Anyway, the publication of the collected Black Hawk gives modern readers the chance to discover, or reacquaint themselves with, a character with one of the weirdest histories in UK comics, especially given that he was only in publication for about a year – initially in the shortlived Tornado, subsequently in the legendary 2000AD. Here the character was handled by creators of the calibre of Alan Grant and Massimo Belardinelli, and it’s probably their names that are the big attraction of this collected edition.

The cover of the actual book isn't by Belardinelli. So here's a cover that is!

That unwieldy title is potentially misleading as any intergalactic gladiating is strictly limited to the middle section of Black Hawk’s career: when this strip was launched it was as a strictly historical affair, with perhaps the tiniest smidgeon of fantasy chucked into season it. The opening installment tells of a Nubian warrior, taken prisoner by the legions of Rome, whose martial pride and self-respect are restored after seeing a black desert hawk defeat a Roman eagle. Later, when pirates attack their ship, the Nubian saves the life of a senior Roman official who grants him his freedom and gives him a job commanding an auxiliary regiment. The Nubian adopts the black hawk both as his symbol and his name. (All this happens in just the first episode: none of this decompressed storytelling for IPC in the late 70s.)

What follows is solidly put-together fare, if very formulaic: Black Hawk and his soldiers get packed off on various apparently-suicidal missions to various parts of the Empire, which they invariably succeed at due to martial skill, personal courage, and the assistance of the hawk itself. There are various recurring enemies who Black Hawk never seriously bothers trying to kill, not much in the way of characterisation, and not really very much to make it distinctive beyond some reasonable art by Alfonso Azpiri and the historical setting itself. Even this is amusingly inconsistent – at the start of the first episode the date is given as 50BC, which changes to 50AD very soon after, and finally mutates into a much less specific ‘in the time of Rome’ – which is just as well as Black Hawk finds himself mixed up in the Iceni rebellion of 61AD for a long tranche of stories!

And then the weirdness starts. Tornado‘s sales weren’t strong enough to support the comic and it folded in 1979, but as was standard in the industry at the time, successful stories were transplanted into another comic in the hope that whatever readership they had attracted would follow them to their new home. The problem with putting Tornado strips into 2000AD, as Alan Grant points out in his introduction, was that Tornado didn’t have any SF or fantasy quotient and 2000AD was an explicitly SF-themed publication. In the case of Black Hawk, while one story in the Tornado annual had featured a sorcerous druid and werewolves, the main strip had never been more than ambiguous about any otherworldly happenings taking place.

So it must have come as a hell of a wrench to established readers when, in the final issue of Tornado, Black Hawk is given a strange prophecy which tells him his life is about to change forever, and then disappears amidst a funny glow in the last panels. Could it be that some Intergalactic Gladiating is on the cards for our boy?

Well, er, yes. Blackhawk (as he is known following the change of venue, though the strip is still technically called Black Hawk) has been teleported onto the ship of some passing aliens known as the Entertainers. The Entertainers roam around the galaxy putting on gladiatorial shows using various fighters from different planets, and Blackhawk (though not his black hawk, which has been left behind on Earth) has just been conscripted to join their number. As reformattings of ongoing series go, this must be one of the most extreme ever. I’ve often wondered about whether or not this kind of radical mid-game genre switch – whether it’s genuinely a good idea, if it messes with the audience’s expectations too much. Many times people play it safe – Predator, for example, opens with a shot of an alien ship heading towards Earth, presumably just so that it’s not too much of a shock when a ray-gun-toting invisible alien pops up in what until that point has really been a gritty war movie. I suppose it’s not unlike musical theory – the first note you play establishes the key of a piece of music, which in turn limits which other notes you’re ‘allowed’ to use in the rest of the piece.

That’s certainly the view taken by my former creative writing coach, who – when not busy persuading me that creative writing might not be such a good outlet for my energies after all – made it very clear that the opening of a story has to make it clear to the audience exactly what kind of story it’s going to be. You can pull surprises on audiences, but not the extent of having horrific aliens invade out of a blue sky midway through The Great Gatsby. Hence the slow but fairly obvious build-up in the zombie presence in Shaun of the Dead, I suppose. On the other hand, the movie version of Psycho – completely unlike the novel on which it’s based – gives no hint it’s arguably a horror movie throughout its first act, and the same is in some ways true of From Dusk Till Dawn.

Either way the original creators of Black Hawk can be excused as they had no idea of the direction the story would ultimately take (and weren’t actually involved in it anyway). Writer Gerry Finley-Day and Azpiri were replaced by a pseudonymical Alan Grant and the Italian maestro Massimo Belardinelli, without too much of a wrench – although the actual continuity of the transition, storywise, is far from perfect. It doesn’t really matter as the strip launches into a bold and imaginative new direction, in which, er, Blackhawk fights a new alien monster every couple of episodes, complains about the monstrous cruelty and heartlessness of his masters on an equally regular basis, vows to throw off his chains and regain his freedom, and never actually appears to do much to this end. This is pretty thin stuff redeemed only by Belardinelli’s matchlessly weird and detailed artwork. It seems that of all the old 2000AD strips I’ve ever wanted to read again – or read for the first time in a few cases – Massimo Belardinelli had a hand in most of them: Flesh, Ace Trucking Co., Meltdown Man, and now Black Hawk. As I say, throughout the gladiatorial stint of Blackhawk’s career it’s only the art that keeps it readable.

All good things must come to an end, but – luckily – tediously mediocre ones too. Kicking the weirdness quotient up by another factor of ten, space pirates attack the starship of Blackhawk’s masters and kill them – is this our boy’s chance to be free at last? Er, no: Blackhawk and some alien buddies leave the wreckage in a lifepod, which is promptly sucked into a black hole. Barely credibly, Blackhawk has bigger problems, just having had his soul sucked out by an alien monster (a particularly brilliant and obscene Belardinelli creation).

As fate would have it, within the black hole is a planet, ruled by a demonic creature known as the Great Beast: he knows where Blackhawk’s soul has ended up but will only tell him where it is if he takes on various violent and bloodthirsty challenges. As you may have perceived, what started out as a straightforward historical action strip has now transmuted from space opera into pretty-much full-on sword and sorcery (collapsing physical laws inside the black hole allow for various pseudo-magical plot devices and similar tropes, although I’m not sure how this explains Blackhawk ending up with a distinctly Stormbringer-esque magic sword). The byline for the strip now changes to ‘Warrior in search of his soul!’ to reflect the change of focus, too.

Well, the stories are a bit more interesting now, at least – and Belardinelli can really let rip with peculiar landscapes and creatures – but one definitely gets the sense of a writer scrabbling around for ideas to keep the whole enterprise going, especially once Blackhawk disposes of the Great Beast. Things finally resolve themselves as Blackhawk tracks down the soul-sucking monster and, after a very striking sequence of panels that recaps and openly acknowledges what a bizarre odyssey he’s been on, throws himself into battle with a genuinely moving declaration that ‘…if my destiny is to die, then I embrace death as a free man!’

Needless to say Blackhawk’s magic sword wins the day – but then an immense ‘gravity storm’ breaks the planet apart and Blackhawk and his companions are sucked into the heart of the black hole, to wink out of existence forever. There’s a vague suggestion that they may somehow survive, but this option was never exercised – a later Belardinelli-drawn strip visits the ‘DEAD’ drawer of the 2000AD editor’s filing cabinet, wherein Blackhawk is to be found grumbling about the long gap between appearances. The ending of Blackhawk’s 2000AD career – dissolving into a funny glow while giving a valedictory speech to his comrades - rather neatly echoes the way he finished his stint in Tornado, but the ending does seem inescapably arbitrary and contrived.

The collected edition nevertheless does a handsome job of pulling together virtually all the Blackhawk material ever published. Black Hawk may have been one of the premier strips in Tornado, but by the standards of 2000AD of the same period it is rather undistinguished (which is probably why the former flopped while the latter endures to this day). The sheer novelty value of the wild shifts in tone give it a certain interest even if most of the individual scripts are mediocre, and there’s always Belardinelli’s wonderful artwork to marvel at. That at least will stand the test of time.

So, this is going to be about the way in which the presentation of a certain class of TV character has changed over the last forty to fifty years and what this may tell us about changes in UK culture. As I’m mainly going to talk about British genre shows, particularly action-adventure and SF (the latter is almost invariably a subset of the former), there’s going to be a lot of stuff about Doctor Who and Sherlock (yeah, sorry about that, people who aren’t interested in them) but also some other shows that no-one seems to care about any more (yeah, sorry about that, people who are interested).

What got me thinking along these lines was a discussion about – yes, you guessed it - Sherlock and Doctor Who, wherein a friend of mine argued that the two lead characters were presented in a fundamentally similar way. Regular readers may recall that I have visited this topic before in the not too distant past, and I’m not planning to go over it again here in too much detail. But anyway, as I suggested to my friend, this may well be a bit of an optical illusion inasmuch as this is how all TV action-adventure heroes are presented these days, and it’s only the scarcity of this type of character that’s clouded the issue.

Certainly British action-adventure TV shows are a lot thinner on the ground than they used to be. Casting our minds back to the 1960s, surely the golden age of the genre, we encounter The Saint, The Avengers, Man in a Suitcase, the original Randall and Hopkirk, The Champions, Danger Man, The Prisoner, Adam Adamant Lives and many other less celebrated examples – to say nothing of the early years of Doctor Who (albeit a rather different show in those days) and no fewer than two BBC-produced Sherlock Holmes series (starring Douglas Wilmer and Peter Cushing respectively). Wind on to 2012 and all we really find are Doctor Who, Sherlock, and – still just about current – Primeval. (Oh, and I suppose the grisly Merlin qualifies, but I can never watch more than five minutes at a time without losing my temper and switching over, so I can’t really discuss it in any detail.)

The reasons for the decline in this genre’s presence are, I would suspect, mainly economic: most of the 60s shows I mentioned were made on film and largely shot on location, with lengthy runs – mainly because they were made by ITC with more than half a eye on selling them to the lucrative American market. American sales were what made a lot of these shows viable propositions and the major American networks are a lot less open to foreign product these days – the only British show to get a major network slot since The New Avengers in the late 1970s is Merlin, for reasons I find utterly impossible to work out.

So this may be why this kind of show is no longer such a fixture, but what’s more interesting to me is the change in the way these shows are written. Many years ago on the BBC Doctor Who message board I remember laboriously trying to explain the difference between a plot-driven story and a character-driven story. I think I settled on saying that in a plot-driven story it’s events that dictate the actions of the protagonists, while in a character-driven one it’s the personalities of the protagonists that motivate the events. This probably sounds rather circular – to simplify things still further, I would go on to say that a plot-driven story is primarily about what people do, while a character-driven one is about who they are. This is not to say that plot-driven stories can’t have an interesting cast, or that a character-driven one must be wholly bereft of incident – it’s a question of focus and emphasis.

Looking at The Avengers or Danger Man these days one of the most striking things about them is how little attention is paid to the histories and emotions of the leading characters beyond the strict demands of the plot. The backgrounds of Steed and Drake remain almost entirely vague; we know nothing about their families or any relationships they may have had in the past. None of this matters in an Avengers or Danger Man episode – it’s all about the case or the mission in that particular episode, the leads are there to fulfil a set of plot functions. This is most striking in the case of Mrs Peel (also from The Avengers) – she’s introduced as Mrs Peel in her debut episode, but her exact marital situation is never addressed or even alluded to, until the closing minutes of her final episode in which it is revealed her husband is a test pilot who’s been lost up the Amazon for years.

Stiff upper lips were the order of the day in Ye Good Olde Days.

If The Avengers were being made today, in the modern style, I cannot imagine an episode going by in which Mrs Peel’s angst over her missing spouse is not given a little moment to itself. Whole episodes would no doubt be written wherein she helps to reunite people who have been forcibly separated from their loved ones, concluding with bittersweet moments – no doubt taking place to a piano or power-ballad soundtrack – where she sees the happiness she has brought about but is confronted yet again by her own loneliness. It would, if you ask me, be totally and utterly awful, mawkish, charmless dross – we can perhaps get a slight impression of what it would be like by looking at the New Avengers episode Obsession, a deeply atypical and rather underwhelming outing focussing on Purdey’s unhappy love affair with Martin Shaw’s character.

I can’t begin to imagine how an updated version of Steed would work – but then again, it’s impossible to imagine anyone else playing the part a tenth as well as Patrick Macnee, so it’s really an empty question – the same kind of applies to the Prisoner, but it’s interesting how much more conventional and less interesting the central character of the updated version is.

These days it isn’t enough to just be an interesting and engaging screen character who resolves fun and imaginative plots – there seems to be a distinct sense that audiences won’t care about that. Every character these days has to have some kind of emotional baggage, which not only allows us access to their psychological hinterland, but seems to insist we visit it virtually on a weekly basis.

As a case in point let us look at the male leads of Primeval, who have the advantage of being new-minted characters unlike Sherlock Holmes or the Doctor and are thus more amenable to being crafted to fit a specific role. The three guys in question are Nick Cutter, Danny Quinn, and Matt Anderson, and they are the successive male leads in a show which largely revolves around people being chased around by CGI monsters who’ve wandered out of holes in time. They are a scientist, a cop, and a soldier-turned-zookeeper, and yet despite this diversity and the nature of the show they all fit the same template: each of them isn’t just chasing CGI monsters because it’s their job. All of them have Personal Issues involved with loved ones who have got mixed up in the holes-in-time business.

Or, to put it another way, everything these days has a much stronger soap opera element than it did in years gone by. This was one of the main accusations flung at the early Rusty Davies series of Doctor Who, certainly, and while I don’t have a problem with the attention paid to extended family lives of most of the regular characters I do sense and slightly object to an ongoing attempt to load the Doctor down with baggage of various kinds.

Specifically, things which were nicely underplayed and subtextual in the 1963-89 version of the series – the loneliness of the Doctor, the grounding influence of his companions – are dragged out into the centre of episodes. The mostly-implied affection the Doctor shares with his friends is replaced by operatic and overblown excursions into sentimental navel-gazing such as conclude most of the Davies seasons. As you may have sensed, I am not a tremendous fan of this kind of thing – I’m quite capable of having an emotion off my own bat without having it wholly specified by whatever it is I’m reading or watching.

Sherlock Holmes is a character who dates back much further than any other I’ve mentioned so far, hailing from an era when angst was an unknown concept and upper lips remained entirely solid. Presenting him not just in a modern context but in a modern style thus presents a bit of an issue. In my initial discussion on this subject, the point came up that Holmes and the Doctor really do mirror each other – one is a superbeing with human emotions, the other is a normal man with superhuman faculties.

Conan Doyle pays lip service to giving Holmes a few weaknesses – most famously his occasional depressions and his ignorance of many basic facts about astronomy – but most of the time he’s an almost superhumanly accomplished individual – an accomplished musician and highly-skilled martial artist in addition to his prodigious talents as a detective. However this clearly will not do for a modern TV hero and so in Sherlock he is assigned a dreadful personal flaw with which he must contend. It’s interesting that Sherlock has received quite so many plaudits for being utterly faithful to Doyle, when the depiction of Holmes as someone quite so socially incompetent and often downright rude is really not to be found anywhere in the original canon.

Holmes and the Doctor have a number of similarities, to be sure, but these are only emphasised by the fact that both have gone through the modern-genre-TV-baggage-attaching process. Heroes are not allowed to simply be heroes any more, nor are we allowed to work out for ourselves what the deeper elements of their characters might be. It’s not enough for a character to simply be likeable or interesting, we have to be able to Emotionally Invest in them, no matter how absurd that might be in the case of a soldier-turned-zookeeper whose job is to chase prehistoric monsters into holes in time.

Why has this happened? It seems to be a recent phenomenon, though the near-total absence of British action-adventure TV shows between the mid-80s and the mid-00s makes it difficult to be sure. Certainly the leads of Bugs (launched in 1994) are in the old style, as were the central characters in Crime Traveller. This takes us up to 1997, an interesting year inasmuch as the death of Princess Diana provoked scenes of wild emotion on the streets of Britain of an intensity and on a scale which was previously unthinkable.

Certainly in the 15 years since, British culture seems to have become considerably more emotionally articulate, if not in fact emotionally incontinent. Quite outside of the action-adventure TV genre, even the main TV variety shows rely on the ‘emotional journey’ of the participants to provide a hook for the audience. Basically, everything has gone very soapy and sentimental at the the expense of reason and wit and restraint.

Once again I suspect my personal preferences may be apparent. I suspect my dislike for the modern Emo-style of genre TV is not solely because I object to cheap and obvious sentimentality but because this has supplanted so many of the elements I really like in the older shows – wit, inventiveness, and so on. Certainly they still exist in the modern shows, which is why Sherlock and Doctor Who remain so watchable for me, but often they seem less important than people’s character arcs and emotional foibles. Maybe the wheel will turn again and they will come back into fashion once more. I hope so, but I’m not holding my breath.

One movie doing rather well in terms of gong nominations is Alexander Payne’s The Descendants. In 2002 Payne made About Schmidt with Jack Nicholson, which I was rather impressed by, so I turned up for the new film with quite high expectations.

George Clooney plays Matt King, a Hawaiian real estate lawyer with a lot on his plate. Not only does he have final say over the disposal of a vast and potentially lucrative tract of virgin land which could very well make both him and his large extended film rather wealthy, but his wife is in a coma following a boating accident, leaving him in charge of their two daughters. He is not very comfortable with this, but things are about to get even worse.

Matt’s wife shows no signs of recovery and under the terms of her living will her life support systems are to be disconnected. Also, his elder daughter (Shailene Woodley) has something to impart: completely unbeknownst to Matt, she has been having an affair with another man.

The film is about how Matt comes to terms with this and resolves his various issues, and on one level I can fully understand why this movie has become such a critical darling: as I suggested up the page, this is a thoughtful and grown-up film about the realities of life, made by an accomplished director, and built around a big leading man performance by a proper movie star. However, I have to say I haven’t fallen in love with it quite as much as everyone else appears to (with the exception of my landlady, who advised me categorically not to go anywhere near it – though not until after I’d seen it).

On a purely technical level Clooney’s performance is very good, of course, but I have to say that as his daughter Shailene Woodley is possibly even better. Either way my problem with the film is not with the cast but with the script, which – at least to begin with – isn’t quite up to scratch. The film is really about loss and grief, but the situation at its centre is presented to us via a very trite and unremarkable voiceover – we barely get to see Matt’s wife prior to her accident, and as a result there’s very little sense of who she was or what the other characters have lost now she is gone. The performances make the anguish that Matt and the others are feeling very clear, but it’s somehow difficult to genuinely feel or share it.

It may also be a factor that a few key scenes essentially take the form of various characters delivering lengthy monologues to each other. Even when the audience is comatose (I mean the listener in the scene, not people actually watching the film in theatres – it’s by no means that bad a film), this still seemed to me to be rather theatrical, even bordering on the melodramatic.

All this said, I did warm rather to the film as it went on, particularly when Shailene Woodley’s character became more central to the story: her performance really is impressive. To be honest, I wasn’t initially sure what this film was about, beyond the slightly soapy central drama, but eventually it seemed to me to be about the difficulties of trying to be a genuinely good individual when encumbered by all the emotional and personal baggage that this typically entails.

One of the most impressive aspects of The Descendants is the way in which it handles this theme with appropriate subtlety and ambiguity and accepts that there are no easy answers – maybe no answers at all in some cases. Everything is addressed through ambiguity and shades of subtlety rather than by glib absolute pronouncements. Clooney is justifiably angry with his wife for her infidelity, but at the same time insistent that his elder daughter not let her own hostility spoil the final hours she will share with her mother. And, towards the end of the film, Clooney takes a significant decision which he claims is for reasons that most people would find laudable – but, as the audience, we are aware he has another motive for doing exactly the same thing which would be outright petty vindictiveness. In a choice that I found deeply impressive, the film opts not to address this ambiguity in the slightest – not to even highlight the fact it exists – and trust entirely to the audience’s intelligence.

That said, I still found The Descendants more effective as a drama than a comedy – which is not to say that I didn’t laugh at all, and I should point out that many people at the screening I attended were roaring their heads off at times when I was barely cracking a smile. Too much of the humour was cutesy or obvious to really work for me, I’m afraid. And while most of the film is put together virtually flawlessly, the soundtrack grated with me after a while – and I will now get soundly told off by one set of my acquaintances, as the score of this film is made up almost entirely of Hawaiian ukulele tunes! (What can I say, give me some Formby syncopation any day…)

So in the end I thought The Descendants was a fairly interesting movie with some definite virtues but a lot of equally clear flaws. I don’t necessarily think it deserves any awards, but then neither would I be surprised if it won some, simply because it’s the kind of film people who vote for awards tend to like. If it is the best mature drama for grown-ups in the cinema at the moment, that says more about the state of that kind of film in general than it does for the actual quality of this particular film.

One with more to interest this constituency than most is The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, made in 1939 and directed by Alfred Werker. This was the second Basil Rathbone Holmes film, and the last to take place in anything approximating a period setting (the Second World War, which entered the public consciousness in the same week as this movie, would prove to have an influence on Rathbone’s subsequent Holmesian career).

Anyway: it all kicks off in the London of 1894 with the nefarious Professor Moriarty (George Zucco) in the dock, accused of murder. The jury know he’s guilty. The judge knows he’s guilty. (Moriarty knows he’s guilty too, but sensibly keeps his mouth shut.) But there’s no proof, and being upstanding, cricket-loving British folk they are obliged to let him go. Holmes arrives on the scene with evidence just after the nick of time has passed, and the two arch-enemies share a pleasant cab ride.

Holmes confesses to Moriarty he’d like to extract his brain and donate it to science. Moriarty takes this rather well and in turn confesses to Holmes that he’s getting bored of life as a master criminal – he’s going to commit one more really big crime, so audacious and shocking that its success will destroy Holmes, and then retire to spend more time with his algebra.

And so the stage is set – however, and I’m by no means the first to point this out, at this point the structure of the film turns out to have a serious flaw in it. Moriarty’s plan, which is as fiendishly clever as his rep would lead one to expect, is to carry out a relatively dull crime (stealing the crown jewels – see what I mean about the Sherlock connections?), having first ensured that Holmes is looking the way by throwing a really macabre and weird mystery into his lap.

It’s this story that takes up the bulk of the film, and it concerns Ida Lupino as a troubled young woman, her possibly-dodgy lawyer fiance, lucky chinchilla feet, Andean funeral chants and a bolas-wielding Inca gaucho hitman with a club foot. Although original to the play this movie is based on (written by William Gillette, the first Sherlock to wear a deerstalker), this plot is authentically Doylean in both its atmosphere and many of its details.

On the other hand, we’re always aware that it’s nothing more than a very intricate blind contrived by Moriarty and as a result it never completely engrosses. Holmes, obviously, also figures this out, but quite how – other than because the script requires it – is never made clear. The whole climax of the film has a slightly rushed and perfunctory air about it, which is shame given how lavishly solidly its opening section is.

But never mind, there is much to enjoy here – Basil Rathbone’s dynamic, rather genial Detective, Nigel Bruce’s pompous and slightly petulant but still rather endearing Watson, and George Zucco’s silkily sinister Moriarty. Moriarty is revealed to have a touch of the green fingers on this appearance, which somehow doesn’t feel quite right, but it’s hardly a major element.

One serious plot-hole doesn’t get mentioned – the bizarre death Moriarty arranges as a distraction for Holmes is, apparently, eerily similar to one which occurred ten years previously. Now, does this just mean Moriarty really plans ahead? Or does he just keep up with the True Crime section of his local bookshop, where he read about this crime and figured out how to replicate it? The other alternative is for him to borrow HG Wells’ time machine and pop back to do it himself – not quite as implausible as it sounds, given that the film’s most off-the-wall moment has a heavily disguised Basil Rathbone performing a high-energy song-and-dance version of ‘I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside’ (for no reason required by the plot), a song not written until 1907.

Different people want different things from their Holmes adaptations, whether that means painstaking accuracy to the canon, scintillating plotting and dialogue, or broad character comedy and visual pyrotechnics. The virtues of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes lie in its broadly faithful performances and characterisations, its convincing period setting, the atmosphere Werker creates, and its breezy pace. There have been much bigger and more colourful Sherlock Holmes movies, but few which have combined fun with fidelity with quite such success.

Gina Carano (a former mixed martial arts fighter, ex-American Gladiator, and pretty much the textbook definition of a strapping lass) plays Mallory, a delicate young flower of womanhood who we first meet going into a diner in upstate New York. Here she meets Aaron (Channing Tatum), a young man of her acquaintance. After Aaron is ungallant enough to smash a cup of coffee over her head and pull a gun on her, Mallory wastes no time in beating him half to death and leaving in the car of another patron, to whom she explains The Story So Far.

Mallory is, of course, an ex-marine specialising in high-risk covert operations – a mercenary, on the books of Kenneth (Ewan McGregor), her ex-lover. After returning from a mission in Barcelona, and on the verge of quitting the company, Kenneth persuades Mallory to take on – oh ho ho! – one last job. She is to masquerade as the wife of MI6 agent Paul (Michael Fassbender) while he investigates a dubious chap in Dublin. However, it becomes apparent that Mallory has been told a pack of lies, and somebody wants her dead…

When I first saw the trailer for Haywire – tough but comely female lead, heavy action and martial arts content, dubiously twisty-looking plot, lashings of style – my reaction was ‘Crikey, Luc Besson’s really rushed his new movie out,’ so similar to the likes of Nikita, Leon, and Colombiana did it appear. The appearance of Steven Soderbergh’s name at the end rather discombobulated me. But why shouldn’t Soderbergh give us his take on an action movie? He’s done practically everything else.

And yet, there’s a sense in which the highest compliment I can pay Haywire is that it’s exactly like a Besson movie, stylish and exciting, but stripped of all the usual excess and with a startling infusion of taste and restraint added to the mix. Not to mention a very distinguished cast – in addition to McGregor, Tatum, and Fassbender, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas and Bill Paxton also show up and do their usual reliable work.

One gets the sense that this gallimaufrey of talent may have been recruited to make up for a perceived weakness in Carano as a leading lady. Given that she was allegedly recruited after one of the Soderberghs saw her fighting on TV, this would not come as a surprise – I’m reminded of the bet one Hollywood producer made his golf partner that he could make the world’s least likely person a major star, with the result being the career of Steven Seagal – but to be fair to her Gina Carano acquits herself perfectly acceptably.

That said, the script is carefully written so that Carano has the minimum to do acting-wise – Mallory’s not the most demonstrative of individuals – and gets the maximum chance to let rip in the action sequences. Just running down the street Carano looks unstoppable, but in the fight scenes she is simply astounding. Haywire almost completely avoids the martial arts movie cliches – hero takes on twelve people in a garage, hero fights giant, hero fights lead henchman – in favour of a series of one-on-one fights between its lead and proper Hollywood A-listers. In terms of realistic action, these are exemplary in every way: the sequence in which Carano and Fassbender kick the living crap out of each other at some length in a Dublin hotel room is one of the most visceral, exciting movie fights I’ve ever seen.

I suppose one could make the criticism that Mallory Kane falls victim to the usual problem afflicting action heroines, in that her characterisation doesn’t extend much beyond ‘man with breasts’ in any positive sense. Certainly, working with a less talented director, Carano as a screen presence could become as clunky a cipher as Van Damme or Seagal, which may be an issue if her career has any longevity.

To be honest the film does a good job of walking the tightrope between working on a cinematic level and simply staying realistic. One friend of mine didn’t like it, saying it was boring, for this reason. And the action is a little thinner on the ground than in some movies of this ilk. You really have to stay with the plot and trust that everything will be explained come the end, which it is – but on the other hand, just when most action movies would start building to a riotously implausible climax, Haywire resolves its story in a much simpler and unexpectedly low-key (but still satisfying) way.

This really didn’t bother me – Haywire is an immaculately made and pleasingly bare-boned action movie. It’s the kind of thing Soderbergh knocks out on a lazy afternoon, managing to surpass genre specialists in the process. I thoroughly enjoyed it, although this was largely due to the Gina Carano-beats-up-famous-actors schtick. My literary advisor and I thought this was a brilliant idea and within five minutes of leaving the theatre had drawn up our own list of people we wanted to see her pound into the earth in the sequel: Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Orlando Bloom, Ryan Reynolds… There’s a lot of potential here. Notable careers have been built on considerably less, and I’ll be very interested to see if Gina Carano can live up to the promise she shows so devastatingly here.

It’s always interesting to go to a new pub, although this may turn out to be a singular pleasure as sheer numbers mean that the group has outgrown this particular boozer and we’re all off to a place I’ve been to a few times as of the next get-together. The Mighty Uke screening seems to have had a catalysing effect inasmuch I wasn’t the only newcomer there.

All in all I think nearly twenty people turned up wielding a variety of different uke makes and models; I was initially worried that I’d be the only one packing plastic but a few other Makalas were also present. I’m pretty sure I was the only lefty there, though.

The meeting was graced by the presence of the prime mover of another local uke group who proceeded to run through the basics of the instrument and then half-a-dozen songs. This format seemed to be very popular with the assembled ukers and I must confess I can’t think of a better one with which to replace it. But I must confess to being slightly ambivalent about the experience.

Firstly – and let’s get this out of the way – I decided not to join in with the singing. This was partly due to the fact that I’d only just met these people and didn’t want to get chucked out on the first night, but also the reality of playing as part of a group felt completely different to playing alone, and was actually rather more challenging. On the one hand going off the rhythm or flubbing a chord change wasn’t that big a deal as the noise from everyone else covered it up, but on the other hand I was still aware of it and it was a little disconcerting to know I was making so many mistakes.

The other major thing was that, as a largely autodidact uker, I’m used to coming up with my own (probably rather eccentric) strums to suit the different songs I tackle – well, they’re derived from the books I have, but I inevitably end up spinning them a bit. At the group we played six rather diverse tunes, all of them using the same strum (Swiss Army or calypso or whatever you want to call it). This was completely different to what I was used to.

Another disconcerting issue was the fact that my uke seemed to be losing its tuning every five minutes, which isn’t like it at all. Rastamouse, my advisor on all things musical, has suggested that I may be strumming harder or for longer periods, which may explain this phenomenon. Possibly the vibrations from nearly two dozen massed ukes may have been having an effect as well. Not sure. Not really a big deal as long as I remember to pack my tuner I suppose.

So yes, I am going again, although I haven’t put nearly as much uke time in recently as I did in December. Partly this is because other stuff has been going on rather a lot: trips to the cinema, stuff to do with the diploma, and so on. I used to squeeze in ten or fifteen minutes late-night practice at the end of a busy day but the young woman in the garret adjoining mine has made it very clear through the medium of banging angrily on our shared wall that she would rather I didn’t.

(Knowing someone can actually hear me fooling around on the thing has sort of made me a bit reluctant to practice at all, if we’re honest. Nevertheless all it takes is a little casual strumming and a quick rattle through House of the Rising Sun or Edelweiss or When I’m Cleaning Windows and I’m as keen on the uke as ever.)

So we shall see: firstly how the uke group gets on in its new environs (changes in my workload mean I won’t be able to stay until the end of the meeting this week, but that can’t be helped), and then about finding regular practice time at a reasonable hour of the evening. The omens are not that great, but such are the realities of diploma year I suppose.

Respected well both here and o’er the pond

An Oscar did he get for Schindler’s List

He’s also the new bad guy in James Bond.

Director now bold Ralphie has become -

A thing’s more worth the doing if it’s hard! -

A complex tale his debut offering:

He’s giving us his vision of the Bard.

No well-known play he’s gone for, no sirree

But obscure Roman saga, Coriolanus

And old Will Shakespeare’s versing’s kept intact

Which must have been a right pain in the neck.

So hence my tribute in this verse that’s blank

The key thing to it (and this I must stress)

Is in the correct placement of the stre… er, beats

At least irregular rhyming is allowed.

(Although this conceit’s wearing rather thin -

I think the time has come to pack it in.)

Oh, be quiet: it’s not like you’re having to pay for this, is it? Yes, it’s the new adaptation of Coriolanus, directed by and starring Ralph ‘Little Sunbeam’ Fiennes. (Rather mind-bogglingly, the script is credited to one John Logan, although some Shakespeare guy gets an ‘original material’ nod.) Now, I know this will come as a shock to regular readers, but there are limits to my erudition and this is not one of the plays with which I am terribly familiar. As a result I recruited an expert in literature to accompany me to the cinema, although the fact that his first words of wisdom on the play were ‘It’s a bit like 300‘ led me to worry I wasn’t paying enough attention when it came to the ancillary staff situation. Hey ho.

Fiennesy plays Caius Martius, respected and feared general in the service of the Roman Republic. The Volscians, old enemies of Rome, are playing up under the command of their military leader Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler – hey, what do you know! He was right!). The Romans come off better in the clash, though the personal feud of the two generals is unresolved.

On his return to Rome, he is gifted with the honorary name Coriolanus and, as is customary and expected (we’ll come back to this), proceeds towards the distinguished position of Consul, a source of much pride to his frankly scary mother (Vanessa Redgrave). However, while a brilliant soldier, Coriolanus is fatally lacking in the common touch and any kind of political sensitivity. His domestic enemies find it very easy to turn the population against him, with dire consequences for both countries and individuals…

Of necessity, any outline of Shakespeare’s plot wholly omits exactly how Fiennes chooses to present it. This is by far the most striking thing about it – rather in the same way that Ian McKellen’s Richard III movie took place in a 1930s Europe falling under the sway of Fascism, so Fiennes’ Coriolanus is contextualised in a world like the Balkans of the early 90s: bloody, senseless fighting; APCs rolling through bleak European cities; murky, self-interested politicking. This seems entirely appropriate for a film which takes as its theme the chaos which ensues when war and politics intersect.

That said, the text has a wider focus to it, and one which may possibly surprise people with only a passing familiarity with Shakespeare. This is a startlingly cynical film – the patrician class are scourged for their contempt and disdain for the wider population, but the public themselves are implicitly depicted as foolish sheep for allowing themselves to be so easily manipulated. Hardly any of the characters are presented in a remotely positive light, with the possible exception of Menenius (Brian Cox), one of Coriolanus’ political allies.

Cox, Fiennes, and Butler are just the most prominent members of an extremely strong cast, which also includes Jessica Chastain, James Nesbitt, Jon Snow, and, most prominently, Vanessa Redgrave as Coriolanus’ mum. Redgrave in particular is electrifying as a domineering, deeply controlling woman who is clearly the source of all that is both good and bad in her son’s character. Fiennes himself gives a striking central turn – he’s terrifying as Coriolanus the soldier, then chilling later on as the man falls from grace. That said, I don’t feel he ever quite gets to the heart of the character in terms of his pride and arrogance – Coriolanus the politician just comes across as awkward and a bit distant, rather than someone temperamentally unsuited to this course.

Another problem with the film is that, inevitably, the scissors have come out and much material has been excised (though my literary consultant distinctly muttered ‘I don’t remember that bit in the text’ at one point). Amongst the stuff that’s gone, alas, is whatever explanation is given for Coriolanus’s decision to become Consul. He seems fundamentally unsuited to the job and doesn’t actually seem to want it, so why’s he bothering? Is it just the done Roman thing? Is he being pushed into it by his mum? It’s central to the plot, so we really need to know why it’s happening.

Oh well – in many ways this is a very impressive film, and one that really works as a film in its own right most of the way through (although, one climactic scene has rather too much of a whiff of the Stratford stage about it in the way it’s staged). The acting is fantastic, the story is about as easy to follow as obscure Shakespeare play movie adaptations get (hmm, mayhaps damning with faint praise there), and it’s visually very interesting. If it doesn’t offer any easy answers to the questions it raises about what happens when the boundaries between soldiers and politicians blur, that’s perhaps because it would be fatuous to do so. I can’t honestly believe Coriolanus will wholeheartedly convert anyone going to see it with no prior knowledge of the play, but people with a better education than mine will probably find it a very rewarding experience.

There once was a soldier named Caius,

Lambasted for anti-prole bias.

When kicked out of town

He said with a frown

‘I suppose this stuff’s just sent to try us.’

Machete, as you may or may not know, originated as one of the spoof trailers that accompanied the two Grindhouse movies on their various releases (a complex story). It apparently received such a positive response (I must admit I probably enjoyed it rather more than Planet Terror, the film it was accompanying) that a full movie was duly made. As such, this film is arguably a textbook definition of being an extended joke.

The meandering and not especially coherent plot concerns the exploits of a Mexican ex-cop known as Machete due to his love of sharp objects (and also of hitting people with them). He is played (well, this is a bit of an issue, which we will return to) by Danny Trejo, a leather-faced performer who has carved out a bit of a niche for himself as convicts and lowlives on movies and TV. Machete is illegally working as a labourer in Texas when he is hired to assassinate John McLaughlin (Robert de Niro – yes, that Robert de Niro), a senator whose support mainly comes from his toxically anti-Mexican rhetoric – he also associates with a gang of murderous vigilantes led by Von Jackson (Don Johnson – yes, that Don Johnson).

Accepting mainly so he can pass his fee on to an underground network for the betterment of Mexican illegals run by Lus (the divine and radiant Michelle Rodriguez), Machete sets out to kill the senator – but rapidly discovers he’s been set up by McLaughlin’s aide (Jeff Fahey), intent on creating sympathy for the senator’s views and drumming up anti-Mexican sentiment. Needless to say, our man embarks on a blood-splattered revenge against those who have ruthlessly betrayed him.

(And I haven’t even mentioned Jessica Alba as a government agent, Steven Seagal (yes, that Steven Seagal) as a drug baron, or Lindsay Lohan (yes, that Lindsay Lohan) who wanders through the final section of the film as a gun-toting nun. It’s not that the plot is especially complex – far from it – it’s just utterly all over the place.)

Well, you know, I sat down to watch Machete with reasonable expectations, willing to cut it some slack – Robert Rodriguez is, if nothing else, a consistent film-maker, I’ll watch anything with Michelle Rodriguez in it, and Danny Trejo has certainly got presence. I was hoping for a moderately OTT action movie pastiche that didn’t take itself too seriously. The problem I have with Machete is that it’s actually… well I’m not really sure what it’s supposed to be, and I suspect some of the people involved don’t know either.

Spoof, satire, parody, broad comedy, genuine exploitation (perhaps in this case that should be Mexploitation) movie: the film lurches back and forth across genre boundaries almost at random, its intelligence level going up and down wildly in the process. Particularly baffling is all the stuff about the rights of Mexican illegals in the USA – while I understand this parallels the political dimension of blaxploitation films of the 70s, it’s not in itself particularly funny if it’s here as a parody, and if it’s seriously meant then it’s horribly trivialised by its inclusion in such a determinedly stupid film (‘the most absurd thing I’ve ever read’ was the verdict of one major actor who declined to participate).

That said, some of the Mexican jokes are quite amusing – there’s a running gag where Machete infiltrates the bad guy’s house simply by pretending to be the gardener, and later on beats up a bevy of henchmen using horticultural equipment – even if the climax (our hero raises an army of illegal labourers to battle the forces of evil, and they all turn up waving the accoutrements of their jobs) is again too silly to be genuinely funny. Basically, as a comedy, Machete is only consistently amusing if you subscribe to an oh-ho-ho-isn’t-this-just-so-intentionally-crap? sensibility, and as anything else it’s undermined by the presence of all these laboured attempts at humour.

Compared to this, the film’s problems in the acting department are relatively small beer, but – come on, this is a movie with Danny Trejo in the lead role, which if nothing else demonstrates that presence and charisma are not the same thing. On the strength of this outing Trejo’s range as an actor runs from A to very nearly the far end of A. It’s like making a movie with Chewbacca playing the lead – Trejo just lumbers around making noises and everyone else either tries to copy his style or wildly overacts in an attempt to compensate for it. Almost all the other performances are paralytically lousy, one way or another, which is especially shocking given some of the people Robert Rodriguez has (God knows how) assembled.

Not that long ago, Robert de Niro was routinely being hailed as the greatest screen actor of his generation – one has to wonder what happened, given that his late-period work seems to mostly consist of deeply underwhelming extended cameos in things like this and Killer Elite. Never mind being acted off the screen by Jason Statham, here de Niro is outperformed by, of all people, Steven Seagal. Steven Seagal! To be fair, the world’s least agile martial arts star is on rather good, self-parodying form here.

When Steven Seagal’s acting is one of the best things about a movie you know you’ve slipped a long way off the map of cinematic excellence. Still, neither that nor Michelle Rodriguez kicking ass in a bikini top were quite enough to redeem the movie. At the end of Planet Terror I told anyone who’d listen that it’s all too easy to make a bad film by accident, and plenty of people do every year, and so for a film-maker like Robert Rodriguez to make a bad film intentionally felt like a terrible squandering of both time and talent. I feel exactly the same about Machete, except perhaps even moreso. Of course, I am in the minority, as usual: financing for the two sequels we’re threatened with promised at the end of this film has apparently already been secured, and production is only waiting on Rodriguez to finish writing the scripts. Don’t rush on my account, Bob.

Nevertheless, proper, sensible, non-stereoscoped revivals continue to take place, which is how I was able to watch the restored version of Orson Welles’ 1958 movie Touch of Evil. Given that the director also plays a major acting role, it may, of course, simply be the case that the 3D technology does not yet exist which is capable of handling Welles’ – er – heroic physique, but the reason is insignificant compared to the result.

The plot runs thusly: night in a small town on the US-Mexican border is shattered when a car bomb kills a local American businessman and his girlfriend. On the scene coincidentally is Mexican government agent Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston, Hispanicked up for the part) and his new bride (Janet Leigh). Worried about the diplomatic implications should a Mexican have murdered an American, Vargas involves himself in the case, despite the fact he’s already mixed up in the prosecution of a local crime family.

This puts Vargas in the path of the local law, personified by Hank Quinlan (Welles), something with severe consequences for both men. Vargas quickly realises that Quinlan will go to any lengths to punish the guilty – and if this extends to roughing up suspects and planting evidence, so be it. The Mexican resolves to expose Quinlan’s methods, not realising that an alliance between his target and his own enemies may put not just him but also his wife in danger…

A summary of the plot does little to explain quite why Touch of Evil has become such a revered movie, and one of the two or three cornerstones on which Orson Welles’ legend rests. The story itself is not that special, but then if this film is remarkable it is not for the tale but the manner of its telling. Welles makes his ambitions clear from the very beginning of the film, with its justly famous, insanely complex three minute shot, in which the camera travels the length of the town as it tracks the progress of the car carrying the bomb. It’s an ostentatiously brilliant flourish – nothing else in the movie quite matches it for sheer verve, but it makes it clear that this is not going to be a run-of-the-mill production.

The camerawork in this movie is almost absurdly accomplished simply on a technical level, but what really makes an impact is the atmosphere that Welles conjures up – the film takes place in a filthy, sweaty, half-lit world of guilty comprises and dirty secrets, with the purity of classic noir becoming stained by the outriders of a new and more frantic culture – biker gangs, rock ‘n’ roll and marijuana are beginning to supplant hoodlums, jazz and cheap booze.

Quinlan is one of cinema’s great monsters: a shabby, obese, brutal racist – but never an inhuman one. Hints of a backstory suggest how this man came to be as he is, and while never sympathetic he is not quite without virtue – if he has abused his power it is not for personal ends, but in the pursuit of what he sees as his duty. If there is any real evil in Quinlan, then it is only a minor element of who he is – a touch of evil, but no more.

As both director and actor, Orson Welles dominates this movie whether on the screen or off it – his arrival as Quinlan may not be as iconic as his first appearance as Harry Lime in The Third Man, but at the screening I attended it was greeted by soft chuckling throughout the audience: this was the man we had come to see. Of course, he does not disappoint, even if his performance at times borders on being a little too mannered. As ever, one is left infuriated by both the quixotic nature of his vast talents and the shortsightedness of Hollywood in making so little use of them.

It has become something of a running joke that Charlton Heston makes an unlikely Mexican, but, oddly, this suits the movie rather well. The star is incongruous in the part, but then again everything that Heston always embodied – a kind of muscular conviction and self-assurance – is equally out of place in the world of the movie. Some of the film’s most electric moments come from the clash between Heston’s monolithic certitude and the intangible ambiguities that always seem to swirl around Welles in his greatest moments.

Elsewhere in the cast, Janet Leigh starts well but after a while simply has very little to do beyond lie around in a stupor – she has virtually nothing to do following a sequence where she checks into a remote motel with a twitchy weirdo in charge (Leigh’s career in the late 50s involved quite a lot of this sort of thing). The performances of the rest of the cast, with the exception of a luminous Marlene Dietrich as Quinlan’s old flame, are really presenting grotesques of various kinds. The only performance which really oversteps the mark is that of Dennis Weaver as the motel nightman: he really is a bit too OTT by modern standards and unintentionally funny as a result.

But, then again, Touch of Evil is really all about presenting a tale of a clash between moral idealism and corruption in an irresistibly exaggerated style – and while Heston may be victorious at the conclusion of the story, one gets no sense that he and Leigh have done anything to amend the wider world in which they live; they are the aberrations, not Quinlan. Even then, the film is too extravagantly stylish and too magisterially made to really feel downbeat. Welles’ great achievement in Touch of Evil is to transform the crime melodrama into the cinematic equivalent of grand opera – but then again, one would surely expect no less of a man who was larger-than-life himself in almost every respect.

Anyway, as the ongoing adventures of a fiercely intelligent, asexual hero temporarily pause with the central character forced to fake his own death as a consequence of an unexpected rise in his profile, let’s look back at the three episodes.

Thinking about this piece, my initial response to A Scandal in Belgravia was that this was one of those practically perfect pieces of art that are actually quite difficult to review without just gushing. Then I remembered beyond all the usual Moffat verbal and narrative pyrotechnics, to the remarkable plunge into pathos and genuine emotion of the second half of the episode. The bit that sticks with me is of Benedict Cumberbatch and Mark Gatiss together outside the morgue, a brilliant written and underplayed scene, with – for me – Gatiss never better: ‘There’s a limit to how much damage you can do.’

I’m not such a dyed-in-the-wool Sherlockian as to venerate Irene Adler as much as some do (much grumbling in some circles, I understand, concerning the handling of the character in Game of Shadows), but I thought the Sherlock version was very engagingly written and played. Some elements of the plot rattled by just a bit too fast to completely keep track of but for me this remains, probably, the best episode of the six so far.

I suspect it was inevitable that Mark Gatiss would demand the rights to the Sherlock version of the most famous Conan Doyle story of them all, and The Hounds of Baskerville turned out to be very characteristic. For the first time, the series had the problem of dealing with a plot which is well known – there are people who haven’t a clue about the plots of any of the short stories in the canon, but who are familiar with the story of Hound from one of the other umpteen versions that have already been made. In some ways this was a more faithful episode than some others, in terms of character names, but more energetically free in many respects, as well as being fun and intelligent. I must confess to guessing a) the nature of the hound’s dreadful influence and b) the identity of the villain, if not his motivation, but these are fairly small quibbles.

And so to The Reichenbach Fall, waltzing delicately through the same narrative territory as Game of Shadows. Certainly Sherlock‘s enthusiastically deranged Moriarty is some considerable distance from Doyle’s character, an interesting choice given that Jared Harris’s very faithful interpretation is, if anything, just as effective. That said, Andrew Scott was terrific in the role, just as good in his own way as Harris.

This is the best thing I’ve seen from the pen of Steve Thompson, but having said that this is the kind of story I can imagine myself returning to in future and going ‘Haaaaang on a minute…’ about. Viewing it the first time, the rush and surprise of it do a very good job of papering over the holes in the narrative, but I don’t think that’ll hold up for subsequent viewings. On the other hand, the handling of Sherlock’s celebrity was intelligent and depressingly believeable.

Looking back, I enjoyed the nod to Moriarty’s stealing-the-crown-jewels caper from the 1939 Basil Rathbone movie. And, on a similar note, I wonder how many non-obsessives spotted the presence of the 92-year-old Douglas Wilmer in a cameo role, Wilmer having played Holmes for the BBC nearly 50 years ago? In itself a sobering reminder of how few notable Sherlocks of years gone by are still with us.

Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes remains a going concern, of course, but the writers really were in a corner when it came to the climax of the series. The real final problem, of course, is that everyone knows that Holmes dies at the end of the original story – but also that he rises from the dead some time later! How to achieve the proper emotional impact without killing the character off for real?

Well, they managed to come up with a suitably shocking climax, but the jury is surely still out on the manner of Holmes’s resurrection. The danger was that his death wouldn’t convince – the problem turned out to be that it was just too believable! Without even the hint of an explanation (not even the tiniest trace of a miniaturised aqualung or its equivalent), his inexplicable survival looked ominously contrived.

Still, better that than the end of what’s surely a contender for drama series of the year (and January only just half over). Given the rocketing profiles of Cumberbatch and Freeman, it’d take a brave person to predict when the series will be back, but surely no-one would not expect it to be worth the wait.