Hair today: "Vidal Sassoon: The Movie"

Fuck me, they're making films about hairdressers now. The existence of the crimp-and-cringe extravaganza Vidal Sassoon: The Movie can only be attributed to the high profile accorded to 2009's The September Issue (Vogue's Grace Coddington is among the interviewees): now every mover and shaker in the fashion and cosmetics world, a universe not generally renowned for its reticence and modesty, wants their own screen in the Odeon devoted to them. Here we find one Michael Gordon, a close personal friend of Sassoon who's already published a glossy tome about the coiffeur's work, interviewing Vidal at his swanky Beverly Hills home for inclusion in what's billed in the credits as "a Michael Gordon Films production". Either Gordon has a massive man-crush on Sassoon, or he desperately wants 10% off a short back and sides.

There's a pronounced litmus test in the very first line of voiceover - "it is impossible to over-estimate the influence Vidal Sassoon has had" (on what - contemporary American literature? The Arab-Israeli conflict? Gabba house?) - and even if you can get past that without snorting, the ensuing montage is a veritable minefield, with a variety of unattributed voices (and Noel Edmonds) delivering breathless encomiums along the lines of "being close to Vidal is like sitting next to Muhammad Ali or Albert Einstein in their prime." (Only, presumably, with curlers in.)

At no point does the resulting film, or its subject, become any more self-aware. A few choice quotes: "It's a very spiritual happening, being in the desert", "Hair is nature's biggest compliment" (no wonder Ross Kemp looks miffed), and "Most people cut hair with a comb and scissors; Vidal cut hair with his whole body." This latter cues an entire segment devoted to the subject's physical vitality, in which we learn "football is a cross between chess and ballet" (this while enjoying a kickaround on the Stamford Bridge pitch dressed in full Chelsea blues, which figures) and "I think stretching is marvellous" (as Gordon watches Sassoon doing yoga, and tries to restrain himself).

The sense of a long, fairly vacuous showbiz anecdote is interrupted only by the sad story of Sassoon's late daughter Catya - the one flicker we get of the downside of this lavish Beverly Hills lifestyle - and even then it barely lasts ten seconds before a voice on the soundtrack seeks to reassure us "I think you're beginning to see haircuts again." It ends with a standing ovation. For anyone who's only known Sassoon as a brand rather than a man, there's an element of surprise in being confronted with this spritely figure, who talks of growing up Jewish in an East End lorded over by Mosley's fascists (a historical detail you can audibly hear being trumped up to give the arc some substance) and how Bauhaus architecture changed the way he came to look at people's heads. But, really: it's hair. It grows, you have it cut, it grows back again. Dearie me, people, get over yourselves.

Vidal Sassoon: the Movie opens in selected cinemas from Friday.

From the archive: "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End"

Thoughts from the deck of a sinking ship: as a member of the general public who, with exceptions, seem to have taken the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise to its foolish heart, you'll have little or no idea what horror it is to be presented with a third in the series. Very rarely can anyone heading to the cinema for an afternoon's supposed entertainment have looked and felt more like a man being led to the gallows; I swear the usherette taking my ticket let slip a murmur of "dead man walking" as I passed.

The POTC trilogy is fascinating only for the ways it defies all known laws of movie physics, comprising not one but three films based on no more inspirational a source than a theme park ride, and this after the series' second entry, last year's Dead Man's Chest, surpassed its predecessor to become one of the biggest grossing films of all time, despite constituent parts - slipshod direction, drippy leads, a script that appeared barely spellchecked, let alone waterproofed - that suggested it might, in most normal circumstances, have sunk without trace.

For At World's End, hesistantly described as the final in the series, the line between jovial piss-taking, the irreverence fans have come to regard as the Pirates stock-in-trade, and outright taking the piss is crossed once and for all: this latest clocks in just shy of three hours and will, probably, against all logic, make even more money. At World's End is subject to the expansion and bloating that hits all successful franchises eventually (just look at Spider-Man 3); it doesn't help that The Curse of the Black Pearl and Dead Man's Chest were bloated enough to be going on with already, thank you very much.

Minor characters, mere pawns in those first two films, suddenly start to jostle for their own storylines, the creators complacent in the belief there's an audience for them, whether we care about any of them or not. The Pirates franchise is, for better or worse, defined by this carelessness - it doesn't have to respond to criticisms of the second film, since parts two and three were filmed back-to-back - and this new film duly brings back even those characters that stuck in the craw last time, like Naomie Harris's black-toothed voodoo priestess, surely the most prominently demeaning role any up-and-coming young actress has ever taken for a chance to catch a Hollywood agent's eye. (It's not as though Harris even needs it: she gave a perfectly fine performance in last year's Miami Vice.) The casual racism is expanded here with the addition of funny-talking Asian and African pirates: irreverence is one thing, insidiousness quite another.

Physically, too, this remains a very ugly franchise, something trumped-up roles for Geoffrey Rush, a squid-faced Bill Nighy and the coral-encrusted Stellan Skarsgard, and the addition of Chow Yun-Fat as a scarified Singaporean with rank fingernails, lank facial hair and a producer's eye on the lucrative Asian market, doesn't exactly help. Of the more obviously attractive elements, Keira Knightley - repositioned here as a proto-feminist warlord on a par with her bounty hunter in Domino - is stuck with that Bisto gravy tan she was dipped in between films one and two, Johnny Depp - introduced with his nose and tongue in extreme close-up - persists with that swishing rastafarian look that a great many people apparently find hilarious, and as for Orblando - coming shortly to a West End stage near you, in a belated shot at credibility - well, if you can find a boy with no qualities more substantial than diverting cheekbones attractive, you can only be 14 years old. At least the Tomb Raider movies had Angelina Jolie in them.

It was around the film's 137th instance of a double-cross passing for a significant plot point that I was struck by just how susceptible our popular culture has come to the unrewarding grotesque: I don't necessarily want to come over all high-minded, but Jordan or Jade Goody or Pete Doherty could walk into a Pirates of the Caribbean film, and no-one would turn a blind eye, not even ship's mate Mackenzie Crook, with his blind eye. Certainly, Klaus Badelt's score - with its spaghetti Western pastiches and interminable love themes - is pretty hideous to have to listen to, the Morricone riffs presumably there as a "playful" nod (everything in Piratesland is "playful"; inverted commas abound) to a subgenre celebrated for its lack of restraint.

The problem with a mish-mash like At World's End is that it doesn't have a Leone at the helm, but a Verbinski; that it doesn't know when to stop. What was so stirring about the original swashbucklers - films like Scaramouche, The Flame and the Arrow, The Crimson Pirate - gets buried beneath an understanding fostered in the worst of producer Jerry Bruckheimer's features, that nothing is ever enough. Just as Dead Man's Chest decided to stage its only swordfight of note atop a giant, out-of-control waterwheel - making the clash of swords precisely the least significant aspect of the scene - At World's End faffs around for two hours before getting to any real swordplay, then smothers it by having Keira and Orblando get married in the middle of it all.

I know I risk sounding like the character in Little Britain who continually turns away pirate memory games on the basis they're not pirate-y enough, but really: Pirates of the Caribbean could care less about piracy, which is a shame, considering some of the junk piled on top of it throughout. One universe can't hold it in in At World's End: the film falls off the edge of the world like a lead weight, and into an alternative reality where there are multiple Jack Sparrows (including, inevitably, a CG one in a state of some disrepair), two captains, and the ghosts of once-dead characters (like Keira's father Jonathan Pryce) revived for no good narrative reason.

The bloating might be forgivable if the world of the film had been bursting at the seams with ideas or jokes, but it's not; instead, we're given three hours of nods, winks and twitches. As an illustration of how overdone and over-produced the film is, consider the introduction of Keith Richards to the Pirates fraternity: his cameo as Captain Jack's dad would have been a lot funnier if he'd swaggered on looking like Keith Richards - but, instead, the make-up department have adorned him with ribbons, bows and eyeliner, swamping whatever kind of joke this is for good. (It may also be attributable to an ignorance of rock history, but at the screening I attended, his appearance raised not a single titter.)

The few critical apologists for Dead Man's Chest - notably Anthony Lane in The New Yorker and Leslie Felperin in Sight and Sound - arrived at the opinion audiences like these films precisely because of their carelessness, the way they promote irresponsibility; as a counterblast, if you like, to the po-faced sincerity of such comparable (yet less profitable) blockbuster entertainments as the Spider-Man films and Superman Returns. This is all very well, except that it's a very safe, conformist idea of irresponsibility - punk never had so many posters on buses and bus shelters, key advertising sites - and it assumes that what we need these days, and what the movies would do well to continue selling, is more consumption and idiocy, excess and thoughtlessness, and more ways of spending our money on vapid, worthless product.

I wish no harm on all those hastening to see At World's End this weekend looking for a good night out, but they're on the wrong side of the culture wars, turning up like sheep or lambs to the slaughter to hand over the five or ten pounds that will bring us all depressingly closer to the prospect of Pirates IV. Nobody truly loves this franchise, or needs it because something in its emotional rigmarole (Keira and Orblando denying they fancy one another, then snogging just for the heck of it) touches the heart, soul or mind; they go to see it because it's there, and within easy reach of the snack bar, all barnacles on cardboard, yo-ho-ho and a 2.5-litre, family-sized bottle of dumb.

(May 2007)

From the archive: "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest"

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl had one good joke - that its pirates were pirates (funny; cf. Dodgeball), but not especially accomplished pirates - that wore thin the more conventionally heroic the leads became. What was amazing about that first film's success was the number of grown adults who fell for it; American cinema is routinely accused of being juvenile, but rarely can a movie - even a summer movie - have been pitched so squarely at a pantomime crowd of seven- and eight-year-olds. (Seven- and eight-year-olds who had to drag their parents along to see it, according to the certificate.) Based on a theme park ride, and helmed by a director (in Gore Verbinski) who never let you forget that fact, this was the type of cinema you'd hoped we'd all have grown out of.

The sequel, Dead Man's Chest, is more - and more (and more) - of the same: silly in a humorless way (Verbinski returning to offer an inflated, unfocused version of the slapstick in his perfectly decent calling-card hit Mouse Hunt) and, here especially, outright dubious in its portrayal of anyone who isn't as white as Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley. The usual retort to an observation like this is not to take anything about the film too seriously; but then, as it's the film most people will be going to see this weekend, it's hard so to do, knowing that a large number of people are going to be exposed to its casual, retrograde racism. At least with last year's King Kong remake (far, I would argue, from racist) you had the advantage of getting a great movie experience to go with the film's questionable racial stereotypes. Not so here; with Dead Man's Chest, all you get is two-and-a-half hours of indoctrinated blockbuster "fun".

That's right: two-and-a-half hours. Even those whose timbers were well and truly shivered by the first film might concede the sequel's length is a problem, not least as it gives the dissenting viewer time to consider a number of things. One: how Verbinski takes one whole hour of faffing around to set up the "dead man's chest" business promised by the title, then labours through a ridiculous series of climaxes-that-aren't-climaxes just as one hopes the film is coming to an end. (Even the final scene isn't a climax, just the set-up for a third film.) Two: that Depp's "comedy drunk" mugging - it's not a performance - is not nearly as funny as might once have been proposed. (Not even he can justify the extended running time.)

Three: that Keira, disappointingly tan, is now almost as boring as Orblando. (This is, in the main, a very ugly franchise - humans with barnacles, glass eyes and bad teeth, grotesque sea monsters, Geoffrey Rush - and it doesn't help that its idea of beauty is of the least interesting kind.) Four: that the franchise - set in a world far, far enough away to have some vague assumption of exoticism about it - is the new Star Wars, and not good Star Wars, but bad Star Wars: Orblando as Luke Skywalker, Keira as Princess Leia, Depp as Han Solo-via-Jar Jar Binks, surrounded by a plethora of squid-like creatures and underwhelming CGI, the whole package cursed by the capacity to irritate more than it really should.

The more time Verbinski gives you, the more one is inclined to think the running time is a major misjudgement. It certainly won't help the cinemas, who won't be able to squeeze as many screenings into the day, and therefore won't make as much money (usually the top priority) as they might. And it doesn't do the studio any good, as it gives the audience fewer hours in the day to spend their hard-earned on the really important parts of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise: the Happy Meals and action figures (take the replica Black Pearl ship, currently retailing for fifty of your English pounds) and the fruits of the year's most bewildering promotional tie-in, with a certain Swedish automobile manufacturor. Pirates on a pillaging mission were often swung by the Volvo's superior safety record, I gather.

(July 2006)

From the archive: "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl"

Though it's certainly the most original blockbuster of this summer - well, pirates haven't been tried at the box-office for, ooh, at least six years, and it arrives without a number at the end of its title (even if that franchise-prolonging colon is something of a worry) - those of us coming late to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, labelled by some "the best blockbuster of the summer", are liable only to find it nonsense with sails on, a disappointingly empty experience that reminds one it's now only four months until The Return of the King, and with it (one hopes) the return of event movies with heart.

What you want from this latest Jerry Bruckheimer über-production is Con Air on a boat, summer season subversion in spades; what you actually get is Cutthroat Island with its tongue slightly further - and even more expensively - in cheek. For a while, it stays see-worthy. Writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio (responsible for the mischievous Shrek) have come up with a set of fundamentally useless heroes, people who look filthy and smell terrible, who barely know one end of a cutlass from another.

Captain "Mad" Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp, who clearly counted all that time spent around rockstars as research) is accused by one British officer of being "the worst pirate I've ever seen". Sidekick Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) is sensitive to donkeys, but when he runs into battle against the evil, moonlight-exposed zombie pirate Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) and his men gets a smack round the head just when he thinks he's got his opponents where he wants them. As the two heroes' becorseted object of, respectively, lust and love, governor's daughter Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley, as pale as the full moon itself; as many reasons as you like for women to stay out of the sun this summer) positions herself as the voice of common sense, but she reaches for a sword in a fireplace decoration, and pulls the whole lot down with it.

Bruckheimer, again, proves unbeatable at packaging, if not necessarily filmmaking. Along with the requisite "hot" male and female leads (Bloom and Knightley, increasingly interchangeable, long of hair, clean of jawline), you get at least one performance that's either in on the joke or very much part of it (for Cage and Malkovich in Con Air, or Gene Hackman in Crimson Tide, read Depp and Rush here, attempting to out-"arrr" one another) and further evidence of this producer's fondness for casting British actors (Christopher Eccleston in Gone in 60 Seconds, Ian Hart in Enemy of the State, here Mackenzie Crook from TV's The Office) in the hope of extending both the film's credibility and overseas box-office.

Stick a Hans Zimmer score (or similar: here, the composer of choice is Klaus Badelt) over the top, get a hack director (Gore Verbinski) who's willing to put their name to it, and - voila! - you got yourself a $200m gross, and counting. It's fine when the formula works, but here - with its protagonists essentially squabbling over a trinket (rather than, say, world peace) - it becomes unnecessarily protracted, exhausting rather than exhilarating, and much less fun the more conventionally heroic the leads become. Verbinski, a pawn in the Disney/Bruckheimer game, adds little: as swashbucklers go, Black Pearl is a lesser film than Kevin Reynolds' underrated The Count of Monte Cristo, and there's nothing here to match the imagination of his own Mouse Hunt, much less the pace of his recent The Ring. He does, however, earn the unique distinction of being the only director whose last three films have been based on a magazine article, a Japanese original, and a theme park ride. Perhaps he should base the next one on a script.

(August 2003)

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office
for the weekend of May 6-8, 2011:

1 (1) Thor (12A) **
2 (2) Fast Five (12A) ***
3 (3) Insidious (15) ***
4 (new) Water for Elephants (12A) [above]
5 (new) Hanna (12A) *
6 (new) Something Borrowed (12A)
7 (4) Rio (U)
8 (new) Priest (12A)
9 (5) Arthur (12A) *
10 (7) Hop (U)

(source: UK Film Council)

My top five:
1. After the Apocalypse
2. Red Hill
3. Love Like Poison
4. A Screaming Man
5. Taxi Driver


Top Ten DVD rentals:

1 (new) The King's Speech (12) ****
2 (3) The Tourist (12) **
3 (1) Meet the Parents: Little Fockers (12)
4 (4) The Social Network (12) ****
5 (7) RED (12) **
6 (5) Due Date (15)
7 (6) The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest (15) **
8 (2) Tron Legacy (PG) *
9 (new) Unstoppable (12) ***
10 (new) Life As We Know It (12)

(source: lovefilm.com)

My top five:
1. The King's Speech
2. Chico and Rita
3. Benda Bilili!
4. Blue Valentine
5. Archipelago


Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. Ransom (Friday, BBC1, 11.30pm)
2. Citizen Ruth (Wednesday, BBC2, 11.50pm)
3. Prime (Wednesday, BBC1, 11.15pm)
4. The Night Listener (Sunday, BBC1, 11.35pm)
5. Zathura: A Space Adventure (Sunday, five, 6.05pm)

From the archive: "Citizen Ruth"

Before Election, About Schmidt and Sideways, director Alexander Payne and his regular writing partner Jim Taylor came to prominence with Citizen Ruth, a sly satire on Middle American values. Laura Dern is Ruth Stoops, solvent abuser and soon-to-be single mom who falls in with a Christian couple (Mary Kay Place and Kurtwood Smith) and finds herself the rope in a tug-o'-war between the pro-choice and anti-abortion lobbies. All the virtues of Payne's later films are already much in evidence here: the superb showcase a Payne/Taylor script provides for its key players; an ability to find shape and character in the great flatness of the American hinterlands; a sense of irony that never quite tips over into the misanthropy blighting most contemporary US satire.

The latter comes down to the writers' understanding we have to have somebody to root for, if anything is to be at stake amid the smart-mouthing. Though unheralded as such, this may yet go down as Laura Dern's finest hour, superb as a foul-mouthed, misguided but essentially sweet woman; even though disenfranchised and wronged, kicked back and forth by life, her Ruth still clings to the right thoughts and deeds, as we all like to believe we do. There's an argument that once it sets up its stand-off, the plotting leaves nothing to do save to chopper in new, richly characterised kooks (Burt Reynolds as a pro-life lynchpin, Tippi Hedren as his adversary); and there's not enough Alicia Witt (there never is, I find). But a decade on from its first release, Citizen Ruth appears only more relevant in its dissection of American religious fervour, and the self-interest of the secular Left. It even makes glue-sniffing funny.

(May 2006)

Citizen Ruth screens on BBC2 this Wednesday at 11.50pm.

From the archive: "Prime"

Another week, another New York City love triangle. Prime has, more than most, the feel of a country-club joke about it. A recently divorced Gentile woman, a habitual nailbiter in her late thirties, walks into her Jewish shrink's office and starts to pour out the details of the affair she's been having with a young man 14 years her junior. This young man has been filled with renewed confidence, learning all about life and art from a woman with Rothko and Coltrane in her collection; she, in turn, gets to run her fingers over a buff stomach on a nightly basis. Still, there's a catch: unbeknownst to the patient (Uma Thurman), the shrink (Meryl Streep) is the boy's mother. Which you might call a conflict of interest.

Aside from a few early lapses into irksome romcom cliche - Thurman's gay best friend really is just there to tick boxes, and the bit where the two lovers abscond into a secret inner-city garden is a direct lift from Notting Hill - Prime proves a perfectly watchable date movie surfing a sunny indie-pic vibe. The generation gap is skilfully defined, always apparent in some form (whether good or bad), and never blanded out as it might have been. The performers, too, are all on good form. Thurman has really blossomed on screen in recent years: gone is the tall, gawky princess who served rather too often as a blank signifier of feminine beauty; in her place, there now stands a genuinely vivacious presence, full of life. (Were that Gwyneth Paltrow able to effect such a transformation.)

It helps that Prime offers her such a blossoming role, of course, but Thurman has never been warmer on screen, has never given us more of a reason (beyond mere looks) to fall in love with her. As the even older woman - the shrink/mother - Streep is initially set up as too much the fusspot momma, rattling about in oversized bracelets and necklaces, but the performance pays off with the look on the actress's face as she attempts to process the info Thurman blithely gives up about her boy's penis, and clings defensively to official statistics about ear wax as her mothering skills are challenged. A whole world away from the chest-beating holler of writer-director Ben Younger's debut Boiler Room, this is a good joke - a joke with some understanding of the complications inherent in growing up - nicely told.

(April 2006; this review was written before The Accidental Husband and Motherhood)

Prime screens on BBC1 this Wednesday at 11.15pm.