Reviews

The Painted Veil is definitely of the Merchant Ivory school of filmmaking. Stuffy English Characters from an old English novel grappling with their Victorian/Edwardian constraints in regard to love and society, in an exotic setting. It looks great and the music is excellent. The actors are excellent. The plot unravels slowly and with great care and taste. Moreover, there is a very modern re-appreciation of colonialism, as of course the English can't get away with rampant imperial colonialism anymore.

So far all good standard Merchant/Ivory, and I do think The Painted Veil is a good film. But I think it's weighed down by its central moral about love and marriage. Naomi Watts is excellent and very believable as a racy woman bound by a stuffy husband. But this plot line drags with morality. I also think Edward Norton is a rare American actor, of the De Niro school, in that he is willing to go to the depths of his character without compromise. In this case stuffy, cold, moralistic, withheld. And its with Norton's Doctor, and his obsessive pursuit of science, that I think the film rises above good into great. The scenes where he tracing the cause and cure of the cholera epidemic are very special. This could have been a very fine, oddball film about a batty doctor in China, but it's bound down by a conventional story. Also the film should have had no flashbacks and started at the couple's arrival in China. That way, the tensions would have simmered away, leaving us guessing and slowly working out what happened to this mismatched couple. A braver filmmaker,probably European, could have made this a great film had he trusted his brilliant actors.

Tandoori Nights was created by Farrukh Dhondy for C4, who was also a top exec for the channel. For series 2 Meera Syal wrote the opening episode, and it's a cracker. In this episode you see a lot of things she would develop and that play to her strengths as a writer- creating a vibrant sense of place full of great comic characters- Asian West London (Goodness Gracious Me, Bride and Prejudice etc.)- but this episode shows a sinuousness and complexity that is missing from her crowd pleasing later work- not that this is unfunny- actually it's very funny.

The series is about Jimmy Sharma, played by the great Saeed Jaffrey, a Punjabi Indian restaurant owner who is being undone by his former Bangladeshi waiter and now rival restaurant owner, Rashid (played by that other excellent veteran actor, Baddi Uzzaman).

In this episode, Jimmy is at his nadir and wit's end- The Far Pavillions (the rival restaurant) is puling in the punters with its cheap and cheerful, 'chips with everything' approach. Jimmy, in the vein of great comic characters, sees himself as a superior restaurateur, but with little business, he resorts to an old friend's advice to go on the PR slog and set himself up rather like an Indian Bernard Matthews- which he feels is a debasement.

Meanwhile, his equally stubborn daughters are both playing havoc- one, played by Rita Wolf, is trying to make a documentary for her degree on the Asian Community, while the other, Bubbly (played by Shelley King) is trying her best to lead the community through running a youth centre which is trying to put on a special Community evening- both are diverting resources and attention away from Jimmy'crumbling business, which leads to a head when Jimmy's oddball Bangladeshi chef, Alaudin, is invited to perform for a Community night.

Syal's script cleverly plays with the clichés of Indianness- community and the compromises of migration to a post-colonial West. These are all themes in Syal's (and most other British Asian writer's) work- but is explored so smartly and entertainingly in this episode, in a manner you find with the best British Sit-Coms- like Fawlty Towers and Keeping Up Appearances.

Plot: Sweetie, Jimmy's niece, visits from Bombay. While everyone at The Jewel in The Crown restaurant expects her to be a demure innocent thing, she turns out to be anything but! The beautiful Sneha Gupta (who worked with Merchant Ivory) stars as the Bombay niece of Saeed Jafarey's Jimmy Sharma- owner and proprietor of The Jewel in The Crown. Scripted by Meera Syal, clearly the idea that the Indian cousins of British Asians should be more modern was a striking one then (and so utilised here for comedy)- nowadays we see the modernity of India and Bollywood daily.

A bit soapy- but nicely women centred (so foreshadowing Syal's later work- e.g. Life is not all Ha Ha Hee Hee'), the performances are all very good, with the great Zohra Segal as a demented Gran (so foreshadowing again Syal's love of this character- e.g. Kumars.

The plot of this is that Saeed Jafarey is the widowed owner of an Indian restaurant, The Jewel in The Crown, in London's East End. He is Punjabi and lives with his mother (Zohra Segal) and two daughters (one who is Rita Wolf of Beautiful Launderette fame). The older daughter is a socialist lawyer who runs the local community legal advice centre and the younger (Wolf) is a gobby college girl.

The chef of the restaurant is an oddball Bangladeshi, named Alaudin. He has entrusted the hiring of new staff to Alaudin, as his old staff have mutinied (which leaves the superior Punjabi Jafarey to say 'you can never trust a Bangladeshi') and decided to open up a new restaurant, The Far Pavillions (you get the literary joke)- and Alaudin is using nepotism to fill it with family relations (a funny old guy who suddenly becomes a wine waiter- joke is being Bangladeshi he is a teetotal Muslim) and also a young man who is obsessed with Rita Wolf, Saeed's daughter.

But she has her own problems with Jafarey's new squeeze, a white lady who Jafarey invites to the restaurant- however everyone is surprised with the white lady's reaction to the restaurant! Overall, I found this a sharp, well-written (with a few cracking lines), humorous traditional British Sit-com with an ethnic twist- a good first episode- everyone clearly feels a bit new and unsure of what they're doing but work well to get over this. Saeed Jafarey is, as ever, superb, and the playing in general is good. Also Jafarey's problems with an old man who, despite all his qualifications and previous status, cannot find a job (and has clearly cracked over his failure to land a job even as a waiter!) lend the mordant air to this sit-com which is so prevalent to British sit-coms, and which makes them in my view quite special.

On a last note, this was directed by Jon Amiel around the same time as his masterpiece, The Singing Detective.

Christie Malry's Own Double Entry should get a rare reprieve from the vaults of British film obscurity, a rare thing in British film, particularly as it came out during the attack of British idiotic Indies, out-and-out failures, mostly funded by the Taxpayer (e.g Shooting Fish, Rancid Aluminium, Lock, Stock.... etc).

Most of those films came and went. But Christie Malry, based on the novel of cult English experimentalist novelist BS Johnson, and in which Lock Stock actor Moran plays the lead, is the best of these, although ironically it was never released or given any attention, presumably due to its playful, po-faced attitude to terrorism, which would never play post 9/11 (it was made before those events). This in itself is ironic, as Christie is an interesting study in terrorism, a sort of book-keeping Billy Liar who starts his own Fight Club-like crusade worthy of the UniBomber, which attains an added poignancy post 9/11- after all, in the film, made remember in 1999, Christie's surreptitious efforts help start the second Gulf War (and he is portrayed by the media as an Arab).

I understand some of the criticisms of the film made by others below, such as Christie's unbelievable jobs, although Christie's bizarre double-entry system- e.g. "debit: Wagner's Lack of Sympathy: Credit: girl at butcher's shop smiled at me", to my mind makes him a more believable character- after all, he is hardly a balanced character.

I can add some more myself (the failure to update the seventies novel to the present decade, leading to weird anachronisms- a result of lack of funding or attention in art direction?). But I also believe the film is a brave attempt at finding intelligence and depth in the British indie.

Tickell is clearly an admirer of Greenaway, and this shows throughout, in the film's theatrical flair and sense of the visual, as well as the oddball eroticism, all part a way of understanding Christie's abnormal psychology. This is particularly evident in the 'historical' sub-plot of the film (the development of double-bookkeeping in Renaissance Milan by a priest with links to Da Vinci).

And I think the acting is marvellous throughout, particularly the Renaisance Italians and Shirley Ann Field as Christie's mother, and Moran, while not a brilliant actor, clearly works hard in the complex task of being Christie (he says it is his best film, although I don't think there's much competition- with the exception of Puritan, another little known British Indie with Moran at its centre).

With a cast of great TV actors, Stockard Channing, Pete Postlethwaite, Juliet Stevenson, to name but a few, and an excellent script from the writer Farrukh Dhondy, I was definitely interested to see the film when it was listed on satellite TV.

What other films with the subject nature of terrorism fail on is insight into character. As a long standing British Asian writer and educator, Dhondy has a clear insight into the three dimensional Asian terrorists he has created (all well played by young, little known actors). These are people he understands intimately, and represent the patchwork nature of British Islamism. Further, Dhondy does not flinch from telling harsh truths, both about Muslims and Non-Muslims. It is a must for all who want an insight into the roots of British Islamism.

Moreover, Dhondy's gifts as a storyteller also shine through and his script is intelligent, funny and gripping, a rare combination. His only fault is in trying to pack too many characters and plot-lines in. I can understand he was trying to create a climate around the theme of generation gap and cultural degeneration, but the tapestry feeling seemed a little contrived.

What lets the film down is its clearly pathetic budget. In a small, low-key drama, this hardly matters. However, in an upmarket, 'big' thriller such as this, the cheap production jars in the eye of the viewer. This doesn't matter so much when dealing with the holed-up terrorists and their hostages, but on the parallel plot following the police, it really shows. The police seem to have the resources not of the entire Met, but of a village police station. Related to this, the direction, while competent, is also uninspired, making it look very much like another piece of unoriginal TV, and there is one truly howling continuity error, for which the editor should be shot (figuratively, of course).

Red Mercury certainly would have been better off as a Channel 4 Mini Series, instead of the childish, unimformed Britz (a major Channel 4 mini series of 2007- even stranger when you consider that Dhondy himself was a senior Channel 4 Executive for many years). It is also a real shame that this film was made in 2005, clearly just before the London Bombings, as its ultimately upbeat message was obliterated by the actions of real 'home-grown' terrorists. This must have been one of the reasons for its commercial collapse when it was finally released.

Just stuck this into IMDb search after looking at PJ Hogan's profile. Obviously, this sitcom has nothing to do with PJ Hogan, but it just popped into my mind. This was shown a number of years ago on Paramount here in England, if I remember correctly.

While it at first looked amateurish and pathetic, I quickly learnt that it was funny and intelligent (hence the PJ Hogan connection), while retaining a distinctly Australian feel. I felt a real 'gang feeling', that the people involved really had fun making this, and my undergraduate self really liked the idea of being able to do this kind of thing, a sort of Lo-fi.

There really is no point in arguing over what drove Hanssen(although it is interesting to note the strong, equivocal feelings he seems to arouse). Hanssen will always be a deeply controversial and contradictory character.

What should be celebrated about Masterspy is the fact that the filmmakers didn't take the easy option and try to simplify Hanssen in order to please nonplussed viewers. Indeed, in an interview Mailer, who wrote Masterspy, said he found Hanssen the most fascinating living subject he has ever studied, and this shows in his careful, even a little obsessive screenplay. And Schiller's subdued, unfussy direction only highlights his own fascination with Hanssen in the form of his leading man, William Hurt. And Hurt really delivers as his performance drives the film- I can't think of another actor, let alone an American, who would dare portray Mailer's strange Hannsen and grasp his confused, contradictory but insatiable needs. In his endeavour, Hurt is strongly supported by inspired company who maximise their own well-written roles, Boyle's seedy, sadistic father Howard, Mary-Louise Parker's loving wife Bonnie, Ron Silver's sympathetic boss Mike, and Sthraitern's strange best friend Jack (though even he comes across as pretty normal alongside Hanssen!).

Television is increasingly becoming the only place for focused, thoughtful studies of complex characters in adult situations. And Masterspy is Television at its best. Still, it is not perfect. Mailer's old-fashioned view of women does affect the film slightly, especially in the case of a one-dimensional harridan female FBI intern, and Louise-Parker's Bonnie cries out for more screen time. Perhaps this is part of a more general fault, which is that the film needed to be longer (it seems too long for a TV Movie and too short for a Mini Series, and as far as I can understand has been billed as both). More detail on Hannsen's youth would have been desirable (perhaps a young actor to fill in for the Middle Aged Hurt?) and Hannsen's bizarre relationship with his best friend Jack needed more screen time.

Ravenous is a film which refuses to be pigeon-holed. The only film I can think to compare it with, both in style and substance, is the genre-defying classic The Wicker Man.

Capt. Boyd (Guy Pearce) has just been honoured for his heroic part in a battle of the Mexican-American War (1846-48). But at the celebratory dinner, he cannot eat a rare beef steak. For this faux pas, his incredulous commanding officer sends him to a dilapidated, marginal outpost in California, Fort Spencer, run by a bunch of misfits unfit for service elsewhere. As he settles into the highly odd rhythms of this particular camp's life, a mysterious man (Robert Carlyle) arrives, telling a strange tale of cannibalism, which the band of misfits who make up Fort Spencer reluctantly decide to investigate.

The basic idea behind Ravenous is that eating animal flesh is akin to eating human flesh. The film shows that it is basically the same, once you know it came from something which had a life, and was killed for your nourishment, be it human or animal (not surprising to know, therefore, that director Antonia Bird is a vegetarian).

Ravenous, with the aid of an invented native American myth, the 'Wendigo', that a man who eats the flesh of another becomes superhuman and his appetite for cannibalism insatiable, takes this maxim to its extreme, creating a demi monde where eating 'pot roast a la Knox', is quite normal and rational, in the pragmatic sense. Capt. Boyd however, runs counter to the frontier tradition of hardy pragmatism, i.e. a blasé attitude to life and humanity (gunfights, massacre) in that he is a man with different, more modern sensibilities to your average mid-nineteenth century American man heading west. He abhors war to such an extent he suffers post traumatic stress disorder. In the times he lives in, he is easily confused (and confuses himself) as a coward, but is put to the test in extreme circumstances.

Along with this clash of mid-nineteenth century and modern sensibilities, is that of westward expansionism. Here the film cleverly adds to its brilliantly imaginative commentary on carnivorism, by making in the insatiable cannibalism inspired by the native American myth of the 'Wendigo', a highly critical allegory of American attitudes towards Manifest Destiny, the irrepressible, inexorable expansion westwards of the 'white man' across the continent.

All this could sound terrible arty, anachronistic and contrived, but the film is crafted so carefully and well, and with such verve, it is also highly enjoyable and thrilling. The dialogue is wonderful and subtly funny. The action is bloody and well-handled, with oddly idiosyncratic twists. The mixing of genres, western, horror and comedy, is seamless, and the film is aided with a wonderfully idiosyncratic soundtrack by the unlikely partnership of Michael Nyman and Damon Albarn. Lastly, but of course not least, the acting is roundly excellent, but the leads, Pearce and Carlyle are both brilliant. Pearce is in sync with the modern sensibilities of his character without making his character feel anachronistic, while Carlyle adds to his repertoire of extreme characters with a double performance that shows great daring and range.

Figures In A Landscape could never be more than a minor work. And I can't see it being made in any time other than the 1970's. It is existential, Beckettian. Two escaped men make an attempt to escape to a bordering country, pursued by a black helicopter with a malevolently playful pilot, and faceless soldiers on the ground directed by him. Along the way, they encounter some villagers, but mostly they are on their own, coping and not coping with escape. Robert Shaw plays the older, gruffer, working class Mac, McDowell is the young, higher class Ansell. But though they at first seem to play to type, this does not prove to be the case.

I personally think there should be more odd films like this. There is a real interesting sense of humour and character study contained within the script, and evinced by the acting. The performances by Shaw (who also wrote the script) and McDowell are excellent. Shaw seems at first a gruff, experienced older tough guy, but soon reveals a very strange underside, and McDowell is wonderful as the young, confused, hunted Ansell. Moreover, Losey's direction is stunning, and a brave departure from the suffocating interiors of his more typical films like The Servant (even though there are some horrors in the editing). But, at the same time, I also feel that Figures In a Landscape is too vague in its allegory.

I saw this director's first film (The Late Twentieth) in a cinema in London about four years ago. I wasn't very impressed, though I did think the film had something about it. I have been checking back every now and then on IMDb regarding him since, and finally got around to seeing Puritan yesterday (stumbled across it in Blockbusters in Stepney, where the film is set....) Puritan has hallmarks of film noir. Most obviously, this is in its dark lighting, probably intended to cover up the low production values, which was one of the main reasons film noir was invented back in the 1930's in the first place. But Puritan synthesises film noir with supernatural horror, making it seem a little like a Cronenberg film, and referencing East London's spectral history, such as Hawskmoor, a nod to the great Alan Moore. It is about a washed up writer on the paranormal, Simon Puritan, whose life fell apart after his wife died, hitting the bottle big time, and now survives by being a medium giving spiritual readings.

But one day a mysterious, bandaged man in a hat turns up and pushes Puritan off in a radical new direction, involving a beautiful woman, and her rich, shady husband. If this sounds conventional thriller territory, then it is, but Puritan is genuinely involving and unexpectedly twisty in novel ways. More importantly, the film, unlike so many other modern, low budget films, both horror and film noir, has a real, tender heart in its love story, which drives the film. This is aided by an unexpectedly good performance by Nick Moran, who displays a vulnerability and neediness that is at times crushing. He is helped by excellent, unnerving performances from David Soul, Georgina Rylance and Ralph Brown. Perhaps best of all was the assured direction and editing, which give a real professional feeling to the film, making it punch far above its weight. The script integrates film noir and horror surprisingly well.

Robert Newman was a rising comic star in the early 1990's, an inventive, intelligent, and unusually photogenic comedian (but then there's not much competition on that last point) from the more 'university' end of comedy, part of a double act with David Baddiel on the Mary Whitehouse Experience, first a brilliant Radio 1 series, and then a less successful TV series.

Though a gifted impersonator and good gag writer, throughout the early 1990's his act became more and more inward, playful and theatrical. He was becoming less a stand up and comic actor and more a writer who performed his monologues. His content became based on autobiographical narrative, touching on heavy, personal subjects such as isolation, depression and adoption. Although he was very funny, he seemed far more inward and poetic than the more traditional gag man Baddiel (he even quoted poets such as Shelly during his performance).

After MWE, Newman and Baddiel madeed another series, Newman and Baddiel in Pieces, darker than MWE as it did not have the input of the more mainstream and traditional Punt and Dennis. But Newman and Baddiel imploded at the height of their success, announcing their retirement at their unprecedented Wembley Arena sold-out show in 1993. Baddiel went on, in partnership with Frank Skinner, to become one of the biggest stars in comedy, reincarnated into a 'lad' (though now he is known as an intellectual, something many suspect was always his real inclination).

Newman, on the other hand, soon disappeared after one solo tour. He became a novelist, publishing two comic novels. Around 2000, when I first started to get into MWE, Newman was a ghost. Then, one evening, he popped up on Channel 4 news, covering an infamous G8 meeting. He was jowly, unshaved and generally unkempt, looking almost like a middle aged roadie. Then he popped up on TV in a panel talking about that year's Edinburgh festival.

This was a different Newman to the one I was watching on old videos of shows and MWE recordings. He seemed older, wiser, calmer, physically bigger and less needy. He also seemed less self-conscious and more concerned with the world.

Then, in 2001, Resistance Is Fertile popped up. It was not a simple case of Newman turning his attention outward. Rather, he presented his own journey from callow Labour supporter to disillusion with mainstream politics after the arrival of the speciously titled New Labour. He was now left-wing, neo-Marxist, anti-globalisation. Resistance Is Fertile was a reflection of his changing outlook. In it, Newman manages a synthesis of politics and comedy, but in a new way that he makes his own, such as when he makes an ingenious plea with the audience to join him in joining the Conservative Party and turn it into a crypto-Communist party.

Newman also manages to retain some of his older trademarks to support his new political comedy vision. For example, he utilizes his gift for impersonation by pretending to be Al Pacino at his incomprehensible, scenery chewing worst (or best), reading the BBC news to illustrate its lack of worth. Less successful, but still satisfactory, is his resurrection of louche gentleman, Jarvis, his old comic persona.

Resistance Is Fertile is directed by Dylan Howitt, who carefully harnesses effects and interesting camera-work to Newman's stage performance. But the video is also wayward and incoherent in structure, which could lead a viewer with the sense that the project was not thought through with enough rigour. But, on the other hand, my position is that Resistance Is Fertile is biographical, and so necessarily incoherent, like life, and provides an intimate reflection of Newman's own growing political consciousness, aided by Newman's inherent charm and integrity. Resistance Is Fertile shows Newman starting to refresh the growing staidness of the alternative comedy scene, along with his good friend and part-time MWE (radio) member, Mark Thomas.

His more recent History Of Oil, broadcast by Channel 4, was more coherent and organized. He has written a new novel (the fraught writing of which was the subject of an inspired episode of the BBC series Scribbling) and has started to regain some of his older profile, becoming an established part of the anti-globalisation movement he has affiliated himself with. But I felt that, in a History Of Oil, the political exposition, though well-developed and well-harnessed to comedy, and extremely interesting, was too external and polemical. In other words, the globalized politics was starting to overtake his rich sense of humanity, a mark of his comedy in the early 1990's. I hope Newman's forthcoming programme on BBC4 will strike more of a balance. In any case, Newman will undoubtedly go his own way, and in the staid world of comedy this is always something to be thankful for.

The hard-won tone of wry humour apparent in Richard E Grant's melodious voice is fitting for this thorough and entertaining series following the fortunes of nine diverse actors looking to storm Castle Hollywood, which lowers its drawbridge a few inches for pilot season every year. I saw 90 Days In Hollywood last year on UK satellite channel ftn, under the less prosaic title of Hollywood Dreamchasers.

It is interesting to see such a socially diverse body of actors and their individual experiences in breaking into the industry and find work, and the fact that the documentary follows them over five episodes, spanning three months, gives a breadth to this series. The series also, thankfully, foregoes the modish gimmick of having them all live together reality TV style, though they do all, far better in my opinion, meet at the beginning and end to ruminate over a meal (not an expensive looking one, after all they are a bunch of actors).

Most people know, or should know, that most actors have a hard ride full of knock-backs. It's a matter of cruel economics, with around two hundred thousand actors in LA, and fewer and fewer movies being made, and relatively limited TV production (compounded for newcomers by established movie stars, themselves forced out of a narrower film industry, muscling into the TV plain, thus further limiting TV acting opportunity).

If viewers didn't know that Actors mostly experience failure, then this series will illustrate this to them. For instance Csaba Lucas, a fledgling Hungarian action star in the Schwarzenegger mould, drives down to Hollywood from his adopted home in Canada for one audition, and then, maddeningly, almost immediately has to drive all the way back up to Canada for another. Royal Shakespearean Company alumnus Steven Elliot is nonchalant, but then he is an experienced thesp used to the business, and with a satisfactory career in Britain to fall back on. Fellow Brit Daz Crawford, from the opposite end of the spectrum, both artistically and socially, an orphan with no formal training, comes across as something of a chancer, learned from the school of hard knocks, a happy-go-lucky guy. But he is also vulnerable and exudes an unsentimental, hard-won pathos. Eliciting a similar pathos is Edwin Hodge, a young man from an underprivileged, black background, still a teenager (at the time this series was made). Acting is not only his one hope for betterment, but he is also his family's principal breadwinner. He is clearly a young man with a lot on his shoulders.

However, some don't seem willing to accept the odds as easily, and interestingly it is mostly apparent in the attitude of the females. With the exceptions of hardworking Hispanic, former New York stage actor Elisa Bocanegra, and the worldly Gail Greaves, who tends bar and gets eye candy roles in beach scenes, Rowena King, an experienced British TV actor, seems to rise (or rather lower) herself to the stereotype of bitchy, stuck-up, drama queen. Holiday Hopke, a singer-songwriter who treats acting like a side business, has a similar, though less desperate (and therefore even more unlikeable) arrogance that is just waiting to be kicked out of her as she is spat out of the industry. Perhaps it is because dreams of stardom, fashioned by the 'dream factory' of Hollywood, tend to be so much more emotive for females, conflated with the likelihood that they are used to getting their way in far smaller ponds?

The series well illustrates the craziness of the industry in Hollywood, and brings to mind William Goldman's famous line, 'In Hollywood, nobody knows anything'. Most professionals in the industry are not reliable and seem full of bull. Csaba Lucas, exhausted from his driving, auditions for a sub-sub-sub-Terminator role and can barely stop laughing at the crass, inane script he is offered. However, the two young 'talents' behind this 'independent' film clash on what it is about- one thinks it is a tribute to eighties action films. The other, far more intense, thinks it is an ineffable Magnus Opus about 'everything'. They both then go on, in kettle calling pot black fashion, to slaughter Csaba's acting ability, saying he is the one who needs to work on 'everything'. Likewise, Steven Elliot can barely keep away a grin (thank god the viewer doesn't have to) when a producer, who looks a little like a washed up porn actor, fatuously describes him as being the 'Olivier of now!'

Each of the actors has to put together a casting tape for Eddie Foy, who adds a participatory element, along with other expert talking heads, to the series. Foy is a very experienced casting director, but his predictions in such an odd business are necessarily speculative. He denounces Jade Carter with exceptional venom, saying that he is fooling himself in thinking he will make it in Hollywood, but Carter's star quickly rises and he has the best career to date out of the selected body of actors.

Over dinner at the end of the series, Carter tells them that he recently found a fan website devoted to him. There follows a loud communal exclamation of approval. Perhaps this shows the underlying dream of fame common to all those actors who pursue Hollywood careers, be they bona fide Shakesperean actors or hopeful, happy-go-lucky wannabe Schwarzeneggers. Maybe, after all, though 90 Days In Hollywood sounds better, perhaps the British title, Hollywood Dreamchasers, is more appropriate?

Bruiser was Mitchell and Webb's first series as lead writers and actors, having earlier written for Jack Doherty and Armstrong & Miller in the late nineties. They were aided by additional writer Ricky Gervais and actor Martin Freeman, as well as Olivia Coleman and Charlotte Hudson, all still in the first stretch of their careers.

Though never rising above good, and quite often charting far below, Bruiser had some of the hallmarks of a successful series with some memorable recurring characters, such as an American TV producer, played by David Mitchell, who is obsessed with Alan Titchmarsh, only he pronounces it 'TITS-MARCH…GET ME TITSMARCH!', and an excellent spoof of spurious, 'down with the kids', TV schools programmes, funky, high on so-called entertainment, but light on education. One of these 'school programmes', ostensibly about the Romans in Bath, was basically an excuse for a romp between Robert Webb and Charlotte Hudson in a bath.

The sketch show is undeniably an extremely tricky format. The basic problem with Bruiser was that it had far too many dud sketches, and not enough good staple sketches in order to cohere into a classic series. Mitchell and Webb's unquestionable comic energy therefore seemed wayward and led in too many unfunny directions. They also didn't give Olivia Coleman or Charlotte Hudson much to do. This might have been OK for Charlotte Hudson, but Olivia Coleman, one of Britain's best comic actors, was wasted.

All of the above betrays Mitchell and Webb's inexperience at the time. Having said that, I still can't quite see why it wasn't given the chance of a second series as there was potential there. Still, Bruiser did point the way upwards for Mitchell and Webb on their ascendant trajectory towards the brilliance of Peep Show, which is a great series, and That Mitchell and Webb Look, which isn't great but still very good.

More than six years after watching Single Take, the first episode in this series by idiosyncratic duo, Noble and Silver, I retain only the impression that it was outstanding. Words such as inventive' 'clever' 'witty' 'mysterious' and 'stark' 'raving' 'mad' are used too often. They have become clichés, stripped of any real meaning. But I can only use these words, with their proper meaning reinvested, to describe Single Take.

Only a few scattered scenes come back to me- Noble and Silver rushing up and down Tottenham Court Road, sitting inside the Burger King next to the Virgin Megastore, and rushing down the back of Oxford Street through Soho Square into an office (not very helpful- I know, but then it was hardly traditional two act situation comedy!). Furiously shot on hand-held cameras, it was not really comedy in a conventional sense. It was more a witty, experimental short film or a video installation that you might just as easily be thrilled to see in an art gallery. It seems to me that Noble and Silver are the chimeras of comedy.

I'm pretty sure the series was shown on E4 (surely now it would be on More4). There were definitely more than the two episodes listed here- I believe there were six in total. Apart from Single Take, I can remember another episode in more detail. It was a recording of a live show by Noble and Silver, in a small theatre, solely for the benefit of an unknowing couple in the audience- the rest of the audience was made up of actors. The show was intentionally bad, with gags misfiring and the partnership of Noble and Silver appearing to self-destruct on stage before the audience. At the end, Noble and Silver, along with the audience of actors, addressed the couple, who looked shocked and incredulous. I guess the message of this episode was, to quote Pinter, that 'there can be no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal' (I promise to put down my well-thumbed book of quotations now, my substitute for...let me get my thesaurus...erudition).

I saw one or two more episodes. But I can't recall their contents, only the impression that I didn't like them very much, and it is because of the inconsistency that I failed to keep up with the erratic series, also perhaps spoiled by seeing Single Take first. Noble and Silver appear not to have been given a second series over the last six years, presumably because they have marginal appeal (or is it that they have turned their backs on Television in characteristically elusive, enigmatic fashion?). They may never be more than marginal because of their refusal to be pigeon-holed. But this is a rare and admirable quality in a world of Television comedy obsessed with catchphrase and the lowest common denominator. They are inventive, witty, mysterious and slightly mad, and it is a crying shame they don't appear more on Television.

Namestey London is a refreshing film in that it gives centre-stage to a British woman of Indian origin, and does not portray her as a one-dimensional, rich-girl vixen, tempting the Bollywood hero away from his constant, truly Indian, girl-next-door. Instead the central character of Namastey London, Jasmeet 'Jazz' Malhotra, played by real British Asian Katrina Kaif, is being pressured into travelling to the Punjab to have an arranged marriage. Moreover, Jasmeet's Muslim friend Imran is in a similar position, a man with a white girlfriend who is deplored by his family.

Namesty London is an enjoyable film, with a quirky, engaging plot and characters. The cast is generally good, with comedian Nina Wadia fine as Jasmeet's mother, Javed Sheikh assured as Imran's dictatorial father, and Akshay Kumar suitably playing up to his zany character, but never overdoing it as Arjun, Jasmeet's arranged husband. But Rishi Kapoor deserves a special mention. His performance as Jasmeet's father is not only funny and delightful- he also manages to find real anxiety and confusion.

Unfortunately, with the exception of Kapoor, Namestey London as a whole attempts, but fails to achieve the deeper, more profound socio-political shades it seems to be aiming for, and it is with this that I take exception. Despite having a refreshing set-up and more than one-dimensional characters, Namastey London cannot quite shake off traditional, as well as superficial, Bollywood conventions about British people, whether Anglo-Saxon or of Asian extraction.

The first is the assumption that ethnic Indians raised in the west are more westernised than native Indians, fully absorbed into the dominant western culture, living the fast, modern, materialistic life- full to the brim with confidence, even arrogance. While some do, this is not a typical experience. Rather, it seems to me, native Indians can be more like this. Such Indians are likely to be wealthy, urbanised Indian residents. Go to a 'Café Coffee Day' in one of Bombay's more fashionable districts, in Bandstand for instance, overlooking the bay, and you may find young Indian women from wealthy backgrounds talking loudly, and self-consciously, about guys, jobs, fashion, and other girls, all in a vulgar way, as they try to imitate their image of westerners.

In my experience, no doubt informed by my being a British Asian, the majority of British Asians tend to have grown up in a fragmented cultural environment, divided between the dominant western culture outside the home, which has historically not been welcoming to them at times, and the insular, ossified, traditional culture that their parents stick to at home, trying to recreate an India which, rather ironically, is fading away.

I feel that the makers of Namestey London have tried to grasp this cultural fragmentation in Jasmeet 'Jazz' Malhotra's situation, not least in displaying her cultural fragmentation in her two names, the formal Jasmeet and her nickname outside the home, Jazz. She has a stern, backward-looking father and a forward-looking mother wishing for her daughter to become modern and westernised. I have no problem in understanding that people in real life have such backgrounds, except that I find Jasmeet's particular character, as explained by her family's circumstances which have produced her character's psychology, to be too simplistic and therefore unconvincing. 'Jazz' clearly comes across as the product of a preconceived, modern, urbanised Indian imagining of a young British Asian woman, rather than a fully researched and thought through British Asian character, rooted in a more secure sense of reality. True, the actress who played her, the fast-rising Katrina Kaif, is a British Asian, but strangely her performance seems to have been more informed by her years in the United States. Contrast her performance with Rishi Kapoor's, as noted above, and you will see that this doesn't help the film.

The second Bollywood convention that the film retains concerns its depiction of Anglo-Saxon British people. There is no doubt that many British people have had something of a colonial hangover in their relations with Indian immigrant communities, which has manifested itself at times in the form of racism. However, the British characters in Namestey London are nothing more than stereotypes of a jaundiced colonialist Indian imagination. It makes for unintentionally uproarious comedy- such as when Charlie Brown introduces Jasmeet and her arranged, but still unofficial husband, to his relative. Charlie's relative is, funnily enough, a descendant of an East India Companyman, who himself seems to have been transported from a cantonment at the height of the Raj. And though it is good to see, in the same scene, Jasmeet telling him of the many successes of modern India, something which needs stressing to many in the west too hung-up on India's continuing failures, this is lazy film making- they should show this through situation and character.

Still, though it is weighed down by traditional Bollywood conventions, Namastey London does engage the viewer and attempts to shed light on the South Asian Diaspora in London, just don't take it too seriously.

The first thing that deserves mention in Omkara is its authentic, carefully cultivated sense of place, as it relishes its location in rural Uttar Pradesh (UP), a dry, dusty land, distant from the first world civilisation that can be found in Delhi, UP's state capital. And Omkara's characters are suited to live on the land, wild and gauche, but also revealing depth and colour, modern in their own way, and speaking a mixture of Hindi with the local dialect, so much so it is hard to understand what they are saying half of the time (so for once even most Indians would probably benefit from subtitles). It is almost a place forgotten by time, and yet pockets like this still exist in the vastness of India.

The superb location is telling for Vishal Bharadwaj's reworking of Othello, Shakespeare's famous Elizabethan play with its heady thematic mix of racism, illicit sex and power. Omkara retains the illicit sex and power, and cleverly adapts European racism towards African into India's residual but still rigid caste system, itself a racial system- after all the Sanskrit word for Caste is Varna, which means colour.

The plot of Omkara concerns an extended family of dacoits, or bandits, headed by Omkara 'Omi' Shukla, played by Ajay Devgan, a half-caste who now heads the family by default as his father had no full-caste heirs. Omkara is a man of substance. True, he is a bandit who leads a gang of dacoits, but this being India, where there exists a nexus between politics and crime, he is a man of high local standing, and he is staunch allies with Baaisaab, a local politician (Naseeruddin Shah). But in India caste can still matter a great deal, and when Omkara marries the daughter of a powerful and proud local family of high caste, an explosive situation is narrowly avoided. Still, as the wedding is organised and an election nears, the situation is ripe for exploitation by Saif Ali Khan's Langda, the reprised Iago, a deceivingly simple lieutenant of the gang unhappy with his position.

It should be clear that Omkara is not a traditional 'Bollywood' film. It is earthy, even grizzly, and shocking in its off-centre depiction of India. However it reintegrates distinctive 'Bollywood' elements by cleverly and imaginatively reworking them into the film. For instance, a brilliant 'Bollywood' song and dance- though refracted through a mujra club night.

Moreover, Saif Ali Khan, Vivek Oberoi, Ajay Devgan, Bipasha Basu and Kareena Kapoor are mainstream stars and all are skillfully used, along with parallel cinema (India's Independent cinema) regular Shah. The cast as a whole give strong performances. However, Saif Ali Khan deserves special mention for rising to his role with such relish, matched with a deep insight into his character, the insidious, canny, deeply flawed but always charismatic Langda.

My only problem with Omkara is that it seems to want to have its cake and eat it too. While it undoubtedly contains an Indian reality overlooked in mainstream Indian films, this gritty, though vibrant realism sits oddly with Omkara's visual indulgence, and the script's sense of doomed tragedy fails, in this one aspect, to modernise the original play, and makes Omkara seem almost fey and old fashioned. Combined, these elements of the film risk upsetting the modern viewer's willingness to suspend his or her sense of disbelief. Still, Omkara is a vibrant and original reworking of Othello in Modern India which signals the advancement of mainstream Indian Cinema.

The Heat Of The Day is based on the novel by Elizabeth Bowen, set during a sweltering, stifling summer in London as World War II rages on. However, from the first scene, when Michael Gambon's enigmatic Harrison approaches Patricia Hodge's bemused Stella with an air of calculated menace, this TV film adaptation unmistakably bears the mark of Harold Pinter with its sense of growing, but suppressed, unease.

An important aspect of Pinter's film work, mirroring his work for theatre, is obsessed with the balance of power between people in relationships, particularly in inter-class relationships. Moreover, this is an understated balance of power, as communication becomes more concerned with muddying the water, thus obscuring the real situation.

In The Heat Of The Day, the common-looking, hefty Harrison quickly establishes an unlikely and unconventional relationship with the beautiful and well born Stella, a relationship with a balance of power weighed favourably towards him. This is because Harrison tells her that her high-powered lover, Robert, played by Michael York, is a spy and that he is the only one who can keep him from infamy and jail. It is clear what Harrison wants in return, but is he actually who he says he is? How does she find out while needing to stay discreet, in case Harrison is genuine and Robert really is a spy?

This is one of Pinter's better screenplays and the top-notch cast is on form. The Heat Of The Day is a low-key, subtle, contained, high-quality psychological thriller from an interesting and original feminine perspective. The fact that it was made for Independent British Television may be its problem. The film seems to have been made on a far too low budget and looks, therefore, stagy and old-fashioned, and could easily be dismissed as 1980's Sunday afternoon costume drama if it didn't have such an unquestionably subtle script and flair in its acting.

Hideous Kinky is based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Esther Freud (descended from a certain Swiss Psychiatrist). The film, set in the 1960's, follows Julia, a young English mother with her small children, Bea and Lucy, recently divorced from her creative, and philandering, husband. She is in Morocco, like many young Europeans inspired by the counter-culture philosophy of the time, to explore herself with respect to its eastern philosophy and culture.

It would be so easy for a film with such a subject to fall into the trap of using the 'orient' as merely a backdrop to depict fun backpackers engaging in pseudo-spiritual experiments. Or, on the other hand, take a more malevolent track of exploiting the bad feeling between Europeans and Arabs by having the bright young Julia encounter the traditional savage, woman-hating Arab as depicted in most western films, and pioneered by Valentino in Hollywood's silent classic The Sheik (1921).

However Hideous Kinky is refreshing as it is fun and 'exotic', but does not compromise in its sense of responsibility. It attempts to show an intelligent, though wayward, young mother with the genuine desire to explore her self internally, and captures the richness and humanity of the country and its people around her, exhibiting their interesting religious life and culture.

The feel of place in the film is astonishing. Marrakech, with the narrow streets and courtyards of its old town, dark and forbidding, but also revealing wonder, and the surrounding desert, are filmed deliciously with ambition and assurance. Julia, as well as being part of the 'drop out' European expat community, finds herself accessing different strands of Moroccan society, the common society of Morocco via her relationship with Bilal, a shady character who turns out to be a convict, played wonderfully by Said Taghmaoui, and the higher rungs via her ex-husband's friend, Santoni.

Central to the film- and what also complicates it, giving it an added, new dimension- is Julia's relationship with her two children, played astoundingly well by Bella Riza and Carrie Mullan. They, in turn, have their own incredible experiences, good and bad, as shown by their delightful but confused sayings. Julia, unusually in film, is a complex female character with many shades. She is naïve, foolish and irresponsible. At one point, she even manages to lose one of her daughters. But she is also smart, soulful and canny, and from her time in Morrocco, Julia does gain an insight into her self, but it is not the insight that she expected, and perhaps it is a genuine insight for that reason. She is played by Kate Winslet with characteristic heart and intelligence, and a brave choice as she had just come off the safety of the glitzy but vacuous blockbuster, Titanic.

Hideous Kinky is a rare thing- despite being government financed, usually the kiss of death for a British film, it is a refreshing and responsible film about an unconventional encounter between European and Arab.

Atonement seems more natural a subject for a novel, rather than a film, as it concerns writing and its momentous consequences, be it a note, a letter or a novel. Moreover, Atonement has a writer at its centre, and is therefore at an even greater disadvantage for film-making, as the craft of writing is laborious and involves little physical action. It is essentially a solitary, even obsessive, occupation, and so doesn't lend itself to the active demands of a film. But it may be argued that a clever, imaginative film would find some way round this.

Unfortunately, Atonement is not a clever film. Instead, its makers seem to have been rather complacent and smugly thought that the film would sell on the back of the alluring parts of the novel, in other words a lavish country house in high summer where there is upstairs-downstairs class antagonism and illicit sex scandals, and later a shift to a harsh wartime romance. The filmmakers seem to have thought that this would suffice. However, stretched over two hours, the film seems rather thin, even threadbare.

The characters in the novel have unusual depth and subtlety. While this has been retained, to an extent, in this adaptation, on screen they seem unreal, lifeless. And with the exception of the three excellent actresses who play Briony at different ages, the (no more than) competent acting complements the competent, but still lacking, characterisation.

Christopher Hampton, who usually engages as a writer and director, has written a disappointing script which loses the charged, sweltering promise of its first act (which would actually have made a much better short film) and gives way to a staid middle act which relies on wartime sentimentality and tries far too hard to elicit pathos in the viewer.

Joe Wright seems content to direct Atonement as a calling card to Hollywood and Oscar, his highpoint being the long scene showing the Dunkirk evacuation, which is technically accomplished and stunning, but also wearying and approaching banality as this kind of thing has been done as well so many times before. The film's denouement seems tacked on to provide a smart-looking, post modern ending.

Atonement is a disappointing and dispiriting adaptation of a clever, intriguing novel.

Mr. Khosla is an old-fashioned middle class paterfamilias. He lives in Delhi with his wife, daughter, his elder son, the disappointing Bunty, and his younger son and favourite, Cherry. Bunty is diffident, effete, and Cherry, though the apple in his father's eye, keeps a secret girlfriend, an actress, and is struggling to live up to his father's old-fashioned hopes.

Mr. Khosla wants to build a new house where they can all live one day with their smaller families as a traditional extended family. He finds the capital in his life savings and buys the plot on which the new house will be built. Proud of his purchase, he takes his family to the plot only to find it has been taken over by the henchmen of a shady businessman, Mr. Khurana.

This is the start of a nightmare journey for the old-fashioned Mr. Khosla, as he is kicked into the Twenty First Century and grey, but influential, areas of modern Indian society as he attempts, along with his family, to regain his rightful land against the hydra of Indian corruption. Along the way, Mr. Khosla must modernise, for good or bad, not only with regard to the problem with his property but also with regard to his family, in a riotous plot involving a strange mix of corrupt businessmen and policemen, lawyers, actors and even wrestlers.

Khosla Ka Ghosla is a brave and smart satire, an Indian 'Indie', clearly inspired by American Independent Cinema, charming but cutting socio-political satires involving dysfunctional families, as evinced in the films of Alexander Payne, David O'Russell and Wes Anderson. However, what makes Khosla Ka Ghosla refreshing is its distinctly Indian feel, as it is rooted in a very Indian sense of reality.

At the heart of satire is tragedy. And Khosla Ka Ghosla contains a pained indictment of India's tragically high levels of corruption practised by many insidious and dishonest, but powerful, con men who cloak themselves in the garbs of legitimate businessmen and adherents of Hinduism. The important message of Khosla Ka Ghosla is that these parasites denude Indian society of its essential, productive middle class, undermine galvanising middle class values and ethics, and thus hold back India's development.

Khosla Ka Ghosla features energetic yet thoughtful performances all round, but special mention must be given to a wonderfully multi-layered central performance by veteran actor Anupam Kher. Kher exhibits with ease his wide range in drama and comedy. The film is directed with an assured verve by first-time director, Dibaker Bannerjee. The script shines with uproarious dialogue and vibrant, but also well-developed, characterisation. My only criticism is that the film's third act risks uprooting the hard sense of reality established in the first two acts. Still, the film's momentum is such that the sinuous plot is pulled off engagingly.

Khosla Ka Ghosla is an Indian 'Indie'- a brave and smart satire on the Hydra of Indian corruption, and evidences the growing maturity of mainstream Indian cinema.

It is hard for the younger viewer, like me, to appreciate the success of Brideshead Revisited. It is from a time when, in Britain, there were only three channels in Britain. Moreover, record players had not become widely available, and things were not often repeated. All this meant that the viewer had to tune in at the appointed time, or miss out. And in Brideshead's case most of Britain, from all sections of society, tuned in en masse, and it has been remarked that even dowager duchesses made sure to tune in, very apt for a series with a subject like Brideshead.

Coming to see such a landmark of British Television over months on an ad hoc basis on DVD, as it spans over 600 minutes, did not detract from my own appreciation of the series. My jaw dropped at its expense and ambition, being an almost-complete filming of the famed wartime novel by Waugh, in the light of other TV productions from the late 1970's and early 1980's, with their cardboard sets and stagy (not to mention stodgy) direction.

Charles Ryder is a single child from a small conservative, Anglican middle class family, consisting only of himself and his oddball father, the elder Ryder. Charles meets Lord Sebastian Flyte at Oxford in the late 1920's. Ryder, a serious-headed student, is seduced by Sebastian's louche, jazz age, unorthodoxly-catholic life, and becomes his close friend and lover. Sebastian gives him an entry into the higher echelons of English society and Ryder becomes closely involved over the next decade with the Flyte family, consisting of Sebastian's proper but thick older brother, Lord Bridy, and his two sisters, Julia and Cordelia, and their separated parents, the distant Lord Marchmain and the nearer Lady Marchmain. She is observant and graceful, yet distant in her own, more emotional, way.

The quality of the characterisation is astounding and mirrored by the high-class acting. In amidst wonderful performances by the stellar cast (as well as younger actors such as Diana Quick, Phoebe Nicholls, Nickolas Grace, Simon Jones and Anthony Andrews) Jeremy Irons, in the central role, evinces a wonderful subtlety, perfectly suited to the restrained but passionate Ryder, and also narrates superbly, in character, the restrained but passionate story.

Brideshead Revisited has a fey, conservative reputation that it does not wholly deserve. It is true that this TV adaptation does not correct the novel's middle class obsequiousness in its view of the decline of the English aristocracy, and at times it is too reserved in its view of the sexual relationship between Charles and Sebastian, which seems coy and a little elusive. But critics mistake its reserve. There is real depth in Brideshead Revisited- rather like large tectonic plates moving quietly but momentously beneath the surface- concerning issues like religion, sexuality and repression, alcoholism, the decline of the English aristocracy and the rise of the middle class, as well as the dehumanisation of war.

It must be remembered that Ryder's journey into the upper echelons of English society via the Brideshead family- engaging and original in itself- is also a passionate and convincing allegory of the higher classes of English society between the two twentieth century world wars. Brideshead Revisited may owe a lot of this, and its general richness, to the fact that it is basically a filmed novel, but it has utilised the novel so well and filmed it with great care and dedication. It is for this reason that Brideshead Revisited arguably deserves its place at the top of British TV Adaptations.

In It's a Free World…. Ken Loach demonstrates his continuing commitment to casting his critical, earthy, though engaging eye on present day issues affecting British society, issues that are usually neglected by mainstream British cinema.

These issues arise from the grey area that is the cheap foreign labour market in the UK. Loach explores the exploitation of cheap immigrant labour in East London with the insight, fluidity, humour and sensitivity that I have come to expect of him. He encourages the viewer to reflect on the lives of thousands upon thousands of immigrants from diverse countries and societies who are crassly lumped together, dehumanized and simplified, lives that most native Londoners take for granted.

Though impartiality has never been one of Loach's strong points, It's A Free World…. is refreshing in that it does not demonize the Brits who exploit foreign labour. Nor does it look for easy answers to the problems of immigration. Rather it has an understanding of the lure of easy money for British people with few options in life themselves. The film suggests that the larger culpability might lie with governing institutions that have lost control of the situation, and so have freed up the conditions for exploitation. Also, the message of the film seems to extend to most of us, being British citizens, as we daily and casually project our own sense of individual freedom onto the wider world around us. But for newer people, living precariously in our midst, the same world is far from a free one.

It may be argued that Loach's main aim with the film has therefore been achieved. However, on the negative side, It's A Free World's characterization and plot feels contrived. This is particularly true of the main character, Angie. It may not be a free world for many, but it certainly can be a strange world, and I am sure a single mum and biker babe who happens to be a redundant recruitment consultant could start up her own illegal recruitment agency. However, such a quirky character sits oddly with Loach's down-to-earth, everyday approach, which would make Angie look contrived and unbelievable if the non-professional actor in her first role, Kierston Wareing, did not play her so brilliantly, finding the humanity in her character so well.

Certain clichéd characters add to the film feeling contrived. This includes not only the censorious old boy who is Angies' father, which must now surely be a cliché of left-wing films, and Angie's casual boyfriend, a handsome, almost-angelic, two-dimensional Pole (written this way presumably to counter the gutter press' jaundiced cliché of a male immigrant, but such a two-dimensional character does not serve the film). This relationship feels laboured because it only exists to conveniently, and all-too-obviously, personalize the main character's external dilemma.

Still, It's A Free World is an engaging and enlightening film, even if it feels contrived.