminable pimping for substandard Belgian films or obscure insurance companies - followed by five minutes of anti-piracy threats.

The film itself will be in 3-D and/or slightly out-of-focus (but not enough to convince the cinema management to do anything about it) and in the wrong ratio (but not enought to convince the cinema management to do anything about it), on a screen around the size of your TV, with sound leaking in from the screening next door; you can also hear the rumbling of underground trains and the gushing of large amounts of water rushing through pipes.

The cinema will be full of people who talk incessantly to each other, text, tweet, bleep, play with their iPhones, flash lights at the corner of your eye, rustle sweet wrappings, and feed their faces with not just popcorn but malodorous takeaways featuring meat products of dubious provenance. Men with especially poor personal hygiene and adolescent leg twitch will insist on sitting next to you. About fifty people will turn up at least ten minutes late and stand around talking while they decide where to sit, and at regular intervals during the film itself, audience members will leave the auditorium; each time they pass through the exit doors you will get smacked in the face by a beam of bright light accompanied by a strong whiff of urine.

But all this horror is a piece of piss compared to the film itself, which will be one or more of the following. Pardon my vocabulary, which has thrown in the towel in the face of such dribbling tedium.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN

(for being inept, stupid, AND boring. From a director who clearly doesn't know how to direct.)

COWBOYS AND ALIENS

(for being a criminal waste of a promising title AND dull.)

GREEN LANTERN

(for being totally lame AND boring and stupid.)

THE HANGOVER PART II

(for being boring, obnoxious AND for not killing off any of its obnoxious characters.)

I DON'T KNOW HOW SHE DOES IT (for making me glad I never married or had children or had a job as an investment banker, for reminding me that I am not like Other Women ie the ones I see in films like this.)

I SAW THE DEVIL
(for subjecting ALL its female characters to rape/torture/killing, except for one, who I think just gets beaten up. If you're a woman watching this sort of thing, it gets tedious REALLY quickly. A huge disappointment from two of my favourite Korean actors and the director of three films I really like.)

ROUTE IRISH
(for being ineptly filmed, clunkily written, badly acted, predictable, worthy AND deadly dull.)

SUCKER PUNCH (for being sexist, stupid, senseless AND unoriginal. And boring.)

THE THING (2011) (for being lazy, sloppy, non-scary AND totally unnecessary.)

TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON (for having a halfway decent trailer which unfairly raised my hopes before flinging a load of scrap metal in my face for hours on end AGAIN. And for Shia LaBoeuf.)

WARRIOR (for being utterly ridiculous, contrived, implausible, sentimental AND predictable. And boring.)

TEN ACTRESSES ON WHOM I HAVE GIRLCRUSHES

2011-12-10T12:54:00.005+01:00

Films and TV are full of interchangeable personality-free starlets with unfeasibly skinny limbs, fake noses and hair extensions, no discernible talent and an IQ lower than their bra size. So it's with great pleasure I can report there are at least ten young-ish actresses whose presence in a film will almost certainly guarantee that I will go and see it.

All these women already have their fans, so I'm not claiming to be discovering them or anything. Just saying I'd like to see more of them, and perhaps hinting that one or two are a wee bit underappreciated...

KRISTEN BELL

I first realised I loved her when: I saw her in Veronica Mars, in that acid green hoody that I like so much I actually went out and bought one like it. At first I thought she was just another lookalike blonde bimbo (see also Rachel Nichols, Maria Bello and a clutch of other actresses I initially dismissed as blonde bimbos - I guess I just must have it in for blondes), then started to marvel at the skilful way she handled that voiceover narration, with its unwieldy chunks of exposition. (She's great at voice-over - cf Gossip Girl XOXO). Then I liked her in the fake TV shows in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek, but otherwise she's not being served well by the movies - Pulse and You Again were both dreadful. And even her recurring role as Elle wasn't enough to restore my faith in Heroes. Stop casting Kristen in naff rom-coms! Give her her own film noir!

ALISON BRIE

I first realised I loved her when: I heard her say, "Stop trying to fluster me with your handsomeness" to Josh Holloway in the second paintball episode of Community. In retrospect, I can't believe it took me that long; I think my subconciousness had latched onto her well before that, and I definitely had some sort of soft spot for Trudy and Pete in Mad Men; their show-offy dance at Roger's daughter's wedding is one of the high points of a great, great series. Forget Zooey Deschanel! Give Alison her own sitcom! ETA: and look - here she is again, wishing all of us a Happy Christmas! Sexy and funny and clever. I think my girlcrush has just been upgraded to straightforward girl-on-girl lust crush.

ROSE BYRNE

I first realised I loved her when: I saw the spoof rock videos in Get Him to the Greek. Much funnier than Russell Brand. But seriously, Byrne can do everything - superhero movies (X-Men: First Class), horror (28 Weeks Later, Insidious), knockabout comedy (Bridesmaids), sci-fi (Sunshine). Come on! Give Jackie Q her own film!

ROMOLA GARAI

(with bonus Michael Fassbender)

I first realised I loved her when: I read some inexplicably catty comments about her performance in Atonement, when I thought both she and Saoirse Rohan were by far the best and most interesting components in that broken-backed mess of a Brit Lit Film for People Who Don't Like Films. In François Ozon's Angel, based on the book by Elizabeth Taylor, she is quite magnificent and fearless in a tour de force performance of a bestselling Edwardian romantic novelist who lives her own life as though it were one of her romances. Give Romola another role like that! (And note to self: take another look at Angel.)

RACHEL MCADAMS

I first realised I loved her when: I saw her jab that Biro into Cillian Murphy's eye before attacking him with a hockey stick in that gloriously convoluted and bonkers and girly (you don't get much girlier than using a hockey stick as a weapon) thriller Red Eye (I love this trailer which deliberately makes it look like a naff rom-com). But McAdams lights up every film she's in; magnificent as bitchy Regina in Mean Girls, heartbreaking in The Time Traveler's Wife, holding her own in State of Play, making a potentially unbearable character sympathetic in Morning Glory. I'll even watch her in tosh like The Notebook. I just hope she doesn't get lost in big productions; Guy Ritchie and Woody Allen should both be put on trial for criminally underusing her. Give her a starring vehicle! Any starring vehicle! Rachel can do it!

RACHEL NICHOLS

I first realised I loved her when: I spotted her in the short-lived TV killer-profiling drama The Inside. Another case of me thinking oh no, not another lookalike blonde bimbo and then realising, as the series progressed, that she was nailing it. Since then I've enjoyed her woman-in-peril in P2, stealing the scene as a green-skinned alien chick in Star Trek, criminally underemployed in the pathetic Conan the Barbarian (whose director, Marcus Nispel, was so useless he couldn't even film a proper catfight between her and Rose McGowan), having fun in GI Joe and doing a sort of Mean Girl from Hell in The Woods. I fear Nichols may be the most underrated actress in this line-up. Let her show her chops in a nail-biting big-budget woman-in-peril movie!

EMMA STONE

I first realised I loved her when: I watched her eating up the screen in Easy A (thanks to John Warrender, who first drew my attention to it). Lindsay Lohan's career suicide left an opening for a Hollywood redheaded comedienne to follow in the foosteps of Lucille Ball, and Stone appears to have stepped into the breach. Not a natural redhead, apparently, but with comic timing and that fabulous throaty voice, who cares? Please don't let her become just another member of the faceless ensemble casts of big budget rom-coms! Give Emma another quirky offbeat comedy to star in, like Heathers or Mean Girls!

KRISTEN WIIG

I first realised I loved her when: I saw her as Vicki St Elmo, singing The Perfect Number in MacGruber. I wasn't as bowled over by Bridesmaids as lots of other people, but she was great in it, adorable and simpatico in Whip It! and her one-eyed religious nut was by far the best thing in the disappointing Paul. Give Kristen another film to write and star in!

MICHELLE WILLIAMS

I first realised I loved her when: She made me cry in Wendy and Lucy with the best fearlessly unsentimental female performance since Émilie Dequenne in Rosetta - so unmannered and natural it seems almost an insult to call it "acting", which I guess is why it went unnoticed by the Academy, which prefer to present its Oscars to actors who arm themselves with fake noses, speech impediments and/or physical disabilities. I'd never taken much notice of Dawson's Creek, but once I'd clocked Williams, I began to appreciate her chameleon qualities; she can do anything from cuckolded wives to femme fatales to Marilyn Monroe (which I have yet to see, and I will see it for no reason other than because she is in it). Give Michelle another film!

OLIVIA WILLIAMS

I first realised I loved her when: I saw Rushmore, in which she just seems so honest and open and blushes so easily it's adorable. If I'd had her as a teacher, I too would have had a crush on her. After that, I noticed her as a saving grace in some of the most appalling British rubbish (Dead Babies, Born Romantic) and giving a leg-up, as it were, to more interesting films like Below and An Education. People noticed her in The Ghost, and with reason - she was brilliant in a difficult key role. And I was thrilled to see her live on stage as Beatrice-Joanna in a Cheek By Jowl production of The Changeling which somehow ended up in the suburbs of Paris, where I lived at the time. Give Olivia her own movie!

ROMAN POLANSKI: THE 1995 INTERVIEW

2011-12-01T14:25:00.004+01:00

In 1995, I caught Eurostar for the first time, to go to Paris to interview Roman Polanksi for British Vogue. The article was to tie in with the UK release of his film version of Death and the Maiden.

Please note this blog is primarily about Polanski's career as a film director, not about the unlawful sexual intercourse charge from 1978. There are plenty of places to discuss that elsewhere (imdb.com, for example) and I'm sorry, but any postings on that subject here will immediately be deleted.

My mother, when she learnt I was going to meet Roman Polanski, warned me to "be careful" - as though I were about to stray into range of some vast corrupting influence. His reputation has had a long time to brew - it is now 30 years since Repulsion did for wardrobe mirrors what Psycho did for shower curtains, 27 since Mia Farrow was raped by the devil in Rosemary's Baby and 22 since Faye Dunaway's immaculate Chinatown make-up launched me on an eternal quest for the perfect red lipstick.

Even so, it's hard to believe that Roman Polanski is now 61. As he saunters into the restaurant where we've arranged to meet, a stone's throw from his apartment on Avenue Montaigne, he looks more like a student than a rich and successful film director - an impression intensified not so much by his diminutive stature (he's roughly on a par with me, at 5ft 4in) as by the way he wears his scarf with one end looped over his shoulder. His hair is longer than I've seen it in films or photographs, giving him a faintly dashing air that is nowhere to be seen in the nebbish figure he cuts on screen.

Polanski gives off an unmistakable glow of good health and bonhomie. He can speak French and Russian and Italian and Spanish and, of course, Polish, but now, in between ordering the haddock and knocking back mineral water, he talks in fluent but endearingly idiosyncratic English. "You need some help with the menu?" he inquires. "You want some little salad?"

My mother needn't have worried. Polanski is on his best behaviour these days. I was informed in advance by people who'd met him that he was courteous, charming, funny and not in the least debauched. And they were right. "We killed a litre of San Pellegrino here," he points out as he orders a second bottle. "Living dangerously, huh?"

Due to a private life that has been splashed all over the tabloids on more than one occasion, as well as to numerous appearances as an actor on stage and screen, Polanski has become one of the highest-profile film directors since Alfred Hitchcock. Among his contemporaries, only Woody Allen has appeared more often in front of the camera and inspired a comparable feeding frenzy in the press for reasons unconnected with his work. Indeed, the revelations about Allen's romance with Soon-Yi have probably taken some of the heat off Polanski, who in 1978 fled the United States while awaiting trial on a charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl and has yet to go back to face the music.

This may have been one occasion when Polanski forgot that his adventure-playground approach to life has its limits. As an nine-year-old child, he escaped, alone, when the Germans liquidated the Cracow ghetto. But meeting him, you realise that his childhood wasn't so much prematurely truncated as forced underground, with the result that it has managed to survive intact through most of adulthood's rites of passage. Polanski retains a child's curiosity, and the childlike knack for effortlessly being the centre of attention. His conversation is full of the sort of quasi-scientific facts reminiscent of the believe-it-or-not data once found in magazines such as Look and Learn. It is as though the world for him is full of things to find out, toys and people to play with. Once, in a restaurant, he talked both his sound recordist and a stranger at the next table into surrendering their belts, and lay down on the floor - all to illustrate a point he was making about the size of the universe.

Paris has heralded the three acts of Polanski's life. It was here that he was born to Polish parents, the year that Hitler came to power. It was also to Paris that he returned with his first wife, the Polish actress Barbara Kwiatkowska, to scrape together a living after he had graduated from the State Film College in Lodz and before his directing career took off. Now, as a venerable artist and responsible family man, he lives here with his third wife Emmanuelle Seigner (the French actress who starred in Frantic and Bitter Moon) and their two-year-old daughter Morgane. When asked if being a father has changed him, Polanski considers the question as if no one has ever asked it before. "To a certain extent it has, yes. I'm much more content with being home with my family. Deep inside, probably, too - more of a conviction that there is life after movies."

That may be so, but the filmmaker in him can't stop directing the action. At the beginning of the interview, he pounces on my microphone and repositions it in what he reckons is the best possible place to pick up our conversation. And a little later, as I fiddle with the cassette recorder, he grabs it from me and, with the doggedness of a true gadget addict, insists on demonstrating how the auto-reverse facility works. I express anxiety that the entire interview will be wiped out, but Polanski shows no such nervousness about modern technology. Half an hour later, he has me crossing my arms, interlinking my fingers and turning my ulnae inside out to illustrate his point that one side of the body always takes precedence over the other. "Also this - do like this - you see? This one is on top! And now try to do it the other way? You see? Hah heh heh!"

There is a tendency in some circles to assume that Polanski lost his filmmaking touch when he left the US. But he made only two films in Hollywood, and his work since then, though uneven, has never been less than fascinating. Moreover, it's as well to bear in mind that Polanski films tend to improve with age. If Dance of the Vampires, which flopped back in 1967, now looks like a witty, unnerving and endlessly inventive fairy tale, what are the chances that more recent bombs such as Pirates and Bitter Moon will be reassessed and hailed as classics in a decade or so?

His latest film is shot through with themes darker than any he has tackled for some time. Had the screen version of Ariel Dorfman's play Death and the Maiden been directed by anyone else, it would probably have rated no more than a shrugged shoulder and a token, guilt-salving donation to Amnesty International. But this is a film which confronts the possibility of coming face to face with someone who has done you a great evil. How many directors could tackle that and mean it? When Steven Spielberg invited him to direct Schindler's List, Polanski refused on the grounds that he was too close to its subject. For a man whose mother died in Auschwitz and whose second wife and unborn child were murdered in 1969 by the followers of Charles Manson, this time, surely, it's personal.

Death and the Maiden takes place in "a nameless South American country" (Chile would seem a good bet, since that's where Dorfman comes from) which is still finding its feet after the collapse of a brutal dictatorship and the restoration of fragile democracy. Paulina (Sigourney Weaver) is convinced that the Good Samaritan (Ben Kingsley) who has just given her husband Gerardo (Stuart Wilson) a lift home in a torrential rainstorm is the doctor who repeatedly raped and tortured her 15 years previously when she was imprisoned by the military regime. She clobbers the stranger over the head, lashes him to a chair and, when he protests his innocence, forces the appalled Gerardo to act as defence lawyer in an impromptu trial. Is the doctor guilty? Or is Paulina simply unhinged by her experiences? It's not until the very end of the film that we learn what really took place.

"I like many aspects of Dorfman's play," says Polanski, "but mainly the one that deals with the relativity of truth. I always was attracted by a subject that could either dispute the truth, or show the different sides of it, like Rashomon, for example, or Citizen Kane." What also attracted him, he says, was the suspense, which has been pumped up many notches higher than in the play. "It's kind of a whodunit," he says. But it's a whodunit with a single suspect, and the action takes place on a single night in a single location - an isolated cliff-top house. "There was also the challenge," he says, "of making a film with three people only in one interior, and not being stagey or theatrical, and not being boring."

Three people in one location is, however, not exactly a departure for Polanski. In his first full-length feature, Knife in the Water, a married couple play perverse games with a student hitchhiker. ("But that was outside, on a yacht, so you had the dynamic of a landscape constantly changing.") In Cul-de-Sac, an armed robber is marooned with another couple on Holy Island. In fact, skewed threesomes are a recurring feature of Polanski's films (take Farrow, her husband and the Devil in Rosemary's Baby, for example, or Nicholson, Dunaway and Dunaway's father in Chinatown), and the characters are for ever getting stranded in boats, isolated castles or strange lands where they're unfamiliar with the local customs. The classic Polanski protagonist is the loner cut off from the rest of the world in their apartment: Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant form the paranoid flat-dweller's trilogy par excellence.

Polanski's work brims with the insight that can only have been learnt from life, as well as with a sense of humour so warped and unsettling that it must have sprung from direct experience of real danger, loss, betrayal and breakdown. One of the most notable aspects of his films is the way that so-called comedies such as Dance of the Vampires and The Tenant tend to be every bit as disturbing as, say, an upfront horror film such as Repulsion, while Bitter Moon had entire audiences on edge wondering whether or not they were supposed to be laughing at the film or with it. "I think humour is part of our lives, whether you want it or not," says Polanski, for all the world as though "humour" were something rather menacing and unwelcome. "In the most tragic situations you have suddenly something funny happening. People have to laugh."

As for his vicious streak, while shock-horror moments such as Catherine Deneuve attacking Patrick Wymark with a razor in Repulsion, or Jack Nicholson having his nostril slit in Chinatown, imprint themselves indelibly on the memory, the terror in Polanski's films comes more usually from a nonspecific nastiness lurking in the wings, waiting to happen. Death and the Maiden has this sort of terror, in spades.

Despite his lifelong passion for the cinema, Polanski's films have never been derivative. It's almost impossible to watch anything made by today's hot young directors without spotting a homage here, a quotation there, a nod and a wink and a rip-off just about everywhere. "They make movies about movies," says Polanski. "I think most of those films don't relate to real life at all, maybe with the exception of those black directors, like Boyz N the Hood, you know?" You get the impression that a lot of these young directors have never gained much experience of life outside their film schools or their video-rental stores. You don't have to look much further than the implausible fantasy females they occasionally insert into their films. Sometimes you wonder whether Quentin Tarantino and his contemporaries have ever met a woman, let alone had a relationship with one.

Polanski, on the other hand, with his past reputation as a swinger and his well-publicised misdeeds, has never exactly been thought of as the feminist's best friend, and yet his films are teeming with complex, sympathetic female roles. Deneuve, Farrow, Kinski - Polanski was among the first to take these actresses seriously, and they rewarded him with some of their best work. "I like woman as the lead," he says, adding modestly, "I've done a few." Even Faye Dunaway, who blew her top when he  plucked out a hair which refused to lie flat on her head while they were shooting Chinatown, agrees that they made a great movie  and says she'd work with him again, no problem. (The phrase "I'd work with him again" crops up more than once when you talk to actors and crew members who have collaborated on Polanski films and cooperated with his notorious perfectionism. "He can drive you insane," says sound recordist Dean Humphreys, "but he's also a charming, interesting, funny, witty, caring person. He can be rude, but not personally or deliberately, and he will never belittle anybody. You stand by him, because he would stand by you.")

Death and the Maiden, of course, is another film with a rip-roaring female lead. Fine though Kingsley and Wilson's performances are, it's definitely Weaver who is running the show, conducting the improvised trial and winding up, as she began, attending a Schubert chamber concert of a piece which formed the leitmotiv of her torture. Polanski's characters, snared by fate, always end up back where they started. "I just like this type of form," he says. "It's neat, it's a roundel." But Death and the Maiden is more optimistic than Polanski roundels of old. The director may identify with all three characters in the film ("I think everybody does, no?") but it's Paulina's predicament which hits hardest. I ask him how he would react if he found himself face to face with those responsible for some of the bad things that have happened to him, or to people he loved?

"I have this initial surge of wrath, of desire for some kind of physical vengeance," he says, "but that wanes very fast, and when I imagine being confronted by these people I feel nothing. I believe in justice - I think that justice can take care of it. To talk specifically of Manson and his gang, I was very satisfied with the fact that they were put behind bars, and I thought they should stay there. When at that time the press was asking me how I felt about capital punishment, I kept saying that althought I have some visceral desire for retribution, my intellect tells me it's wrong."

Polanski's way of dealing with things is not to dwell on them but to forget and move on to the next project; an adaptation of Les misérables and  an erotic adventure based on an adult comic strip are two possibilities for the future. Unlike his characters, he refuses to be trapped by destiny, and if anyone wants clues as to how he has lived and what he has been through, they're all there in his films, therapy transformed by genius into art, and then left behind.

Postscript: some things I thought were quite interesting but which for various reasons didn't make it into the final transcript: 1) When I asked Polanksi how he decided where to put the camera, he told me it was obvious - there was only ever one place it could possibly be. (I wish now I'd asked where that place was!) 2) He regretted throwing the camera out of the window in The Tenant, considering the effect too gimmicky. 3) When I said I'd just come from the swimming-pool, we started talking about exercise, which I clearly remember him referring to as necessary since it was a form of "hygiene". 4) I showed him two Editions Yellow Now film books I'd just bought in the Champs Elysées branch of Fnac - one about Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à part and the other Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter. Polanski completely ignored the Godard - it was as though it didn't exist - and homed in on Night of the Hunter. It reminded me of the decisive moment near the start of Lone Wolf and Cub, in which the baby has to choose between a toy and a sword, and moves unerringly towards the weapon - a statement of intent.

BRING ME THE HEAD OF KEN RUSSELL!

2011-11-29T14:01:00.003+01:00

This interview was first published in the London listings magazine City Limits in 1988, shortly before the release of Salome's Last Dance. Despite having directed Altered States, Crimes of Passion and Gothic in the 1980s, Ken Russell was pretty much regarded as a has-been in the mainstream press. He was good company, and I wish I'd had more time with him. (Apologies if I've inadvertently lifted someone's screengrabs; let me know if you'd like me to remove it or add a link.)

But how great is it that City Limits let me add the Severed Heads in the Movies list?

Salome is all set to take over from Carmen as Everybody's Favourite Femme Fatale. After Claude d'Anna's film (which came, dropped its veils, and vanished last year) and much-publicised cases of full-frontal diva at both Covent Garden and the Coliseum, the quintessential severed head story has now got the Ken Russell treatment.

You've got to hand it to Russell. Preferably on a silver platter. While the rest of the British Film Industry continues to approach the Art of the Literary Adaptation with po-faced reverence, Russell twists his material into a zany fictional biopic with added banana-skin jokes. In Salome's Last Dance, Oscar Wilde looks on as his banned play is performed by inmates of the local brothel. Richard Ellman this is not. Lord Alfred Douglas takes on the role of John the Baptist but it is Wilde's head that rolls when the Victorian vice squad comes a-knocking. Salome, severed head fancier and striptease artiste, is played by the brothel's resident skivvy, who, in turn, is played by the pointy-faced Imogen Millais-Scott, descendant of the man who painted Bubbles. Russell found her in Spotlight.

"I bet someone I could make it for a million dollars and still make it look quite lavish," he says. "I didn't quite manage that but I did make it for one million, three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which is peanuts. I shot it in three and a half weeks."

Detective Chief Inspector Barlow from Z Cars watches Salome eat a banana.

As usual, he takes the most frightful liberties with his sources, but the play's language is so ridiculously flamboyant, so cod Song-of-Solomon, that this amateur night production turns out to be the perfect approach. It is all festooned with endearing end-of-pier smuttiness. Glenda Jackson, as Salome's mother, jumps into an ottoman for some rumpy-pumpy with the rough trade. And there is the director himself, in an uncredited cameo role, as a lewd photographer. In his recent ABC of Music for The South Bank Show, he dressed up as a sailor, a spaceman and a swami. "I had an offer the other day to do a Japanese cigarette commercial," he says, but his extrovert streak, rather surprisingly, has so far gone untapped by other casting directors.

Russell's early composer biopics were virtually blueprints for the pop video boom of the 1980s. He has produced opera on stage, but never in the UK: he was all set to do Tannhäuser for the ENO, but government cuts scuppered the production even before it hit the boards. Will we never see his Melbourne Madama Butterfly, set in a Nagasaki brothel and ending with an atomic explosion? Or his Vienna State Faust, with the orgies and the giant fruit machine?

When it came to Salome's Dance of the Seven Veils, Russell didn't use the music from Strauss's opera. He used Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King instead: a piece which has always reminded me of the clunking sound made by an antique radiator shortly before it blows up. Russell fans have fond memories of his notorious Strauss film for TV's Omnibus, in which the composer was shown humping Mrs Strauss and conducting Thus Spake Zarathustra at the same time. Strauss's surviving relatives didn't care for it. The BBC has reputedly kept a copy in the vaults all these years, but no-one is allowed to see it any more. That isn't however, the reason Russell didn't use the Strauss music this time around. "It would have been too expensive," he says. "It's a low budget film. You can't afford to pay three thousand pounds a minute for music."

Salome with the Honourable Member for Hampstead and Kilburn.

Russell once wrote a screenplay based on Bram Stoker's Dracula. "I kept thinking he must get tired of the taste of blood over a thousand years or so, so I began to wonder why he would go on doing it." The film company who commissioned the script wanted a pop star for the role.

"In particular they wanted Mick Fleetwood. He was desperate to do it. He said that while we were shooting, he would have a pint of blood drained away from his body every day so he would look the part." (Fleetwood has since made his acting debut alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Running Man, and doesn't look as though he needed any special make-up for his role as a venerable sage.)

Russell cooled on the project after the company went bust and Dracula started popping up all over the place. Then someone gave him Stoker's last book: a farrago of Freudian vermicelli entitled The Lair of the White Worm. "It was an absolute shambles. I think he was going gaga when he wrote it. There are red herrings and false trails which I'm sure he didn't intend. But there are good things in it and I've always liked that old Geordie folk song The Lampton Worm, about brave John Lampton riding out and slaying the dragon. And, when you cut a worm in two, of course, the two halves go on growing. And Roman coins found in Britain had a cross with a snake round it."

This, then, is Russell's next film. The worms are already in the can, and, on July 4, he will start shooting DH Lawrence's The Rainbow.

SOME GREAT (AND NOT SO GREAT) SEVERED HEAD MOVIES OF OUR TIME

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia: You don't actually see it because it's wrapped in a cloth, but it attracts swarms of flies and Warren Oates's expression suggests that it doesn't smell too good.

Aguirre - Wrath of God: The head that goes on counting after it has been lopped off.

The Possession of Joel Delaney: The original severed head in the fridge movie. Also features a severed head dangling by its hear from an ornamental mobile. But the most shocking thing about this movie is that Shirley MacLaine is in it.

The Omen: David Warner is decapitated in spectacular fashion by a pane of glass after he messes with the Antichrist.

Theatre of Blood: Vincent Price, as a crazed Shakespearean actor, paints a dotted line around drama critic Arthur Lowe's neck and severs his head with a surgical saw. The head fetches up on top of a milk bottle.

Re-Animator: A severed head which gets the hots for the heroine, kidnaps her and sticks its tongue in her ear (ETA: and does even more in the uncut version, but I didn't get to see that in the 1980s thanks to the BBFC).

Android, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Alien: Three examples of robot heads which continue to twitch, talk or slime after decapitation.

Evil Dead II: Demon's head chomps its teeth into the hero's hand and has to be removed with a chainsaw. Can also be glimpsed dancing in the woods with its own torso.

Macabre: The definitive severed head in the fridge, as kept there throughout the movie by a woman whose lover has been topped in an auto accident. Directed by Lamberto Bava, son of Mario.

The Silent Partner, He Knows You're Alone, Terror Eyes: Three examples of the severed head in the fishtank.

House of Evil, Curtains: Two examples of the severed head in the toilet.

SIX REASONS WHY THE THING PREQUEL IS BETTER THAN JOHN CARPENTER'S 1982 FILM

2011-11-06T18:50:00.008+01:00

I know. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. But what can you do? I might have got a few of the finer details wrong because I watched it in Kinepolis in Northern Brussels which is basically Cinema Hell, knee-deep in smelly popcorn and mewling children. And of the dozen or so people in my audience, at least half of those were adolescents suffering from ADD who chattered loudly and kept running in and out of the cinema. So it was quite difficult to concentrate. But please be aware there are

MAJOR SPOILERS HERE!

(and thanks to Phelim O'Neill for the mouth-chests.)

THE EXPOSITION

Hello, my name is MEW and I'm going to be the heroine of your film, which is why there's a scene near the beginning (I don't think it's in Antarctica, but I missed that bit because of the adolescents with ADD) where I'm doing palaeontology-type things. It's so you know who I am. And that's what was missing in the 1982 film - I don't think you ever got properly introduced to those guys, they never ever actually said Hi, I'm a chopper pilot, or Hi, I'm a dog handler, or a geologist, or radio operator or whatever; you just see them doing whatever it is they do, so that's probably a bit hard for audiences to grasp, they need to be told stuff like that, over and over again. And you definitely need to know I'm a palaeontologist, because otherwise you might mistake me for a schoolgirl. Yes, I'm that young. Hey, I could almost be just out of kindergarten! But be thankful you've got me instead of some old woman who might be better qualified and have more field experience, but who hey, wouldn't be nearly as HOT and appeal to the young male demographic.

Also we get introduced to Bad Scientist Guy (a descendant of the Bad Scientist in Christian Nyby's 1951 The Thing From Another World who wears a roll-neck sweater and wants to communicate with the creature, instead of killing it). Bad Scientist Guy says, "I need a palaeontologist." Which is what I am, I think we may have established that already, but we should probably establish it again because it's a difficult concept. And I say something like, "I need to know a little more about this," and I think there's a bit more explanation here in case spectators came in late and missed the earlier scene where some Norwegian guys find something in the ice in Antarctica, and so we set everything up again and hint that Bad Scientist is really excited about it. You can't explain these things too many times, especially if there are adolescents with ADD running all over your cinema.

And then we get the journey to the camp in the helicopter. Just so we know these guys are helicopter pilots. I mean, the 1982 film jumped straight in without any of this useful scene-setting. And where's the fun in that?

THE FEMALE CHARACTERS

The 1982 film didn't have any female characters at all (unless you count Kurt Russell's computer chess game which had a female voice) so obviously that had to change. And I know it's 1982 and all that, but audiences like their female characters not just to be cute but also to be smart and kickass, like Ellen Ripley in the Alien films. I know in Alien it was established early on that she was second-in command on the Nostromo and anyway, that was the Future, but I don't see why we shouldn't retrofit those non-sexist attitudes on to a bunch of manly Norwegians in 1982 who have been holed up in an isolated place without sex.

I realise that in real life, the best-case scenario would be them expecting me to make the tea all the time, and the worst-case scenario would be the sort of unpleasant misogyny routinely dished out to the heroine of George Romero's Day of the Dead. And it's quite likely at least one of those guys, back in 1982, would normally have tried to feel me up or made sexist or condescending or even threatening remarks. But hey, we've got a good old-fashioned monster mash-up here, so why worry? These men will realise straightaway that even I look like a 15-year old schoolgirl I'm actually very capable and smart and know better than they do, so every time I say anything they'll all shut up and pay attention, and they'll take everything I say very seriously, even if it does sound outlandish, because I'm so smart it takes me only a fraction of the time it took Blair and the others to work out what was going on in the 1982 film, and so the rugged Norwegian guys will be happy to let me take over as a leader and order them around when there are Things on the loose and people start killing each other. Put a flamethrower in my hands (which I immediately know how to use even though I am, as has already been explained, a palaeontologist) and I, MEW, am a perfectly acceptable substitute for Kurt Russell. Even though I may look like a 15-year-old schoolgirl.

Oh there's a weepy Norwegian woman in there too. Just in case you might be tempted to think I'm a token female or anything.

THE MALE CHARACTERS

The male characters in the 1982 film were far too dissimilar. And where's the fun in that? Surely it's much cleverer to have them all look identical, blond and bearded and with no discernible personalities, thus making a pertinent point about human beings all being the same even before they get Thinged. For a while, I thought I could tell Bad Scientist Guy apart from the others.... but no, he's blond and bearded too. Even Joel Edgerton, the only other cast member apart from me, MEW, who might conceivably be recognisable to people who watch a lot of films, is kind of blond and bearded. Thank God for the Afro-American helicopter pilot, who sticks out a mile. And me, MEW, of course. I stick out a mile too. Even though the men immediately accept me as one of them.

THE THING

In the 1982 film, the Thing tended to lie doggo, trying to pass for human until attacked, when it erupted into ever more elaborate configurations to try and protect itself - dogheads splitting open when the other dogs growled at it, mouths opening up in stomachs to swallow the hands that were assaulting it with a defillibrator, legs extruding from a severed head to it could run away and hide. But where's the fun in that? The 2011 Thing sprouts mouth-chests at the drop of a hat, even when it's not being directly threatened. Then it chases people down corridors like the psychopath in a slasher movie. Then it sneaks around a kitchen like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. Then, evidently having absorbed some Alien DNA, it sprouts sharp probosci on which to impale people, or sheds Facehugger-type appendages that drop on them from above. You see? MUCH more fun.

THE STUPIDITY

Oh yes, we're in Antarctica, so I think I'll just pop outside and wave at that helicopter WITHOUT PUTTING MY COAT ON. And oh, any one of you could be a Thing, so hey, let me just STICK MY HEAD IN ALL YOUR MOUTHS TO SEE IF YOU HAVE FILLINGS. Because, you know, Things can't reproduce metal or something, though they don't appear to have any problems with clothes or zips or whatever. And oh look here's an alien spaceship embedded in the ice, I think I'll just POP DOWN AND EXAMINE IT FROM REALLY CLOSE QUARTERS. And it doesn't matter if I fall into one of those open flaps into the ship because I can easily find my way out again before it takes off, or its engines ignite and burn me to a crisp or anything.

COPYCAT BITS & CONTINUITY

This is supposed to be a prequel, not a remake. But why think of new stuff when the old stuff will do just as well? The melting ice block from the 1951 film. The malfunctioning flamethrower. The characters who are treated with suspicion because, logically, they shouldn't have been able to survive either the cold, or a helicopter crash, or both. The icky noise that alerts a character to someone going full-on Thing just behind him or her. Testing all the characters, one by one, for incipient signs of Thinginess. The poorly character who turns out to be not as poorly as you think.

You know when the Norwegians blow a big hole in the ice with their thermal charges? Well, none of that matches up. And how about when the Thing wakes up suddenly, as you do, and leaps out of the block of ice the Norwegians have taken back to their camp? Here we really get to show the Thing's uncanny abilities when it leaves a perfect oblong hole in the ice it has just leapt out of.

And oh look, here's a husky! Suddenly leaping out of a window! Now where did he come from? How come no-one had used the dogs to try to get away? Or the snowcats, come to that - there seem to be loads of them around. In fact, these guys seem fairly mobile.

Here's a thought for screenwriters: why not work on your characters a bit? (And that includes the Thing itself.) Don't just have things happen because you've seen them happening in another film.

That's not all, I could write about the CGI or the way no-one really looks cold the way the did in the 1982 film. But I can't be bothered to go on. I've already wasted too much time on this Thing.

ps I liked John Carpenter's The Thing so much I said so in a book which in 1997 was published in the BFI Modern Classics series.

Me writing a couple of years ago in the Guardian about the original critical reception of John Carpenter's The Thing.

SCARY BITS: PART TWO

2011-10-08T13:19:00.008+02:00

This is the second part of my list of films - and more specifically some of the scenes - that have always given me the creeps. (Here's a link to the first part, for those who haven't read it.) At some point the list got out of hand and expanded into 12 films instead of the five or six I'd originally envisaged. And then even that extended list got out of hand as I kept thinking of films I'd left out. I've mentioned some of these in an appendix of Honourable Mentions. I might add to it at some point.

I would like to repeat - this is by no means a list of all the scary films ever made; it's just the ones that made a big impression on me. And it's no good berating me because I've included or excluded such-and-such a title - there can be few experiences more subjective than being scared, and I'm sorry, but The Exorcist didn't do it for me. But if you have any titles to add, I'd love to hear about them; that's what the comments are for.

Once again, spoilers galore. You have been warned. Also, please be aware that where there are links to these scenes on YouTube, they are posted primarily for the benefit of those who have already seen the film in question, and may seem ridiculous watched out of context by the uninitiated. To get the full spine-chilling effect, you need to watch the entire film - preferably on your own, after dark and in an impressionable mood.

7) WHISTLE AND I'LL COME TO YOU (1968)

"There was something about its motion which made Parkins very unwilling to se it at close quarters." (MR James)

How did I see it? On TV, not on its first broadcast, but when it was repeated in the early 1970s, while I was still living with my parents. Then in the 1980s, on video, at David Pirie's house. Then in the 1990s, on DVD. On my own. Big mistake.

What's the story? MR James' "Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad" was first published in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary in 1904, and has been filmed twice for television; I haven't seen the more recent adaptation. As Helen Conrad O'Briain writes in Laudian Eccleisa and Victorian culture wars in the ghost stories of MR James*, "The story is set in motion by one of James' most common narrative devices: the unwarranted, unthinking removal of a hidden object. It is set in the days leading to the winter solstice when the powers of evil are at their height, but also, as the local curate reminds his congregation, the feast of St Tomas the Doubter." Jonathan Miller's adaptation, "a parable on intellectual arrogance", was screened under the banner of the BBC's arts series Omnibus. Michael Hordern plays a muttering, socially inept Cambridge professor who discovers, on the site of an ancient Templars's church, a bronze whistle inscribed with the words, "QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT", which he translates as "Who is this who is coming?" And of course he blows it.

Why was I so scared? "I gather that what he chiefly remembers about it is a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen." When I first saw Miller's film, I still lived with my parents, and my bedroom had a spare bed in it. I still regard spare beds with distrust.

But what frightens me even more than the crumpled linen ghost at the climax is Professor Parkin's fractured nightmare as he slips in and out of sleep, dreaming - in fits and starts, with equally fitful and alarming sound effects - that he is being chased along the otherwise deserted beach by "a figure in pale, fluttering draperies, ill-defined." Miller captures perfectly the half-waking, half-dreaming state of disturbed and disturbing sleep. And ever since first seeing it, I have been afraid that I too might one day dream this same dream.

I'm not sure I'd ever want to be entirely alone on one of those big deserted beaches on the Norfolk coast, either.

* A chapter in The Ghost Story From the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (Four Courts Press, 2010) edited by Helen Conrad O'Briain and Julie Anne Stevens.

8) SCANNERS (1981)

"I must remind you that the scanning experience is usually a painful one."

How did I see it? On its first release, at the Empire cinema in Leicester Square, with a boyfriend.

What's the story? Exploding heads are two-a-penny in the movies nowadays, but David Cronenberg did it first in this futuristic tale about the unexpected side-effects of a pregnancy drug. Patrick McGoohan plays the mad scientist whose experiments have resulted in a race of mutant telepaths, one of whom (Michael Ironside) is going around blowing up heads and forcing cops to turn their guns on each other. Stephen Lack and Jennifer O'Neill are the "good" scanners who try to settle his hash with their own super mental powers. Compared to many of Cronenberg's films it's all good clean upbeat fun (despite - or maybe even because of - an ending in which the hero's eyeballs explode before he goes up in flames) but it's also packed with the same eerie prescience as the rest of the film-maker's early work.

Why was I so scared? The inclusion of the exploding head in this list is really a nod to all the early oeuvre of David Cronenberg, who throughout the 1970s and 1980s held me in his thrall with his icky yet fascinating visions of body horror, made even more compelling by their intellectual underpinnings. There are few directors who I feel are capable of showing me something so unpleasant that I could never in my wildest dreams imagine it; David Lynch has done it several times, Martin Scorsese has managed it once or twice, but David Cronenberg used to do it regularly, from the gung-ho sexual parasites of Shivers via the extreme mind fuckery of Videodrome, all the way through to the gloomy Greek tragedy of Dead Ringers, I would sit through his films in a state of extreme terror, fearful of what he might serve up.

I need you to try and think yourself back into my shoes in 1981. You don't read trade papers, and Empire magazine doesn't exist: the only thing you know about Scanners is the poster that has gone up in the underground with the words, "10 seconds: The pain begins. 15 seconds: You can't breathe. 20 seconds: You explode." You're a bit scared of this poster, but you've seen Brian De Palma's The Fury (1998), so you're not entirely unfamiliar with the idea of exploding people. What you are not expecting is an exploding head, still less for it to occur only about 12 minutes into the film, almost before you've even got comfortable in your seat. It's a huge suprise, and you spend most of the rest of the film in a state of whimpering shock, worried that someone else's head is going to blow up. By the time it gets to the final scanning duel between good scanner Cameron Vale and evil scanner Darryl Revok (I'm gonna suck your brain dry!"), you're almost disappointed that all it entails is bulging veins, squirty haemorrhage, monstrously misshapen heads and spontaneous combustion (which incidentally looks even better now than it did at the time - it just wouldn't be the same in CGI). No exploding heads. But a cinematic frontier has just been passed.

9) THE WOMAN IN BLACK (1989)

"...the combination of the peculiar, isolated place and the sudden appearance of the woman and the dreadfulness of her expression began to fill me with fear." (Susan Hill)

How did I see it? On TV, its first broadcast, 24th December 1989. I was scared to go to bed afterwards - and I wasn't even on my own.

What's the story? A new adaptation of Susan Hill's spooky novel The Woman in Black, already successfully adapted for the stage, has been filmed by James Watkins with Daniel Radcliffe in the leading role and is due for release in the UK in February 2012, but we'll be fortunate if it's half as terrifying as this 1989 Granada adaptation, with a teleplay by Nigel Kneale of Quatermass fame. Whenever we veterans of the original TV screening discuss it among ourselves, we all talk about "that scene" and exchange nervous looks. If you thought you couldn't possibly be frightened by such hoary old ghost story clichés as old dark houses, foggy marshes and black-clad figures looking vaguely malevolent in graveyards - think again. The ending is fudged - but maybe that's just as well; if it had been as terrifying as the rest of the film, I would probably still be gibbering.

Why was I so scared? Misled by prior familiarity with movies about haunted houses, I somehow fell into the trap of thinking the woman in black was haunting Eel Marsh House, where young solicitor Arthur Kipps is assigned to sort out the papers of its late owner, Mrs Drablow. So, after a few unpleasant and frankly nerve-racking incidents in the house and on the fogbound causeway outside, I assumed Kipps would be safe once he got back to sleep in the Gifford Arms in "the little market town" of Crythin Gifford. But he comes down with some sort of fever, wakes in the middle of the night and sees the woman in black bearing down on him, letting out the most terrible shriek.

Interestingly, this particular scene appears to be an elaboration of Kneale and his director, Herbert Wise; the only hint of it in Hill's novel is, "The woman in black seemed to haunt me, even here, to sit on the end of my bed, to push her face suddenly down close to mine as I lay asleep, so I awoke crying in terror." In the film, it's the sort of shock effect we expect to be cut away from, but it goes on and on for what seems a horrible eternity, with that awful shrieking, and her ghastly face getting closer and closer... It's not just the ghostly make-up, and it's not just a case - as in Mario Bava's Black Sabbath - of a scary old woman; kudos to Pauline Moran for expressing so perfectly what Hill describes as, "the purest evil and hatred and loathing".

The scene was a big influence on my novel The Ex, a ghost story I self-published in 2008, and which was bought and read by four people. My heartfelt thanks to those intrepid four.

10) RINGU (1998)

"It doesn't start by one person telling a story. It's more like everyone's fear just takes on a life of its own."

How did I see it? At a packed press screening in the tiny cinema at Soho House. My heart sank when I saw we were expected to watch a just-arrived-by-Fedex crappy video copy. But, of course, the crappy video quality turned out to be entirely appropriate for the film.

What's the story? The Hollywood remake has its moments, but for chills that reach all the way down to your bone-marrow there's no substitute for the original Japanese horror movie, directed by Hideo Nakata, about a cursed videotape that condemns anyone who watches it to a horrible death seven days later. The feisty reporter heroine can't resist taking a peek, but only really starts to worry when she catches her small son watching too. And so the countdown begins. Can she and her ex-husband trace the source of the recording and lift the curse in time?

Why was I so scared? Like The Woman in Black, this is a story that tricks you into thinking the worst is over. The heroine, Reiko, has already undergone a nail-biting ordeal at the bottom of a well, where it seems she finally laid the vengeful ghost of Sadako - the entity at the root of all the trouble - to rest. So when her ex-husband Ryuchi sees the haunted video playing, of its own accord, on his TV screen, we're perturbed, but only mildly. We've watched this haunted video before, and hey, it's kind of creepy, but not that scary.

Except that this time, the jerky figure of Sadako comes nearer and nearer to the camera until - horror of horrors - she's actually crawling out of Ryuchi's TV set. At this point, and for perhaps the first time in my life, I could literally feel that old cliché - the hairs standing up on the back of my neck. Because we thought it was all over (it is now). Because, if Sadako can crawl out of Ryuchi's TV set into his living-room, what's to stop her breaching the fourth wall, and crawling out of the screen and into the cinema? And what's to stop us dying of fright, like Ryuchi?

11) KAIRO (2001)

あなたは幽霊を満たすようにしますか？

How did I see it? At the MK2 Beaubourg, on my own. I was fortunate to be living in Paris when Kiyoshi Kurosawa's film came out; he's a favourite of the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd, so it got a gratifyingly rapid release in France, just three months after the Japanese premiere. My less fortunate colleagues on the other side of La Manche, however, had to wait five years before they could see it in the UK - and then only because Pulse, the appalling American remake, was in the offing - by which time many of them had had their fill of Japanese ghosts with long black hair and shuffling steps.

What's the story? "Do you want to meet a ghost?" Asian film-makers, unlike most of their Hollywood counterparts, understand that a sense of mounting dread is many times more potent than a flurry of cheap shocks, loud music and frantic editing. While Ringu was predicated on new technology (albeit, in the case of video, technology that even then was in the process of being superceded) Kurosawa reinterprets the ghost story for the computer age in a story about suicides on a university campus, with results that will have you eyeing your laptop suspiciously. There's an apocalyptic thread running through the narrative, as well as a plausible metaphor for alienation in the modern world, but there are also some classic ghostly manifestations that you won't forget in a hurry.

Why was I so scared? It's hard to get a handle on Kairo, which is probably the point; characters keep fading away, leaving nothing but the shadows of their outlines on the wall, like victims of the Hiroshima blast. Disused rooms are sealed off with literal red tape; you enter them at your peril. People commit suicide for no apparent reason; faces are blurred in reflections, and everyone's movements seem slightly out of synch, like images viewed via webcams and a Lynch-like soundtrack of ominous rumblings and ghostly singing. There's a lot more to Kairo than the aforementioned ghosts with long black hair and shuffling steps, but for me, the scariest scene is when one of the characters sees a woman in black walking down the room towards him with an oddly purposeful gait, made even more disconcerting by the way she stumbles - and recovers - in mid-stride. And then, as she comes up to him, you share his point of view as he takes refuge behind the sofa and see, with him, that her feet are no longer visible. Aha, you think, she's gone. But no...

12) THE DESCENT (2005)

"The worst thing that could have happened to you has already happened... and you're still here."

How did I see it? At home, on DVD, on my own.

What's the story? Six women go spelunking in the Appalachians and get lost. Within minutes of the beginning of Neil Marshall's follow-up to Dog Soldiers, the writer-director has already killed off characters, wrecked lives and established ground rules for the coming ordeal: damaged psyches, no mercy and just enough psychological depth to underpin oodles of gruelling action and gore. The result is the strongest horror movie in years - even before the gutsy cast of unknown actresses meets a tribe of man-eating troglodytes.

Why was I so scared? Dog Soldiers was entertaining, but derivative and more funny than scary. So I started watching Marshall's follow-up without expectations. The opening car accident, filmed in a way I'd never seen a car accident filmed before, was a jolt, but even so I wasn't prepared for the scene later on in which Sarah gets stuck in a narrow tunnel. I never realised I had claustrophobia, but at this point I started hyperventilating, and had to put the DVD on pause and go off to make a cup of tea to calm myself down. Thank heaven I was watching at home and not in the cinema. I don't think I've ever hyperventilated at a film before; it was an alarming experience, and this is why The Descent makes it on to this list.

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

The Uninvited (1944) A great little haunted house mystery, adapted by Frank Partos and Dodie Smith from the novel Uneasy Freehold by Dorothy Macardle. Maybe not a classic, but great characters, ingenious Rebecca-style plot, a lovely song ("Stella by Starlight") and some genuinely scary moments, including the ghost at the top of the stairs.

Dead of Night (1945) The dummy, the hearse, the architect's dream. But especially, when I first saw it, the story with the mirror, which has made me wary of mirrors ever since, and which I still find both more frightening and more interesting (so you're telling me Googie Withers actually went ahead and married that guy?) than anything in the recent fad for "mirror scares".

Phantasm (1979) Strange to reflect on this now, but for several months after seeing Don Coscarelli's film I was worried about having my brain drilled by a flying ball. (I should add, in my defence, that I was living in Tokyo at the time, and we all know the Japanese are well-known for inventing high-tech gizmos. So it could have happened.)

Ghostwatch (1992) The great postmodern TV ghost story, written by Stephen Volk and directed by Lesley Manning, was first broadcast on Halloween 1992 and caused a rumpus by fooling a lot of people into thinking it was a reality TV inquiry into a haunted house rather than cleverly constructed fiction with the TV presenters Michael Parkinson, Sarah Greene and Craig Charles playing themselves. Being older and more jaded, I didn't fall for it, which is not to say it didn't scare me with its cunningly planted shocks, especially a fleeting glimpse of the ghost - "Pipes" - as the TV camera pans across the children's bedroom.

The Grudge (2004) For once, I prefer the American remake to the original Japanese film, though both have equally baffling narratives - something which doesn't stop them being spooky as hell. Sometimes, to scare visitors to my seven-storey apartment block in Paris, I used to race down the stairs while they were still waiting for the lift and stand right next up to it as they passed. Just like the little boy ghost in this. The sequence with Susan in the empty office block (and then, when the ghost follows her home) contains at least six moments that made my skin crawl: the CCTV camera-view of the corridor, the phone call, the stairs, the lift, the spy-hole and, oh God, the bedclothes.

Here's a piece I wrote for the Guardian about ghosts in movies.

SCARY BITS: PART ONE

2011-09-28T12:22:00.008+02:00

I've gone off horror films a bit recently because I'm getting fed up with watching people being tied to chairs and tortured, or young couples being terrorised by sociopathic home invaders, or wobblicam FFFF (Faux Found Footage Films) of people meeting horrible fates that you can't see properly because they're shot in such impressionistic flurries.

Then, last week, I found myself enjoying Insidious - and not just the first half, which everybody likes, but the second half, when most people think it goes off the rails. I enjoyed it because it's a return to the sort of horror I love the most - ghosts, and demons, and ghoulish tableaux, and parallel spirit worlds - and because although director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell have borrowed, they have clearly borrowed from, say, Mario Bava, rather than Rob Zombie or Zack Snyder.

So I decided to make a list of films - and more specifically some of the scenes - that have always given me the creeps. This was easier said than done, as taking screengrabs from some of the films in question became impossible to do after dark, when it got too scary. (I'm looking at these pictures now, with the sun coming through the window, and wondering however I could have been such a wuss.) And then at some point the list got out of hand and took on a life of its own and ended up being 12 films instead of the five or six I'd originally envisaged, so I've had to split it into two.

This is by no means a list of all the scary films ever made; it's just the ones that made a big impression on me. Everyone's list will be different, but it's clear mine tends towards the ghostly end of the spectrum rather than the shock-horror splattery end - with one big exception, which you'll see in Part Two.

Needless to say, there are spoilers galore. You have been warned.

1) NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1957)

"Oh, if you're thinking of going through the woods, you might find it unpleasant."

How did I see it? On TV, at home, in the 1960s.

What's the story? Jacques Tourneur's superb occult chiller is based on the MR James short story Casting the Runes, very loosely but cleverly adapted for the screen by Charles Bennett (who began his career writing for Alfred Hitchcock) and Hal E Chester (who co-wrote the screenplay of Robert Hamer's School for Scoundrels). Niall McGinnis plays Dr Julian Karswell, the oddly bearded but affable villain (and mother's boy) who dresses up as a clown for children's parties, keeps a guard-cat in the library of his Home Counties mansion, and puts a hex on Dr John Holden (Dana Andrews), a visiting psychologist determined to discredit Karswell's devil-worshipping cult. The American's initial scepticism is gradually eroded by a sense of mounting terror and horrible squeaky noises in the corridor of the Savoy.

The demon later featured on the cover of the Roky Erickson and the Aliens album I Think of Demons; Kate Bush sampled the line, "It's in the trees! It's coming!" for Hounds of Love; and Dana Andrews "said prunes gave him the runes, and passing them used lots of skills" in Science Fiction Double Feature, the opening number in The Rocky Horror Show (I prefer the title of the original stage show, by the way, because I don't like the film much.)

Roky Erickson & the Aliens: I Think of Demons cover art

Why was I so scared? Are you kidding? The woods at night! This is primal scream territory (cf The Blair Witch Project). And the pure terror of being chased by something you can sense, and maybe hear, but can't see. Add the power of suggestion - Karswell saying to Holden as he sets off from the house, "Oh, if you're thinking of going through the woods, you might find it unpleasant" and you've got a classic scary sequence. All Tourneur has to do is have Andrews walk through the trees at night, throw in a bus* in the form of an unexpected branch and then add the demon's signature sound - a sort of squeaky wheel noise - and some thudding footprints (which reminded me of an episode of the mildly terrifying mid-60s cartoon series Jonny Quest) of a giant entity that remains unseen, apart from the odd bit of stray fireball.

Though the demon itself doesn't appear in this particular scene, purists insist the film was ruined by the studio's insistence on including explicit shots of it elsewhere. But it was the demon that made me want to watch Night of the Demon in the first place after I saw it in a trailer on TV. And once the monster had appeared right at the start, I spent the entire film in a state of terror that it would appear again.

* A "bus" or "Lewton bus" (named after producer Val Lewton) is the sort of fake scare (for example, when someone opens a cupboard door and a cat suddenly jumps out) that has since become a cliché in horror films. The name comes from the shock moment when a bus suddenly and noisily pulls up in front of an already nervous heroine in Tourneur's Cat People (1942).

2) THE INNOCENTS (1961)

"He was staring past me, into the house, as if he were hunting someone."

How did I see it? On TV, at home, in the 1960s

What's the story? Jack Clayton's spooky film of Henry James' classic chiller The Turn of the Screw (with a screenplay by John Mortimer, William Archibald and Truman Capote) stars Deborah Kerr as Miss Giddens, a highly-strung governess (typical repressed spinster, in other words) who begins to suspect her young charges are possessed by the spirits of the dead servants she sees peering through the window or lurking on the far side of the lake in an uncanny impression of a Black Sabbath album cover. Are the ghosts real, or figments of her neurotic imagination? Kerr's febrile performance leaves it up to you to decide whether it's the spectres or the governess herself who's the more frightening, but either way Martin Stephens and Pamela Franklin are two of the creepiest child actors in the history of cinema.

Why was I so scared? During a game of hide-and-seek with the children, Miss Giddens hides behind the curtains and sees Peter Quint (Peter Wyngarde, who's pretty scary at the best of times) peering in through the window. Windows! Which seem to offer a solid surface for you to put your back against, but which are not solid at all - not only can you see through them, but something on the other side can look back at you. Also, they provide lots of worrying dark space (especially in the widescreen format) and odd reflections.

This scene has left me with a lifelong distrust of windows, curtains and, especially, hide-and-seek (see also the Christmas Party ghost story in Dead of Night (1945)). I particularly worry about seeing someone peering in through my window when I'm on the second or third floor. With no balcony.

3) THE HAUNTING (1963)

"Oh God, whose hand was I holding?"

How did I see it? On TV, at home, during the 1960s. But then - more memorably - on TV, at home, during the early 1990s.

What's the story? Forget Jan de Bont's crashingly dull remake. This first adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House proves that, where ghost stories are concerned, you’re more likely to get goose pimples from spooky sound effects and camera angles than from a truckload of computer-generated apparitions. Neurotic Julie Harris and chic lesbian Claire Bloom are among four researchers bunking down in a big old mansion with a troubled history to investigate rumours that it’s haunted. My favourite bit is when the lights go out and Harris holds Bloom’s hand for comfort… Like Night of the Demon's Jacques Tourneur, Robert Wise did his directing apprenticeship under the aegis of legendary horror movie producer Val Lewton, and it shows in his less-is-more approach in conjuring up an atmosphere of overripe evil.

Why was I so scared? I first watched this in the 1960s without lasting damage, so by the time I decided to take another look at it in the early 1990s, I'd seen hundreds of really horrible and scary horror films, had read Jackson's novel a couple of times, couldn't recall anything memorably frightening in it and was feeling blasé. Big Mistake. It was after midnight, I was on my own, and I had completely underestimated the cumulative effect of spooky noises, shadowy close-ups and unexplained hammerings at doors. By the time the film ended I was a gibbering wreck and had to watch several episodes of Blackadder before I felt able to go to bed.

This illustrates a universal truth, by the way, and may go some way towards explaining why a lot of serious film critics continually sneer at or make patronising comments about horror movies. Of course they do - they watch them at 10 o'clock in the morning in a packed screening-room full of other critics. There should be a legal clause in every new horror movie's press pack demanding that individual critics have to watch the film on their own, after dark. That would sort them out.

4) I TRE VOLTI DELLA PAURA (BLACK SABBATH) (1963)

How did I see it? At the Croydon ABC, in 1970, with a boyfriend. Afterwards, I pretended it hadn't scared me at all. I took another look at it in the 1990s and it scared me all over again. It still scares me. It scared me when I took this screengrab from it.

What's the story? Black Sabbath (aka I tre volti della paura or The Three Faces of Fear) is a portmanteau film comprising three stories directed by Italian horror maestro Mario Bava. Weakest segment is the giallo-esque thriller The Telephone, but The Wurdalak (adapted from a story by Aleksei Tolstoy and starring Boris Karloff as a vampire) and The Drop of Water (about a nurse who ill-advisedly steals from a corpse) both contain heart-stopping moments that are guaranteed to haunt your nightmares.

Why was I so scared? The idea of something horrible coming closer and closer is always a frightening one, even more so when you can't actually see how it's moving. The ghost of the old lady in The Drop of Water (see illustration above) may be wearing generic spooky-old-lady make-up, but she freaks me out. I don't like the way she glides, and stretches her arms out, as if she has some sort of claim on me... I suspect James Wan and Leigh Whannell have seen Black Sabbath, because their old lady ghost in Dead Silence reminds me of this one. Also, Bava has a way with shadows and colour filters that just gives you the creeps. The colour scheme, all those greens and purples, is just... unhealthy. Like something putrefying.

For ages I thought The Drop of Water was from a story by Anton Chekhov (in fact it's by Ivan Chekhov) and wondered why I couldn't find it, even though I scoured his short story collections. (So hey, a Mario Bava movie made me read lots of Chekhov short stories, which can't be bad.) I think this was quite an understandable error, as the old lady ghost also reminds me of Edith Evans in Thorold Dickinson's The Queen of Spades, adapted from a short story by another Russian, Alexander Pushkin. Italian + Russian = a killer horror movie combination.

There's something scary about old ladies at the best of times, and the scariest thing is that I'm in the process of turning into one. I think I shall have to return to this subject at a later date.

5) NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)

"They're coming for you... Look, there comes one of them now!"

How did I see it? A heavily censored version (the scenes of ghouls eating Tom and Judy's roasted entrails were missing, as was the scene in which Helen Cooper is hacked to death with a trowel by her zombie daughter) with a boyfriend, in 1973 at the Gate Bloomsbury. Followed by an uncut version, with another boyfriend, in 1974, at the Electric Cinema in Portobello Road.

What's the story? Over 30 years, two sequels, one colour remake and hundreds of pale imitations later, the no-budget zombie flick that changed the face of the horror genre has lost none of its bite. George A Romero shattered all the conventions with his grim story of seven people holed up in an isolated farmhouse, where their petty bickering threatens to tear them apart just as surely as the flesh-eating walking corpses who have got them surrounded. Meanwhile, the vigilante militia who are closing in are almost as frightening as the zombies they're using as target practice.

Why was I so scared? The opening scene in the graveyard begins as the film means to go on: with the guy you thought was going to be the hero hors de combat, the woman you thought was going to be the plucky heroine terrified out of her wits, and the dead man coming at you, and coming at you, and coming at you. And it only gets worse. Faceless armies of ghouls, and all they want to do is rip you apart and eat you. You can destroy some of them, but there are always more of them, and they just keep coming. Zombies are pretty much the monster of the Millennium, and there's no end to what they can represent in our fevered subconscious: disease, poverty, terrorism, anarchy - you name it. They are legion and, let's face it, whatever they are, they're going to get you in the end.

Night of the Living Dead never went on general release in the UK, and so had to be tracked down to its intermittent screenings in odd places and arthouse cinemas, but strong word of mouth ensured it was the horror movie to watch. I knew in advance where the story was going because I'd read the synopsis in Monthly Film Bulletin, which is why I'd heard of it in the first place. Even so, I wasn't prepared for its sheer unrelenting bleakness: no light relief, no ray of light, no way out. Also, though I'd seen Plague of the Zombies and I Walked with a Zombie, I had never seen zombies like these before; in fact, until the Italian zombie craze started up after Dawn of the Dead, we didn't even call them zombies - just ghouls or the living dead. Dawn of the Dead and Romero's later living dead movies are fun, but I still find Night of the Living Dead almost unbearably grim, very hard to watch, and genuinely upsetting.

When I went to bed after seeing it for the first time, I dreamt the first zombie, the one from the graveyard, was standing over my bed, just standing there and looking down at me. This is one of the most frightening dreams I can remember ever having, and I hope I never have it again.

6) TOBY DAMMIT (1968)

"He was a sad dog, it is true, and a dog's death it was that he died." (Edgar Allan Poe)

How did I see it? Late night at the Screen on the Green, 1975. On my own.

What's the story? Histoire Extraordinaires (aka Spirits of the Dead aka Tales of Mystery and Imagination) (1968) is another portmanteau film, this time consisting of three adaptations of stories by Edgar Allan Poe, each directed by an arty European auteur. Roger Vadim's Metzengerstein (Jane and and Peter Fonda, plus horse) and Louis Malle's William Wilson are more kitsch than scary (though William Wilson does feature a memorable scene in which Brigitte Bardot, in a black wig, gets whipped), but it's the third and final segment, Federico Fellini's Toby Dammit, which is the zinger here. Terence Stamp plays a burnt-out film star who arrives in Rome to film a "Catholic Western" and finds himself up to his eyeballs in typically Fellini-esque nuttiness - nuns, paparazzi, TV presenters, fashion models. But it's the final pay-off, which involves a ghostly little girl, that will give you the willies. If I tell you the title of the Poe story on which it was based is Never Bet the Devil Your Head, it will give you a clue as to what happens after Toby gets his 1964 Ferrari 330 LMB (thank you Internet Movie Cars Database) and puts pedal to the metal.

Why was I so scared? Toby keeps seeing a scary little girl ghost, an image not featured in the Poe story (in which the "Devil" of the title is an old man) but which was almost certainly "inspired" by the little girl ghost in Mario Bava's Operazione Paura (aka Kill Baby, Kill) (1966) - same long blonde hair, same white frock and ball. I suspect that if I'd seen Operazione Paura at the Screen on the Green that night, instead of Histoires Extraordinaires, it would be Bava's film and not Fellini's on this list you are now reading. But Stamp's performance is scary too - drunk, dishevelled and dissolute, he looks like Edgar Allan Poe's even more decadent id, and his nocturnal drive through the outskirts of Rome is so desperate and terrifying you just know it will end badly.

The little girl ghost in Mario Bava's Operazione Paura.

After I saw this film I had to walk home from Islington to Tufnell Park, through streets that were just as deserted as the ones in the film (albeit in north London rather than just outside Rome), at two o'clock in the morning. Deserted streets after dark are scary, because they might turn out to be not deserted at all. All the way back I kept expecting to see the little girl ghost. Or her ball. Or worse. And then, when I finally got home, I expected her to be waiting for me when I opened the door.

Terence Stamp looking quite Poe-ish as Toby Dammit.

To be continued in...

SCARY BITS: PART TWO

Here's a piece I wrote for the Guardian about ghosts in the movies.

MEGALOMANIAC FILM DIRECTORS: A BEGINNER'S GUIDE

2011-09-17T15:55:00.000+02:00

Cecil B. DeMille once asked Jesse Lasky Jnr if he believed in God. "Yes, sir," the young writer replied, "I think so."

"But you don't know."

"I believe in you, sir," said Lasky.

"Not a bad beginning," said DeMille.

The wonder of it is that all film directors are not megalomaniacs. Orson Welles famously referred to the film studio as "the greatest electric train set a boy ever had", and being put in the driver's seat is enough to go to anyone's head. Think of it: millions of dollars of other people's money, hundreds of technicians on hand to do your bidding, the whole world ready and waiting to soak up your personal vision. So you want to be a megalomaniac film director? To ensure that your name is writ large in cinema mega-history, all you have to do is observe the following rules.

1. JIFF UP YOUR NAME

Anything Italian sounding or with a European possessive such as von, de or di will do nicely. Hey, it worked for Von Sternberg, Von Stroheim, Von Trotta, Von Trier et al. You opt for Tony Von Dio, with the accent on Dio. It was going to be Tony Del Rio, after Dolores, but you suspect this might have lead to disrespectful types calling you "Del Boy".

2. PUT YOUR NAME ABOVE THE TITLE

"A Tony Von Dio Film." Or, better still, insert your name into the title. Thus: Fellini Satyricon, Kinski-Paganini, Tony Von Dio's Book of Revelations. (Your producers, mindful of the cost of advertising space, will eventually shorten this to Revelation.)

3. STUDY THE MARKET

You wouldn't want to be accused of selling out. Musicals, westerns and epics are all conspicuous by their absence from Variety's 50 top grossing films. You decide to turn Revelation into an epic western with added musical numbers that will be performed live by actors with no previous experience of singing or dancing. You envisage the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as cowboys, and the Whore of Babylon as a hardboiled chanteuse with a heart of gold. You think that maybe you could get Angelina Jolie or Anne Hathaway interested, and Nicolas Cage is already in talks for the pivotal role of the Lamb of God.

4. DON'T WORRY ABOUT THE SCRIPT

Whose film is this anyway? Yours or the screenwriter's? His screenplay is pathetically lacking in mythical resonance, social significance and Big Crowd Scenes. Ignore it completely. Cobble something together as you go along. Rewrite each scene yourself half an hour before it is due to be shot. Actors are naturally lazy; best keep them on their toes.

5. TAKE LOTS OF MIND-ALTERING DRUGS

There is a certain subgenre, not applicable to any of the directors mentioned in this article, known as "The Coke Movie". Coke Movies are easily recognisable by their zany humour and their car crashes, hysterical performances and flagrant disregard for dull narrative traditions such as The Story. Coke Movies tend to be enormously popular with children under 10 years old, as well as with members of the public who have been taking the same mind-altering drugs as the film-makers.

The mind-altering drugs, when you take them, confirm your suspicions that your current project will change the course of film-making history as we know it, and also persuade you that it would be a terrific idea to cast seven stand-up comedians as the Seven Angels with the Seven Last Plagues, thus adding new dimensions of zany humour to the poignant tragedy of mankind.

6. STRIVE FOR AUTHENTICITY

Period settings offer plenty of opportunity for expensive perfectionism. The white raiment of the four-and-twenty elders must be woven on authentic antique looms which have been handcarved by blind men on the slopes of Mount Sinai. The crowns and the vials-full-of-odours must be fashioned from real gold. Few of these objects will be seen in close-up, but it matters not. You are not making a St Trinian's film here. You are staging Armageddon.

7. CHOOSE YOUR LOCATION CAREFULLY

Any klutz can make films in a film studio, but it takes real genius to transport hundreds of people and millions of pounds worth of equipment into the Amazon jungle. Since you have already decided that you are making a western, your first task is to raze several square miles of rain forest in order to give the horses room to gallop.

8. ABUSE YOUR ACTORS

Actors are there to fit into your lighting schemes. If the Lamb of God starts agonising over his motivation for the line "Holy, holy, holy," get ratty with him. Tell him you are creating Art, not running a charitable organisation for the furtherance of sensitive Method performances. If necessary, punch him or make him cry by telling him his mother is dead.

Spice up your sex scenes by encouraging the Lamb and his screen wife to indulge in an offscreen affair behind the backs of their respective real-life spouses. Encourage the angels to ostracise Satan during lunch breaks. Insist on your actors performing their own difficult and dangerous stunts. The actor playing Satan will naturally be reluctant to plunge head-first into the lake of fire and brimstone; it is your job to persuade him that stuntmen are for wimps.

9. ABUSE YOUR EXTRAS

The extras who are doubling as the Tribes of Israel and the Great Multitude of All Nations and Tongues will, sooner or later, grow tired of standing around, waiting to be pelted with locusts. When they threaten insurrection, see to it that one or two are accidentally drowned in the flood of wormwood, and gently remind the rest that there are plenty of tribespeople in the Amazon jungle who will be prepared to work for brightly-coloured beads instead of standard union rates.

10. KEEP THAT CAMERA ROLLING
Clint Eastwood does everything in one take, but he is not a genius and you are. Shoot no fewer than 60 takes of every set-up. Shoot well into the night: your cast and crew won't object because they will be getting paid overtime, and you will also have shared your mind-altering drugs with some of them. Shoot and shoot again.

11. BUDGET? WHAT BUDGET?
Your backers know nothing about Art. You know, however, that Great Art Hath No Price. Costly special effects such as the fall of Babylon and the sky being rolled up like a scroll are vital to your vision. Go ahead and film them: it is rare for a film studio to pull the plug on a project once shooting has started.

12. CHANGE YOUR MIND

You have been filming in the jungle for several months. You have already exceeded your allotted budget by something like $50 million. Most of your cast and crew have been struck down by septic mosquito bites and dysentery, but the set builders have finally managed to erect a New Jerusalem in the middle of an alligator-infested swamp. Alas, as soon as you lay eyes on the 12 foundations of the city garnished with all manner of precious stones, you realise that the natural lighting effects are not quite what you had in mind. You decide to abaondon the New Jerusalem and rebuild it in the Nevada desert.

13. BLOW IT UP

Artistic licence permits you to round off Revelation with a big bang instead of the rather low-key ending suggested by St John the Divine. Your film should incorporate at least one sequence in which the entire set is destroyed in a massive explosion. Also, this saves having to dismantle it.

14. CHOP AND CHANGE

As things stand, you are in possession of 1.5 million feet of film, all of it brilliant. With the aid of your mind-altering drugs, you edit ruthlessly and show the finished print to your producers. They persuade you, against your artistic judgement, that a film lasting 33 hours will not be a feasible commercial prospect.

Furthermore, they complain that the storyline lacks narrative drive and that the characterisations, especially those of the Lamb and Satan, are not sufficiently developed to engage an audience's sympathies. Also, they would like a happy ending. They threaten to take the film away from you. You remind them you have the right of final cut. The backers send men who threaten to break your legs. You reassemble your cast and film some extra scenes in an attempt to clarify the plot for audiences whose lack of artistic sensibility prevents them from understanding it.

After months of slaving over a hot Steenbeck you present your producers with a film lasting three hours and 20 minutes. Congratulations. You have exceeded your budget by $80 million and gone five months over schedule. Revelation is now ready for public consumption.

15. GIVE GOOD INTERVIEW

Blame your movie's box-office failure and disastrous reviews on studio interference, on the emotional instability of your actors, and on the complete absence of aesthetic judgement on the part of critics and public.

16. STEAL YOUR FILM BACK

Restore two hours of the cut footage. Open it in Paris to rave reviews and queues around the block. Show the 33-hour version at MOMA and BFI Southbank, with intervals. You are acclaimed as the genius you always knew you were. Feel vindicated.

APPENDIX:
SOME EXAMPLES OF FILM DIRECTORS BEHAVING LIKE MEGALOMANIACS

Coppola on the set of Apocalypse Now

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA (1939-) used to be an inveterate exceeder of budgets. Apocalypse Now (1979) went from $12 million to $30 million. One From the Heart (1982) went from $12 million to $23 million, and The Cotton Club (1984) from $30 million to $45 million. During filming of Apocalypse Now in the Philippines, he destroyed several acres of palm trees by dropping 1,200 gallons of gasoline on them. "There aren't too many places in the world you could do it," he said. "They'd never let you in the United States. The environmentalists would kill you."

Heaven's Gate (1980) directed by MICHAEL CIMINO (1943-) was originally budgeted at $7.5 million. It came in at $36 million, and its spectacular critical and commercial failure nearly bankrupted its studio, United Artists and made the film's title a watchword for creative profligacy. The director was aiming for perfection. Cimino's perfectionism included his order for a painstakingly constructed period street to be made six yards wider. One side of the street was accordingly dismantled and moved six yards. Cimino, viewing the result, declared that the lighting was now all wrong: the side of the street that had already been moved would have to be shifted back three yards, and the other side of the street would have to be shifted out three yards. For the full story, read Steven Bach's Final Cut: Art, Money and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the film that sank United Artists.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Like many of the directors who worked on early silents, CECIL B DEMILLE (1881-1959) showed a cavalier disregard for the well-being of his actors. During the shooting of Joan the Woman (1916), for example, Geraldine Farrar was bound to a stake with her nostrils and mouth stuffed with ammonia-soaked cotton while the surrounding logs were set aflame. The same actress was later placed in a tank full of blazing oil. One of DeMille's biographers notes: "She was only slightly singed."

RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER (b. 1946; d. 1982) "would start the day demanding ten Cuba libres - rum and Coca-Cola," recalls the producer Peter Berling in Love is Colder than Death: The Life and Work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder by Berling and Robert Katz. "He would drink nine and throw the tenth at the cameraman." The filmmaker was a master in the art of cruelty to actors; like a one-man Mutt and Jeff act, he alternated between abusing and building up the confidence of members of his stock company until they ended up grovelling and dependent. He once cast the wife of Uli Lommel as a nympho-sadist and forced her to whip her husband for take after take until both of them collapsed in tears. But his abuse of others was as nothing to his abuse of himself: he smoked anything he could lay his hands on, consumed three grammes of cocaine, often flown on to location by private jet, per day, drank bourbon out of beer mugs, and could go to sleep only after repeated doses of Mandrax and Valium. He died aged 37, a brilliant burn-out, having directed 43 films in 17 years.

Alfred Hitchcock and friends

During filming of The Birds (1963), ALFRED HITCHCOCK (1899-1980) instructed two crew members to follow Tippi Hedren wherever she went off-set. According to The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock by Donald Spoto, the director told her what to eat and what to wear, and she had to ask his permission to visit friends in the evenings. The filming of the climactic scene of the movie, in which her character is attacked by birds, went on for a week, during which the actress had live gulls attached to her body by elastic bands. One bird almost pecked out her eye and Hedren suffered a nervous collapse. When, midway through the shooting of Marnie (1964), she rejected his sexual advances, he stopped speaking to her, gave direction to her only via assistants, and lost interest in the film.

For Heart of Glass (1976) WERNER HERZOG (1952-) worked with all but one of his cast under hypnosis. (It shows.) Not content with having made one film - Aguirre: Wrath of God (1972) - in the jungles of South America, the director returned there to film Fitzcarraldo (1982), a story about an opera buff who drags a steamboat over a mountain from one river system to another. Not for Herzog the wonders of special effects and trick photography. "I have decided we will do it for real," he announced, "and not use modern technology at all." When local Peruvian Indians demonstrated their reluctance to have him film on their territory, Herzog had 400 natives from another part of Peru airlifted on to the film set. The director has since denied that they where abandoned there for four months without pay, while he returned to Europe to raise extra funds. Herzog has complained that he has exhausted the possibilities of earth, the jungle, the outback, the barren plains. For his next movie "Perhaps I will go to the moon."

Dennis Hopper (photo copyright Anne Billson)

Easy Rider (1969), directed by and co-starring DENNIS HOPPER (1936-2010), was such a box-office hit, despite Hopper's violent rages and LSD binges, that he received virtual carte blanche to make The Last Movie (1971) in Peru - obviously a Mecca for mad film-makers. Hopper ended up with 46 hours of raw footage, which he and various editors, cowboys and hangers-on then tried to assemble into the film to end all films, a commentary on life and art and the bits in between, an examination into the very process of filmmaking itself. They were greatly hindered in this quest by consumption of psychedelic drugs which made everything they did seem incredibly awe-inspiring and mysterious. The film itself, accordingly, turned out to be incredibly awe-inspiring, mysterious and pretentious in more or less equal parts. It was voted Best Picture at the Venice Film Festival, but got dumped pretty rapidly by its American distributors.

Revolution (1985), directed by HUGH HUDSON (1936-), was budgeted at around £17 million. "We've gone to £19 million," said Hudson. "I don't think that's much. The Americans do it all the time." The difference was that the British Film Industry was in one of its perennial states of crisis, and the huge cost and subsequent box office flop of Revolution virtually put the kibosh on Goldcrest, its production company. During filming in Devon, a £20,000 marquee "caught fire", and a £250,000 camera crane "fell" off a cliff. "We seem to have a lot of problems with stick-in-the-mud Devonians," said Hudson. Morale was not high. When hundreds of extras had been kept waiting around in full costume, in the cold, for three days, it was suggested to the director that they should either be used or allowed to stand down, because they were tired. Hudson replied, "I like them tired."

It was said of JOHN HUSTON (1906-1987) that he chose a "victim" on each of his movies. On Freud (1962), he did so many takes of a sequence involving Montgomery Clift being pulled by a rope that the actor's hands ended up torn and bleeding. Clift was in a bad way; he was still troubled by serious head injuries sustained in a car accident some years previously, and suffered from a hyperthyroid condition, which affected his balance. And, on the Freud set, it was discovered that he had cataracts in both eyes, threatening permanent blindness. Huston, when he heard the news, quipped: "Now I suppose we'll have to get him a seeing-eye dog."

Klaus Kinski as Paganini in Kinski-Paganini

KLAUS KINSKI (1926-1991) sneaks into this list by virtue of Kinski-Paganini (note the personalised title) and because, as Herzog's favourite actor, he always gave his director a run for his money in the megalomaniac stakes (see Herzog's documentary My Best Fiend). Kinski-Paganini was well named, having been written by Kinski, directed by Kinski and starring Kinski alongside Nikolai Kinski and Debora Kinski. Kinski, as Paganini, gets to bury his head between the thighs of a girl young enough to be his granddaughter. At the Cannes Film Festival, he called a press conference, insulted everyone in sight and stomped off along the promenade threatening photographers.

STANLEY KUBRICK (1928-1999) was notorious for insisting on every single print of his films being vetted in every single cinema to ensure it was being correctly projected etc: if this is megalomania, we should have more of it. However, Kubrick also exhibited the darker side of OCD while shooting The Shining (1980), on which he set records for the number of takes of a single scene - variously reported as 127 or 148. Vivian Kubrick's documentary Making "The Shining" (1980) shows the director bullying Shelley Duvall quite mercilessly, and the rumours circulating concerning filming of the rape scene in A Clockwork Orange (which I haven't been able to substantiate) are quite unsavoury.

AKIRA KUROSAWA (1910-1998) was nicknamed "The Emperor". At the end of Throne of Blood (1957), Toshiro Mifune, as the Macbeth character, dies under a hail of arrows which turn him into a human pin-cushion. Kurosawa tried fake arrows which popped up, and he tried arrows on wires. Eventually he opted for real arrows, shot at Mifune by real archers hidden behind bits of scenery.

JOHN LANDIS (b. 1950) is known for his scenes of anarchic destruction in films such as The Blues Brothers (1980) and An American Werewolf in London (1981). During the filming of a scene for his segment of Twilight Zone - The Movie (1983) in which a Vietnamese village is strafed by an American helicopter, Landis later denied that he said, as various witnesses claimed, "Well, we may lose the helicopter," and, when one of the special effects detonations was more intense than expected, "You ain't seen nothing yet!" The helicopter, buffeted by an explosion in the middle of the night-time shoot, crashed on top of actor Vic Morrow and two child actors, aged six and seven. Morrow and one of the children were decapitated; the other child was crushed to death. Landis and four of his film crew were indicted on charges of involuntary manslaughter. On the stand, the director repeatedly denied that he had been aware of any danger and, in 1987, all the defendants were acquitted. In 1988, he held a special preview of his new film, Coming to America, for members of the jury which acquitted him.

ELAINE MAY (1932-), formerly half of a stand-up comedy duo with Mike Nichols, wrote and directed A New Leaf (1971), one of the funniest and most underappreciated comedies of the 1970s. In 1973 she started work on Mikey and Nicky (1976), starring John Cassavetes and Peter Falk. During filming, a camera operator watched Cassavetes and Falk wander off the set. The camera continued to run. After several minutes of filming nothing, the operator shouted "Cut!" and turned off the camera. May yelled at him, "You don't say cut. I'm the director, and only the director says cut." The operator protested that the actors had left. "Yes," said May, "but they might come back."

The ratio of film shot to film shown in the finished print of Mikey and Nicky was 40 to one - twice the average. May finally approved a finished print in 1985. It is said that, during the long and arduous editing, she bit a sound-timer on the leg. The cost of Ishtar, the 1987 megadisaster starring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, soared from $35 million to $51 million during shooting. It soared, partly, because of incidents such as the one when May decided she wanted sand dunes in the shot. The Sahara was duly scoured for suitable sand dunes. They were found. Then May decided that she didn't want sand dunes after all. She wanted flat desert. So, for the next two weeks, the dunes were scraped away, bit by bit.

John Milius, with accessories

JOHN MILIUS (1944-) is a member of the National Rifle Association. He keeps a bazooka in his office. He likes to use live ammunition in his films. "I can't be a general," he once said, "but I can try to live like one. When I'm working on a film, I demand the kind of treatment a general gets." While writing the original script of Apocalypse Now, he redecorated his office to resemble a military command post. He prefaced his film of Conan the Barbarian (1982) with a quotation from Nietzsche. Milius has a reputation for being a wild and crazy guy, but on the whole he seems a reasonable sort of fellow who merely enjoys living up to the legend he has created for himself. "I enjoy the Bomb immensely," he once said. "I think of it as a religious totem." And: "Pain is temporary, but the film is permanent."

STEVEN SPIELBERG (1947-) said "It's true when I say that 1941 may be too intense for normal people. I just hope there are enough abnormal crazies in the world to make Universal and Columbia back their 30 million dollar negative cost investment." 1941 (1979), it should be added, was chock-full of wacky humour such as chandeliers crashing on to dance floors, tanks crashing into paint factories, bombers crashing into tar-pits and Ferris wheels crashing into the ocean. There were not enough "abnormal crazies" in the world to prevent the film from being a box-office flop, although it has since been hailed as a cult movie manqué, albeit a not very funny one.

ERICH VON STROHEIM (1885-1957) was the son of a Jewish hatter from Silesia, but passed himself off as the descendant of a noble Prussian military family. With monocle, jodhpurs and riding crop, he cultivated his image as megalomaniac film director par excellence. He built a facsimile of Monte Carlo on the Universal back lot, insisted on extras wearing monogrammed silk underwear under their Austrian military uniforms and on rooms being fully furnished, even though all that might be seen in shot was the exterior of the window. He was partial to orgy sequences: they would be shot on closed sets for anything up to 20 hours, the actors were treated to champagne (even during Prohibition), and girls would emerge with whip marks and bites. For The Wedding March (1928), he imported a professional dominatrix from Vienna. Von Stroheim was also a footage fetishist. His original version of Greed (1923-25) lasted seven hours; the studio eventually had it reduced from 42 reels to 10. Gloria Swanson had him fired midway through the filming of Queen Kelly (1929), after he insisted on having one of her co-stars dribble tobacco-juice over her hand.

This is an edited version of an article originally published in Tatler in 1987. I find it interesting now to reflect that the entire piece was cobbled together, in pre-Google days, entirely through diligent perusal of reference books and sifting through cuttings in the BFI library.

Of course, many things have changed since 1987. Hardly anyone shoots on film any more; the relative cheapness of video takes the financial pain out of excess footage. Francis Coppola has mellowed (to the extent that his films are no longer interesting), Werner Herzog has blossomed, and Hugh Hudson is no longer regarded as a serious film-maker. But I would like to see John Milius back in the director's chair.

BIG BOSOMS!

2011-09-04T11:05:00.001+02:00

"I did it for myself". It's a recurring phrase you often see or hear in the personal testaments of some of the 22,030 women who, according to the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, have undergone breast augmentation surgery in the past four years. Year by year, we're told, their numbers are on the increase.

If you were one of those 22,030 women and you said this, I'm sorry, but I think you're deluded. Perhaps you didn't get breast implants to try and make yourself more attractive to men (which is so pathetic a justification I can't imagine anyone ever admitting to it anyway), but you have certainly been brainwashed into thinking that a certain type of physique is the ideal, and that your life won't be complete if you don't conform to it. Well, it's a free country, so go ahead and get your breasts enlarged, if you must. Just don't go looking for my respect as well.

Maybe you saw pictures of Victoria Beckham or Lindsay Lohan or Carmen Electra, and thought, "Hey, wouldn't it be great to have breasts like those?" If this was indeed the case, you clearly need an eye-test. Though you're not alone; each new manifestation of demented celebrity knocker enlargement seems to be met with less of the derision it deserves. Once upon a time, unfeasibly large mammaries were the province of strippers, or of actresses in kitsch softcore movies directed by Russ Meyer, but nowadays even Erica Gavin in Vixen! or Tura Satana of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! are being comprehensively outbosomed by the likes of Famous-for-Doing-Nothing or Bazooma Baywatch or Chantilly from the latest dimwitted TV reality show. Simply by dint of featuring in so many photos, freakishly large bazoomas that are completely disporportionate to the rest of a woman's anatomy are starting to be thought of as the norm.

Russ Meyer, American auteur and bosom fetishist

Even if your surgical expansion is limited to a cup-size or two rather than the full Boobzilla, I still think you're nuts. I can understand seeking breast reconstruction after a mastectomy, or surgical reduction of breasts so big they cause back pain. But submitting to a medically unnecessary procedure simply to bolster self-esteem is madness; if your self-esteem really is that low you'd be better off seeing a psychotherapist, or even just buying a new lipstick. And no, it's not the same as dyeing your hair, or getting your teeth fixed; every operation carries a risk of infection, bleeding, scarring. In any case, there will be pain, and the impact on your bank balance will be excruciating as well; the average cost of implants is around £5,000. Blimey, if you were so dead set on having a more prominent rack you could buy a gel-filled Wonderbra and still have $4,080 change to spend on holidays, mortgage repayments and sandwiches.

And it's not as though it ends there; even after the op you will need to pay for regular screening to detect leaks or ruptures in the implants, and you may well require further surgical procedures to deal with problems such as "capsular contracture" (tightening of scar tissue resulting in hardening, rippling and other unwanted changes), wrinkling, asymetry or malposition. Mammograph results will be less reliable, and should you decide to have children, congratulations, you have reduced your chances of being able to put your breasts to the use for which nature originally intended them - breastfeeding your babies. Moreover, since implant surgery can cause irreversible nerve damage and consequent decrease in sensitivity, you may well be depriving yourself of sexual pleasure as well. So is the way you look so much more important than the way you feel? If that really is "doing it for yourself", it sounds perilously close to masochism.

And just look at the things! Since when did it become aesthetically pleasing to have what looks like two halves of a melon bolted on to your chest? Some women describe their ops as "breast-lifting" rather than augmentation, but you can't help suspecting they've spent so much time studying photos of fake celebrity chests they've forgotten what real bosoms look like. A bit of droop is par for the course, unsightly only to those whose physical ideal is a plastic Barbie doll. When you lie on your back, your breasts should seem smaller and floppier; they're not supposed to stick straight up into the air like ice-cream cones, for heaven's sake.

Michael Douglas mesmerised by Kate Capshaw's mammaries in Black Rain

And what is this obsession with bigger bosoms anyway? In my experience most men (and OK, yes, a lot of women too) like tits, any old tits, in any shape or form; this preoccupation with size, beyond the obvious remit of the dedicated breast fetishists, is primarily a girl thing. It's often assumed that small-breasted women are envious of their more fulsomely endowed sisters, but this is a myth, probably put about by those trying to justify their surgically enhanced mammaries; I have friends with naturally spectacular cleavage, and they look fabulous... but I've never for one moment wanted to be like them, nor have any of the other smaller-chested women I know. We like being able to sleep on our tummies. We like people looking us in the face as we talk instead of staring fascinated at our décolletage. We like being able to tap-dance or play badminton without banging ourselves on the chin. We like not getting backache. And we especially like the option of being able to go braless, every now and again.

Ah yes, bras. The brassière (invented towards the end of the 19th century by either Herminie Cadolle or Marie Tucek, depending on which history of underwear you happen to be reading) is a relatively recent development in women's fashion. In the 20th century its design, which supported the breasts from the shoulders instead of, like a corset, constricting the torso to force them upwards, has been instrumental in the pumping up of the breast into a primary fetish zone, despite the occasional vogues for flatter chests which, historically, have tended to coincide with periods of female emancipation - the flat-fronted flapper of the jazz age, or the skinny Twiggy silhouette of the 1960s.

But ever since 1994, when Eva Herzigova stopped traffic with her "Hello boys!" Wonderbra ad, it has been bosoms a-go-go, and they're on the increase. Marks & Spencer now stock GG, HH and J cup sizes, and Bravissimo, purveyors of bras for even larger ladies, offers a K. A lot of this may be due to an all-round increase in obesity, of course, but the average bra size has reportedly jumped from a mere 34B during the 1990s to 36C. It sometimes seems to me as though lingerie manufacturers (and the market is worth more than £800 million in the UK alone) are conspiring with plastic surgeons and tabloid newspapers to promote the idea that bigger is better - and women are falling for this nonsense.

Whereas, less than a decade ago, the likes of Calvin Klein and Lacoste sold simple yet elegant stretchy camisole-type bras that contained the bosom rather than forcing it up and out, these are nowadays virtually impossible to find (and believe me, I've hunted for them) leaving us small-breasted women stuck with a choice between armour-plated sportswear and underwired confections that restrict the breathing (just try doing a yoga exercise in one of these) and package the breasts like fancy Easter eggs in scratchy, preformed cups that never seem to fit properly, no matter how many professional fittings you get. Brassieres in general may be an advance on the bone-crushing, organ-deforming, breath-constricting corsets that preceded them, but beyond considerations of comfort (and I can see why you wouldn't want to go jogging without strapping yourself up) they are not strictly necessary. Age, exercise, weight and childbearing all have more bearing on the droopiness of your breasts than whether or not you wear a bra.

As for subjecting yourself to a medically unnecessary surgical procedure in the hope of conforming to an unfeasibly va-va-voom silhouette, it's surely not so very different from allowing yourself to be laced into a garment that deforms your ribs and internal organs in the hope of ending up with a 10-inch waist. One hundred years of feminism, and women still hate their bodies. Why otherwise would they be subjecting themselves to this sort of tragic mutilation?

This is an edited version of a ~~rant~~ piece I wrote a few years ago for a women's magazine, which subsequently rejected it on the grounds that my tone was too aggressive. (No! Surely not!) Please be advised that the statistics are now out of date, though they were accurate at the time of writing.

But I still have a problem finding nice stretchy bras without wiring or pre-formed cups for everyday wear; my only friends in this area are Sloggi, which does a basic black or white, and Sweaty Betty's ultra-comfortable exercise crop-tops in a wide range of bright colours.

CHINATOWN AND THE PERFECT RED

2011-08-26T12:56:00.002+02:00

To go out of the house without lipstick on is, as far as I'm concerned, to go out into the world improperly dressed. I don't think twice about popping out to the local shops in baggy-kneed trousers and an impasto of henna concealed beneath a makeshift turban of chiffon and clingfilm. So long as my mouth has been anointed with Rouge Cubiste, I am armed and in control.

Once my lips have been given the once-over, I feel confident, capable of handling just about any crisis. If there were a fire in my house, I would probably pause to apply a slick of Love That Red, before grabbing the cat and my insurance policy, and diving for the exit.

It was when my vampire novel Suckers was published to what is generally referred to as "a mixed reception", that I began to suspect lipstick was performing a function in my life that went far beyond the purely cosmetic. Instead of taking to heart the more vitriolic reviews ("Absolute drivel!" "Shockingly bad!" etc - most of these penned, I suspect, by writers upset that a vampire novel had got me included in a list of Granta's Best Young British Novelists), I found I was using them as an excuse to go into Harvey Nichols and blow 20 quid on a tube of Kanebo's Rose or Misty Akane. Somehow, it put everything in proportion. So long as I had an expensive new lipstick to play with, all was right with the world.

Pedants will tell you that the painted mouth was once the sign of a courtesan whose speciality was fellatio. But I prefer to think of lipstick as a mark of liberation, a brand of power, a sign of self-sufficiency. During a brief flirtation with radical feminism in the 1970s, I found myself faced with a choice: lipstick or dungarees. Are you kidding ? No contest: if lipstick and sisterhood were incompatible, then I'd rather tackle life as an only child.

Since my first encounters with the Rimmel make-up display at the hairdresser's where my mother went for her perm, my relationship with lipstick has acquired a rich assortment of cultural, philosophical, and religious connotations. That ancient make-up counter bore more than a passing resemblance to an altar, with lipstick the most potent ritual implement.

It took me years to perfect the art of air-kissing—a gesture invented specifically for lipstick-wearers. I have learned to savour the blotting of a freshly repainted mouth on a paper napkin at the dinner table. And how can I begin to describe the Zen-like pleasure of that moment when you pull off the cap and the vacuum suction kicks in and gives out an immensely gratifying little "thunk"?

I embarked on this lifelong relationship capriciously, at a time when the fashionable shade was a whiter shade of pink. There followed several years of barely-there flesh tones and discreet auburns, all designed to blend and look natural. Then, in the early 70s, I saw two films that changed my attitude to lipstick forever.

Delphine Seyrig as Countess Báthory in Daughters of Darkness

The first was Harry Kümel's Belgo-Franco-German (but primarily Belgo - I think Belgium can fairly lay claim to this one) horror flick, Daughters Of Darkness, in which Delphine Seyrig plays a 300-year-old vampire with a Marcel wave, long red fingernails and the most perfectly scarlet-painted mouth you ever saw - not a fang in sight. Lipstick, I realised, was not meant to blend in with the rest of your face. You had to flaunt it. It made a statement and perhaps, just perhaps, it hinted at decadent, neck-biting tendencies. Not for nothing is Daughters of Darkness known in French-speaking territories as Le rouge aux lèvres or Le lèvres rouges. Red lips.

From that day on, I revelled in the darker, more conspicuous shades and started to outline them in lip pencil. Those early days were dominated by Biba and Mary Quant - Posh Prune, Aristo Claret, Bordeaux and Mulberry. And it didn't stop there. On dark party nights I dabbled in proto-Gothic chic, crossing the colour bar with Biba's Black or Matisse Green.

The second film - as you might have guessed by now (the pictures are a bit of a giveaway) was Chinatown, a revisionist film noir and one of the best private-eye movies ever made, and as soon as Faye Dunaway made her entrance in impeccable femme fatale make-up, I was a woman possessed. Since that moment my life has been an Arthurian quest for the Perfect Red. I am doomed to wander the enchanted realms of cosmetics counters, my wrists covered with experimental scarlet smears like the hesitation marks of a would-be suicide.

When, many years later, I found myself actually interviewing Dunaway in the flesh, there was only one question I really wanted to ask. And so I asked it. She responded politely, but vaguely: "Revlon's Fire and Ice?" But I knew it wasn't Fire and Ice; I'd already checked that one out. Of course, the correct answer would have been that that precise shade of lipstick had never existed in real life, any more than the shades featured in lipstick advertising exist - they're figments of filmstock, lighting and the cosmetician's palette.

But in 1980, I thought I'd finally located the motherlode. Yardley's Holly Red had it all: the plain pillar-box colour, waxy texture, evocative smell, and affordability. I wore it constantly. Other women admired it, inquired after my secret, and agreed I had hit the lipstick jackpot. Then - disaster! Overnight, and without warning, Yardley changed the formula. All of a sudden, Holly Red was slicker and less tenacious, a shadow of its former self. And I never even had a chance to stockpile. I still have a worn-down stub of the original Holly Red. Occasionally, I take the cap off and sniff it nostalgically, thinking of what we might have achieved together, that lipstick and I. It smells like an attic, but not a musty one - the sort of attic in which you would stumble across a chest containing a treasure trove of antique but eminently wearable garments in exquisite silk, lace and chiffon, all untouched by moth. The original Holly Red smells like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It smells like... Chinatown.

And so my quest was resumed. Thanks to Yardley's perfidy, I have been obliged to graze in ever more exclusive pastures. I have explored the rich pickings of Chanel's Rouge Extreme. I have kissed in Clinique, eaten in Estée Lauder, wrapped my laughing tackle around Lancôme. I have yet to find the Perfect Red but, as far as I am concerned, happiness is a new lipstick. The way I see it, wearing lipstick is the entire point of being a girl.

This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in Elle (British edition) in 1993.

TEN BEST MEN'S STYLE MOVIES

2011-08-24T11:19:00.001+02:00

This blog started life as a semi-frivolous but lavishly illustrated selection of men's style movies for GQ (British edition) in 1994. Since all ten films on this list are stone-cold classics, I don't see any reason to update it, but I might add to the also-ran titles from time to time, if and when the fancy takes me.

10. TWO-LANE BLACKTOP [1971)

Take to the tarmac in ROAD MOVIE style. Go-go grunge in anti-design anoraks, too short trousers and Tex-Mex textiles, teamed with wild and woolly hats and the wonderful Warren Oates. See also: My Own Private Idaho, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Rebel Without a Cause, Drugstore Cowboy.

9. ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS (1960)

Nothing like a bit of Italian NEO-REALISM. Alain Delon and co show those city-slicker Milanese what blue-collar country boys are made of: vests, sweatshirts, rugged knitwear, patched elbows, berets and yet more vests. See also: On the Waterfront, Ossessione, The Wild One.

8. AMERICAN GIGOLO (1980)

Richard Gere as the NEW WORLD DANDY. Come on down and show us your shirts! This is the movie that launched Giorgio Armani in the US. See also: Saturday Night Fever, A Single Man, The Great Gatsby.

7. BLADE RUNNER (1982)

Trip the future light fantastic in CYBERPUNK style: opt for replicant leather à la Rutger Hauer, or the Harrison Ford rundown raincoat. See also: Mad Max 2, The Terminator, Tetsuo, Highlander, The Matrix.

6. ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1969)

Say howdy pardner to MARLBORO MAN in the original duster coat movie, and one of Ennio Morricone's (many) finest hours. Black-hatted Henry Fonda strides out of the sagebrush to show off his rough, tough textiles and shoot a little kiddy in the head. See also: The Wild Bunch, The Long Riders, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, The Gunfighter.

5. NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959)

Check out Cary Grant's LITTLE GREY SUIT. Multi-purpose, crease-free, crush-proof and go-anywhere: spend a night dead-drunk in the cells, dodge crop-dusting planes, run away from exploding trucks, crawl across the face of Mount Rushmore and emerge unrumpled! For the little black equivalent, see The Blues Brothers, Reservoir Dogs and Inception.

4. A BOUT DE SOUFFLE (1960)

Go EXISTENTIAL with Jean-Paul Belmondo and his omnipresent cigarette. Let's hear it for the jump cut, the chequered tie, the New York Herald Tribune and the fashion gospel according to the Nouvelle Vague: "You're wearing silk socks with a tweed jacket?" See also: Le Samouraï, Orphée, Pierrot le Fou, The Rebel, Funny Face.

3. KING OF NEW YORK (1990)

Christopher Walken in Cerruti presides over killer-diller STREET STYLE: superdudes decked out in pimpwear, featuring chunky gold chains, baggy black leather, and sunglasses after dark. For extra pizzazz, pile on the ponytails and porkpie hats, gold teeth and a brace of pneumatic babe bodyguards, plus that all-important touch of sleaze. See also: 48 HRS, New Jack City.

2. THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (1957)

POWER DRESSING personified in the square-cut shoulders of Burt Lancaster as scumbag gossip columnist JJ Hunsecker. Prime accessories include pocket handkerchiefs, a manual typewriter, endless cups of coffee and a grovelling lackey (Tony Curtis) to light cigarettes. Heavy horn rims a bonus. Plus, of course, a possessive thing about your little sister. See also: Wall Street, The Godfather, Scarface, Casino.

1. THE CONFORMIST (1971)

Architecture and immorality. The incomparable Jean-Louis Trintignant models the essence of RETRO CHIC: fascism meets Art Deco and erupts in an orgy of spivvy Italian coats, sharp-cut suits and black leather gloves. See also: The Godfather, The Untouchables, Swann in Love, Chinatown, The Great Gatsby, Wings of Desire, The Fountainhead, In the Mood for Love.

THE CURSE OF BILLSON

2011-08-21T14:06:00.005+02:00

Boris Vian

With Proust, it was tea and biscuits that set him off. With me, it was a movie. Backbeat is the story of Stuart Sutcliffe, the one-time Beatle who left the band in 1961 to become a painter. When I saw it on its release in 1994, it reminded me that I'd once had such a big crush on Sutcliffe I'd torn his picture out of Beatles books to make a Stuart Sutcliffe collage. The problem was, I had that crush in the mid-1970s, by which time he'd been dead for a decade and a half.

Stuart Sutcliffe

I can't help it, I've always gone for unsuitable men. I'm not talking about my private life (though some of the men in that have been unsuitable too). I'm talking about the sort of public figures whose pictures end up on bedroom walls: film stars and pop singers, sporting idols, TV personalities - pin-ups and pashes. I made a list. Some of the names on it are embarrassing. Here are men whose dork-rating shoots off the end of the scale. Here are names that could be held against me. But I'm going to tell you about them anyway.

Towards the end of the 1950s, I was sufficiently sentient to have formed preferences, and my favourite TV personalities were Tonto and Mr Turnip. Evidently, my taste in men was already showing signs of nonconformity, but I'm happy to say this was the first and last time that headbands were featured. In the early 1960s, I was still intending to be a ballerina and accordingly nursed a pash on Rudolf Nureyev, blissfully unaware that the bulge in his tights was not for the likes of me. I must have had a thing about Russians, because the next object of desire was Illya Kuryakin in The Man from U.N.CL.E. as portrayed by David McCallum with his trendy polo-neck sweater and floppity blond hair.

Mr Turnip

Tonto

Rudolf Nureyev

Illya Kuryakin

Then there was Brian Jones from The Rolling Stones, bestowing on my list a hip credibility — almost immediately neutralised by his being followed by Peter Tork of The Monkees. (ETA: Note to young people: The Monkees may have some retro-respect now, but at the time of their TV show they were about as trendy as Elsie and Doris Waters.) Any lingering trace of hipness is then blasted out of the known universe by the two names that come next: Peter Frampton from The Herd and Mike D'Abo from Manfred Mann. Uncannily enough, they too had that floppity blond look. They were all cast from the exact same physical mould, and only now can I face up to the true identity of the prototype. Let's hear it for the guy who was always stuck on his own in the Thunderbirds space station. John Tracy: loner, philosopher, puppet.

(ETA: My first live teenage crush was on a boy called Bryan who had that same floppity blond hair. We never went out, but he did once stick his tongue in my mouth at a party while we were slow-dancing to "The Long and Winding Road".)

Brian Jones

Peter Tork

Peter Frampton

Mike D'Abo

John Tracy

Skip this next paragraph if you have a weak stomach. I was bewitched by John Hurt's freckles in A Man for All Seasons, bothered by David Hemmings's horsemanship in The Charge of the Light Brigade, and bewildered — God forgive me — by Peter Wyngarde's sideburns in Department S. I can reclaim a smidgeon of pride by confessing to a brief A-level crush on Lucifer in Paradise Lost. But Milton would have wept.

And then - catastrophe! No sooner had I decided to dedicate the rest of my life to Robert Powell in Doomwatch than his character blew himself up while defusing a nuclear bomb, so leaving the actor free to take on the title role in the Jesus of Nazareth mini-series. A generation of schoolgirls went into shock, and thence into mourning. Black armbands were seen in class. This violent termination of a favourite TV character had a profound and traumatic effect on me. After that, my crushes tended towards the morbid and the damned.

It was the Curse of Billson: throughout the 1970s and most of the 1980s, my chosen darlings bought the farm, one by one. Remember James Beck, the spivvy Private Walker, now gone to that great Dad's Army in the sky? He was one of mine. I transferred my allegiance to Sergeant Wilson, aka John Le Mesurier, but he passed away as well. Warren Oates? Lee Van Cleef? Lino Ventura? One by one, these hard-boiled heroes were snatched away. Walter Matthau clung on longer than most, but eventually he, too, succumbed to the Curse.

John Hurt

David Hemmings

Jason King

Lucifer

Robert Powell

James Beck

John Le Mesurier

Warren Oates

Lino Ventura

Walter Matthau

And yet there are a few on my list who cling to life, though - even now - they are old enough to be my father. I surprised even myself when I had an erotic dream about Matthau (shortly after watching The Secret Life of an American Wife). Not so surprising was the erotic dream about Jean Rochefort, that wonderful pointy-faced French actor, perhaps best-known for his Arabian dancing in The Hairdresser's Husband.

I thought I was finally exhibiting symptoms of an orthodox if belated schoolgirl crush when I started fancying Daniel Day-Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans, but it turned out to be a one-off; when not reloading his rifle while simultaneously running through the woods in a loincloth, the actor left me cold. I developed a fixation on Michael Keaton's mouth, but only when it was set off by his black rubber Batman costume. The nearest thing I had to an unconditional infatuation was with Christopher Walken, who invariably played misfits and psychopaths. I like to think Christopher and I would have got on rather well.

And the spirit of space-loner John Tracy lived on in the studly form of one of my most intense 1990s crushes, Data the android from Star Trek: The Next Generation, occasionally enhanced, though never entirely supplanted, by sporadic weaknesses for other members of the crew: Worf, Riker, Counselor Troi. And the dead men kept on coming: Gary Cooper, Gary Grant and (a final desperate stab at hip credibility) French surrealist Boris Vian - literary prankster, occasional actor and cat-lover to boot. This isn't nostalgia; it's virtual necrophilia.

But what are we to conclude from all this? What erotic imperatives are at work here? And what would I get if I fed all these crushes into a dating computer to construct my composite ideal? A dead blond ballet-dancing surrealist father figure, with strings. No wonder I never got married.

Jean Rochefort

Daniel Day-Lewis

Michael Keaton

Christopher Walken

Data

Gary Cooper

Cary Grant

This is an edited version of an article first published in GQ (the British edition) around the time of the UK release of Backbeat in 1994, hence the reference to it in the opening paragraph. Walter Matthau, bless him, was still going strong when the piece was written. I'm retrospectively dedicating it to everyone on the list who has passed away. RIP.

CRYSTAL PALACE v CITIZEN KANE

2011-08-19T12:57:00.005+02:00

Between October 1969 and August 1972, football was one of the most important things in my life. It started off innocently enough. "Went to a football match with Dad," read the relevant diary entry. "Crystal Palace v Newcastle. Palace lost 0-3." Enthralled by the novelty of watching 22 men (25 if you counted the ref and linesmen) running around showing their legs, little did I suspect that this scoreline was not an unfortunate aberration, but symptomatic of the big picture. By the time my eyes were opened, it was too late.

People who support glamorous teams such as Manchester United, Liverpool or Chelsea can have little idea of what it's like to find yourself attached to a club whose results are typified by diary entries such as these: "Went to Spurs v Palace (2-0). Rotten game," and, a couple of days later, "Went to Palace v Chelsea (1-5). Better game." We lost by four goals and this was a better game?

What masochism drove me back, week after week, for further punishment? I might have put it down to the compulsion of the gambler who, having once tasted good fortune, throws away the rest of his life in the hope of tasting it again - except that I had to stand and suffer with that heroically stoic home crowd six times before I saw my team so much as win a match (Palace 2, Arsenal 1).

That first season, Palace managed to hang on in the First Division, but they avoided the drop with a point tally so low it set records. Terse, tantalising, impenetrable entires in my diary hint at a woeful tale of ritual weekly humiliation and ensuing despondency, alleviated only by an occasional social event, cultural outing or goalless draw: "Palace 0, Derby 1. Dave and Julie came round afterwards to deliver cheese (Camembert!)." Or: "Palace 0, Coventry 3. Terrible!!! Saw Citizen Kane at film club. Not bad." Or: "Near-riot at the Palace!! Yes concert at Rainbow. Superb!!!"

I yearn for illumination but there is none. What caused the near-riot, and does the lack of scoreline indicate the match was cancelled or simply that it was the usual two-points-on-a-plate for the visitors? Did Citizen Kane cheer me up, or did it depress me even further? And what about that Camembert? Alas, the secrets of the past remain forever locked away.

None of this dampened my enthusiasm. When the first team were playing away, I went to reserve games. I attended "At Home" events and watched the players training. I knitted a Palace scarf so long that it had to be wound around my neck six times to stop me tripping over it. On weekends, I applied careful stripes of claret and blue lacquer to my fingernails.

But what of the football itself? Palace, a little team that had suddenly found itself among the big boys, had evolved a tactic that was simultaneously expedient and completely useless. For ninety minutes, ten Palace players would wedge themselves in their own goalmouth and fend off the opposition as best they could. Once in a blue moon, someone would manage to welly the ball up the field to a solitary Palace forward who, seconds later, would be relieved of his burden by six opposing defenders tackling in unison. The ball would then be booted back into Palace's penalty area and the Siege of Selhurst Park would continue as though never interrupted.

The terraces rang with shouts of "Woman!" and "Women! The lot of them!", which seemed to be the worst insult anyone could come up with, though today's soccer wags would no doubt have had a field day with the name of that solitary forward, Gerry Queen. (This once engendered the classic headline, "QUEEN SWEEPS UP AT PALACE"after an uncharacteristically dynamic performance, though one imagines the writer had to carry it around in his head for several aeons before finding an occasion worthy of its use.)

The players themselves were square-jawed jocks who gave 110% effort, though there were only two among them who were not hopelessly outclassed. One was canny midfielder Steve Kember, popularly known as "Little Stevie Kember", who was later transferred to Chelsea. And then there was heroic goalie John Jackson, who many a time seemed to be the only thing preventing the opposition from running up a scoreline more appropriate to a game like Space Invaders.

I frequented Selhurst Park for the best part of three seasons and then, in 1972, I stopped going and never went back. This had a lot to do with me going away to college, but a perusal of the relevant diary entries suggests it was also thanks to my first steady boyfriend, who had already established - with an awe-inspiring battery of sulks and tantrums - that he objected to me going to Test matches (August 4) and talking to other people at parties (August 10). The entry for August 12 reads: "CJ upset that I seem to prefer football to him."

But I don't like to think of myself as having been at the beck and call of some over-possessive egomaniac. I prefer to think that Palace and I parted company because I could no longer tolerate the gloom into which they routinely cast me. And then, a couple of years ago, the team began to enjoy a modicum of success under the management of Steve Coppell. Against my better judgement, but from what I considered to be a safe distance, I found myself once again taking an interest in their exploits.

Poor fool. I thought I could remain detached. Before I knew what had hit me, the jaws of the trap had sprung shut and Crystal Palace had suddenly and unexpectedly managed to get themselves relegated from the Premiership. And what do you know? I was depressed for weeks. It was just like old times.

This article was first published in GQ (British edition) in 1994.

ME AND ST BAAFSKATHEDRAAL

2011-08-15T17:55:00.004+02:00

I spent a couple of days in Ghent, which is about half an hour's train ride from Brussels. My Ibis hotel room had two windows; this is the view out of one of them. I stopped trying to hide my reflection after deciding I preferred the pictures with me in them. And I decided not to adjust the lighting settings either, because I liked this colour.

The cathedral was begun in the 15th century. Inside is the magnificent altarpiece Het Lam Gods - Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, by Hubert or Jan (they're not entirely sure) Van Eyck. Photography was forbidden, but I probably wouldn't have taken any pictures of it anyway as I think some things are best seen and not photographed. But I did buy a couple of postcards.

The following three photographs were taken from the other window. The cheery building on the right is a restored 19th century theatre and the tower in the central picture is the Belfort, a mediaeval bell-tower topped by a dome with a copper dragon on it. Next time I go to Ghent I shall go up this tower and pay more attention to the dragon. By this time, as you can see, I'd stopped paying attention to what was outside the window and was simply messing around with my reflection. (I'd had a few Duvels.)

Anyhow, I thoroughly recommend Ghent. Unlike a lot of well-preserved towns of historical interest, it doesn't feel embalmed; you get a sense of life going on beyond the old buildings and tourist landmarks. Apart from the cathedral, I also visited Gravensteen, a mediaeval castle (a bloke I was chatting to in FNAC warned me it was "lugubre", but I told him that was OK because I liked lugubre) with ramparts, dungeons, a torture museum and a guillotine and so on. You can go right up to the top, where there's a spectacular view of the city, but I didn't stay up there long because it was pissing with rain and I worried the wind might blow me over the side. I also visited the Museum of Fine Art, and the Design Museum, which had a hilarious exhibition called Die Essenz der Dinge; exhibits included plastic cutlery, paper clips, Tupperware containers and Ikea "Billy" shelving. But it's true that having objects like this on show makes you think about their design, which I guess is the point.

One of the nicest things about Ghent, though, was the people. For some reason, I thought the Flemish were going to be dour, but they were really, really lovely. Even the ones I thought were going to be stand-offish (a maître d' in the designer-y café attached to the Museum of Fine Art, for example) turned out to be sweetie-pies. Everyone I encountered was helpful, patient and friendly. I'll definitely be going back.

ROOMS I HAVE KNOWN: CROYDON '74

2011-08-07T15:39:00.003+02:00

The road in East Croydon where I lived from 1968 to '72 (and 1973-74).

In 1968, my family moved from Exeter, where I grew up, to Croydon, where I would be spending most of my teenage years. My brother got the small bedroom, even though he was away at university and spent hardly any time at home; I had to share a bedroom with my sister, who was finishing her A-levels in Exeter and who would also soon be going away to college. So I mostly had the bedroom to myself, though it never truly felt like mine. I always wanted a room I didn't have to share.

The house where I spent my teenage years. My bedroom is at the back.

View from my bedroom window. I didn't drink the contents of these bottles.

The bed. You can also see part of my beermat collection.

When I was little I liked collecting things: stamps, jewels, cigarette cards, empty mini-cigar tins, trolls. In these pictures you can see parts of my beermat and miniature liqueur bottle collections. My dad started bringing the empty bottles home from business trips when I was about eight, so naturally I started collecting them. Names like Drambuie, Chartreuse and Marie Brizard exercised an exotic fascination over me from the very beginning. I also collected pictures that caught my attention, and started Sellotaping them to my wall. That was how it began.

The wardrobe doors.

These photos were taken in about 1974, after I'd left home and begun living in rented rooms around London. My father had started using the mostly unoccupied bedroom as storage for his cricket magazines and other papers (much to my mother's frustration he'd already turned the dining-room into an office-cum-library-cum-jazz-record-depository - I wish I had photos - that made my own clutter look like the work of an amateur) and my mother was itching to get the back bedroom decorated so she could invite normal people to stay in it. I snapped off a couple of rolls of film just before all the pictures were torn down.

Some of my father's cricket magazines.

The washbasin in the corner.

The two beds (and an extra chair).

Holman Hunt, crumpets, fashion & illumination.

I drew eyes, Frankenstein's monster & mushrooms.

I think this started off as a drawing of a face.

The Sundance Kid, henna and the Lone Ranger.

In 1972 I did a year's Foundation Course in Art & Design at Wolverhampton Polytechnic. I chose Wolverhampton more or less at random, mostly because I wanted to leave home, but spent most of that year pining for London. One year later, in 1973, I was accepted by a degree course in Graphic Design at Central School of Art & Design; the downside was that I had to move back in with my parents because Croydon wasn't considered far enough away from London to get me a student grant. I hated living at home so much that towards the end of my first year I sunk into a semi-faked fit of depression to persuade parents, tutors, student grant authorities that I NEEDED to leave home for my personal and artistic development. Several hysterical weeping fits later, I left home for good and rented a tiny room in Camden Town. In the end, the grant worked out at something like £25 per term, so I worked in shoeshops, bookshops, cakeshops, the office of the Croydon Inland Revenue (where my mum worked) every weekend and holidays. I was always skint, but I didn't mind too much because at last I had a ROOM OF MY OWN.

I liked pictures of old, cluttered rooms.

Frankenstein's monster - a recurring motif of my adolescence.

The bedhead; cheese packaging and the picture of another old room.

In these pictures we can see an early example of the Cluttered Collage Approach to Interior Decor that has been a characteristic of all the rooms I have lived in throughout my life; recently I have tried to tone it down a bit, not entirely successfully, though I have learnt to preserve the occasional bare white wall. In the late 1960s I became addicted to the (then) exciting new phenomenon of the Sunday colour supplement - principally that of the Sunday Times - which for the adolescent me was a treasure trove of thrilling fashion photography, publicity film stills, witty adverts for Benson & Hedges or Smirnoff ("Accountancy was my life until I discovered Smirnoff" - no wonder they banned alcohol and tobacco advertising) and aspirational imagery of Camembert and croissants, the sort of lifestyle I wanted to lead even though I had never even tasted Camembert or croissants. Little did I know that, one day, I would have all the Camembert and croissants I could eat.

My sister's pictures. The miniature liqueur bottle collection is all mine.

From the days when I found fashion photography exciting.

A chest of drawers.

PARIS '77

2011-08-06T13:50:00.004+02:00

On Tuesday the 5th of April 1977 I caught the night ferry (half the price of the day ferry) and went to Paris for the second time. (The first time had been in 1971, when I spent half a day there as an exchange student on my way to stay with a retired footballer's family in Chamonix.) I had very little money, my camera was a borrowed Pentax, and I checked into the first cheap hotel I spotted, just south of the Gare du Nord. Toilets and shower were on the landing.

I had an A-level in French, but not a lot of practical experience of speaking it. I didn't know how the Métro worked, so I walked everywhere, from Montmartre Cemetery in the north, to Montparnasse Cemetery, in the south. I didn't have enough money for proper dinners, so I lived off croissants. At one point I was joined by my friend Sue and her mother, but they kept stopping for coffee (which I couldn't afford) so I didn't hang out with them much. I think it was their fault I came down with a cold; I went into a pharmacie and gave them a sample display of snuffling and sneezing, and they gave me some eucalyptus ointment to spread over my hankies. To this day, I can't smell eucalyptus without being being transported back to having a cold in Paris.

In the space of one week, I visited all the major cemeteries including Père Lachaise (where I took photographs of the graves of Colette, Balzac, Wilde, Proust et al), the Pompidou Centre (where there was a Marcel Duchamp exposition), Sacre Coeur, the Gustave Moreau museum, Napoleon's tomb in l'Hôtel des Invalides, the Eiffel Tower, the Rodin museum, the Jardin des Plantes, Balzac's house, the Louvre, the Jeu de Paumes, the Trocadéro and the Rive Gauche.

Doors to what is now the Brady cinema, in the 10th; don't know what it was called in 1977

I called on a couple of contacts I'd been given - one who lived in the Rue Jacob and another who lived near Père Lachaise - but neither was home, so I didn't really speak to anyone except shopkeepers the whole time I was there. I went to see one film - Fellini's Casanova - and had just enough money left for one souvenir - a packet of strawberry flavoured cigarette papers with an Art Nouveau cover. At this point in my life, I didn't even smoke, so I treasured those papers for years, every so often sniffing the artificial strawberry whiff for the Proustian time machine effect, until one day a friend tore the cover into pieces to make a roach for his joint.

As you can see, I very much enjoyed taking photos of reflections in shop windows.

REP TALES (AND OTHER CINEMA MEMORIES)

2011-08-05T23:08:00.037+02:00

The glory days of the Croydon Focus.

A repertory cinema, as defined by Kevin Jackson's The Language of Cinema (Carcanet, 1998), is a cinema "which specialises in showing a wide variety of old and new films from around the world, rather than the far more restricted fare of first-run Hollywood releases." But rep in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s was more than just a few movies - it was an attitude, a way of life, and it extended into the big cinema chains as well. As a teenager, growing up in Croydon, I saw Death in Venice and Black Sabbath at the Croydon ABC. I saw Theatre of Blood and Solaris at the Croydon Odeon, Modesty Blaise and Casino Royale at the Fairfield Halls, Carry on Camping and The Music Lovers (the first film I ever went to see on my own) at the Croydon Classic. And that was just Croydon.

Ask anyone who misspent at least part of their youth in London during the 1970s and early 1980s. (And apologies if you find this piece too London-centric, but tough, because London's what I know about.) We're talking BV - Before Video. Before late-night TV as well, and pre-Channel 4. Pubs closed at 11pm. Nightclubs were too expensive. What was a skint young Londoner to do? Rep cinemas were relatively cheap hang-outs with non-stop entertainment. Often, payment of a nominal club membership fee meant you would be able to see hardcore oddities, such as Curt McDowell's Thundercrack! (men, women, gorillas, cucumbers) among the cult items and golden oldies.

The Odeon Swiss Cottage.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, whole pages of Time Out (and, for a limited period, rival London listings magazines City Limits and Event) were devoted to details of midnight screenings and all-nighters. Regulars at these post-pub beanos became adept at smuggling in cunningly disguised alcohol, while the cinemas themselves offered indigestible hippy-harvest snacks such as flapjacks and samosas. I still have nightmares about the aduki-burger from hell, which was on the verge of being sold to an unsuspecting customer at the cinema where I worked in the 1980s, until one of my colleagues spotted the luxuriant mould sprouting from its base like a ponytail from the head of an ageing rock star.

The importation of takeaways into auditoria was discouraged, but hot food was usually the last thing on anyone's agenda. In those days, the projector beam had to slice through a solid curtain of smoke in order to reach the screen - and it wasn't always the smoke from regular cigarettes. Unsurprisingly, Reefer Madness was a perennial rep favourite. How we laughed hysterically at the characters on screen who were laughing hysterically, before recovering just long enough to chuckle to one other, "This is so hilarious! Stoned people don't behave like that at all!"

Rep cinema, like fringe theatre, first came into its own towards the end of the 1960s, when an interest in all things retro (Art Nouveau, old posters, second-hand devoré velvet frocks) expanded to embrace music (The New Vaudeville Band, "Pictures of Lily" by the Who, Sergeant Pepper) and old movies starring Hollywood icons such as Humphrey Bogart (as namechecked in the lyrics of Roxy Music's "2HB") But this New Wave of Nostalgia was balanced by a healthy enthusiasm for the films of radical French, Japanese or East European film-makers, anything that stuck it to The Man, or anything that smacked of rock 'n' roll, especially cod-psychedelic tosh like La vallée or Wonderwall. In the 1970s I exhibited what seems to me now an astonishing tolerance and willingness to tackle cinematic Mogadon like Numéro Deux, Riddles of the Sphinx or India Song (John Waters once wrote that Marguerite Duras "makes the kind of films that get you punched in the mouth for recommending them") or endless worthy documentaries about, say, China or Vietnam.

The Electric Cinema, Portobello Road.

The Imperial Playhouse in Portobello Road, where John Reginald Christie once worked as projectionist, was renamed the Electric, which ran as a sort of co-operative. The night's takings were just as likely to go towards a new sleeping-bag for Eric, a local tramp, or to causes such as London Street Commune, as find their way into the hands of the capitalist running-dog film distributors who provided the prints. Occasionally, when no film was forthcoming, or when the seven-man collective couldn't reach a consensus on which film to hire, it would simply trundle out its trusty old 16mm print of Yellow Submarine. No-one ever complained. In those days (I'm told), you could get a tab of Strawberry Fields for ten bob, which would no doubt have helped ease the pain of Yellow Submarine for the umpteenth time.

No-one ever complained, either, when the ceiling fell down, or when the basement was flooded by sewage, or when a whole row of seats collapsed. (I must have been the only person in the audience who didn't scream with laughter when my seat in the front row of the Screen on the Green suddenly tipped me on to the floor midway through The Man Who Fell to Earth.) The Electric was probably my favourite rep cinema; it provided me with an education in Jean-Pierre Melville, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, King Hu and a mad samurai movie called Shura, which I've been dying to see again ever since.

The absence of luxury never seemed to put off the celebrities. Regulars at the Electric included Brian Eno and, when he was in town, Dustin Hoffman. Peter Firth was once spotted bringing his girlfriend to a screening of Equus (starring Peter Firth, mostly with his clothes off) and Ingrid Bergman, bless her, had to be rescued from the queue at the ICA, where she was patiently waiting in line to see her own film, Viaggio in Italia. My own memories include Ralph Richardson turning up, motorcycle helmet under his arm, to see Maîtresse; one of my co-workers surreptitiously swapped her cash for his cheque, so she could keep the autograph.

Facilities were basic, though it was still a shock to Scala stalwarts when Shane MacGowan of The Pogues rose from his back-row seat during a William Castle all-nighter to relieve himself on the floor. The steep rake and force of gravity did the rest, resulting in a descending Mexican Wave of activity as those sitting downhill were obliged to scramble out of the way. It's little wonder, then, that the Scala, which in 1981 moved from Tottenham Street to King's Cross, was notorious for the way its carpet adhered to the soles of your shoes, so that by the end of a long film-watching session, you would literally have to peel your feet off it. The place was also famous for its ill-tempered cat, which once clamped its jaws around my forearm during a programme of horror trailers and clung there, like a pitbull, for the duration of several grisly coming attractions.

Another view of the Odeon Swiss Cottage.

Mostly, though, rep cinemas were manned by more congenial types - students, oddballs and people like me, who couldn't seem to get proper jobs, no matter how hard we tried. (I did wonder, many years later, whether this might have had anything to do with my Skinhead Number Two haircut and scorpion tattoo.) We were in it more for the films and the flexi-hours than for the pay, which was just as well since it wasn't very much (though if you played your cards right and returned the favour, you could get into other London rep cinemas for free). One of my favourite rep stories concerns the opportunistic thief who made off with the evening's takings while the entire late-night staff were watching Fellini's Casanova. I've also heard tell of the mirrored surfaces of bars being used to chop up various substances in full view of the clientèle (though obviously that never happened when I was there) and a substitute manager running up and down the aisles, shrieking in terror, during a midnight screening of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

But what you have to remember is that, once upon a time, there were cinemas everywhere. There was one in Trafalgar Square - the Jacey, where I once caught a Sonny Chiba double-bill. There was the Clapham Junction Ruby on St John's Hill where I saw Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires; you could see its neon ruby glowing red in the dark as you passed in the late train from Victoria to East Croydon. The Oxford Circus branch of Marks & Spencer used to be the site of the Academy, one of the best arthouses ever; I saw Providence and The Lacemaker there, and further along Oxford Street, towards Tottenham Court Road, was the Oxford Street Classic where I saw Novecento, and down past Piccadilly was the Cinecenta where I saw Slaves.

The Croydon Focus again; may I draw your attention to the name of the bar.

Then there was the Eros in Piccadilly Circus, immortalised in the last reel of An American Werewolf in London as a hangout for zombies, and rumoured to have been temporarily boarded up as Lady Di's carriage passed by on its way to St Paul's. When I started writing about films professionally, distributors occasionally held press shows there, though the projectionist never seemed to make any extra effort for reviewers and was nowhere to be found when the film once slipped so the sprocket holes were visible on the screen. It was there, during a press screening for Lucio Fulci's Conquest, that an eminent film critic got out out his Zippo and threatened to set fire to a punter who put his hand on my knee. I also got molested in The Moulin, on Great Windmill Street, famed for its hunchbacked ice-cream lady who had a habit of entering the auditorium and parading her wares just as whatever softcore smut was showing was reaching its climax; I saw Antony Balch's Secrets of Sex there, but I also spotted Barry Levinson's name in the credits of Street Girls, and Claude Chabrol popping up in a cameo in an arty French slice of erotica distributed in the UK as Naughty Blue Knickers.

Often, if you wanted to see a specific title, you had to be prepared to travel. Thus it was that I trekked all the way across London to Hendon to catch the only screening in town of Daughters of Darkness, to the Elephant & Castle Odeon to see Death Line and, many years later, to the same cinema (but with a different date) to see Southern Comfort, after which we got our money back because a quarter of the image had been out of focus. I remember going to the Kilburn Gaumont for a Bruce Lee all-nighter, to the Holloway Road Odeon to see Grave of the Vampire (which made me faint), and to the Biograph in Victoria, where I watched such splendid double-bills as Hatchet for a Honeymoon and The Flesh and Blood Show, and naïvely assumed that the unceasing line of men marching back and forth to the lavatories was due to an epidemic of weak bladders.

~~Edie Sedgwick~~ Me in movie-going mode, 1981.

I remember Yojimbo and Wildwechsel at the Paris Pullman in South Kensington, which in 1983 was demolished and replaced by a block of flats, and the dinky 68-seat Minema in Knightsbridge, where I saw Lino Ventura and Jacques Brel in L'emmerdeur, which made my date laugh so hard that fizzy drink shot out of his nose, or the cinema in the basement of the May Fair Hotel, where I watched Kagemusha for the second time, pining for Japan. Or the Odeon Westbourne Grove, where a shock moment in The Evil Dead (or was it The Beastmaster?) made my companion jump so much he showered the front three rows with Pepsi. I remember the Royal in Charing Cross Road, where I saw Tenebrae and Dr Jekyll et les femmes, and where the soundtracks of all-nighters were counterpointed by the snoring of tramps, attracted by a warm auditorium and the tea and biscuits included in the very reasonable ticket price. Every so often, one of the sleepers would get an attack of the DTs in his sleep and start screaming, which somehow only enhanced movies like Campsite Massacre.

Rep cinemas were once an inextricable part of the fabric and history of our capital; they were quirky village London, as opposed to faceless corporate multiplex London. But it was too shambolic to last. In the mid-1980s, rep started to go the way of the steam-engine. With the proliferation of video, people who wanted to watch old movies late at night could finally do so in the comfort of their own living-rooms, instead of in smelly old fleapits in the company of people who threatened you with knives if you accidentally kicked the back of their seat (as once happened to a friend of mine at the Electric). With increased opportunities in ancillary rights (video, satellite, cable and so on) the companies holding distribution rights became less inclined to hire their films out to impoverished rep houses. In addition, the quality of available prints degenerated to such a degree that rep programming started to revolve around the new prints struck from reissued classics.

One by one, the rep cinemas and arthouses went dark. A few stalwarts such as the Rio (where I saw Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain) and the Ritzy (The Tomb of Ligeia) clung on, and I hear the Electric is still going strong - but as a first-run cinema, with nary a Yellow Submarine in sight.

I still dream sometimes about the old places, and about the films I saw there. But it's no longer a way of life.

Germany, Pale Mother: another gem of early 1980s arthouse cinema.

Parts of this post first appeared in 1999, in an article on repertory cinema published in ES, a now defunct magazine once given away with the Evening Standard.

See also Front Row Confidential, in which I explain why I like sitting in the front row at the cinema.

FAVOURITE FILMS OF THE NOUGHTIES

2011-07-24T12:02:00.003+02:00

No point in compiling your Top Tens at the same time as everyone else, right? So here, belatedly, is my List of Favourite Films of the Noughties. I don't suppose there are any surprises here. If the following movies have anything in common, it's that they all plunged me into perfectly formed worlds and didn't let me out again till the end. Two are explicitly about dreaming, but all have dreamlike qualities. None has the standard Hollywood three-act plot, there are no superheroes and the special effects aren't distracting. If there's an odd-film-out, it's the last one; but since some of the others are pessimistic to the point of existential crisis about the human condition, I think I'm entitled to a bit of a laugh.

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD

Each generation gets the Jesse James it deserves, and this magnificient western directed by New Zealander Andrew Dominik is a sideways look at today's celebrity culture. It's deliberately paced by contemporary standards, low on physical action (though set-pieces such as the early train robbery, when they come, are expertly handled and deftly used to reveal character) but brimming over with psychological complexity, period mood with folksy narration and Roger Deakins' mesmerising cinematography. It also packs a brace of terrific performances; Brad Pitt, perfectly cast, proves he's not just a pretty face as the dangerously unpredictable outlaw, already a legend in his own lifetime, and Casey Affleck is creepily ingratiating as the hero-worshipper giving off Mark Chapman vibes.

KAIRO

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's ghost stories don't just reflect the malaise of modern life, they also scare the shit out of you. A university student commits suicide, but his shade can still be glimpsed in his apartment. His friends (if you can call them that - everyone in this film seems disconnected) start disappearing, leaving their outlines burnt into walls like the shadows of Hiroshima victims; a floppy disc promises a connection to the afterlife, computers seem to be literally sucking the souls out of their users, and there's one of those herky-jerky ghosts that became ubiquitous after the success of Ringu. The sense of dread is palpable, and the fact that you don't know what the hell is going on makes it even more frightening. Kurosawa's film turned up in the UK five years after its release in Japan (and France, where I saw it), by which time everyone was getting blasé about Asian ghosts, but this is a key work, one of the best. (The Hollywood remake, Pulse, was piss-poor even by the standards of Hollywood remakes, not to mention a criminal waste of the lovely and talented Kristen Bell.)

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN

This little Swedish film, adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his own novel, is the perfect antidote to the sparkly vampires of Twilight; it's not just the best vampire movie since Near Dark but arguably the best horror film since the genre's last great flourishing in the 1970s. The setting is a Stockholm housing estate in the early 1980s; lonely 12-year old Oskar, who's bullied at school, hopes to make friends with the girl who moves in next door. There's more to her than meets the eye, of course, but as these two outsiders forge a curiously innocent bond, you'll find yourself rooting for them against the rest of the world. Director Tomas Alfredson favours mood and slow, stealthy camerawork over gimmicks and shocks; the results are simultaneously touching and troubling, and, just occasionally, horrifying. I liked this film so much I wrote a book about it; it has yet to be published, but watch this space for details. The Hollywood remake, Let Me In, wasn't bad, had a couple of great scenes, and has its devoted fans. But it was just so... unnecessary.

MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD

Around the time of this film's release, certain men of my acquaintance developed the habit of repeatedly murmuring the first part of the title as though it applied to them personally. Peter Weir's exemplary conflation of two Patrick O'Brian novels (expertly adapted by John Collee) offers you a rare opportunity to immerse yourself in the virtual reality of another era and place - on board the HMS Surprise, off the coast of South America in the Napoleonic Wars. Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany are on splendid form as mismatched duo Captain Jack Aubrey and his nature-loving pal Dr Stephen Maturin. Booming cannons, stormy weather, impromptu surgery, tactics, superstition, sea-shanties and not a single duff note; it lasts 138 minutes, but I could have watched it all day. This is one movie of which we'd like to see multiple sequels - but they would have to be made by the same dream directing-writing-acting team.

MULHOLLAND DRIVE

Whoever said that watching films was like dreaming with your eyes open might have been talking about David Lynch's movie, which began as the pilot for a rejected TV series (hence the loose narrative ends) before being reworked into something deeper and much, much darker. After a car smash on the eponymous Los Angeles road, a brunette with amnesia (Laura Elena Harring) teams up with a perky blonde (Naomi Watts in a stunning performance - it might not seem so straightaway, but just you wait) determined to make it big in Hollywood. What starts out like a Nancy Drew mystery develops into a nightmarish imbroglio of Freudian keys, auditions, rotting corpses, hot lesbian sex and a sinister cowboy. Even if you can't always get a handle on the plot, the director's masterly evocation of dread and a nagging sense that things are out of joint will keep you hooked, even while you're scratching your head. Multiple viewings are not just a good idea - they're absolutely necessary if you want to get hit in the solar plexus by the story's full poignancy.

PAPRIKA

It's always sad when a beloved film-maker passes away, but I don't think I've ever actually wept the way I did in 2010 after hearing of the death, at the ridiculously early age of 46, of Satoshi Kon, whose animated work I'd confidently been expecting to accompany me into my old age. (Here are his last blog entries, if you feel up to it - probably NSFW unless you have no objection to your co-workers seeing you sobbing.) The film's tagline - "This is your brain on anime" - only hints at the multiple levels in a plot about a lady scientist investigating the theft of a device allowing therapists to enter their patients' dreams. If you thought Inception was clever, get a load of the dreamworlds on display here, with their jolly but sinister parades of toys, homages to a wide variety of cinematic genre and constant narrative rug-pulling that makes you continually question whether what you're watching is real or imaginary. And Paprika, unlike Inception, doesn't shy away from dreaming's sexual undercurrents; at least one scene here is a troubling variation on sexual assault.

THE PRESTIGE

"Are you watching closely?" You'll have to pay attention if you want to keep up with Christopher Nolan's yarn about stage magicians whose escalating rivalry takes a turn for the deadly in turn-of-the-century London. Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman, both impeccable, are ably supported by Michael Caine as an "ingenieur" and David Bowie giving a lifetime best performance as the Serbian-born physicist Nikola Tesla, whom Jackman consults in a bid to outdo Bale's most celebrated illusion, "The Transported Man". As fans of Memento will tell you, Nolan (with brother and co-writer Jonathan) is a master of the intellectual roller-coaster; this adaptation of Christopher Priest's novel is a multi-layered imbroglio of flashbacks within flashbacks, narrative sleights of hand and tour de forces of cinematic showmanship - it's like a fabulous magic act in itself, with a final revelation that may disappoint some with its banality and obviousness, but which struck me as the perfect punchline to this most engrossing of shaggy-dog stories. I could maybe have done without Scarlett Johansson as a magician's assistant, but even she's not enough to spoil things. A pity Inception didn't live up to this - Nolan is a brilliant architect of worlds, but maybe he needs help with the nuts and bolts of the storytelling.

SPIRITED AWAY aka Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi

If the noughties saw the flowering of a new golden age of animation, then Hayao Miyazaki's extraordinary Oscar-winning fantasy, a blend of traditional cel animation and computer techniques, must be Exhibit Number One. A whiny 10-year-old girl called Chihiro (the French title was Le voyage de Chihiro), disgruntled at the prospect of moving house, passes through a mysterious tunnel with her parents, who are promptly turned into pigs, leaving their daughter to fend for herself in a strange world populated by wraiths, witches, bouncing green heads, a monstrous baby and a dragon-boy called Haku. This Japanese spin on Alice in Wonderland was neither the first anime I'd ever seen, nor even my first Miyazaki, but it was the film that sealed the deal, and which launched me on a quest to watch or rewatch everything by him and his associates that I could find. Like so many Studio Ghibli films it plunges you into such a strange and wonderful dreamworld that emerging from it at the end is an almost physically painful wrench.

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman doesn't shy away from the big subjects in his directing debut: this is about life, death and the bits in between. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a neurotic theatre director who spends years constructing a detailed simulacrum of his life in a vast hangar, with actors playing himself and all the people he knows. As time passes, the story starts folding back on itself, and the border between reality and theatre becomes increasingly hazy. The result is like an elaborate but only half-remembered dream seeded with surreal and satirical touches; Hoffman's wife (Catherine Keener) paints pictures which can only be seen through a microscope, while his mistress (Samantha Morton) buys a house which is perpetually on fire, though it never actually burns down. Metaphor alert! I think - because the beauty of the film is that you ending up wondering if the metaphors are themselves metaphors. It's strange, sad, sometimes funny and oddly beautiful. All of human life is here, though maybe you need to have lived a bit already for any of it to make sense.

TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE

From Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the guys who brought you South Park, comes a puppet film which makes Thunderbirds look like a team of pussies. It's a scabrous, tasteless send-up of Hollywood action movies - complete with sex and violence, bigotry and extensive vomiting – all done with marionettes. Watch our heroes trash Paris, Cairo ("That's in Egypt") and the Film Actors' Guild ("FAG" for short) in the war against terrorism. Listen to Kim Jong II singing, "I'm Ronery" and arab terrorists babbling "durka mohammed jihad" as they launch their WMDs. Watch Hollywood lefties come to gory ends, and never let it be said that Stone and Parker are not equal opportunity offenders. Hilarious, and pretty much the action movie to end all action movies. Except that it hasn't ended them - they're still being churned out, and they're still using the exact same clichés.

FRONT ROW CONFIDENTIAL!

2011-07-22T14:35:00.000+02:00

Your friends never learn. No matter how many times you tell them you don't look on going to the cinema as a social activity, they still insist on dragging you along with them. And even though you've told them a hundred times that, after a hard day's writing about Béla Tarr the only film you can even consider watching afterwards is District 9, they still call up and say things like, "Hey, let's go and see the latest Michael Haneke," or, "What do you say to Hunger?" or, "How about that new Iranian film?"

The usual arguments ensue. They say, "But Mr McCritic gave it five stars and four smiley faces," to which you counter with, "Yes, but it's about a man smearing shit on his walls and starving himself to death, and I don't feel like watching that right now." Then you move in for the kill: "But did you know there are alien guns in District 9 which make people's heads explode?" They are not impressed. After much lively discussion along these lines, you finally settle on a compromise and go and see Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

Even supposing your friendship survives the epic decision-making process and logistics of arranging for, say, four different people to agree on a time and venue to suit everyone's working hours and whereabouts, there's that inevitable moment inside the auditorium when they cluster in the aisle, blocking everyone's path, locked in a fruitless debate over where to sit. It's a delicate decision, complicated by every single person in the cinema audience, except you, wanting to sit in the exact same place: right in the middle.

And it's this, more than anything else, that separates you from the masses, who really just want to huddle together and whisper comments to each other and guzzle evil-smelling popcorn while the film unspools on some postage stamp-sized rectangle in the far distant yonder. Because, rebel that you are, you prefer to sit in the front row. On your own, with only your two cinema-viewing fetish objects for company, those precious talismans without which no screening can be complete: a small bottle of mineral water for that sudden, unexpected onslaught of thirst (which, oddly enough, afflicts you only when you forget to pack it) and a moth-eaten pashmina. Because even in mid-winter, air conditioning can be brutal.

There are many advantages to sitting in the front row. Even if you arrive at the last minute, it's hardly ever full, so you nearly always get the seat you want. You can stretch your legs out. In the event of the cinema catching fire, you won't find your route to the exit blocked by a crowd of slow-moving people. With luck, the people who like talking or texting or kicking the back of your seat during the film will be sitting in the middle of the cinema, out of earshot and kicking range.

And, speaking as someone who invariably finds herself stuck behind men of basketball-playing stature or women with Amy Winehouse hair-dos, there are no distracting head-shaped silhouettes between you and the screen to turn it into some ghastly form of Mystery Science Theater. Plus you don't get friends asking, as soon the credits start to roll, "So what did you think of that then? Where shall we eat?" and trying to hustle you outside before they've finished, thus depriving you of Samuel L Jackson's surprise cameo appearance at the very end of Iron Man.

Certain adventurous chums have braved the front row experience, just for the pleasure of being by my side, but few have been willing to give it a second go. They complain that they can't follow the action, or they can't focus on both sides of the screen simultaneously, or that the Battle of Helm's Deep has given them a headache. I think they are wimps, particularly when they subsequently show themselves willing to sit in, say, the second or third row, which have all the so-called drawbacks of the front without any of the concomitant advantages. The difference between us, I think, is that my friends want to control what they see on the screen, keep it at a safe distance, while I want to be inside it.

Of course there are drawbacks. If the screen is too high, it can make your neck ache, though after years of experimenting with angles and spinal tilt, I have learned how to avoid this. Sometimes you're so close you can see the texture of the screen itself, which can give large expanses of even the most flawless film-star skin a mottled appearance. But 20 years after I first started taking my place in the front, I read the Surrealists liked to sit there as well, which makes me me feel vindicated.

Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut met in the front row of the Cinémathèque; sometimes, when the cinema was full, they would lie on the floor right in front of the screen, staring up at it from a supine position, and you can't get much closer than that. They liked to be dominated by the image, and so do I. Brooke Shields famously declared there was nothing between her and her Calvins. Well, I want nothing between me and my movie.

This article first appeared on theartsdesk in October 2009.

Screengrabs from (top to bottom): Scream 2, Burn After Reading, Matinee, Sullivan's Travels, The Purple Rose of Cairo.

HARRY POTTER AND THE PORKSWORD OF GRYFFINDOR

2011-07-15T12:36:00.001+02:00

Harry's wand emits a lot of red-gold swooshy stuff

Harry's wand gave out a big swooshy flash of golden red, with a side helping of glitter, and it was then that he finally understood. The sword of Gryffindor. The giant snake. And all this complicated business of the wands that you needed some sort of flow chart to follow - this wand belonged to that fellow, but that wand was waiting for this master to grab it, but in the meantime that other wand wasn't working properly because it was being handled by the wrong owner. It all added up to one thing, or maybe several things - it was hard to tell. According to Hermione's Dictionary of Slang, wands, swords, snakes were all slang terms for penis. This entire eighth and final film had degenerated into one big slithering mass of phallic symbolism, and by the time the swooshy flashes cleared, there would be only one male wizard left standing.

Walking Penis-Face strokes his wand suggestively, prior to pointing it at Harry

It all made sense now. The entire Harry Potter saga had turned into a gigantic pissing contest as the blokes competed with each other for wands, snakes, swords, broomsticks, seats on the Hogwarts Express and anything else vaguely long and suggestively pointy. It had become a burning obsession with the wizard formerly known as He-who-must-not-be-named, now known as Voldemort, no doubt to compensate for his unfortunate noselessness, which had even his most faithful followers wondering if he was similarly underendowed in the nether regions. And in the case of Nagini, it was clear he had overcompensated, allowed the public to feast their eyes upon his giant snake once too often, and now Neville Longbottom had gone and lopped its head off, leaving its owner even more unmanned than before. Now Voldemort needed to win the wand wars more than ever. Harry almost felt sorry for the balding old queen in his black dress; once upon a time it had probably seemed le dernier cri in chic-est cocktail wear; now it was just a flappity rag festooned with shreds of shattered horcrux, and its wearer looked like a walking penis.

Neville Longbottom's sword is so big and long he can hardly lift it

And now Harry understood, too, why the excursion into Bellatrix Lestrange's vault had been so fraught with peril (no sooner had they penetrated its innermost recesses than her baubles had multiplied and threatened to crush them), why Hermione and Ron had found that secret Slytherin chamber lined with rampant serpents so arousing, and why Voldemort, with all those marvellous magic powers at his disposal, had insisted on a full frontal infantry charge on Hogwarts, followed by one-on-one wand-fu, instead of simply taking off and nuking the site from orbit. At all costs, he had to preserve the wands, find out which was the biggest and then wave it in everyone's faces. Only that way could he get his own back on Neville for lopping the head off his snake.

Badass Maggie Smith looks taken aback to find herself holding a wand

Harry's musings were suddenly interrupted by a fresh swooshy flash of evil green spurting from the tip of Voldemort's wand. Harry immediately countered by spurting out another big swooshy flash of golden red from his own wand, and for a while, the red and green swooshes mingled and danced a magical cha-cha-cha as their owners scrunched up their eyes and swooned. And then... and then... Harry couldn't believe his eyes. Voldemort's wand was starting to droop! Voldemort strained and strained to keep it hard, but he clearly had no staying power, whereas he, Harry, felt able to carry on spurting swooshy stuff till the cows came home. He was the Wand Master! All was well.

Harry forces Voldemort to his knees in the Battle of the Wands

THE PORKY'S II: THE NEXT DAY TEST

2011-07-05T14:24:00.006+02:00

An alternative version of Romeo and Juliet in Porky's II: The Next Day

It was when Time Out sent me off to review Porky's II: The Next Day that I had my watershed moment as a fledgling film critic. Looking forward to impressing readers by exercising my coruscating wit on what I confidently expected would be the film's crass sexism, scatological humour and all-round political incorrectness, I was taken aback to find myself... laughing.

And so I was faced with a choice. Go ahead and get a couple of cheap laughs by ripping Porky's II to shreds, in the knowledge that it was the sort of film no self-respecting film buff would do anything but scoff at? (This being the early 1980s, by the way, when the chasm between critical and popular opinion was even more pronounced than it is nowadays, when you can usually find apologists for any old dreck.) Or own up - in print! - to having laughed, with the risk (or so it then seemed) that I was scuppering my career as a serious film critic before that career had even begun?

I decided to tell the truth. Having never had any sort of official film critic training (if Film Studies existed in the UK in the early 1970s, I hadn't been aware of them) and without even the sketchiest familiarity with any sort of academic film theory, there would be only one method of criticism I could ever rely on, and that would be my own opinion, as honest as I could make it. It might be stupid, misguided, uncool - but at least it would be my opinion and no-one else's, and no-one would be able to call me on it.

Two cops about to get boogey-boogeyed in Porky's II: The Next Day

And that's what I've tried to do, more or less, ever since. If I like something, it's not important to me if everyone else likes it too. Conversely, if I find myself out on my own, I will stick it out, even if the isolation becomes embarrassing. Here, then, are six occasions when I swam against the tide. I could have listed Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which was booed at Cannes and dismissed by most critics when it came out - except it appears now to have found a loyal following; the same goes now for Heaven's Gate, which has been reappraised since its first disastrous release. I might also have chosen Hudson Hawk or Wild Wild West, both of which were roundly rubbished, but - incredible as it may seem - they too have their supporters.

Not that the following films are perfect. I know they're not, but I'm fond of them anyway, the way one is fond of gawky adolescent offspring, and I don't think any of them deserved the savage kicking they got, and continue to get.

ALIEN: RESURRECTION (1997)

Rotten Tomatoes rating: 54%

"Grotesque carnage, vile characters; steer clear." (Charles Cassady, Common Sense Media)

Batty scientists on a covert military-run space station resurrect Ripley as a clone with alien DNA. When captive aliens stage a prison breakout and go on the rampage, she teams up with an oddball crew of space smugglers to try and escape.

What I like about it: Sigourney Weaver giving another world-beater of a performance; the fact you're never quite sure which way she'll swing; Brad Dourif drippings with goo; the recurring motherhood/reproduction/abortion motif; a chest-bursting with a difference; the clone laboratory scene; the dreamlike scene of aliens swimming through a submerged kitchen; the twisted yet morally agonising ending.

ALL ABOUT STEVE (2009)

Rotten Tomatoes rating: 6%

"It's dreadful" (AO Scott, The NY Times)

Sandra Bullock plays a socially challenged cruciverbalist (crossword puzzle compiler) who mistakenly gets it into her head that TV cameraman Bradley Cooper is her soulmate, and duly stalks him and his self-regarding reporter (Thomas Hayden Church) all over the country as they cover quirky human interest stories.

What I like about it: of the films on this list, All About Steve is the least likely to be reappraised - just look at that Rotten Tomatoes rating! But I like Bullock playing an irredeemable girl geek (possibly with some sort of Aspergers), and that her character is annoying in a way that female characters are rarely allowed to be; that she doesn't get a makeover in the final reel and - indeed - ends up unattached, which is almost unheard of in a Hollywood rom-com. Not all the humour works, but I liked some of the Pythonesque incidentals and particularly enjoyed a scene involving a bunch of orphans that some critics found in bad taste (I bet they wouldn't have objected to it in a Farrelly brothers comedy) but which reminded me of a choice moment from Hancock's Half Hour. Bullock won an Oscar for the ingratiating, platitude-filled The Blind Side, but I prefer her performance here - it's brave, challenging, prickly, embarrassing - and obviously rubbed everyone up the wrong way. Everyone except me, that is.

DEAD SILENCE (2007)

Rotten Tomatoes rating: 20%

"Formulaic and rather lazy exercise in booga-booga scare tactics" (John Anderson, Variety)

James Wan and Leigh Whannel, who inadvertently kick-started torture-porn with Saw, try something a little different with this non-Saw writing-directing collaboration - a creepy little tale of a young man trying to discover why his wife was murdered by a ventriloquist's dummy, with results that are creaky, scary and barmy in equal measure. (And why is there a theatre in the middle of a lake? Don't even ask.)

What I like about it: Critics didn't really go for this, but I bet they saw it at 10 o'clock in the morning in a packed screening room. Me, I had to follow it with three episodes of Arrested Development before I dared go to bed. Ventriloquist dummies are always spooky, and have already featured in several scary movies (most notably Dead of Night); but if you think the dummy's creepy, wait till you see the ventriloquist! Wan, who directed, has clearly been inspired by the films of Mario Bava, though lacks Bava's unerring sense of composition and build-up, and during the big shock-horror set-pieces tends to chop everything up and throw it in your face instead of having the confidence to let his imagery and effects speak for themselves. But I love the attempt to make an Italian-style scarefest that owes nothing to current Hollywood horror trends; the town of Ravens Fair, haunted by back story; True Blood's Ryan Kwanten is a personable hero; and the ending is clever.

ESCAPE FROM LA (1996)

Rotten Tomatoes rating 54%

"Sequels have reached an all-time low" (Clint Morris, Film Threat)

Kurt Russell reprises his role as buccaneering one-eyed anti-hero Snake Plissken, injected with a lethal virus by presidential lackeys and promised the antidote only if he plunges into futuristic Los Angeles (turned by earthquake into a lawless island) and undergoes ordeal by basketball to recover a Doomsday Device from ruthless guerrillas.

What I like about it: You can take the director out of the low-budget 1970s exploitation, but you can't take the low-budget 1970s exploitation out of the director. Predictably, critics sneered at this belated sequel to Escape From New York (which - Plissken and brilliant premise apart - I was never that wild about to begin with. If the Isaac Hayes character is top of the food chain, why is he so desperate to escape into the outside world where, presumably, he will simply be just another low-rent convict on the run?) but die-hard John Carpenter fans (like me) lap up the director's endearing ability to reduce everything to the level of a tacky B-movie populated by refugees from a heavy metal video clip (see also Ghosts of Mars). I like the satirical rejig of Los Angeles; Bruce Campbell as the crazed Surgeon General of Beverly Hills; Peter Fonda as a superannuated tsunami-surfer; Steve Buscemi as Map to the Stars Eddie; Pam Grier as a windsurfing transsexual; and the ending is one big in-your-face fuck-you. And did I say it's got SNAKE PLISSKEN in it? Come on - I can't believe I was the only person to enjoy this.

OBSERVE AND REPORT (2009)

Rotten Tomatoes rating 51%

"I don't think it's much of a comedy. The darkness overpowers everything." (Ben Mankiewicz, At the Movies)

America prefers its flabby misfits to be loveable as opposed to deluded, psychotic and bipolar, like Seth Rogen's character in this fearless black comedy, the uncomfortable flipside to Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Rogen, obsessed with guns and violence, is determined to catch the flasher who's been exposing himself to women in the carpark, so he can impress shallow blonde salesgirl Anna Faris. Ray Liotta plays a cop who's the rival for her affections.

What I like about it: Writer-director Jody Hill set out to make a comic variation on Taxi Driver and to my mind succeeds, though you're more likely to cringe than laugh. The film was condemned - mostly by people who never actually bothered to watch more than the trailer - for its supposed depiction of date-rape; setting aside, for now, my contention that if this is rape, I would have spent half my twenties trotting back and forth to the police station to accuse my sexual partners of it, Faris is clearly shown as consenting. But even if she weren't consenting, where in the film does it say that any of what's happening is admirable behaviour, for heaven's sake? Rogen and Faris are fearlessly unlikeable and there's an extended male full frontal scene that shocked some young and tender-hearted viewers. The easily offended should stick to Paul Blart. On the other hand, fans of, say, The Cable Guy may find this right up their street.

PSYCHO (1998)

Rotten Tomatoes rating: 35%

"A lot less scary!" (Bob Fenster, Arizona Republic)

Gus Van Sant's colour replica of Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1960 slasher movie is the film everyone loves to hate, but this is not your average remake. Of course it no longer works as a thriller, because by now the world and his wife knows whodunnit, and the most shocking thing on display is Anne Heche's orange Wonderbra. And it isn't quite shot by shot; Van Sant, working from the original shooting script, films as he reckons Hitchcock would have done had technology and censorship allowed, which means Norman Bates (Vince Vaughn) is clearly masturbating as he peers through the peephole - just the sort of tacky detail Hitch himself would probably have loved - but also slips in odd inserts of sky, of a goat, of a nude woman - at unexpected moments.

What I like about it: I find it hard to understand the vitriol, since this is so obviously not a commercial venture but an experimental art movie variation on a classic artefact, in the spirit of Picasso's variations on Velasquez's Las Meninas, or Duchamp's appropriation of Mona Lisa for his L.H.O.O.Q.. Van Sant's Psycho is certainly not intended to replace Hitchcock's original - the way recent remakes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Halloween are updates for a new generation familiar with the titles but too young to have seen the original films - but rather to complement and comment on it. The result's an oddly compelling art movie that not only makes you look at the original through fresh eyes, but shows how radically dialogue, editing and acting styles have changed over the past 50 years. Last but not least, a lot of is just downright weird; most of the cast look as though they've wandered in by mistake from an American indie film. And why is Heche wearing those distracting earrings?

PLASTER CAST MOVIES

2011-07-02T18:19:00.005+02:00

On Friday 24th June I found myself, for the first time in my life, with my leg in a plaster cast. As is my usual practice in challenging situations, I turned to the movies for tips on how to cope, and with the help of the good people of Twitter, compiled a list of films featuring plaster casts.

Here is the Top Ten of my favourites:

WORKING GIRL (1988)

"I have a head for business and a bod for sin," says Melanie Griffith in this very 1980s corporate fairytale about a secretary who gets her own back on the female boss who stole her ideas by posing as an executive in her absence. The big hair, power-dressing and shoulder-pads have dated badly, but Sigourney Weaver, who should do comedy more often, is huge fun as the evil bitch boss who breaks her leg on a skiing trip; Joan Cusack steals scenes in a supporting role. Griffith's recent career has been so low-key it's easy to forget how appealing she used to be with her not so dumb blonde attitude and disarming streak of Monroe-like vulnerability, though Carly Simon's Oscar-winning theme song makes me want to kill someone (preferably Carly Simon).

PLASTER CAST TIP: Just because you have a leg in plaster doesn't mean you should let your standards slip. Weaver is quite possibly the sexiest plaster-cast wearer ever as she dolls herself up in lingerie for a visit from Harrison Ford, unaware that he has unaccountably become smitten with Griffiths in her absence.

FOR YOUR EYES ONLY (1981)

I'm sorry, but Live and Let Die was the only Roger Moore Bond film that coincided with my adolescence, so I couldn't be bothered to shell out the ticket money for the others. Even now I'm not entirely sure I've seen all the Moore Bonds - they tend to run together in my head in a brume of bad quip and raised eyebrow acting. But I do know I've seen For Your Eyes Only, mainly because I was interested in Carole Bouquet, who'd played one of Luis Buñuel's Conchitas in Cet obscur objet du désir, and also because one of the villains is played by Michael Gothard, and I've been a Gothard completist ever since seeing him in 1967 as Milady de Winter's vengeful son in the BBC's The Further Adventures of the Musketeers. The plaster cast is basically a throwaway gag in Q's laboratory; it swings sideways off its wearer's arm and smashes a dummy's head, at which Bond quips, "That'll come in handy."

PLASTER CAST TIP: Never forget that your plaster-cast can be useful as a weapon. But it's a shame Bond didn't use this one in the field.

42ND STREET (1933)

"You're going out a youngster, but you've got to come back a star!" Let's hear it for the archtypal "putting on a show" musical, starring Warner Baxter as the Producer, Ginger Rogers and Una Merkel as wisecracking broads and Ruby Keeler as the chorus girl who steps into the limelight after leading lady Bebe Daniels breaks her ankle, and magnanimously says to Keeler, "You know Peggy, when I started for the theater tonight I wanted to tear your hair out, but then I started thinking... Well after all, I've had my chance, and now it's your turn!" Busby Berkeley stages the musical numbers (including the naughtily suggestive "Shuffle off to Buffalo" and "Young and Healthy") with his customary flamboyance, but what galvanizes the attention nowadays are the dancers' figures. No Showgirls-type muscled hardbodies here - it's chubby thighs a-go-go.

PLASTER CAST TIP: It's my contention that Bebe Daniels didn't really want to take part in that stupid show anyway. Never forget your plaster cast will provide you with the perfect excuse to get out of doing stuff you don't really want to do.

THE DISORDERLY ORDERLY (1964)

Jerry Lewis plays an accident-prone orderly at a plush private sanitarium. Looney Tunes alumnus Frank Tashlin directed this comedy, and the best parts are cartoon-inspired slapstick; the last ten minutes, a beautifully choreographed medley of runaway stretchers and supermarket mayhem, are particularly brilliant. Elsewhere, Lewis' exaggerated mugging has fallen so far out of fashion that it often seems grotesque, and it's hard to watch without wondering if his ingratiating idiocy is merely a cover for the sour misanthropy he later displayed in Martin Scorsese's King of Comedy, while his physical antics seem laboured compared to the graceful stunts of, say, Jackie Chan. But there are good moments, including a peculiarly pertinent board of directors' meeting that makes comic hay out of naked capitalism.

I bet there aren't many hospital-set comedies that don't feature some comic business featuring plaster casts, but The Disorderly Orderly has three variations on the theme:
1) Jerry pushes a wheelchair containing a cigar-puffing man with a comically exaggerated cast on his foot. Blinded by cigar smoke, Jerry accidentally pushes the chair into a wall; hilarity ensues behind the opening credits.
2) Jerry accidentally tapes a nurse to a patient's plaster cast.
3) Jerry accidentally lets go of a plaster-covered patient while out strolling in the hospital grounds. The man rolls down a grassy incline, the plaster smashes against a tree... and there's no-one inside.

PLASTER CAST TIP: People in plaster casts are invariably seen as amusing, which is no doubt why they appear in so many comedies. You can always bring a smile to people's faces with a well-timed pratfall. Though if you're saddled with a plaster cast yourself, you're unlikely to see it as a source of humour.

THE VANISHING (1988)
(aka SPOORLOOS)

George Sluizer’s Franco-Dutch psychothriller begins with the disappearance of Saskia, a young Dutchwoman at a service station in the south of France and ends with one of the most nightmarish denouements in film history. In the interim, we become almost as obsessed as the missing woman’s boyfriend with finding out what happened to her, though unlike him we’re privy to the kidnapper’s identity – he’s an ordinary-seeming family man played with chilling affability (and slightly dodgy Karswell beard) by Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu. But the game here is not whodunnit, but how and why, with missing pieces falling into place to show us how the madman ticks. All he needs now is an audience to appreciate his cleverness.

American serial-killer Ted Bundy would sometimes wear plaster casts, slings or crutches to gain the trust of his young female victims. In The Silence of the Lambs, Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb approaches a victim with his arm in a sling. In The Vanishing, we watch Raymond Lemorne meticulously planning the abduction of a young woman - any young woman - by wearing a fake plaster cast on his arm. In the end, ironically, he doesn't need it to lure Saskia into his car; her misgivings are put at rest when she spots a photograph of his family.

PLASTER CAST TIP: A plaster cast can easily win you a stranger's trust. Try not to abuse this trust by killing them.

ORCA (1977)

Richard Harris plays an Irishman living in Canada who harpoons a pregnant female whale. Its mate seeks vengeance by attacking boats, houses, people, including Bo Derek, whose leg is in plaster following an earlier attack. Bo is chillaxing with a glass of wine in a seafront house on stilts (as you do) when the vengeful killer whale headbutts the stilts, tipping the house and sending Bo sliding down the floor. While she's clinging on for dear life, waiting for Harris to rescue her, Orca chomps off her leg, plaster cast and all.

PLASTER CAST TIP: While your leg is in plaster, try to avoid situations involving killer whales, houses on stilts and Richard Harris.

DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944)

One summer I got myself fitted with a slutty gold ankle chain as a special tribute to Barbara Stanwyck's performance in this classic film noir adapted (by Raymond Chandler, among others) from a James M Cain novel. Babs plays Phyllis Dietrichson, a duplicitous housewife who seduces insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) into helping her bump off her husband, only for things to go horribly wrong as they invariably do in such tales. Me, I flaunted my ankle chain like mad, but have yet to meet my Walter Neff.

The plaster cast first appears, in silhouette, during the opening credits, and plays a pivotal role in the plot; Dietrichson has a broken leg in plaster and walks with crutches, making it easy-peasy for Neff to impersonate him after his death.

PLASTER CAST TIP: People will remember your plaster cast, not you. Unless you also wear an orange fright wig and spangly tutu, in which case they'll probably remember what you're wearing as well as the cast. I haven't put this to the test, but it seems quite logical they'd be more likely to remember your signature injury rather than your face or your sparkling wit.

SPANKING THE MONKEY (1994)

Before he went on to direct such films as Three Kings and The Fighter and yell obscenities at Lily Tomlin (see YouTube), David O Russell cobbled together Spanking the Monkey on the short ends of other productions' film stock and did such a splendid job of it that you readily forgive the odd rough edge in his writing-directing debut. The title is a slang term for masturbation, and the film itself is about incest, but don't let that put you off - this is a classy coming-of-age black comedy that treats its themes in a thoroughly entertaining but responsible way.

Jeremy Davies is the antithesis of heroic, cool or witty in his breakout role as Ray, a medical student forced home to nowheresville in upstate New York to look after his attractive but neglected mother (Alberta Watson, also excellent) who has broken her leg in a botched suicide attempt. For Ray, it's hell on earth. He is bored, frustrated, and thwarted in his attempts at sexual relief by the family dog. It's only a matter of time before enforced intimacy turns into an intriguing combination of a boy, his mother and a plaster-cast.

PLASTER CAST TIP: If you fancy someone, you could try asking them to rub moisturizer into the skin around your plaster cast. Or you could get them to help you take a shower. Though probably best if you're not related to them by anything other than marriage.

INFERNAL AFFAIRS (2002)

aka MOU GAAN DOU

This brilliant Hong Kong thriller stars Tony Leung (Chiu Wai, that is, not the other Tony Leung) as a dishevelled cop who has spent a decade in deep cover amongst the Triads and Andy Lau as a dapper Triad who has been infiltrating the police department at the same time. Each is assigned by their respective bosses (Anthony Wong and Eric Tsang) to flush out his counterpart mole, leading to edge-of-seat tension, steely visuals and sparse but effective bursts of violence.

You’ll need to keep your wits about you to work out who’s who, who knows what, and which side they’re on – especially since the two lead characters aren’t always too sure themselves – but your reward will be one of the most gripping thrillers of the noughties. Martin Scorsese won an Oscar for remaking it as The Departed, but sacrificed the original's tight narrative and knife-edged tension to sloppy storytelling and an out-of-control star performance from Jack Nicholson.

In the tense, pivotal scene in which each mole first becomes aware of the other's existence, Tony Leung communicates by tapping out Morse code with the plaster cast on his arm, to let the cops know where a Triad drug deal is going down, while Andy Lau is simultaneously feeding information about the planned drugs bust back to the Triads.

PLASTER CAST TIP: Yeah, Morse code. Sometimes, SOS is all you need.

REAR WINDOW (1954)

The pleasures of voyeurism have seldom been served up more seductively than in Hitchcock's film of Cornell Woolrich's story; it's the Master of Suspense at his most gloriously entertaining. James Stewart, laid up in his apartment with a broken leg, starts spying on his neighbours through a telephoto lens, with results so fascinating it's almost a shame when the plot proper kicks in and takes over. Has Raymond Burr murdered his nagging wife, or is our hero letting his imagination run away with him? Thelma Ritter is a riot as Stewart's wisecracking nurse, while Grace Kelly as his fiancée is such a vision of gorgeousness - kissing her beau in slo-mo or saucily unpacking her negligé with the words, "Preview of coming attractions!" - you'll be asking yourself why he's finding it so hard to commit to her. All the answers, of course, are to be found in those windows across the yard, each of them cynically illustrating one of the many different stages in the eternal battle of the sexes.

PLASTER CAST TIP: In a perfect world, we would all have Thelma Ritter to rub us down and Grace Kelly to awaken us from our reveries with a magical kiss. But in the absence of either of these angels, we can console ourselves by spying on the neighbours in the house opposite. Or, if your window is too high and your vantage-point too low, by gazing mesmerised at Magritte-esque cloud formations and the gently swaying branches of the sycamore outside.

Honourable Mentions: The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, Frida, A Fish Called Wanda, Splash!, GoldenEye, Assassins, Office Space, Election, Spider, Goodfellas, The Incredibles, Les amants du Pont-Neuf, L'astragale, Verso sera. (Please don't hesitate to suggest other plaster cast-related titles to add to this list, which I realise is nowhere near exhaustive.)

25 SCREEN GRABS

2011-05-28T20:27:00.001+02:00

Faye Dunaway in Chinatown

Die dritte Generation

Margit Carstensen in Die dritte Generation

Françoise Dorléac and Jean Desailly in La peau douce

Françoise Dorléac in La peau douce

David Farrar in The Small Back Room

Robert Helpmann and Ludmilla Tchérina in The Tales of Hoffmann

Delphine Seyrig in Daughters of Darkness

Andrea Rau in Daughters of Darkness

Jean-Paul Belmondo in Pierrot le fou

Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven

Margit Carstensen in Martha

Lana Turner in The Three Musketeers

Alain Delon in Le samouraï

Terence Stamp in Toby Dammit (Histoires extraordinaires)

Toby Dammit (Histoires extraordinaires)

Kim Novak and James Stewart in Vertigo

Kim Novak in Vertigo

Monica Vitti in Modesty Blaise

Ania Pieroni in Inferno

Grace Kelly in Rear Window

Kim Novak in Bell, Book and Candle

GOD SAYS "HA!"

2011-05-24T13:22:00.006+02:00

God says "Ha!" Undoctored photograph of Brussels skyline, sunset, 23rd May 2011.

MY TREE OF LIFE

2011-05-22T22:02:00.002+02:00

My 17 word one-minute précis of Terrence Malick's THE TREE OF LIFE, Palme d'or winner at this year's Cannes film festival.

SUCKER PUNCH

2011-05-01T10:37:00.001+02:00

Instead of writing a review of Zack Snyder's SUCKER PUNCH, I decided to do a dance like the one Baby Doll does in the movie.

For more on SUCKER PUNCH, here's the link to a piece I wrote on female fetishwear in the movies. It was meant to be lighthearted, but Guardian readers took it very seriously and got quite cross about it.

BRUXELLES, MAGIC HOUR

2011-03-06T20:45:00.006+01:00

ALOUETTE

2010-12-12T17:23:00.000+01:00

This is my first short film. It was shot in August 2010 in my flat in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, with one actor (the very wonderful Madeleine Bongard) and a crew of one (me). The videocam packed up immediately, so it was shot on a combination of Canon Ixus, Sony Ericsson K800i and Sony Ericsson W910i. Sound effects were added later, so they're a little impressionistic. It was fun.

THE COEN BROTHERS: THE 1985 INTERVIEW

2010-10-29T16:06:00.001+02:00

In January 1985 I interviewed Joel and Ethan Coen for Time Out magazine just prior to the UK release of their debut feature, Blood Simple. Not many people had heard of the Coens at this point, but there was a certain amount of buzz about the film, which in that same month won the Grand Jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival (then in its infancy, having only just changed its name from the Utah/US Film Festival). I'd read somewhere that they knew Sam Raimi, and that Joel had worked on Raimi's debut feature, The Evil Dead, but that was it.

I arrived at the interview venue a little breathless, having come directly from a press screening of Ninja III: The Domination, in which Lucinda Dickey (who would go on to star in Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo) plays an aerobics instructor possessed by the spirit of an evil ninja. I duly told the Coens all about this film, and they seemed pretty interested.

Here be the Rules of Samuel M Raimi, director of The Evil Dead: 1) The innocent must suffer. 2) The guilty must be punished. 3) You must taste blood to be a man. To these three film-making maxims, the brothers Coen have added one of their own: The dead must walk.

There are no zombies in Blood Simple, though Joel Coen reckons all four rules are applicable "in a weird kind of way". Joel (29) and Ethan (27) wrote it. Joel (who was Assistant Editor on The Evil Dead) directed it. Ethan produced.

They set Blood Simple in Texas, for reasons that were both practical (weather, unions, cost...) and aesthetic. "We wanted a very specific milieu," explains Joel, "and Texas carries a lot of baggage with it, at least for American audiences. It's sort of overblown, mythical Texas." It's a Texas of sleazy motels, neon-lit bars and ramrod highways stretching to the horizon. It's about as far from Paris, Texas as you're likely to get, but nor is it anywhere near the neighbourhood of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Blood Simple is not a horror movie.

The title was taken from Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest. "It's an expression he used to describe what happens to somebody psychologically once they've committed murder. They go 'blood simple' in the slang sense of 'simple' meaning crazy." But it's left up to the audience to ponder the implications; they're never spelt out in the film itself. "We always cringe when we hear the title of a movie mentioned in the dialogue," says Joel. "He doesn't love you," says Ethan, "He's just... Romancing the Stone." "Makes me grind my teeth," says Joel.

Blood Simple, says Joel, "was financed completely independently. We set up a limited partnership and then solicited private investment. That was a really time-consuming, frustrating process. It took us about a year. It was probably the hardest part of making the movie. What we did do, which proved to be really helpful, was make a two-minute trailer before we made the movie, and then use that to show to prospective investors, as a sort of foot-in-the-door tactic."

Blood Simple's roots lie in that school of hardboiled crime fiction typified by Hammett, Raymond Chandler and, especially, James M Cain. Althought superficially similar to Body Heat in its updating of classic film noir conventions and characters, it nevertheless forges its own overwrought territory, particularly in terms of plot. "Body Heat," says Ethan, "was more of a mystery. One didn't know who was doing what to whom. We didn't want to write a whodunnit. We wanted to do a movie where the audience knows what's going on every step of the way."

The audience knows, but the film's characters don't. "The original premise was a sort of central double-cross," says Ethan, "and beyond that it was a question of figuring out how to make things progressively worse for the survivors." The innocent must suffer.

Whodunnit or not, the delicious convolutions of Blood Simple's plot are such that excessive elaboration of them here would detract from their cumulative effect on screen. Suffice to say, the increasingly sticky webs of murderous intrigue wrap themselves around a wealthy Texan bar-owner, his attractive young wife, the barman whom she's boffing on the side, and a sleazy divorce detective, played by M Emmet Walsh with all the sordid and slimy panache of a walking social disease. There is paranoia to spare, and there's guilt a-go-go. The guilty must be punished. And there's blood, lots of it.

"Would you say the ending verges on Grand Guignol?"

"Yeah," the Coens reply. You must taste blood to be a man. The precise meaning of taste, of course, is open to interpretation. There are no vampires in Blood Simple. If the use of the word "blood" misleads you into expecting more splatter, then the word "simple" may also lead you astray. Simple - as in artless and unsophisticated - does not describe the Coens' film-making style. Tricksy camerawork, arty set-ups, super-real sound effects: they're all there. And the Coens have gone for a soundtrack which counterpoints the action, rather than underlining it. "We didn't want to tell the audience how to feel." Accordingly, there's, "a very eclectic sonic score" mixed with a lot of Latin-American, a little reggae, the Four Tops and a Balinese Monkey Chant.

Despite the gore, doomed characters and downbeat storyline, Blood Simple unfurls enjoyably like long tangles of hair from the coat of a big black shaggy dog, complete with climactic punchline. The Coen purposely temper their violence with, "a certain amount of humour". They keep a detached, cool, almost cruel distance from their characters, and the most sympathetic of these is also the most despicable. "he probably has the same sort of ironic attitude to the story as we do," says Joel.

PETER CUSHING: THE 1986 INTERVIEW

2010-10-24T13:04:00.001+02:00

I interviewed Peter Cushing for Time Out in March 1986, to coincide with the publication of Peter Cushing - An Autobiography (Weidenfeld & Nicholson) and a season of his films at the National Film Theatre.

The reference to "Winston" in the fifth paragraph is to Winston Churchill (grandson of the more famous Winston Churchill) who in 1986 led a campaign in parliament to amend the Obscene Publications Act to cover, "the increasing amounts of obscene material transmitted by television into millions of homes." The linked section from Hansard, in which he and his cronies waffle on about "proper values", is interesting, bearing in mind Churchill's own private life, which included not-so-proper extra-marital affairs with, among others, Soraya Khashoggi and a Belgian jewellery maker. I very much like the contrast with the sensible, measured contributions from Gwyneth Dunwoody, and what sounds like a spot of giggling at the back there from Clare Short.

As before, I have retro-edited my writing to excise some of the lame neologisms or pathetic attempts at wit that now make me cringe, but direct quotations have not been altered. There's nothing here that strikes me as particularly illuminating or original, and I would probably think twice about using the word "schlockiest" if I were to write such an article now, but I do think some of the quotes capture Cushing's tone of voice quite nicely. What a lovely man.

Baron Frankenstein raises a thin yet elegant finger and points towards the cake-stand laden with cucumber sandwiches and strawberry tartlets. "I want all that gone, otherwise I shall never speak to you again. And what you don't eat, you can take in your doggy-bag, because you never know, you might be waylaid."

There's more to Peter Cushing than Frankenstein and Van Helsing, of course, though all of us who grew up with Hammer tend to think of those as his signature roles. "Nearly all my theatre was comedy," he says, "and a great deal of television work too. But after the sensational and financial success of those early Hammer pictures, you do rather get typecast. It doesn't matter." But at least the two characters with which he is most closely associated are contrasting ones (ETA: you just have to look at the stills on this page to see the difference between Frankenstein and Van Helsing), and very few of his roles were as out-and-out villains, despite the NFT programme summing up his film season with the words, "A Talent to Terrify".

Even Frankenstein was, "not a villain per se, he's just a brilliant scientist gone wrong. As for Van Helsing in Dracula, you couldn't have a more goody-goody, could you? Dear old Christopher Lee was the baddie in that one." Cushing's must unremittingly villainous role to date is probably that of Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars. During the filming of which, it is rumoured, the boots they gave him were so uncomfortable he replaced them with carpet slippers whenever his feet weren't in frame.

Cushing lives near Dover, but is currently staying at Brown's Hotel to help publicise his autobiography. The book glides gently to a halt with the death of his wife in 1971, but gets much mileage out of his childhood, when his mother insisted on dressing him as a girl, and his early theatre career, when he once topped up the whiskies at a backstage party with gin, because it looked exactly like water and he didn't know the difference.

In 1954 he played Winston Smith in a BBC dramatisation of Nineteen Eighty-Four. This was over 30 years ago, long before the other Winston's plans to ban sex and violence on the box, but even then there was an outcry. Questions were asked in the House as to whether the BBC should be allowed to run a repeat three days later. (In those days, running a repeat meant doing the programme all over again, live.)

Cushing still gets a steady stream of fan mail, much of it from people too young to have experienced the early thrills and chills of Hammer in the cinema, though the films have now gained new admirers through being show on television. "What they say in their letters is that the horror films of today, they repel you and you're sickened. And the Hammer ones that we did make you shiver and shake and cuddle each other to feel comforted, but they never repelled. And that is, I think, frightfully interesting coming from young people who must be so immune now to seeing these terrible things on the news - football fights and Ireland and South Africa - it's just dreadful, isn't it. One has become so used to that as part of everyday life that I think watching a Dracula picture made 25 years ago must be rather like watching Noddy in Toyland."

Nevertheless, it is chastening to recall the critical reaction to the release of The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957. "Depressing, degrading - for all lovers of cinema only two words describe this film." "Among the half-dozen most repulsive films I have ever encountered." "A sickening and nauseating way to make a living." Yet, as David Pirie writes in A Heritage of Horror, the film, "looks today like a colourful and witty fairy story - which is exactly what it always was." Cushing concurs; "I don't really care for the adjective "horror". I think the films are fantasy as much as anything. Horror is concentration camps, war, murder, real things. It's car accidents and plane crashes."

It's an odd coincidence that both Vincent Price and Christopher Lee were born on May 27. Cushing lets down the Triumvirate of Terror, somewhat, by being born on May 26. "We always send each other cards. Vincent's the daddy, I'm second and Christopher's the baby." He is the perfect English gent, getting to his feet when a lady (that's me) comes into the room, helping her on and off with her coat, finding her a taxi at the end of the interview, and so on. He is dressed in muted early Doctor Who style (in fact, played the Doctor twice on film in the mid-1960s) with a discreetly floppy bow tie, checky sort of trousers and watch-chain.

Besides being tagged as Baron Frankenstein and Van Helsing, he is also one of the screen's best Sherlock Holmeses, and will shortly be donning the deerstalker again for The Abbot's Cry, with John Mill as Dr Watson. It's an original story, updating the character to 1920, when Holmes is in his sixties. "Even to try to make me look 64 is cheating it a bit," says Cushing, who is 73. He expresses guarded admiration for Jeremy Brett's portrayal of the detective in the recent TV adaptations. "He obviously went into tremendous detail, everything is dead right, but... you don't like the man. You should like Holmes; whether he was nice or not doesn't matter."

How does Cushing react to being described (the NFT programme again) as a "living legend"? "To be living at all is quite remarkable, at 73. It's a lovely thing to be called. Mind you, things about people becoming legends in their own lifetimes have been rather overdone, haven't they? When I first started in this business in 1936, I never dreamed I'd end up sitting here in one of the nicest hotels in London with everyone interested in such a very old man's memoirs, and having a rose named after my wife. It's all absolutely wonderful. I'm not a writer, and I think I've proved it. But I'm so thrilled people should be interested enough to publish it."

On reflection, Cushing hasn't been typecast at all, unless it's simply by his habit of talking each role as seriously as he can, bringing a depth and a dignity to his roles in even the schlockiest of movies. "That's the thing; you should never play down. If you'd only got a scooter, you'd pretend it was a Rolls Royce, wouldn't you."

Stills (top to bottom) from: The Brides of Dracula, Frankenstein Created Woman, Frankenstein Created Woman, The Brides of Dracula.