Black Swan

Tamara Rojo, principal dancer with the Royal Ballet, has given a cutting review of Natalie Portman in Black Swan in today’s Guardian. She wants to know why they didn’t use a professional dancer for the role. But then Elena Glurdjidze, principal dancer with English National Ballet, seems to think that Natalie had a body double and it was hard to tell when she was being used...

High Tide

I just got hold of a film I haven’t seen since I was a kid: High Tide. It’s an underrated Gillian Armstrong film that no one remembers. You can’t even get it on dvd. The Radio Times says it almost drowned at the time it was released in 1987. Well, I think it would make a great Christmas re-run with all those shots of the Australian sunshine.

A Single Man

My heart sank when I read Stephanie Thoebald's review of A Single Man in The Telegraph, yearning for life after the fashion of Julianne Moore's character, Charley, who works on nothing but her face and her booze all day long. If Stephanie is being ironic, then I can't quite hear her. I am writing this because I don't think she is.

Julianne Moore's character is the most vapid, irritating and pitiful figure in the whole movie. Why is it that the leading female in a film about the gay male aesthetic has to be a kind of stuffed doll who comes out with robotic lines simmering with self-hatred? It's cliche and it's dull. The great joke of the movie is an anti-lesbian jibe delivered by Charley: "You remember that time in London when that old lesbian poured a glass of wine over my head because I asked her if she was hung like a doughnut?" (or something along those lines). Charley and George (Colin Firth) roar with laughter. Charley looks as if she might fall backwards off her chair. Drum roll.

Charley is cut in the style of a dysfunctional fag hag. She comes nowhere near Ann Bancroft in The Graduate or Bette Davis in Dangerous (see Stephanie's review). And as for comparing Julianne's role in A Single Man to the one she played in Boogie Nights - there is no contest. In Boogie Nights, the off-camera suggestions of Julianne's character are exciting. In Single Man, they are dull, predictable and unerotic. Women who have gay male friends are tired of seeing themselves portrayed in this way.

Passage Through: A Ritual

I have an idea for an antidote to present to those people who have been so seduced by James Cameron’s 3D Avatar that they would rather take their own lives than be denied a world where you get chased by killer rhinos, are subjected to the rule of a supreme leader, wear the same clothes every day and can never read a book or watch a movie.

I suggest nationwide screenings of Stan Brakhage’s Passage Through: A Ritual, which was screened in London for the first time ever last night thanks to Close-Up and The Dog Movement using Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club as a venue.

It intensifies the film experience by taking away much of what you would expect, i.e. images. Five minutes will pass during which you’ll see nothing on the screen except the visual equivalent of white noise, like white fire flies dancing around a dark light. Then there’ll be an image – a haystack, a dandelion, a kitchen, a glow of red above black card – which disappears after a couple of seconds, and the fire flies start dancing again. All the while, Philip Corner’s music (Through the Mysterious Barricade, Lumen I - after F. Couperin) sustains the experience, but what’s stayed with me are the images.

Cigarettes and Honey

Spotted: Billboards on the London Underground advertising the release of Coco Avant Chanel have actress Audrey Tautou holding a fountain pen in her right hand and resting a journal on her knees. In the original poster she is holding a cigarette in her right hand and there is no diary to be seen. Stunning that a cigarette held by an actress in a film commercial didn’t make it past The Tube’s advertising regulations, but blown-up nightmarish pictures of preserved dead bodies advertising Gunter von Hagens’ Body Worlds at the O2 were plastered all over the place.

Dans Le Monde Du Pape

Anyone who has ever fallen in love with an illusion will have great sympathy with the anonymous young writer in the film, Dans La Ville de Sylvia, as he walks around Strasbourg consumed by the projection of his muse. Because he (the actor Xavier Lafitte) is beautiful, and his fantasy harmful towards no one but himself, the sensitive artist is easily forgiven.

The Pope, however, is not.

Today’s papers are full of reports about how Pope Benedict XVI has announced that condoms are not the answer to Africa’s fight against HIV and Aids.

Speaking to journalists on his flight to Cameroon, the Pontiff said the condition was, "a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone; that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems".

I wish it were an illusion that this man’s belief in a misogynistic, homophobic and sadistic God could not affect the lives of so many Christians across the world. According to a report in today’s Guardian, 22 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are estimated to be infected by the disease. Past BBC reports say that there are 143 million Catholics in Africa.

If I didn’t know there were outreach programmes in Africa spreading the right message about HIV and Aids prevention, including Christian outreach programmes, my despair would be a lot greater.

The final scene in Dans La Ville de Sylvia shows how successful the director, Jose Luis Guerin, has been in transferring the artist's projection on to the viewer. The camera holds still showing a shot of a street in Strasbourg. People walk in and out of the frame and, while Xavier remains out of it, there is a palpable lightness of being. I sat there bracing myself for Xavier’s entrance and for, what by this point has become, the heaviness of his desire.

But he doesn’t come.

Award-Winning Tragedies

(Note: If you have not seen The Reader or Revolutionary Road, or read the books, and you don't want to know what happens, then don't read on!)

Kate Winslet won two Golden Globes for her performance in The Reader and Revolutionary Road and is now up for the Baftas and the Oscars.

She is excellent in both and they are good films.

However, it is hard to escape the fact that the two characters she plays kill themselves off at the end.

Does one have to die in a tragedy?

I think not.

If our heros, heroines, villains and tortured souls all killed themselves off - directly or indirectly - what would that mean for the rest of us?