You're a beautiful woman probably...

I must be one of the last handful of people in the World to watch James Cameron's Avatar . Finally saw it the other night and found it, as expected, visually spectacular, but lacking storywise and characterwise. The aliens' "philosophy" in particular seemed half-baked. Although they were supposed to revere life, they seemed to go into the battle scenes with gusto and, in the latter part of the film, wipe out humans without a twinge of regret. None of the characters was given any light and shade either, with Stephen Lang's baddie being particularly clichéd and lacking in background and motivation. Sam Worthington looks good but already seems to me an appropriate successor to Russell Crowe - and I'm not a Russell Crowe fan. Anyway, the real point of this posting is that The People Who Know keep saying that the film is vastly better in 3D. On hearing the recent hype about the new 3D process, I've groaned on more than one occasion. I'm sure it's fi...

We went to see the new film A single man at the Tyneside Cinema today. Based on a book by Christopher Isherwood and directed by fashion designer Tom Ford, it's a melancholy story set in 1962 about a middle-aged gay man about to take his own life after the death of his partner in an accident. The story follows him through the day when he has planned to kill himself. Having heard of Isherwood in connection with the brilliant film Cabaret , I remember browsing the book in a bookshop many years ago but deciding that it was too depressing for my taste. Although the film was sometimes self-consciously "arty", it was beautifully shot, impeccably acted and emotionally quite affecting. The very well-chosen cast including Colin Firth, Julianne Moore and Nicholas Hoult ironically has a Brit playing an American and an American playing a Brit, although you wouldn't know this from the accents. The novel may well have been of only marginal interest to my younger self. I seem to r...

Here are the 15 films I find most memorable. Once again, these are in order by the (approximate) date that I saw them. I should add that I love all of them except number 10. I think this is an awful film that infuriates me in the way it threw out almost everything good in the original novel, and gets universally extravagant praise purely because Stanley Kubrick is treated as a god in the world of film. Other films to which I've taken a strong dislike are Pulp Fiction (we don't need film-makers trying to make violence seem "cool"), The Evil Dead, The Descent and The Straight Story (the last one for completely different reasons to the others). 1. A Taste of Honey 2. The Knack and How to Get it 3. Bedazzled (1967 version) 4. The Wicker Man 5. Cabaret 6. Planet of the Apes (1968 version) 7. Carrie 8. Pardon Us (Laurel and Hardy) 9. The Terminator 10. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick) 11. A Room with a View 12. Pleasantville 13. The Sixth Sense 14. AI - Artificial ...