SPECTRE (2015)

"Information is all, is it not?"" 

Ok, perhaps this isn't quite as good as its predecessor, but that's a very high bar, and this is nevertheless a fine Bond film. And a highly satisfying payoff to all the long-running plot threads that have been playing out since Casino Royale. Needless to say... spoilers!

It's a huge thrill to see Bond, gone just rogue enough, chasing all the pre-existing clues to an organisation that was always going to be SPECTRE, and an end of level boss, played superbly as always by Christoph Waltz, who was always going to be Ernst Stavro Blofeld. The backstory is nice, though, with "Blofeld" being Bond;s childhood stepbrother who regards him as a "cuckoo". The fact that his mother's maiden name happens to be Blofeld does, admittedly, feel a little forced... but, dammit, rule of cool.

The set pieces are awesome, right from the start with the Day of the Dead in Mexico City, right through Bond's infiltration of the mysterious organisation's headquarters in Rome through to the final showdown with "Blofeld". Andrew Scott's secondary, bureaucratic baddie ("C"... yes, I get the allusion!) is fun. And there is, of course, a very real subtext to it all with us all merrily handing over our personal data to those evil, MAGA-loving tech bros. In the real world, sadly, there's no 007 to save us from our fate.

The ending is, with the very obvious difference that Madeleine gets to live, somewhat redolent of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, with Bond falling in love and choosing love over the job. But, of course, there's one more film of this era to go. If it's anywhere near as good as this, I can't wait.

The Lady in the Van (2015)

 "You wouldn't get Harold Pinter pushing a van down the street."

I remember reading, some decades ago, some mention of the tragic and eccentric Miss Mary Sheppard, as she certainly wasn't called, in the memoirs of Alan Bennett. rather more recently, we lost the superlative Maggie Smith. So it's high time that I saw, and blogged, this film.

Much though Alex Jennings is magnificent in totally inhabiting Alan Bennett while also giving us not merely an impression but an actual performance, Maggie Smith is indeed utterly incredible here, in a role that perfectly fits her talents- a humorous figure, yes, but one who will, by the film, come to evoke such pathos. Not exactly likeable- but endearing, nonetheless.

Yes, as befitting a script by Alan Bennett, this film is about so much. The very English timidity that can lead one to reluctantly allow an imperiously haughty homeless old lady to live in a van on one's property. How easily one can become a carer without really intending to, or realising it. That very English issue of class- Miss Sheppard is from loftier origins than the nevertheless Oxford educated Alan Bennett, son of a Leeds butcher, yet he is now a feted playwright living in fashionable Camden whereas she is homeless- plays out in all its nuances, most deliciously as Bennett's mother avoids contact with her son's unwanted guest because "With her being educated, I wouldn't know what to say."

This isn't a film for those who like action- very little, I suppose, happens, and even the mystery of Miss Sheppard's past is not over-emphasised. This is a quietly philosophical, meditative film that is, above all, about the ethics of using real peoples' lives for one's writing, and I for one found it most enjoyable.

Inside Out (2015)

 "Forget it, Jake. It's Cloudtown."

This is a film chosen not by myself but by Little Miss Llamastrangler. It's been a while since I've seen a Pixar film, and this one I's never seen before.

Yet I've never seen a Pixar film I didn't like, this one included. It's not necessarily a genre I'd usually seek out, but good films of any genre can be hugely enjoyable. I mean, I've even watched and blogged Grease...

I must admit... I'm a Brit of a certain age. So, with apologies to those who don't get the reference, I was very much reminded of the Numbskulls from The Beezer. But the concept was superb. On, on the surface it's about a littlre girl's anthropomorphised emotions, yes. But it's about the uncertainties of change, especially rocky ones, when one is growing up.

And it's also about the necessity of sadness, too. We know what Joy is for. Anger, Fear and Disgust protect us. But Sadness? It takes the whole film, more or less, to effectively drive home the lesson: we could all do with a bit of melancholy, sometimes.

We also have lots of little in-jokes from the grown-ups, a random supporting role from Kyle MacLachlan, no less, and some bloody brilliant imaginitive concepts. Not, then, the sort of film I'd often seek out, but very good stuff nonetheless.

Macbeth (2015)

"What's done cannot be undone..."

I consider myself a Shakespeare geek. I know all but a handful of his plays. I've read the sublime Macbeth several times, but have only ever seen it performed once: at Leicester in 1990 when I was far too young to appreciate what I was seeing. I was surprised, watching this film, that I know the play much better than I thought. Certainly enough to realise ths film is, well... underwhelming.

On paper it has a lot to recommend it. It's a fairly faithful adaptaton of one of Shakespeare's finest plays. It's a realistic evocation of 11th century Scotland (look, no kilts!) with authentic accents, a shockingly rare virtue which adds a lot and hides many faults elsewhere. It stars Michael Fassbender, a very good actor. The cinematography is bleakly artistic, with subdued colours and severely bleak locations.

And yet... this bleakness doesn't serve the play. Fassbender and Marion Cotillard are excellent but their performances seem to lack charisma here in ways they don't elsewhere- perhaps Justin Kurzel is not an actors' director? The gloriously poetical lines seem to be cancelled out at every turn by a crushing dullness that pervades everything.

The locations are haunting. The performances good and often excellent. The film beautifully shot almost if not wholly on location... yet I find myself yearning for a stagey old BBC 1970s style production with multiple cameras.This fim seems to please the critics, but it disappointed me.

Terminator Genisys (2015)

"Bite me!"

"That is a very immature response."

Ok, I started off resenting this film for its retconning earlier films, some of which I liked, and for Jason Clarke not being great as the future John Connor. And the first ten or fifteen minutes are seemingly just a version of the first film, as amended by its events:the beginning of the film hardly impresses. And yet it wins me over. Hugely.

Why? Simply put, it wears its timey-wimeyness lightly and has fun ith it and, most importantly, it has heart. And that's not something one would necessarily expect of a Terminator film.

The film starts to turn around as soon as the leather jacketed Arnie turns up,,, and kills his naked future doppelganger sent by Skynet. And we get a witty script where Arnie ("Pops") gets to insist that he is "old, not obsolete"- a delightful touch. And I love how Kyle Reese is sent back in  time to a 1984 which has already been changed by a Terminator being sent to kill Sarah Connor eleven years earlier. Interestingly, we never do get told who sent "pops" back.

Wonderfully, there's a constant theme of the helpless fatalism of living on  set path in a future that's already been written versus living in an unwritten future- and we get a happy ending, where Sarah and Kyle get to live and be happy together, and yet Sarah still has a kick-ass metal dad who will literally murder Kyle if he hurts her. As a father of a daughter, I find this the happiest possible ending. plus, we get a (bizarrely) American accented Matt Smith (credited as "Matthew") as Skynet. Best Terminator film since 1991, despite the cheeky recon.

The Hateful Eight (2015)

"They shot my nuts off!"

Wow. I know I tend to like Quentin Tarantino's films a lot. \but this, of the ones I've seen, which are most, this is his masterpiece.

Superficially, perhaps, it has many of Tarantino's tropes- his usual cast members; his signature sudden acts of graphic violence punctuating the narrative as if to shift the narrative from slow ad dialogue driven to fast and action-driven; the way he somehow makes everything seem, somehow, both natural and curated.

And yet... fundamentally, this is very different. For a start, the direction, while masterful, is restrained stylistically in a deliberate move to foreground the script an actors. His disinclination to do this in the past has never, of course, been a problem- there's a reason he's a famous director- but here he chooses to foreground the script and the performers.

 This feels, incredibly for a Tarantino film, not so much like the Western that it undoubtedly is but a serious stage play that evokes no less a writer than Arthur Miller. The characters- acted superbly, with Samuel L. Jackson and Jennifer Jason Leigh (weirdly, I'm familiar with her from Atypical) standing out, are well fleshed out, and there's a very prominent theme of race of the original American (and British, and French, and Dutch, and Spanish, and Portuguese) sin of slavery. This film has a lot to say of the difficulties involved in being black and American, in still living in the country in which you (or in the Major's case, you) were enslaved.#

The narrative- in chapters, framed by the music of Ennio Morricone, is masterful, mostly observing the Aristotelian unities but with necessary but restrained flashbacks, is both gripping and beautiful. One of the last films I see during the '10s may well be the best of the decade.

Ant-Man (2015)

"How's retirement?"

"How's your face?"

This is probably one of the less good Marvel films I've seen; there was a certain lack of polish and there's an unevenness that makes it very noticeable that Edgar Wright was replaced as director. And yet it shows the Marvel benchmark that we nevertheless have a thoroughly enjoyable film that isn't going to garner many negative comments. It helps that Paul Rudd is so excellent.

You can sort of tell, in spite of the different genre (a heist movie within the Marvel Cinematic Universe) and very different setting that the script is from the same source as a certain three films starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, in spite of the lowered humour quotient. But this is very much a Marvel film, complete with Stan Lee cameo and gratuitous reference to Tales to Astonish. It's interesting that Henry Pym was a superhero, as Ant-Man, back in the '80s here, but that Janet Van Dyne, a character I remember so well from Secret Wars, is dead. my Marvel comics knowledge is pretty thorough up to about 1993 and pretty hazy after that; is she dead in the comics?

It's nice to have someone released from prison (admittedly for a pretty Robin Hood crime that doesn't lose our sympathy) as a hero. This film believes in rehabilitation, which is a big reason to like it. The character stuff s good too- Scott being cruelly kept from his daughter (my own little girl is not much younger) and the dynamic between Hank and Hope. The most emotive scenes are all about fathers and daughters. It's a fun film to watch, and even has a giant Thomas the Tank Engine. It's well worth seeing, and don't be put off by the fact that there are better Marvel films. It would be a shame to skip this.

Krampus (2015)

"Because that's what family is. We have to get along with them, even if we don't have much in common."

This film was suggested for me by Mrs Llamastrangler in a particularly evil moment as the Christmas film to blog this year. Next time I'm doing bloody Die Hard.

The German legend of the Krampus seems not to have travelled to this country with Prince Albert alongside Christmas cards and Christmas trees, but it seems to be impinging more and more on popular culture, particularly in the United States; I first heard of the legend from an episode of Grimm a couple of years ago. I suppose it's calling out for a good horror film but, well, this is not it.

Let me tell you the plot, shall I? A family squabble a lot. A kid wishes for it to stop. The Krampus arrives and offs them all. The kid regrets it and the adults all come back, except for those who really don't deserve it. And that's it. No stars, no wit, no fun. You don't care about any of the characters and it's boring, boring, boring.

Yep. Definitely Die Hard next year.

Pixels (2015)

"Don't tell anyone I killed a smurf..."

I am, to put it mildly, far from an Adam Sandler fan. Worse, this film seems to have left the critics unimpressed. But, perhaps because I'm very old school when it comes to computer games (I was born in 1977 and pretty much stopped buying new games in the early '90s as albums by rock bands replaced games in my limited teenage budget), I found this film pleasantly and nostalgically entertaining. I'll admit, though, that I'm still not particularly enamoured with Sandler as such.

The film looks great, and it's huge fun seeing Space Invaders, Centipede, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong recreated in real life. And Ludlow is an enjoyable piss-take of conspiracy nuts ("JFK shot first!"),  so insane that he actually uses 4chan. The film also makes a good point; those 8-bit games from the '80s relied on recognising the pattern, not something that applies these days.

I love the scenes in London- Hollywood certainly seems to love our visually arresting national capital, and Fiona Shaw gets a great cameo as the prime minister. There's a lot to love. But I'm a little disturbed by the treatment of Fox News as a legitimate news source and the troubling idea that it's ok for  a US president not to know big words. But there's no denying how much I enjoyed this film.

Fantastic Four (2015)

"Its clobbering time!"

This may just possibly be the worst film I have EVER seen. It really is that bad, and it's depressingly clear that Fox only made the film to retain the rights- not the only time this has happened with a Fantastic Four film, unfortunately. You can certainly understand Marvel's disquiet.

So what's wrong with the film? Well, Reed Richards is blatantly too young; the character of Doctor Doom is mishandled in exactly the same way as the otherwise excellent 2005 film, portraying him as simply an arrogant scientist who may as well be American; and it does the bloody origin again, which is something I keep banging on about as something films should avoid as they're essentially just exposition and it's best just to skip to the action.

But what's truly unforgivable about the film, aside from the cast's utter lack of charisma, is that it utterly fails to do this. It's boring. Literally nothing exciting happens until the last ten minutes. It takes a lot to make a film about the Fantastic Four that's just dull, but this has managed to do it.

I suppose you could say that the film successfully conveys the horror of Ben Grimm's situation, and it's nice to substitute another dimension for cosmic rays, but this film has no other redeeming features. This is one to be watched only for the purpose of slagging it off in blogs, which is my way of trying to justify wasting my time on this dreck.

Minions (2015)

"Gentlemen do not steal ladies' crowns!"

This is yet another instalment of Minion fun; by no means one of the greatest comedy films of all time but a thoroughly entertaining romp with a first class '60s rock soundtrack. It's 1968, and the pre-Gru and tragically bossless Minions seek to become the underlings of the splendidly supervillainous Scarlet Underkill (Sandra Bullock in a rare appearance in a film that isn't rubbish).

I love the gentle mockery of us Brits as unflappable and always reaching for a cup of tea in a crisis (I certainly do so, in a crisis and at all other times), however much I somehow doubt the constitutional validity of Bob becoming king by simply drawing a sword from a stone, which is apparently a tourist attraction in central London. It seems the Glorious Revolution never happened. Hmmm. I also loved the inevitable Beatles cameo, and the nice family of bank robbers who kindly pick up hitch hikers.

It ends entertainingly, with Scarlet turning into a massive Dalek and a final intervention from a very young Gru. This is a very silly film and one I much enjoyed.

Steve Jobs (2015)

"I play the orchestra."

Five years after Aaron Sorkin scripted a biopic of Mark Zuckerberg he does the same for the late Steve Jobs, another scion of the Silicon Valley aristocracy, this time helmed by Danny Boyle, whose London Olympics opening ceremony has certainly not harmed his career. The result is gripping, full of quick-fire dialogue (that'll be Sorkin, then) and plenty of zingers and little nostalgic touches. Throughout it all is a portrait of a confident- nay, arrogant, bordering on unlikeable visionary who, while not an engineer or a programmer, is the conductor who cannot play an instrument but plays the orchestra superbly.

The film is structured around the preparation to three distinct big speeches in 1984, 1988 and 1988, all big product launches. It's a brave yet ultimately successful way of limiting the palette in order to produce a cohesive narrative. Michael Fassbender is spellbinding and the excellent Kate Winslet is barely recognisable; a leading Hollywood actress actually playing a role that isn't sexualised.

The emotional centre of the film is Jobs' relationship with his daughter Lisa, starting with his denial of paternity but ending with his actually delaying his speech- a big thing- for her sake. We also see his abrasive relationship with his underlings, but he inspires loyalty in spite of everything. In the end, his vision triumphs, although it's interesting that the film ends in 1997, before Jobs' biggest wave of successes.

I like the nod to the fact that you can't get inside any Apple device without special tools, the grainy picture, the nod to the iPad's origins in Jobs noticing the clinginess of Lisa's Walkman, but at its heart this is a masterful character study. It is an artfully constructed and fascinating little film.

Poltergeist (2015)

"Well, it's not like it was an ancient tribal burial ground.."

Meh. It's not that this film is badly made- it looks slick, is stylish and is well acted in a naturalistic style that Sam Rockwell excels at in particular. It just doesn't work as a horror film. At all.

As I've said many times before, I dislike sequels. And, as my wife pointed out during our viewing of this film, it's true that the slick look of so many modern horror films destroys all atmosphere and suspense in favour of a kind of music video arty cleverness; even the clown isn't scary.

The film goes through the plot motions of the original films but, while nothing is bad, and there's a genuinely brilliant scene involving a drill, well, Zelda Rubinstein has been replaced by Jared Harris as a reality TV ghost hunter and the directorial style, while slick, lacks the emotional manipulative was of Spoelberg which, while often annoying, makes the proper version of Poltergeist work.

This is a pointless remake. A shame; if they'd just made an original film about poltergeists they'd have saved themselves the awkward comparison.

Ted 2 (2015)

"Piss off- I don't want to get any jizz on me..."

Ted 2 is much like Ted, which is no bad thing. And that is to say that it feels like an extended episode of Family Guy right up to the point of reusing a skit about donated sperm. But, again, this is no bad thing. Seth MacFarlane may not be quite in the very first rank of comedy film-makers, but he can certainly be relied upon to be very funny indeed.

This time the plot is about Ted's legal crusade to legally prove that he's a person while much weed is smoked by all, but this is just an excuse for the one liners that we know and love, and the stand-up style observational comedy that we expect from MacFarlane. The pop culture references abound again: Sam Jones is back, while Michael Dorn's character goes to the New York Comicon dressed as Worf...!

Also, Sam is cool: an idealistic and very intelligent lawyer, an attractive female character whom we can actually respect for her brains and her principles... and she smokes a lot of weed. It seems that young Americans do a lot of that these days. 

This is a film that will surprise no one who knows the slightest thing about Serh MacFarlane, and I for one have no problem with that. I'm hoping for another sequel.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

"Is there a garbage chute? A trash compactor?"

Well, that was a little bit awesome. First point: this is going to be a very positive review. Second point :SPOILERS. This is going to be one very spoilerific blog post. If you don't want to see the scores, look away now.

We see lots of Han and Chewie, a fair bit of Leia, some of Threepio, less of Artoo and only a final glimpse of Luke. And, unlike the prequels with its forgettable characters, here we have the very likeable and interesting Finn and Rey, and it is the success of these two new characters, above all, that makes J J Abram's sequel such a triumph. He's also realised what good Star Wars should be: not so much science fiction but the feel of myth with the trappings of science fiction.

It's brave to hold off the appearance of any familiar characters for the first part of the film while we get to know Rey and Finn, but it works. Rey is a deliberate parallel of Luke on Tattooine, poor but noble and waiting for a family that will never come- but the Force is strong in her. Finn is a stormtrooper with a conscience, already a rich and powerful background for a character. It helps that both of them are played so well.

And then Han and Chewie appear. It's so good to se them, and Harrison Ford is so amazing you forget how old he is. He gets a huge role and gets to be really heroic- and at the endowed see why, narratively, it had to happen: killed by his own evil son. Whose mother, Leia, now leads the Resistance and is as cool as ever.

The First Order, who have taken over from the Empire, are superb baddies and... well, they're Nazis, aren't they? There were so many punch the air moments with the reveal of various old faces- Admiral Ackbar! Nien Nunb! Yes, lots of the plot beats feel familiar, but so they should. The plot feels completely Star Wars. Everything looks good, with a proper, finely balanced Star Wars aesthetic for all the aliens and all the decor. J J Abrams has done an amazing job.

The Human Centipede 3: The Final Sequence (2015)

"These films risk causing harm! They should be banned!"

Oh yes. Here we are again. There was absolutely no way I could ignore this film. And in glad I didn't. It's gloriously awful, and easily the best bad film I've seen all year.

The acting has more ham than a ham sandwich, with Dieter Laser chewing the scenery with gusto as disturbingly sadistic US prison governor William Boss. Boss is a believer in mediaeval torture for prisoners, and is horrible to his pretty secretary Daisy, whom he bullies terribly and forces to give daily blowjobs, and swallow. Oh, and he abandons her to the mercies of rioting prisoners, and ends up accidentally including her in the human centipede.  He's not a nice man, or stable.

His accountant, Dwight, is a truly awful Laurence R Harvey, horribly miscast. Dwight has a bright idea based on a certain two movies he's seen, and we inevitably end up with a massive human centipede as penal policy.

This is a very silly film that revels in its B movie status, completely different in tone from its two predecessors and especially from the rather serious second film, with its social conscience. I suppose there's a bit of satire there aimed at the American attitude to capital punishment, but if so it doesn't run very deep. But it's a fun way to spend ninety minutes. Well, except for the castration scene. That was gross.

The Scandalous Lady W

"I belong to no man!"

It's almost a cliche to say that the BBC could do a costume drama in its sleep. Unfortunately that's what it seems to have done here.

Oh, it all looks good. You expect that. And Natalie Dormer is good and not to blame for her underwritten character. But given the huge themes at play here- the fact that women, in 1782 as here and for ninety years after, were legally their husbands' "property" and, of course, our old friend those sexual double standards- the script doesn't really involve us much inter characters, or get us to understand or care about them.

The concept is huge here: a woman isbeing persuaded by her husband to indulge his cuckolding fetish by shagging other men while he watches through a keyhole, thereby meeting another man with whom she elopes. She wins s victory of sorts by successfully fighting in court his attempt towin punitive damages against her new lover, but this comes at the terrible cost to herself of a shattered reputation, ultimately costing her access to her daughter and the very lover for whom she sacrificed all.

This is a heady brew. Why, then, do I not feel emotionally engaged? Perhaps this is not a story that could have been told over a mere ninety minutes; it feels extremely rushed, to the point of being hard to follow. Why not a six part series?

There are a couple of lines that made me smile- Lord North tells Sir Richard that "Lady Wortley will no more give up her independence than will the American colonies": rather witty for such a terrible prime minister. But beyond this there isn't much historical depth. The role of Lord Mansfield, presiding over the trial, in the ending of slavery on English soil is not even remarked upon, and neither is anything except plot, plot, plot.

This is a wasted opportunity of a story that could have made great telly. Hopefully one day it will. 

Fifty Shades of Grey (2015)

"Are you gay?"

Before I say anything else, I should praise the way this film is shot by Sam Taylor-Wood. I'm not sure about the washed-out colours ("grey", yes, very clever), but she has shot the film with a lot of style and used some rather neat narrative tricks, particularly the montage illustrating the contract between Ana and Grey; large pieces of text are difficult to get across well onscreen, but Taylor-Wood delivers here. She does as good a job with the source material as can be done. The script also adapts the novel well.

However, it's still based on the novel by E.L. James and it's intrinsic virtues and flaws. The novel does not pretend to be literary fiction, but it is rather well-written, with good prose, engaging characters and a fast and dramatic plot. It may not be very deep, but there's nothing wrong with that. It would have been better if James had employed a proper proofreader instead of letting her husband do it, but it isn't a bad novel. Except in its message. And the film cannot help but follow suit.

The main problem I have with both book and film is Christian Grey. I dislike him as a character, I would intensely dislike him as a person if he was real, and I find him a somewhat disturbing subject for female desire. He's a bully, a control freak, a stalker, and he and Ana have an abusive relationship. There. I've said it.

And none of this, I hasten to add, is in any way to do with BDSM. I have issues with how the media (and this is a prime suspect) treats BDSM as being about dominant males and submissive females whereas, in reality, it's just as likely to be the other way round. Indeed, BDSM has its origins in gay culture and remains something of a gay-heavy subculture. But BDSM itself is a perfectly healthy thing, done safely and consensually. 

The problem with Christian isn't that he's a dominant, and there isn't a single sex scene in the film which wouldn't be perfectly ok in a different context, but that he's a weird, damaged control freak who does what he does out of a desire to hurt women as revenge for his mother's failings- pretty basic misogyny. There are lots of alarm bells. For a start, he wants to dominate a woman who isn't into the lifestyle when he meets her, which is in itself deeply dodgy. He's trying to psychologically manipulate her into submitting to him when she has no prior desire to do so. That's deeply creepy and I'm of the opinion that Ana is rushed and pressured into "consenting". That's more than a bit rapey.

The book, and the film by extension, could do a great deal of harm, firstly in propagating misleading ideas about BDSM and, most worryingly, encouraging naive women in the audience to enter into abusive relationships masquerading as such.

BDSM aside, it's not exactly feminist to present a rich man as a wish fulfilment figure, as though the place of a woman is to marry a man who can look after her and just be an ornament.

All that said, Jamie Dornan does an excellently nuanced job of playing the character. He does the best with an impossible job, and impresses. And that's something that can be said of the film as a whole: it does a good job of adapting material which is deeply dodgy in what it is saying.

The C Word

"I'll tell you what, mate, right. You stand up, and I'll rummage around in your nuts."

Let's get all the superlatives about Sheridan Smith out of the way first, shall we? She's simply awesome, as always. So much so that we shall overlook the lack of any real attempt at a Derby accent. Sheridan Smith is probably the best actress on telly today.

This time she plays Lisa Lynch, real life cancer sufferer and author of the eponymous book. We start off by establishing how nice and normal Lisa is, as we would expect, and then the C bomb is duly dropped. It's an awful moment and, like everything, beautifully scripted and played. All of the big moments- mastectomy, chemotherapy, death sentence- are perfectly judged. And Mrs Llamastrangler and I were glad of this, as the subject of the C word is raw; earlier this year it took Mrs L's uncle, one of the nicest and coolest and most rock 'n' roll guys you could ever meet, get a bit sloshed with or compare beards with. He was only 44. The C word is indeed a C word.

There's an ironic contrast in that Lisa doesn't want to talk about the elephant in the room and can't be surrounded by drama, preferring to talk about other things. Hence the blog. It's all very human and very real.

The blog leads to a book, ironically recommended to Lisa after her second, terminal diagnosis, and the awful heartbreak of the cancer is juxtaposed throughout with humour and humanity. Like life, I suppose.

This is a most affecting piece of television and, what with my having just turned 38 and knocking on the door of middle age, as pleasant a way as any to confront my own mortality. We will all die, and it's usually painful and unpleasant, but at least we have each other, and our pleasures.

Sheridan Smith will win yet another award for this, mark my words. 

Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

"They're breeding like Catholic rabbits."

Because Samuel L Jackson always gets the best lines. It's the law.

Obviously, I enjoyed this muchly, and I'm not just saying that because it was both a nice birthday treat and the first time I've been able to go out with Mrs Llamastrangler to spend some time alone together since we had our beautiful baby- thanks to my lovely mother-in-law for babysitting! We just about managed to survive a few hours away from our little girl, and enjoyed ourselves.

The film is superb. Joss Whedon writes and directs. Those are two different ways of writing the same thing. We should appreciate how narratively difficult it must be to come up with a script which both works and gives substantial parts to (deep breath) Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Black Widow, Hulk, Hawkeye, Nick Fury, Scarlet Witch and the Vision, with substantial cameos from War Machine and (new Avenger!) the Falcon. Joss Whedon accomplishes that, along with giving us thrills, spectacle, emotion, and the best Stan Lee cameo yet. I can't stress how much of an achievement it is to serve all these characters well script-wise. Whoever follows on from Whedon has big boots to fill, and I can't wait to see what he does next.

There are a couple of downsides, however. The death of a certain character comes as a surprise, which I suppose is the point, but also comes across as a pointless waste. And, as most of the Internet correctly points out, this, like all Marvel films, serves female characters rather poorly. Black Widow, up till now the only kick-ass female character alongside all the boys, spends much of her time pining after Bruce Banner. This is not a film which comes close, I suspect, to passing the Bechdel test. I'm not going to give Whedon a hard time over this- his feminist credentials are as good as anyone with a Y chromosome's- but Marvel needs to find a better gender balance, at least. Still, Scarlet Witch now gives us a second female Avenger.

Oh, and I love the fact we get to see Scarlet Witch, and the Vision (budding romance ahead?). And Ulysses Klaw, no doubt to return in Black Panther. And am I reading too much into Tony Stark's guilt at creating Ultron, what with seeing signs of a future storyline based on Armour Wars? Be that as it may, I'm liking the conflict of values between Stark and Steve Rogets from film to film. 

Essentially, this is a bloody good film. Go and see it. Now.