Marantz PMD661 field recorder

Excitement yesterday as a parcel containing my new Marantz PMD661 field recorder arrived at the door. Having a new toy does tend to throw my day out of equilibrium. Instead of writing two thousand words of novel, I unpacked the box and started to explore a new world of high quality sound recording.


My choice of the Marantz over other field recorders came from an extensive survey of reviews on the Internet - reviews penned by people who know more about sound recording than I ever will. Without getting too technical here, I'll say that I needed a recorder that would take an external microphone input via balanced XLR connectors. I wanted it to record onto memory cards, have reasonable battery life and as good a quality preamplifier as I could afford.

Of all the review sites, the most helpful was the one at Wingfield Audio - with its superb table of sound samples from different machines. And I eventually found the best UK price at Pink Noise Systems, who were so helpful that I will certainly be checking their website if I need more audio kit in future.

So - now it is out of the box and I've had 24 hours to play with it, I have to report that I love everything about the Marantz PMD661. The look and feel of the machine are very satisfying. Plugging in a good microphone and a set of reasonable headphones is like having bionic hearing. I don't know where to take it that is quiet enough to find out how good the preamp really is - but so far so good. Yesterday I thought I detected a slight hum - but then realised I was hearing the fan in my laptop some distance away.

If I can figure out how to embed audio into this blog, I'll share some recordings in the near future.

Guerilla Filmmakers Masterclass

The Guerilla Filmmakers Masterclass by Chris Jones is a huge journey crammed into 2 intense days. It is film making from story conception through screenwriting, production, post-production and premier all the way to film sales and beyond to the development of your career in film.

Thanks to the work of Hive Films, Creative Leicestershire, Phoenix Square and of course Chris Jones himself, this workshop was brought to Leicester. And thus for the last two days I have been sitting, absorbing what felt like gigabytes of information. Some of it I knew before. Much of it was new to me. It was by stages uplifting, fascinating and frankly terrifying. In short, it was reality.

All the information I might have been able to dig up from books and the Internet. But nowhere could I have had the whole package served in one go. The effect of this was quite startling. Going through the journey of the filmmaker in two days from start to finish gives a sense of perspective. It lets you see the whole thing - every stage in its place.

And having seen the big picture, I can now go and learn more about the individual parts of the process and understand where they fit into the whole. Short of having done it - having made a feature film and taken it to market - short of that I can't imagine a better way to get perspective on the process.

If you are thinking of making your first feature film I strongly advise you to attend this excellent course. It'll be the best money you spend on your project.

I'll write more about one or two specifics in a later post - particularly some lessons that I will be taking from this into my novel writing.

Avatar Review

I hated the Avatar trailer, which projected a corny plot and unbelievable, blue CGI creatures. I might not have gone to see the film at all if James Cameron hadn't been the director. But he was. So I did. I mean, the man created Aliens and Terminator 2 - both formative movie experiences for me. So I had to go.

That's the problem with trailers. There is no time to get immersed in the world of the film. Image and story are reduced to a few seconds. And these days the most likely place to see those images will be a small rectangle on the screen of your laptop.

But in a finely crafted film - as Avatar most certainly is - the film makers have the time and the tools. It is a testament to their skill that watching the movie itself, the strangeness of the imagery never burst the bubble of my belief. Even the flying mountains.

In Avatar James Cameron takes the European genocide of native American peoples and re-writes it, placing it on an alien planet and thus giving himself the space to re-cast the ending. The humans (European-American colonists) want the planet because of its mineral content. The indigenous blue tinted humanoids (native Americans) just want to live in harmony with the ecosystem.



But the humans have a trick that is going to get them into native culture and discover its weaknesses. A human mind can be made to temporarily inhabit a lab-grown alien body. And thus our paralysed hero gets to walk again - as a tall, blue skinned native. And of course, there is love interest along the way. Who was it who called this film 'Smurfahontas'?

Cameron cleverly uses imagery evocative of the destruction of the World Trade Centre to help us feel the obscenity of the destruction of native peoples. (I'm not saying there is any kind of moral equivalence between the two. But that is the power of metaphor - taking feelings that were attached to one event and juxtaposing them with another, without ever having to define logical equations of meaning.)

The film is not carried on the strength of the sci-fi story. The major act climaxes were obvious some 45 minutes before they arrived. This is Hollywood. We know where we're heading. The film is carried by its imagery, movement, immersion and, yes, emotion. It caught me up. I was enthralled. And, unexpectedly, I found myself weeping with emotional release at one particular moment near the end.

It is not, in my opinion, as perfect a film as Aliens or Terminator 2. But is is excellent none-the-less. Don't wait for it to come out on DVD. This is one for the big screen. As for 3D or 2D - perhaps that can wait for another blog posting.

Frost / Nixon

Watching the movie Frost / Nixon last night left me with a question. How did the writer produce such an entertaining, suspenseful story for an audience that already knows the ending?

I don't think I need to put in a spoiler warning before saying that the real Richard Nixon was confronted by the real David Frost in a series of television interviews and ended up giving a more complete apology and admission of error than he gave to anyone else. That's history. What room is left for suspense?



And yet Frost / Nixon works as a story. Superbly well, in my opinion. We all know the bare bones of where we are going. But we don't know how we're going to get there. And we don't know what effect the journey is going to have on the characters.

Stories tend to have an outer journey and an inner one. The outer journey is the obvious quest. A knight attempting to recover the Holy Grail, for example. Or Frost attempting to make a successful television program and boost his career in America.

The inner journey is often a byproduct of the outer one. It is the fact that in seeking the Grail, the knight comes to a deeper understanding, a greater wisdom. Perhaps the outer quest is a failure - the Grail is not located. But the inner quest may still provide a victory.

What is the inner journey for Frost? That is something the history books do not so obviously tell. And that is the real substance of this story.

I'd wanted to watch Frost / Nixon to figure out how the writers would tackle this problem. I hadn't expected to enjoy it so much or to find it quite so compelling. If you are looking for a thoughtful, beautifully textured movie to get out on DVD, this one comes highly recommended.

Happy-go-lucky review

Ever since I saw the poster image for the movie Happy-go-lucky, I have wanted to see it. There is something immediately inviting about the picture of Sally Hawkins playing the part of the protagonist Poppy. The open smile. The open gesture. The plastic bead necklace.



Last week I finally had the chance to borrow the DVD and am pleased to be able to say that the film delivered exactly what the poster had promised. Poppy is a delight to watch from start to finish. And although I couldn't really put my finger on the thread of a story plot, I was a happier, person with more of a bounce in my step after watching it.

Worlds are not in danger here. No one is killed. No banks are robbed. No dinosaurs are recreated. Poppy, her friends and her relatives are more or less unchanged from start to finish. The one person who changes is Scott, Poppy's driving instructor. So in a story-telling sense, he is the real protagonist. But that is not how it feels.

Confused? Sorry. That is what you get when you ask a structure-fixated writer to tell you about a film that is really about the audience spending a little time in the company of an extraordinary person.

That it works so well is testament to the superb acting and the director's achievement in co-creating these fascinating characters. Happy-go-lucky is a movie of the small, beautiful, everyday. It is a rare celebration of the breadth of the human spirit. And it is a reminder to writers such as myself to trust in what we are doing and not to feel the need to shoehorn a helicopter explosion into our screenplays.


Thank you Mike Leigh.

Virgin Media broadband customer review

The Virgin Media broadband fiasco continues. Late yesterday the household was blessed with connectivity and I managed to post up the blog entry I’d written earlier. The problem, it seemed, was solved. However, at 8.30 this morning I turned on the modem and found no service yet again.

I am now a master of the Virgin Media helpline system. Not through any natural ability. Rather, through repetition. I phoned up, keyed in the numbers before the voice could ask me for them and was put through to a charming Indian man who asked me to turn things off and turn them on again, report on which lights flashed and which lights didn’t, tell him which operating system I was using and eventually informed me that there was a problem in my area but engineers were working on it and the service would be back by 6pm.

‘How many more days will the service be out?’ I asked.

‘It will be back by 6pm today.’

‘That’s what I was told yesterday.’

‘Yes.’

‘And the day before. And the day before that.’

‘Yes.’

‘So when will this problem be over?’

‘At 6pm today.’

Whatever they are paying their helpline staff it isn’t enough. The guy must be
facing a screen which tells him to tell me this stuff. It is ludicrous, frankly. He knows it. I know it. But he delivers the lines faultlessly. He is polite, concerned and does not deviate a hair’s breadth from the script. I’ve spoken to seven or eight of these helpline workers in the last week. They have all been charming.
It seems that Virgin media have wisely invested in their complaints department. Shame about the broadband service.

If you are a Leicester customer of Virgin Media and are having problems could I suggest you phone the helpline on 151. Key in the numbers 2 followed by 3 and wait while it tells you to turn everything off and then on again. They’ll play you a bit of music, then someone will speak to you. Ask for a refund and they should credit you £5. Today I asked for a substantial refund and was told I would be credited £10. Tomorrow I intend to ask for an enormous refund.

But then again, if you are a Leicester Virgin Media broadband customer you probably won’t be able to read this.

Virgin Media – Broadband Service Review

Virgin Media’s broken broadband service is to blame for the lack of blog entries this week. Yes, let’s say that again so that the search engines find this page. My customer review of Virgin Media’s broadband service: in my recent experience it is highly unreliable.

For the last week or so Virgin Media broadband has been cutting out for chunks of five or ten minutes at a time. Then three days ago the service stopped completely. I called the help line and discovered I was not alone. The entire LE3 postcode area was apparently experiencing problems. No broadband and no cable television. But all would be well by 6pm. That’s what I was told.

The forecast proved correct. By 6pm we were up and running again. The problem was over.

Except that it cut again the following morning. I was getting used to the automated help line by this time and, having memorised the route through the maze, could key in the various number choices without waiting to be prompted by that insufferably cheery voice.

Yes there was a new problem, they said. A faulty fuse somewhere. But all would be well later on very soon.

When it happened again today I began to see a pattern. The service is on until work starts in the morning and then off until work finishes in the evening.

‘I suspect your engineers may be cutting me off,’ I said to the helpline worker.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They are working to upgrade your area. But it will all be over soon.’

‘This was planned?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Then why didn’t Virgin Media bother to tell its customers?’

‘It will be up and running by 6pm,’ she said.

‘And tomorrow?’

‘Your area is being upgraded.’

So here I am, composing my blog entry offline in the hope that the Virgin Media engineers may have a tea break and let me back onto the Information Superhighway at some stage.

Coincidentally, Virgin Media just hiked the price of their broadband. The justification? The service was going to be better.

Mr Branson, you are a highly successful dyslexic, an inspiration to dyslexics like me. But your Virgin brand is not looking so shiny right now. Quite frankly this service is shoddy.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (2009)

The release of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince was an eagerly awaited event among the members of my family. Yesterday was the day, so we trotted down to Vue Cinema in Braunstone, Leicester and enjoyed a couple of hours of easy escapism in the company of wizards and witches conjured from J.K.Rowling's immense imagination.

The Half Blood Prince was the book that got me reading the series. Until then, I'd been alone in the family in resisting Potter mania. But bored one day, and with that book the only reading matter available, I caved in. And yes, the story was good. From there I read the final episode - the Deathly Hallows, then worked my way backwards through the series to the beginning. (In a kind of Harry Potter meets Memento style reading experience.)

I don't wade through that many words easily. Dyslexia keeps me back from many of the longer classics. So I have to say that, however ropey the prose may be in parts, the Harry Potter series is a triumph of sustained story telling.

What about this film? As with the others in the series, it contained some very fine acting performances. Alan Rickman is never less than scintillating. Jim Broadbent's quality shines through. And the once child actors have grown into their roles beautifully. The visual effects were fine. The production values everything one would expect. It was, in short, a very successful depiction of an episode in this long saga.

But that is also it's limitation. It felt like an episode rather than having the shape of a feature film. I enjoyed it all the way through, but ultimately didn't feel as if I had been taken on a journey. Perhaps that was just the nature of the book - which leaves readers waiting for the final instalment. Or perhaps opportunities were missed in the way the the book was interpreted for the screen.

Once the final films have been made, I will doubtless go back to this one and watch it as a prelude to those. In that, I suspect it will have reached its highest point. But as a stand-alone it will always be limited. The only film in the series that stands alone as a great movie in its own right is the Prisoner of Azkaban. But that won't stop me and vast hoards of Harry Potter fans enjoying the Half Blood Prince and looking forward to the next one.

Now, how long do we have to wait?

Terminator Salvation (2009) Review

Reviewing Terminator Salvation is never going to be easy for me. Seeing Terminator 2 was one of my stand-out movie experiences. It was a rare beast in that it managed to combine a strong storyline with a huge special effects budget (instead of the more usual studio policy of replacing a strong storyline with a huge special effects budget.)

What about Terminator Salvation? It must have handed over more cash to the effects guys to make it look as if things were being blown up than most armies spend on the real thing.
Industrial Light and Magic certainly earned a prominent place in the credit roll, delivering exactly the seat-juddering spectacle we have come to expect.

But how about the story?

Well, there was one, despite what I heard reviewer Mark Kermode saying on the Radio 5 Live this afternoon. But thinking back now, 24 hours after I walked out of the screening, I am finding it somewhat hard to remember all the ins and outs.

There's this guy, John Connor (Christain Bale), who looks grim and shouts a lot at this other guy in a submarine who also shouts and looks grim. But then, the year is 20-something in the future and the machines are doing the usual Skynet thing of trying to take over the world. So looking grim and shouting is probably an appropriate response. Though it did make it harder to engage with him as a character.

Most of the movie takes place in the future, but before the time travel of the earlier movies(Before? Uh, hold on a moment. Couldn't they...? Best not ask.) Can a man who has done evil things find salvation, the movie asks? To reveal the answer would be to give away the ending, so I'll leave you to guess what Hollywood is going to pronounce on that one.

I did find the dénouement cheesy. And the ending speech could easily have been replaced with someone winking at the camera and saying: "Enjoyed the explosions? Just wait till you see the sequel." But Terminator Salvation isn't a bad summer blockbuster for all that. It is easy entertainment that sits comfortably on the big screen.

It is always going to stand in the shadow of the original movie - which was better storytelling on a far lower budget. And both stand in the shadow of T2. But hey, that's not such a bad place to be. Most action movies do.

Cinema de Lux - Highcross

Cinema de Lux in Highcross was my destination yesterday morning as I headed into Leicester. Yes, I was fleeing the sweltering heat that has gripped the city for the last few days (If you live outside the UK, read 'sweltering heat' to mean 'mild summer weather') I was also looking for a way to chill my brain after the feverish unreality of seven days of non-stop screenplay writing and editing.

Why did I choose Cinema de Lux out of Leicester's clutch of multi-screens? The seats in the Odeon are frankly uncomfortable. Vue cinema - my usual destination - doesn't start screening until later in the day. And the others are somewhat off my radar. (I must explore more. Feel free to send me tickets and I'll review your cinema for you.)

So I took my first exploratory steps into Leicester's newest cinema. It was 11.25am and I was heading in to see Blood: the Last Vampire, reviewed in yesterday's posting.

First impressions were somewhat marred by the fact that the £1 voucher clutched in my sweaty hand was refused at the front desk. "You can't use that, I'm afraid. That's only valid after 6pm. The tickets are more expensive then, you see." I coughed up the cash and took my ticket. But as I was walking away I heard the same line being delivered to the couple in the queue just behind me. "You can't use that, I'm afraid..." I read the small print afterwards and was still none the wiser. It seems a petty policy and leaves a bad taste. However, I was so relived to be standing in the air conditioned lobby that this didn't feel like too much of a hit.

Going to the cinema during the day is one of the perks of being a self-employed writer. It is a way to avoid the crowds and all the distraction of slurpings and crunchings from the seat in front. I've been to showings when there were only four of us in a large theatre. But never before yesterday have I been the only viewer. I asked afterwards and was told they would still have shown it if no one was there.

With the luxury of solitude I tried a variety of different seats, in search of the optimum position. I turned my mobile off then turned it on again, realising that it really didn't matter because I wasn't going to disturb anyone. Then turned it off again realising that I didn't want to be disturbed either.

I watched the movie in eerie isolation, enjoying the chance to lounge around but realising that the feeling one is sharing a film with others does curiously add something to the viewing experience.

I should report also that the seats were more comfortable than those in the Odeon, though I still prefer Vue in that respect.

On leaving the lady usher asked if I'd enjoyed the film. I had. She loved it too, she said. Had seen it three times. Liked the way the plot unfolded, and that it was a vampire story - which she particularly enjoys.

She was genuinely interested, genuinely engaged and genuinely likes the cinema she works for. And that was great to see. If the place motivates its staff to feel so positive, perhaps I can forgive them the voucher scam after all.

Blood: the last vampire 2009

Blood: the Last Vampire (2009) is a live action remake of the year 2000 anime movie of the same name.

In plot terms, this is a standard revenge tragedy with a few scenes from Star Wars spliced in. I’m not saying that is necessarily a bad thing. Most hero epics follow the same pattern: Orphan sets off to do battle with his nemesis, the quintessence of evil. Along the way he fights and spectacularly defeats improbable numbers of evil and increasingly powerful henchmen. But on coming face to face with the biggest, baddest baddie of them all, he finds a mirror of his own self and becomes aware of his own dark side.

Switch ‘he’ for ‘she’, and ‘a galaxy far away’ for 1970’s Japan and you have this movie in a nutshell. And it is none the worse for following a tried and tested formula.

You don’t go to a ballet, a rock concert or a fireworks display for the plot. And let’s face it, you don’t go to an oriental vampire and demon martial arts flick, for that reason either. A movie like Blood: the Last Vampire is going to stand or fall on the quality of the fight choreography and the precise genre-styling.

On that basis, the film delivers more-or less what you’d expect. Our hero is a samurai sword wielding immortal with a need for regular blood refills, who just happens to look and dress like a Japanese high school student. The demons she fights cleverly disguise themselves as human for most of the time, transforming when needed into a range of fanged beasts. The first set are little more than martial art-enabled zombies, but the medium range change into heavily muscled, winged and fanged creatures. The big baddie is of course perfectly human-looking, and would not look out of place on the catwalks of Paris or London, if she could stop decapitating people for long enough.

Does the styling work? In part. There are good fights, lots of brooding silences and more wire work choreography than you could shake a stick at. But the intermediate beast creatures were distinctly dodgy. More like 1970s Plasticine Godzillas than 21st Century digi-tech creations.

Hero and side-kick battle their way entertainingly through to the climactic scene – which was so Star Wars-like that I was sure they’d mention ‘the dark side of the force’ at any moment. (Alas, they didn’t.) And in the end, naturally enough, room was left for a sequel.

If you like creatures with fangs doing battle with sword-wielding Japanese schoolgirls (and if you are 18 or over) this might well be a movie for you. But you’ll have to overlook the dodgy monsters.

The Incredible Human Journey

I woke this morning feeling burned out from the script writing over the last couple of days, so I treated myself to an hour watching the final episode of The Incredible Human Journey on BBC iPlayer.

If you haven't been following this series, I would strongly encourage you to look at it. I'm sure it will be repeated on the BBC. It is also available at the moment on iPlayer. I am not sure if it will be accessible outside the UK, but it is the kind of BBC product likely to be sold around the world.

The series explores the genetic heritage of modern humans from our origin 200,000 years ago in East Africa. It follows the great journeys of exploration that led to our populating the world. The presenter, Alice Roberts, is a medical doctor and anthropologist. She is also enthusiastic, sincere and immediately likable.

The story she tells of our ancestors, pieced together from fragments of evidence, is astonishing. It emphasises once again the common humanity of all people. I can't put it better than by quoting Alice Roberts's final statement in the last program.

Referring to the slaughter of native Americans by European settlers she describes it as:

"...a tragedy which seems so much more senseless in light of what we now know about our human story: our origins in Africa, the journeys our ancestors made and the close genetic bond we all share.

The differences between us all are really just superficial. We're all members of a young species that goes back less than 200,000 years and we're all surprisingly closely related.

This is the story that has emerged from the study of stones, bones and our genes: that wherever we've ended up, all over the world, we are Africans under the skin. And uncovering that story, retracing the steps of our ancestors has given me a profound sense of our common humanity, our shared past and our shared future."

If you follow this blog, you'll probably be aware of my view that, in the words of Baha'u'llah, we are all "leaves of one tree" and "fruits of one branch". You will also be aware that my emotions are never far buried. So you won't be surprised that I wept profusely on at the end of the program!

It is a truly beautiful series.

Dr Who - narrowing the audience?

I watched the latest episode of Dr Who on BBC1 last night - presumably still available on BBC IPlayer. Unfortunatley, I don't have much good to say about it.

It seems to me that the revitalised Dr Who had a distinctive combination of qualities which attracted a wide audience.

• There was lots of simple to understand adventure - attractive and accessible to primary school aged children.


• Many of the episodes were genuinely frightening - attractive and cool to a teenage audience.


• The relationships and story arcs carried a real emotional load - keeping the attention of adults.

In pulling this magic trick, the writers managed to buck the trend of modern television - which has moved further and further from general viewing and concentrate on increasingly finely segmented audiences.

So - why do the recent episodes of Dr Who seem to be cutting out the aspects that gave it such broad appeal? Yesterday's episode, Planet of the Dead, was not frightening. There goes the teen audience. The emotional story arc was slight to non-existent. Adults make excuses and leave the room. That leaves the young children who, I must assume, are the audience the screenwriters have chosen to target.

I take it this move towards a re-narrowing of the audience must be a conscious choice by the screenwriters. But I don't understand why. Last night's episode looks particularly flat when compared to classic episodes such as Blink.

Having said all the above, this is hugely subjective and I fully expect there will be many people out there who loved it.

RSS Feeds and Blog Indexing

Yesterday I was under-the-weather and didn't have the mental energy to do much writing. I did , however, have enough energy to feel bored. I therefore set about indexing my blog posts with labels. This means that you should now be able to see one or more key words below each posting. Clicking on one that says 'dyslexia', for example, should bring up a list of articles on that subject. Similarly for 'writing', 'film', 'creativity', 'publicity', 'review', 'Internet' and 'politics'.

To do this, I had to edit and re-save each article. A laborious process, as I have over the years written quite a number of articles on this blog. I got half way through before running out of patience. The rest, I thought, will have to wait until another day.

Then, in the middle of the night, I work with a worrying thought. Do the people who subscribe to this blog feed through RSS and the like, now receive ALL the articles I re-saved yesterday? Have I inadvertently spammed them with some 50,000 words of blog article?

If you are one of my feed subscribers, please let me know what happened. If you have all been flooded, please forgive me. I'll try not to do it again!

Pirates of the Caribbean - at world's end

If someone tells me there’s going to be a firework display just down the road and that the organisers have blown $200 million on the thing, I’m definitely going to go along and have a look. With that philosophy in mind I went with the family to see the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie – At World’s End.

We sat there dazed by moments of brilliance from the legions special effects teams, stunt performers, martial arts choreographers, set designers, and actors. I couldn’t see anything wrong with the little bits that made up the film. But saying that is as meaningless as admiring all the individual pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The question is, did it work as a whole?

When I walked out of the cinema some three hours later, I found myself relieved that it was over.

‘That was kind of fun,’ someone said, ‘but there wasn’t really a story.’

I begged to differ. There was too much story – none of which I found myself caring about. Every character was double-crossing everyone else. No one said or showed what they really felt. None of the many heroes of the film had a discernable inner journey. Sure they were in danger. But did I or any of the other members of the audience really give a damn? We were just waiting for more explosions and cameo performances.

The next day, my daughter, as keen a Pirates of the Caribbean fan as ever you are likely to meet, confessed to me that she couldn’t really remember any of the scenes. But it was fun, she said. And that about sums it up for me. If movies were only measured by the weight of gunpowder ignited, this would be a classic.

Hot Fuzz

What happens when a pumped-up urban uber-cop is relocated to a sleepy rural village with a zero crime rate? The answer is the distinctly British crime comedy, Hot Fuzz. No other country could have given birth to a movie like this. Will audiences in any other country understand it? Do the producers even care? They’ve made a movie that is true to itself and its origins and been rewarded with a huge domestic commercial success.

I’m lucky enough to be able to go to the movies in the early afternoon on weekdays when the theatres are largely empty. Viewing Hot Fuzz with me in the Leicester Odeon were two elderly couples. Unlike me, they didn’t seem to notice that low notes were causing the speaker system to rattle like a china shop in a small earthquake. To be fair the manager eventually offered me a couple of free tickets in compensation, but only after I’d talker my way past a couple his rather defensive staff members.

Notwithstanding the situation, I found plenty of laugh-out loud moments and was grinning through a good part of the rest of the movie. The slapstick nature of a lot of the gags did make it hard to get emotionally involved with the story and two hours was starting to feel like a long haul on the jokes alone. But who knows, given a working speaker system and a load of people around me laughing, I might not have noticed. The editing is certainly tight through out. I only wish that during the final fight sequence in the model village, one of the characters had said, ‘This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.’

Stranger than Fiction

Characters in novels do sometimes come to life. Like in the novel Breakbeat – where I put my main character in an argument with a woman from the Social Security, and was surprised when, at the end of the conversation, he invited her out on a date. They both wanted it, so I let them. Other times I have to keep my characters more tightly under control. I have occasionally spared them some ordeal, feeling they have suffered enough already. But I have never believed they were real.

In the film Stranger than Fiction, however, they really are. It is a delicious ‘what if’ story. What if someone woke up one day and found a narrator in his head? What if the plot choices of a reclusive novelist were being played out in real people’s lives?

Will Ferell plays a man who thinks he is in control of his admittedly narrow life. He counts the strokes of his toothbrush. He counts the number of paces to the bus stop. But when the voice of Emma Thompson comes into his head one day, narrating the things he is doing and is about to do, he starts to suspect that his future is being written.

With metafiction – stories in which storytelling itself is in some way the subject – one is never quite sure whether any shortcomings are in fact ironic statements by the writer. In Stranger than Fiction, the clichés and quirks of Emma Thompson’s narration are surely intended in this way, and added greatly to my enjoyment. I would have liked to think the unbelievably two-dimensional character of the author’s assistant, played by Queen Latifa, was another ironic statement. Unfortunately that one was just a mistake. There was nothing wrong with her acting, but the character was so obviously a device to give the novelist someone to talk to that she became unbelievable.

However, that is a small complaint about an otherwise eminently watchable, well acted and cleverly constructed romantic comedy which has plenty of laugh out loud moments along the way, especially for those who enjoy reading (and /or writing) novels.

The Last King of Scotland

Dr Nicholas Garrigan escapes his father’s dour presence by signing up to work in a medical station in rural Uganda. He may be treating the poor, but his motivation is adventure. He likes drink and dope and women – black or white, married or otherwise. These he finds.

He also finds, or is found by, president Idi Amin. On learning that Garrigan is Scottish, Amin takes an instant liking to the young doctor and invites him to become his personal physician.

Watching events unfold, I found myself willing the fictional doctor to run. Amin is going to turn into a monster. That is history. But in the film it is still 1971 and the signs are not yet clear.

They say that a frog dropped into scalding water will hop straight out again. But Garrigan is stepping into a pleasantly warm bath. The president seems clown-like at times, charismatic at others. He has wealth and pleasure at his disposal, some of which he bestows on his young doctor. He is strong, perhaps ruthless. But that’s what it takes to govern a newly independent country, isn’t it? The temperature rises a degree at a time.

The brilliance of this film is in the characters of Amin and Garrigan, played by Forest Whitaker and James McAvoy. The portrayal of Amin is multi-dimensional and terrifyingly believable. His relationship with Garrigan is paternalistic, domineering and corrupting. The doctor has fled from one father to be adopted by another. The dynamic between the two is mesmerising.

The insanity of what is happening in Uganda is revealed gradually as the president slides into paranoia. Towards the climax of the film, where some of the horror of what is happening is graphically revealed, Amin confronts the terrified Garrigan with the words: “This is real.”

Superlative performances and a fine script combine to make this film feel very real. It also feels close. We see the Asians being expelled from Uganda. How many of my friends and neighbours in Leicester were among those thousands, forced to leave with nothing but the clothes they were wearing? And what of the people who stayed? I remember seeing Enoch Olinga speaking at a Baha’i conference in 1976. That wonderful man was later killed in Uganda, together with his wife and three of his children, victims of unknown gunmen. No one knows the number murdered during Amin’s rule. Three hundred thousand is the figure quoted by the film.

The numbers are incomprehensible. Butchery of this kind is incomprehensible. But through the film, the tyrant is revealed as human. The steps that led to the madness are small enough to be believed. Just about. That doesn’t make this, our history, easier to cope with. But hopefully it will make it harder to forget.

Miss Potter

Beatrix Potter was the children’s publishing sensation of her day. In terms of book sales she was the Edwardian equivalent of J K Rowling. She was also a lady of remarkable drive, insight and wide-ranging abilities.

If you’ve seen the trailers for this biopic, you’ll know that Reneé Zellweger plays the eponymous writer/artist and Ewan McGregor the publisher with whom she becomes romantically involved. You will also know that Beatrix Potter’s beautiful illustrations are seen coming to life on the page. It was this latter point that gave me cause for concern as I queued up to buy my ticket. It looked altogether too cutesie for a depiction of the life of such a woman.

Surprisingly, this aspect of the film seldom felt out of place. I found myself accepting that we were being given glimpses into the mind of the writer and artist who, for many years, considered these fictional characters to be her only real friends.

The film opens with her trying to sell her first book, Peter Rabbit (a story that my family used to have a vinyl record of. I still remember my complete fear and fascination for the thing as a child, especially the bit where poor Peter squeezes under the gate.)

We see Beatrix Potter’s rise to fame and fortune, her first romance, her refusal to play the part of the upper class unmarried woman, her arguments with her family and ultimately her move to the Lake District.

My only complaint is with Reneé Zellweger’s portrayal of Potter, which I couldn’t believe at first. Perhaps it was a memory of Zellweger playing another famously unmarried thirty-something. It wasn’t an easy role, of course. Characters that spend so much of their time living in internal worlds are notoriously difficult to portray in movies (much easier in novels). Whatever the reason, I found her harder to accept than the other members of the cast, who all gave excellent performances.

A good story has its own momentum, however. I soon forgot my reservations and by the end I was completely absorbed in this gentle, beautiful and genuinely poignant film.

Why all the film reviews?

Why all the reviews?

Here is a list of possible reasons, some of which may be true.

• A friend was kind enough to give me some Vue Cinema vouchers last year - a perfect gift.
• An editor once told me that he went to see 50 movies a year so he could keep up with trends in fiction. The movies are often a couple of years ahead of written fiction, he said.
• An author once told me that going to the movies is a tax-deductible expense for a writer of fiction.
• Having to write a review makes you think about what you have seen – not just in general terms.
• I love going to the cinema.