What he said:

“There are some films that arrive here from the international festival circuit almost incandescent with self-importance. They hover into the cinema in a kind of floating trance at how challenging and moving they are. ... One such is Babel, the exasperatingly conceited new film from Alejandro González Iñárritu. It is well acted and handsomely photographed, but still extraordinarily overpraised and overblown, a middlebrow piece of near-nonsense: the kind of self-conscious arthouse cinema that is custom-tailored and machine-tooled for the dinner-party demographic. The script is contrived, shallow, unconvincing and rendered absurd and almost meaningless by a plot naivety that is impossible to ignore once its full magnitude dawns on you.”

The intimacy with which Iraq in Fragments portrays its subjects is undoubtedly remarkable, given that it was shot in a warzone. There are some striking images, too, particularly in the final “fragment”, Kurdish Spring. But for the most part the result is dissatisfyingly impressionistic.

(Contains spoilers.)

This is the second film I’ve seen in recent months whose climax touches on the Christianization of “primitive” peoples whose traditional social frameworks are being destroyed by environmental change – but beyond their basic premise the two movies couldn’t be more different. The Journals of Knud Rasmussen depicted its protagonists’ journey from shamanism to Christianity with sensitivity and tact; Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto tackles similar themes with all the blunt force of the axes his pseudo-Mayans wield on each other with increasingly monotonous regularity.

Pseudo-Mayans because, as with The Passion of the Christ (which I haven’t seen), Gibson’s deployment of authentic language and locations obscures the liberties taken with historical accuracy. As has been hashed out elsewhere, Apocalypto compresses several hundred years of Mayan civilization into the same milieu and throws in some Aztec motifs to boot, while failing to pay even lip service to the cultural, scientific or social achievements of either the rural or urban Amerindians.

Much of this inaccuracy can be forgiven in the name of artistic license, but Apocalypto seems in part to be an exculpation of Europeans in Central America, starting with its opening quote: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” Certainly Mayan civilization had tumbled far from its peak by the time the conquistadors arrived, but some of the motifs in Gibson’s film suggest a questionable reframing of the Europeans’ arrival as a doomed attempt at salvation, rather than a largely remorseless process of colonisation.

For example, we see a young girl suffering from smallpox – a disease that Amerindians first contracted from Europeans. It is hard to see how such an obvious anachronism could have accidentally survived the editing process; but if it is deliberate, it would seem to be blatantly revisionist. The hero’s journey, too, is suggestive: having survived a gruelling ordeal (seemingly another Gibson motif) his skin is saved – quite literally! – by a succession of miracles: an eclipse (yawn), a jaguar, a snake, a waterfall.

Are these sent from God, or the spirits of the jungle? That question goes unanswered, since it is Jaguar Paw’s decision to become predator, rather than prey, which turns around his fortunes. (Mind you, God does help those who help themselves.) Ultimately, he turns his back on the landing missionaries to return to the animist forest: even the noblest of the savages is ultimately doomed. It’s not an unsympathetic decision: after all Jagar Paw has been through, it’s hardly surprising that he doesn’t trust his fate to another group of outsiders.

The consequences of Godlessness are drawn more explicitly in the broader milieu. The good guys are live in something akin to a state of grace (albeit one in which bawdy humour is much appreciated); the baddies are the urbanites whose implausibly cruel society appears to comprise little more than a vast machine for enslaving and sacrificing legions of innocents. It’s hard to escape the message that heathens just can’t assemble a half-decent civilisation without it turning into a death cult. Given that the film is partly an allegory for our own times, the moral – and the presumed remedy for our social ills – is clear.

Does any of this really matter? After all, nobody really expects historical accuracy from Hollywood, do they? Well, no – although I’d argue that this lack of expectation itself suggests worrying complacency. But Apocalypto is not, in any case, a Hollywood movie in many respects. Mel Gibson bankrolled and co-wrote as well as directing it, making it an uniquely personal creation – and one that has more in common with the works of Werner Herzog than Tom Cruise.

Gibson has his strengths as an auteur: as Peter Bradshaw observes, it’s hard to see how such a “mad and virile” film could have been made through the usual channels. Apocalypto might be light on plot and characterisation, but it’s muscular, energetic and visually stunning. (It’s refreshing to think that other squillionaire and hopefully non-Scientologist stars might choose analogously risky vehicles in the future.)

But Bradshaw also comments on the difficulty of assessing Apocalypto without being swayed by Gibson’s personal, but well-publicized, beliefs and public (mis)behaviour. He’s a professional, so he manages. I’m not: and I can’t be well satisfied by any film whose context and content both make me so consciously second-guess its creator’s motives.

I bought these in – of all places – Lakeland in Bluewater Shopping Centre, whose stock in trade is kitchen gadgetry along the line of grapefruit spoons and bagel slicers. The idea is that you pop them in the bottom of a champagne glass, where they open up and bubbles stream off them. Rather to my surprise, they actually worked exactly as promised (and turned the champagne a lovely purple colour). You can also eat the flowers, which the jar claimed tasted “of rhubarb and raspberry”, although a cynic might argue that they taste mostly of the preserving syrup. Still, “a delightful surprise for your guests”, as Good Housekeeping might have said circa 1965.

Saw the first two episodes of this on the big screen at the NFT in September. Which makes the small-screen version seem … cramped. And I had to borrow episode three on video from a friend. And then my video recorder broke …

(Oh yes: So far I’m with the consensus that says Ruth Wilson is superb as Jane, Toby Stephens a bit too jovial as Rochester.)

Specifically, a giant puffball fried in breadcrumbs and served with Parma ham, soft-boiled eggs and new potatoes. Interesting texture – the closest thing would probably be one of the stickier variants of tofu – and a fairly strong mushroom flavour. Apparently a single giant puffball can contain seven trillion spores, which makes me feel a little guilty, as though eating it was an act of mycological genocide. But not that guilty.

I tend to find dystopian science fiction disappointing. All too often, it transpires that a single catastrophic failure – political, environmental or military – has resulted in Doom and, I dunno, I think I’m just too bullish on human ingenuity and resilience to find that convincing. People seem to have always thought that the world was going to hell in a handbasket, even as many objective measures of human wellbeing – infant mortality and literacy, for example – have steadily improved. I don’t believe progress can be derailed that easily.

The few dystopian fictions that I really admire – the usualsuspects, basically – are less attempts at prediction, more allegorical warnings of present-day ills. But that approach is fraught with difficulty, too: I find ham-fisted, half-baked morality tales even more tedious than pointlessly pessimistic apocalypses. Even when allegories are done well, a dystopian approach can be overkill: it’s a cinematic analogue of Godwin’s Law. I already understand that prejudice/fascism/pollution/cyborg killing machines are bad, m’kay?

And since I’m not the kind of guy who likes to sit in his bomb shelter fondling small arms and counting cans of sweetcorn, I’m not particularly interested in watching civilization disintegrate for the sake of it. A post-apocalyptic landscape can make a decent backdrop for a story, but rarely captures my interest in its own right. It’s not enough that the world should end: it has to end in an interesting way. The first example that leaps to mind is Brian Vaughn’s Y: The Last Man, in which the world doesn’t actually end, but civilization certainly stumbles a bit.

Like Vaughan’s comic, Children of Men postulates a future in which a single social element has been mysteriously removed: in Y it’s men; in Children, it’s, well, children. This, of course, sets up an obvious plot in which the first pregnancy in eighteen years becomes the target of warring factions, and the expectant mother has to be shepherded to safety by a conflicted everyman. But since Alfonso Cuarón’s adaptation of PD James’ novel is neither didactic nor simplistic, there’s both more and less going on than that.

More, because the infertility pandemic is only one of the ills that have beset humanity: totalitarianism, armed conflict and environmental collapse are all suggested as contributors to the film’s version of the Grim Meathook Future. And it’s a startling believable vision, thanks to richly textured set design and convincing performances – as well as distinctly British locales that helped me out a lot in suspending my disbelief. I’m still not wholly convinced by the world it depicts, but it’s close enough to be scary. And it is very scary.

Less, because – like much of my favoured fiction these days – Children of Men offers few clues or answers. There’s no explanation for the childlessness, or for the miraculous pregnancy – this isn’t the kind of apocalyptic thriller in which the race is on to identify a magically curative antibody. The plot twists and turns a little, but the narrative’s force really comes from the cinematography and insistent pace. Even the ending is inconclusive: all the viewer is left with is hope. And that, more than all the careful world-building, is what makes Children of Men enduringly memorable.

It’s somewhat ironic that a book which celebrates literature should itself be so unliterary. There are any number of holes you could pick in Fforde’s writing style, but that would rather miss the point: this book’s appeal lies in its frenzied innovation, not in its wordsmithing, character development or even its episodic and somewhat incoherent plot.

I’m curious as to whether Fforde keeps the ideas coming later in the series, or whether having established his world he simply runs his stories through it. Not curious enough to read the next one particularly soon, though.

I wouldn’t normally be much interested in seeing the movie version of a TV show – I find they’re usually too much of a good thing – but I was attracted by the premise of Apocalypse: Royston Vasey’s cast of freaks, creeps and weirdos break the fourth wall, crossing over from their fictional universe to “ours”. Their mission: to persuade the League of Gentlemen, their creators, to continue to write about them, thus averting the apocalypse of the title. As a sucker for all things metafictional, that was enough to draw me in, but the film turned out to be a bit of a curate’s egg.

The plot requires the Roystonites to be more than one-dimensional caricatures – but in making them more sympathetic, it also makes them less sinister. Where the TV series frequently curdled the blood, the movie rarely does more than slightly turn the stomach. There’s nothing particularly novel about the handling of the metafictional element, either: a film-within-a-film that doesn’t really add much, the portrayal of the comedians as self-obsessed (seemingly obligatory these days) and a mildly amusing riff about free will. Apocalyptic it may be; definitive, it’s not.

Peter: I don’t like my job, and, uh, I don’t think I’m gonna go anymore.

Joanna: You’re just not gonna go?

Peter: Yeah.

Joanna: Won’t you get fired?

Peter: I don’t know, but I really don’t like it, and, uh, I’m not gonna go.

Joanna: So you’re gonna quit?

Peter: Nuh-uh. Not really. Uh… I’m just gonna stop going.