Reviews

Groan. Every cliché on the book. Big breasted heroine, plain Jane (you can tell that because she wears .. spectacles), square jawed unfounded hero with endless pocketfuls of cash, villainous sharp featured mildly bad woman, miraculous situations (heroine gets a super-job having no apparent qualifications, oh she's magicked away to exotic locations and top class hotels based on, um, fresh air?), bad kids become good kids because the plot needs it. And plagiarisation - the inevitable wiggling woman laughingly trying on lots of thousand dollar outfits half way through the film whilst the sound track plays .. yup "Pretty Woman" (I wonder where they got that idea from?). Best of all, the heroine eventually abandons her spectacles and .. wow! she's beautiful. And so on and so forth. A disgraceful attempt to make money using other people's achievements.

Dishonest pretence has been a damaging problem in television since its beginnings, partly caused by governmental censorship, partly by lack of budget, but mostly by cowardly programmers and the easy path. Black is black. It is never white. You can put something black in front of me and insist that it's white until the end of time, but I am never going to believe you. You can persuade, lie, threaten, do whatever you darn well pleasey, but I will never believe you; not now, not tomorrow, not in two years time when you repeat the programme … never. Dawn, write that down. It might be worth you having a think about it.

I remember an early example. In the 1960s there was a huge surfeit of steam trains. Nowadays we hang on to every precious example that comes our way, but back then they were scrap and going for a song. The BBC decided to stage a live, prime-time spectacular. They rigged a train line on a high ridge with dynamite, set up a few cameras and sent one of the old beasts with a full train of carriages hurtling down the track. The idea was this. As the engine passed over the rigged section, they would blow up the track, the beast would crash stupendously over the ridge and there would be a huge and breathtaking disaster as it hurtled towards its death. What actually happened (groan; you could have guessed it from the start) was that the engine jumped the rails a bit and the train juddered to dusty halt rather quickly. It was a decidedly unspectacular spectacular. But what sticks in my mind was the commentary. Instead of saying "Sorry folks, that wasn't too brilliant, was it? Now over to the News", the fellow pretended that the original vision had actually happened and we got a solemn exposition on cataclysms and scale, and niddle naddle noo. "Magnificent old gal", was one phrase I remember.

40 years later, and still black is white it seems. Journalist Dawn Porter presented a programme called "Dawn Gets Naked". Her point was that modern women become misled about their bodily worth because they are constantly surrounded by impossibly glamorous magazine images of beautiful models. Yet the images are lies. They are electronically improved and distorted, and the standards are actually unattainable. So Dawn starts a campaign called "Get naked with me". She wanted to demonstrate what women really look like, moles, wobbly bits, the lot. Laudable. She gathered together a number of women who were prepared to do just that and they paraded around central London on an open top bus. But what of Dawn, their leader? Did she get naked? Did she heck. I can excuse her the knickers, she was in public and British law states - no public genitals. But the rest? There she was, doing a programme about being unashamedly naked, insisting she was naked, boasting about being naked, celebrating being naked, yet over her nipples she wore two large plastic leaves. "Yeah, I'm naked!", she proclaimed. No you're not Dawn, and you can tell us you are until the end of time, but we can see you aren't. And in case you think I'm being unreasonable, some of her companions, with a bit more courage than Dawn, had bare breasts.

Dawn was actually making an important, valid point, that modern women allow their self esteem to be badly damaged by the manipulating magazine industry. So a reluctant 5 (medium, ordinary), downgraded to 4 because she kept her nipples covered.

Why this is called "Mistresses" is a puzzle, because it's about four women, three of whom aren't mistresses… Except, wait. Ah, I see. It's a salacious title and we all have to merchandise I suppose. The series itself? Delicious. Most of the characters are hell bent on cutting metaphorical chunks off themselves. Great fun. Reminds me of LWT's 1976 miniseries "Bouquet of Barbed Wire", where every character and their dads wielded the machete.

Siobhan (Orla Brady) is the only actual mistress and she's getting herself in proper trouble. Husband is infertile. So no chance of a baby there then. But at work, there's Dominic, played by uber-sexy Adam Rayner, who looks so good that there's no surprise when heavy lust breaks out. Dominic, it turns out, has no fertility problems. I expect his sperms do swashbuckling - probably each carries a little sword - and now Siobhan is inevitably pregnant that way instead. What Siobhan should do is to shut up good and tight, and go with - it's a miracle. What she actually does of course is say to her friends "I have to tell my husband". No you don't. Really, you don't. Stop. Stop!

Katie (Sarah Parish) was a mistress once, for we learn that she'd had an affair with a married man before the series started. Unwisely, she's now taken up with his son. The father died of cancer and Katie, who is a doctor, helped him on his journey. So, she's an euthanasiarist, has had affairs with two of her patients and is sleeping with the son of the father in carelessly ignoring the incestuous undertones. It's not going to end well for Katie.

Jessica is an experimental lesbian. She arranges events and she's busy doing a lesbian marriage as the series gets underway. She quickly gets into steamy eye exchanges with one of the brides Alex, played by Anna Torv, and the script hurries along to a lesbonk with great haste. However, it can't think of a good way of putting the two women in bed together, so it invents a very lame "You're not having a hen night?! Well I can't let you get away with that. I'll organise one and the guests shall be .. Me!", which achieves the result but isn't exactly Winterson. I thought script writers were supposed to earn their living. Lazy. Torv's interpretation of her character is good. Alex treats Jessica as possibly unsavoury and Alex's body language always points backwards when she's moving forward. Mind, once she's over the wall, in she happily goes, and unsurprisingly, for Shelley Conn is so mouth-watering that so would a good percentage of the human race given the chance.

Which brings us to Trudi, who's a widow. Of course there should be plain people in a community but, if you're going to have a plain character, then you have to invent something to admire in them. It's quite possible to be a lump and engaging. However, Small's Trudi looks like one of those characters that Casting put prominently in a medieval crowd scene after the director said "That's ridiculous, not every single character would be pretty". More tellingly, you can't find anything to admire in her. Nothing. She's a turnip in a bowl of apples. Appallingly, she does "sexy" from time to time. I won't forget her appearance in bright red corset with stockings tucked into her crotch for a long time, and for all the wrong reasons.

So, good, delinquent fun all round. There's easily enough material here for a second series and I hope that they do one. I trust they learn one lesson though. The characters never take off their underclothes in bed! Having spent abandoned hours of unbridled lust, afterwards they surface still wearing their bras, or keep the sheets tight wound round their naughty bits. After several episodes, no nipples yet and you can go beg for a cock. What's this? Early 21st century puritanism? So production team, are you listening? Your characters will solve some of their mental problems if they Do abandon as well as Talk it. At least they'll have more fun in the fun scenes, poor things. In a series dominated by either being in the bedroom, or wanted to be in the bedroom, or having just been in the bedroom, it's a bit silly, and jars a lot, that the characters bonk in their underwear.

Overall. I was going to score 6 (top end medium), but the series does one trick that's rare enough. When each episode ends, you always want more, and you look forward to the next one with anticipation. So I score 7.

Becky and her friend Cath are in their mid teens, 15 maybe 16. There's a sub-plot about Becky's single mother Zoe who has her own preoccupations. Mum wants.. she wants.. well, fun mainly and that bothers Becky. She catches her mother trying on one of her dresses. She's horrified when her mother and her science teacher Richard hit it off instantly when they meet.

Becky sneezes a lot and they come with no sympathy. She's cleaning her teeth and "choo!" the mirror (the camera) gets peppered with toothpaste. "You sneeze 9 times every morning", notes her mother. "What's the matter?" asks Cath, Becky's friend. "I'm just allergic to my life", sighs Becky because something is definitely wrong. Cath tries to find out who Becky fancies. "Do you think he's hot?" asks Cath, offering a variety of boys around them. But Becky always answers "No". Becky's worries are simpler. She just wants to know why she sneezes. Eventually the answer to their questions surprises them both …

This is a lightly handled and amusing short featuring Elsa Carnaby playing Becky and Miriam Glaser playing Cath. Neither actress appear to have done much else apart from this piece. Pity. Carnaby in particular has a nice screen presence, with one of those faces that is interesting rather than pretty, a face of freckles that fluctuates between closed and sunny. She has a uncompromised Australian accent. When she says "no", it sort of rhymes with "sigh" except that there's 2 or 3 "y"s in there somehow. Film makers missed a trick not capitalising on her.

Why did they call the film "Blow"? I don't understand the choice, given the story.

I score 7/10.

Zoë is a young mother of four small children. She's really down on her luck. Her partner has left her, she has little money, the kids need what kids need. Well food mainly. She has attitude. So would anyone in her position.

Angrily she storms down the stairs of her high rise carrying her baby boy and with her little daughters storming alongside her. She is wearing a nightie, and that's it. No shoes, no knickers. She stomps across a bleak working class estate and bangs on a door. When another young mother opens the door, Zoë falls upon her and the pair tumble out into the street fighting the way women do, hair in both hands, shrieking and swearing. There's some issue over their children squabbling. The neighbours drag them apart and as she beats a retreat, she and the kids, on her command, all together, give them The Finger.

Then Zoë meets an old flame Kai and the chemistry between them is palpable. Kai asks her out, but wonders who the children belong too. "I'm looking after them for a friend", lies Zoë. It's her first date for a long, long time, but she can't find a baby sitter. In the end she has to take the children with her. She's pulled between her genuine love for her children and her desperate need to, just once, break away from her troubles and have fun.

The story is powerful, supported by a careful and accurate screenplay. The whole cast plays well, but this is Nathalie Press' film. The Zoë character is feisty and frightened, blousy, brave and beautiful, despairing and hopeful, and Press hits the nail square on the head. The performances from the children are astonishing. Either the editors found some of the best child actors in Britain, or an enormous amount of material ended up on the cutting room floor as the editors tracked down just what they wanted. Kai needs to be gentle and intelligent, and the well-cast Danny Dyer gets it just right.

This short film really got to me. I it found heart breaking watching the young mother and her children gradually getting into more and more trouble. She just needed someone to take care of her! Director Andrea Arnold made a very special film. I score 10/10.

Update - and on 27th Feb 2005 Wasp won the Oscar for Best live action short film.

Probably because I'm not American and certainly because I'm not young, I find it hard to feel much empathy with characters seeped in American street culture. In consequence the film left me stone (sorry Ollie) cold sober at the beginning. A bit like the whole of Apocalypse Now. Soldiers swear and get doped, they're incomprehensible, ill breed and ugly. When they get blown to smithereens and blood flows, arms come off and characters scream and screech, all I feel is yeah, yeah, yeah, if you learnt some decent human values maybe I would care that you're suffering. And then came the sequence in the Vietnamese village and that really got to me. Outrage and anger, and did they really murder and crush like that, but it's not that simple, were the villagers harbouring the enemy, and so on. It's the best film I've seen on the Vietnam war, although I've yet to see Full Metal Jacket. I score 8/10.

Anyway ... The reason for me writing a comment is that it occurs to me that there's a similarity between The Magnificent Seven and Platoon. In the same way that Seven consolidated the careers of a number of young 1960s film actors (Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn, James Coburn), Platoon deepened the careers of a number of young 1980s film actors (Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe, Charlie Sheen, John C. McGinley, Johnny Depp). For that reason alone, Platoon was a milestone (sorry Ollie).