The Wrestler [The Review]

Mickey Rourke stars as the washed-up New Jersey wrestler in this Oscar-tipped low-budget movie, due for US release on 19th December.

Rourke's performance as the washed-up eighties actor playing a washed-up eighties wrestler has gripped those cultural commentators who have already seen it. Nobody ever thought this would happen – a comeback performance from Mickey Rourke many years on from his 1980’s triumphs with Barfly, Angel Heart, 9½ Weeks and Rumblefish.

Rourke plays Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson (and gets annoyed when people use his real name), a career wrestler who is still putting on performances way past his sell-by date and having to supplement his meagre income with work heaving crates in a warehouse. He lives in a trailer park, is estranged from his daughter and seems to have few friends, even though he’s popular with his fans and his fellow wrestlers. During one event he suffers a cardiac arrest, and briefly retires, involving a humiliating stint on a deli counter in a supermarket.

Tempted by a rematch of his most famous fight back in 1986, he unwisely agrees the fight, the massive bypass scar still healing across his chest, pumping himself full if pharmaceuticals and steroids to build up bulk.

Director Darren Aronofsky is best when he plays his New York card – fancifully in Pi, but very down-to-earth in Requiem for a Dream (2000), a film whose central performance, with Ellen Burstyn as a middle-aged woman addicted to speed-filled slimming cures, won an Oscar. Here he’s in New Jersey. This is a cold and fairly uninviting place, and the hand-held camerawork accentuates the feeling of a documentary.

The environment is wintry and decaying, but the wrestling ring, somehow, always feel warm – and its understandable why Randy feels forever drawn back to it. It’s not like it was however; he was to endure many novelty, gothic acts, which involve a great deal of superficial mutilation and bleeding. The audience, these days, doesn’t want peroxided men in spangly tights and Guns and Roses on the soundtrack. They want rivers of blood.

Randy describes himself as a ‘big broken piece of meat’ and that is the feeling that Rourke gives with every inch of his performance. Indeed, the final speech that Randy gives at the end could as well describe the troubled career of Rourke himself, who at one time retired from acting to box professionally.

There’s hardly a scene where we don’t see Randy, whether he’s trying to make friendly with his angry, estranged daughter, getting picked up by a slightly suspect female fan, or in the ring with fights. There are no Rocky style training sequences. Training sequences are, to be honest, pretty boring. Instead we get more attention payed to the unexpected femininity of these super-masculine figures – the care they take with their hair being dyed, the tanning, the obsession with the body beautiful.

This isn’t Rocky, this is rock-bottom. Both Aronofsky and Rourke have pulled of a spectacular, shining comeback here – Aronofsky from the disaster of The Fountain and Rourke from the disaster of his life. This film is highly recommended.

***** stars our of five

Boris Johnson and Jaws

Colin Firth looked black as thunder while London Mayor Boris Johnson joked about his politics on Wednesday night.

Here's me standing by Boris a few minutes beforehand.

Giving a speech prior to the Gala screening of Michael Winterbottom’s Genova, Johnson told a packed audience that he routinely called his secretary ‘Miss Moneypenny’ before giving an extended, stream-of-consciousness riff on the true hero of Jaws, which was, he claimed, the local mayor, who quite rightly fought to keep the beaches open despite some ‘trifling incidents’ with the bathers.

As Michael Winterbottom and Firth, who stars in the film, waited in the wings of the Odeon Cinema in Leicester Square, Johnson joked that he noticed from an internet search that Colin Firth didn’t share his political views. Throughout the mayor’s monologue Firth scowled, and never looked at him once.

He looked even more annoyed when Johnson started quoting Elizabeth Bennett, evoking memories of Firth’s most famous TV role as Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Who would have thought that the mop-haired politician could so successfully play the regency heroine to his moody Mr Darcy, evincing a saturnine scowl as good as anything he did in the Jane Austen.

As minions brought his bicycle at the end of the movie, Boris was heard to mention that the film was ‘wrist-slashing stuff’ before hurtling off into the West End.

Chevy Chase - Not Amused

Chevy Chase didn't see the funny side of Sarah Palin’s guest appearance on Saturday Night Live last weekend.

The former SNL alum slammed Palin’s lack of improvisation skills on Saturday’s program, which was hosted by W star Josh Brolin and featured Mark Wahlberg and Alec Baldwin.

Palin appeared in an opening skit with staunch Democrat Baldwin, and again in the Weekend Update segment, when she nodded along to a rap song by SNL’s Amy Poehler.

He tells Access Hollywood “Quite frankly, it’s a big mistake to let her go on. What was brilliant about (SNL producer) Lorne (Michaels) was that he had nothing written for Sarah and that apparently she cannot improvise herself out of a paper bag!"

Watchmen footage HERE

Body of Lies [The Review]

Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe star as spy and spymaster respectively in this over-complicated, fast-moving tale of CIA operations in Jordan and the Middle East by Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, American Gangster, Black Hawk Down). Rushed into production after the unexpected success of American Gangster, Scott is always hugely businesslike and methodical in the way he goes about making movies, and this one was no exception, impressing Leonardo DiCaprio with his organizational skills. But as a director he’s made as many bad movies as good ones; sometimes being organised just isn’t enough.

DiCaprio evokes echoes of his (rather better) performance in Blood Diamond, a movie he did directly before this one. He’s convincing as the on-the-ground Arabist perpetually frustrated at the way his remote bosses back in Washington don’t understand or don’t care about what’s happening on the ground. Filling these rather large and squashed loafers, looking as overweight and bloated as he’s ever been, directing Leo from afar with a hugely sophisticated electronic surveillance system, is Russell Crowe, phoning in one his laziest performances to date. There’s a hugely contrived romantic link too with Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani (who has had some grief in her native country for appearing in this movie), who plays a nurse in Jordan for whom Leo falls.

Essentially the plot follows CIA spook Roger Ferris (DiCaprio) as he uncovers a safe-house in Jordan which he is convinced will lead him to the most-wanted terrorist in this particular deck of cards, Al-Saleem. The only way he can flush him out is to pose as a rival terrorist and wait for the man to get in touch. Much of the action is gritty and visceral, recalling Black Hawk Down with its myriad of helicopter shots and sense of heat, danger and dust. But acting kudos goes mostly to Mark Strong as the Jordanian chief of intelligence Hani; he proves more than a match for DiCaprio is some key scenes.

Based on David Ignatius 2007 novel, which is supposed to be very well researched, Ridley clearly aims to get as much to the on-the-ground truth of things. The DiCaprio torture scene is graphic. This is not for the feint-hearted, but it also refuses to be dumb lock ‘n load entertainment. On a big screen in a big cinema it looks and sounds fantastic (Scott’s sound design is always immaculate) but it does lose its way somewhat with too many characters and too many strands of the storyline. This is not a feelgood movie, and consequently an ambiguous choice for a Saturday night out.

Frost/Nixon [The Review]

In 1977 a garrulous talk show host virtually unknown in the USA scored a world exclusive – the first interview with Richard Nixon since the Watergate scandal forced him to resign. David Frost was known mainly as a light-entertainer, and his career in the UK and Australia was already beginning to fade when he pulled off the coup of a lifetime, borrowing heavily from friends and family to fund the $1million check (Nixon's fee).

Everyone predicted the encounter would be a farce. But by the end of the interview Nixon had admitted to his criminality, and his hopes of returning to politics lay in tatters.

Adapted from a stage play, and featuring the celebrated lead actor who trod the boards in London’s West End and Broadway, Frank Langella reprises his Tony award-winning role as the astonishingly skilful as the wily statesman forced to confront the level of his disgrace by a cheap British TV huckster. Martin Sheen plays the smooth-tongued playboy interviewer David Frost, bringing a little of his previous roles to bear, most notably his Tony Blair impersonation in The Queen, which also happens to have been written by the screenwriter and playwright of this most Shakespearean of downfalls, Peter Morgan.

Ron Howard brings fluidity to the story and manages to avoid all the obviously pitfalls of the movie’s stage-bound origin, even if some of the to-screen interviews of some of the leading players in this drama feel a little corny and even synthetic. There’s a strong sense of the Californian landscape, where the interviews took place, so far from the dank intrigue of Washington DC, where Nixon languishes in exile like some deposed Roman emperor on Capri.

But there are also many interiors here. Like the Watergate scandal itself, much of this action takes place hunched over recording equipment and the shuffle of papers in hotel rooms. You can tell this has been made on a relatively low budget, but such is the craft of the acting, especially by Langella, and such is the excellence of the writing, that none of the scruffy ends of the filming matter too much.

There are good supporting performances from the likes of Kevin Bacon as Nixon’s right-hand man but Langella’s Oscar nomination seems like a shoe-in.

The film opens the London Film Festival, October 15th 2008.

Guillaume Depardieu

A sad story came to an end yesterday, with the death announced of 37 year-old Guilluame Depardieu at the Raymond-Poincare hospital west of Paris. He died of pneumonia, taken ill while filming in Romania.

The son of Gerard Depardieu, Guillaume never got on with his famous father and in 2004 published an autobiography accusing the iconic French actor of neglecting his children in his pursuit of money and fame.

While he appeared with his Gerard in the 1991 movie Tous les Matins du Monde (All the Mornings of the World), Guillaume's first acclaimed role was in Les Apprentis (The Apprentices), for which he one a Cesar, the French equivalent of the Oscar. But he led a troubled life, including prison terms for heroin possession.

The film they made together in 2002 A Loving Father now seems to have added resonance.

Burn After Reading [Review]

George Clooney, Tilda Swinton and Brad Pitt star in Burn After Reading, a sour black comedy from the Coen Brothers whose Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men in 2007 was one of the highpoints of their career. Every Coen brothers film is an event, but there's nothing on show here except the chilly proficiency of these sibling creators.

Yes film school students should study its clever script and immaculate editing, should trawl over its astonishing sense of craft. But the profound sense of the rotten on show here, of rotten people doing rotten, decaying things, may not be to everyone’s taste just now.

John Malkovich plays the disgruntled former CIA operative, a mean-minded horrible drunk, who decides to take his grievances out on his former employees by penning a tell-all memoir. The memoir falls into the hands of his wife Tilda Swinton, who is secretly trying to divorce him just as she carries on an affair with George Clooney, and the memoirs in turn accidentally fall into the hands of some gym employees. There’s a bouncy, funny little performance from Pitt, who is the only ray of sunshine going in this grimy little world. In cahoots with Frances McDormand, a fellow worker obsessed with getting plastic surgery, they try to blackmail Malkovich by trying to sell his memoirs to the Russians.

This is a film about something that is never really quite there and events that never really quite happens. It’s about toxic narcissism, sexual delinquency, and middle-class hypocrisy. By the end the CIA bosses who have been monitoring just what is going on dismiss the whole sequence of events, including a murder, as a ‘clusterfuck’ but little else of very great importance – at which point the movie ends.

The Coen Brothers have created some great comedies – The Big Lebowski being the best-known – plus some brilliant thrillers with comedic elements including Fargo. But this film reminds me of their only actual misfire, The Ladykillers from back in 2004. Burn After Reading has no pretensions towards great entertainment or making great statements; its quite self-evidentially a minor work, a novella rather than a novel.

I’m going to try and forget about the nasty taste this film left in my mouth.

The Org Gets Organized

Anti-Scientology group Anonymous are gearing up for another protest in the presence of Katie Holmes at the Broadway opening of "All My Sons" this Thursday.

Last month the group, whose members often sport "V for Vendetta" masks with mustaches, picketed the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre for the play's first preview. They carried signs that read "Scientology Kills" and "Free Katie, Keep Tom."

Scientologists aren't taking all this lying down. One Anonymous member claims that church members taunted the picketers by ranting, "I need Prozac" (Scientology opposes psychiatric medication) and "Let's break all the windows at the Org," (the Scientology headquarters on W. 46th).

The Anonymous source says Scientologists later showed up at his house with a legal letter ordering him to "cease and desist."

The original performance of this 1947 play closed after only four performances. Tickets for the new show are $61.50–$301.50

Catch the story on YouTube here

White Knight

There have been some generous donations to the campaign against Proposition 8 - which seeks to prohibit same-sex marriages in California.

Steven Spielberg and Brad Pitt are not averse to liberal causes, but their donations sent a something of a message as to where their feelings lay on this issue.

After organizers of the movement complained that Hollywood was doing precious little to help, TR Knight has stepped forward with a $50,000 gift towards the campaign.

The Grey's Anatomy star, you may recall, had some problems with co-star Isaiah Washington onset and some alleged homophobic comments. It was an ugly little spat, and it damaged Washington's career.

Back in June, speaking to USmagazine.com, he ruled out marriage for himself and youthful boyfriend Mark Cornelson.

What Spielberg Does Next

The Paramount Dreamworks bust-up has left Steven Spielberg with time on his hands. Here's a list of his next possible projects:

1. Tintin
A trilogy based on Herge's comic strip about a young reporter and his clever side-kick dog Snowy who always lands in exotic forms of trouble. Spielberg has held the rights to Tintin for 25 years and he may begin lensing the first installment this fall, using 3-D performance capture technology. Peter Jackson will likely direct the second film.

2. Lincoln
The director has a draft from Munich writer Tony Kushner for a project which has been ongoing since 2001. Spielberg says he'd like to start this longtime passion project in "early 2009, because it's Lincoln's 200th anniversary." The film is expected to focus on the Civil War and star Liam Neeson in the title role as Lincoln himself.

3. The 39 Clues
An adaptation of a 'next Harry Potter' book series centers on The Cahills 'the most powerful family in the world'. Spielberg has hired screenwriter Jeff Nathanson (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) to kick the whole thing off. Spielberg's presence as a producer as well as director bodes well for the film.

4. The Trial of the Chicago 7
Based on the story of the seven Americans charged with conspiracy and inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention, The Trial of the Chicago 7 would mark a very political departure for Spielberg, as well as for stars Will Smith and Sacha Baron Cohen. Baron Cohen will play Abbie Hoffman. Smith may play Black Panther Bobby Seale (watch out, Will), and Philip Seymour Hoffman has been considered as defense attorney William Kunsler.

5. Dinner For Schmucks
Sacha Baron Cohen and Spielberg have been conducting a mutual admiration society since they met at the 2007 Paramount/DreamWorks Golden Globes party. Already in development, this could be a rare Spielberg foray into straight comedy with a kind of Larry David feel about it.

6. St. Agnes' Stand
A wounded man on the run who, against his better judgment, stops to help a group of nuns under siege from Apaches. Previously connected to Martin Scorsese, this adaptation has been in development for about 6 or 7 years. Those in the know say Spielberg and company are very happy with it, even though it has been kept very quiet. "They talk about it less than Lincoln, but that doesn't mean anything," says one person familiar with the project.

7. Interstellar
Spielberg attended lectures at Caltech for this project based on physicist Kip Thorne's relativity, time travel, and wormhole work. Dark Knight scribe Jonah (brother of Christopher) Nolan is set to deliver a script in 3-5 weeks.

8. The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara
DreamWorks book exec Lisa Hamilton quietly acquired rights to David Kertzer's 1997 true story of a Jewish boy kidnapped by agents of the Papal inquisition. Tony Kushner is earmarked to adapt but is currently busy revising the Lincoln script.

9. The Children of the Lamp
This P.B. Kerr book adaptation about twins who live in Manhattan and battle with evil Djinn has not so far been ear-marked for Spielberg. At the same time, DreamWorks have not sent the drafts out to any directors - so it could be that Spielberg is eying it. Kerr's blog can be found here.

10. A musical?
The director told Time Magazine in 2002 he's set on doing a musical someday. The rank outsider.

When J-Lo Had Enough

Jennifer Lopez has been revealing quite a bit about herself to The Daily Beast.

Amongst other things she admits she had a nervous breakdown round about the time she was filming Enough in 2002.

Now a mother with twins, she's not averse to sending them to a Scientology School.

'I wouldn’t mind. Not at all,' she tells The Daily Beast. 'I know that the technologies that they have are very helpful…It’s all about communication. That’s the thing I really don’t like about talking about this.'

'I do know so many great people who do do it, who choose it as a lifestyle and really follow it and it is their religion…I just wish that people wouldn’t judge it without knowing what it is.'

Sandra Said to be Upset

Sandra Bernard insists her recent comments about Sarah Palin have been taken out of context.

The comedienne has been dropped from a fundraising event for a Boston charity after making a gang-rape gag about the vice-presidential candidate.

Organizers for Rosie’s Place, which offers refuge to women who have been physically, sexually and mentally abused, were unimpressed.

"In no way am I making any sort of joke about crimes against women,” protests the gobby funny-woman, never been noted for her subtlety. “Quite the contrary - I'm speaking out about someone who doesn't do enough to protect women”.

Ghost Town [The Review]

There’s something ineffably, beautifully winning about the New York comedy. It's hard number to pull off these days. For obvious reasons. And here we have a new one, a new incarnation, just arrived – written and directed by David Koepp (writer, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). Koepp has previously directed such spooky fare as Stir of Echoes with Kevin Bacon. He is a skilful writer – one of the most successful in Hollywood – and his directorial chops aren’t so bad either. But will this old-fashioned tale convince audiences?

Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais) is a dentist. He enjoys being a dentist because he hates people. When an especially talkative patient he arrives, he likes nothing better than to fill their mouth with instruments to make them shut up. When his colleague has a small party to celebrate the birth of his daughter, he’s glimpsed sneaking out without attending.

He’s mean-spirited and sardonic. He’s also something of a coward who hates physical pain, so when he goes to hospital for a routine health-check, he insists on a general anaesthetic. When he wakes up, he can see ghosts. And the ghosts all want to talk to him – a Upper East side dude in a tux who hates his widow’s new man, an old lady worried that her daughter didn’t find a letter slipped under the door, and gangland killer who wants to finish the job. There’s several dozen of them. There’s even a camp naked guy who keeps saying ‘is this a bad time?’

Pincus hates this of course. They all want favours. He doesn’t do favours. But the womanising smooth-talker in the tux (Greg Kinnear) is especially persistent; he wants Pincus to stop his wife Gwen (Tea Leoni) dating a human rights lawyer. When Pincus starts to intervene, he rather falls for Gwen as well. He succeeds in creating a problem between Gwen and her fiancé. And then regrets it.

This is familiar stuff – a curmudgeon schooled and made a better person by a series of ghostly visitations was an idea dreamt up by Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol well over 150 years ago. The trouble here is Ricky Gervais and, to some extent, the basic interpretation of a well-worn premise. It’s a tough balancing act to make a disagreeable person sympathetic, and Gervais simply doesn’t have the acting skills to pull it off. In the UK, where Gervais is a star, this film will receive a much better reception. In the US audiences will be baffled by this dumpy, unappealing character with no social skills, a Manhattan dental fascist who nevertheless sports British teeth, a man whose ability to charm Tea Leoni seems beyond the realms of wildest fantasy.

But in the end the script doesn’t make us care enough about this man, and his redemption, and nothing Gervais could have done would ever fix that. This is another one for those long-haul flights; perfectly agreeable, quite funny in parts, but I wouldn’t pay money to see it. The New York comedy has yet to find a new form, or so it seems.

Spike Vs Italy

Spike Lee is in trouble with the Italians - again.

His new film Miracle of St Anna has been described as a 'travesty of history' by an organization which represents the Italian partisans who fought alongside US and allied forces in the closing days of WWII.

Lee is unrepentant. In a recent press conference in Rome he said “I am not apologizing. There is a lot about your history you have yet to come to grips with. This film is our interpretation, and I stand behind it.”

He added that the film, which follows the fate of four black GIs, was intended “to restore the voice of black soldiers who fought in the war”. He said that “not all Italians” had admired the partisans, many of whom fled to the mountains and left civilians to face the Nazis. “I have not invented anything,” he declared.

Spike Lee last annoyed the Italians with Summer of Sam in 1999. But there again his feuds are legendary - most recently with Clint Eastwood and Quentin Tarantino.

I’ve Loved You So Long [The review]

Released this weekend in the UK, I’ve Loved You so long is a French-language film garnering rave reviews for British Actress Kristin Scott Thomas. Some people are even whispering the Oscar word – best supporting actress was, after all, won by French-speaking and singing Marion Cotillard last year for the superlatively French La Vie En Rose.

La Vie En Rose was funny and sad, as ripe and runny as a large slice of unpasteurized Brie. But this film is a very different affair - much cooler and much more cosmopolitan. We first meet a dowdy-looking Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) dragging on a cigarette as she waits for her sister at an airport. Lea (Elsa Zylberstein) is wary and fairly soon, as she drives back to the family home in Eastern France and Juliette meets her brother-in-law for the first time, we begin to realise that Juliette has been in jail for fifteen years for a horrific crime.

I’ve Loved you So Long is directed by a literature professor who lives and teaches in Nancy where the film is set, and there’s a real sense of intelligence behind this film and the way the story is told – which is really just an accumulation of little family melodramatic moments (any family can have) but with this extraordinary back-story looming like a monstrous shadow in the corner. On a human level this film has great universality quite beyond its very middle-class setting; Juliette is the figure some families have, the scapegoat and the villain on whom everything bad is heaped.

At first Juliette seems an almost sinister figure, but after the shock of discovering her crime, we realize that this isn’t a Chabrol film and she isn’t going to murder anyone before she goes to bed one evening after making a cup of chocolat. In fact her story becomes, as bits and pieces make themselves known, almost unbearably poignant and sad. She is like a woman living a posthumous life. She gazes on the warmth of her sister’s family life as if it’s a dangerous illusion. As she looks for and finally finds a job she suffers placidly the contempt of strangers, and it becomes slowly clear just how much she has lost.

That said this is not a depressing film and it does tail off on a note of healing and quiet optimism. A hit at the recent Toronto Film Festival, this is a thoughtful, intelligent piece of French filmmaking.

Paul Newman

Paul Newman was the last of a breed, a contemporary of James Dean.

Leonardo DiCaprio has just described him as a role model for the more socially-conscious Hollywood type. Those sauces he dreamed up have so far taken well over $200m for charities including the Hole in the Wall Camps for sick kids. Favorite films? The Hustler, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy - there are so many to chose from.

There's a well-written tribute to him here in the New York Times.

Here are some wonderful images of him on Youtube. And see him here in classic form in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

The new DiCaprio film

I saw the new Ridley Scott movie Body of Lies last night - check back here for a review nearer the time.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays a CIA operative who moves swiftly around the Middle-East dealing with terrorist cells (and inevitably falling in love with a local girl) while a fat and cynical Russell Crowe directs him from afar.

It's rammed with Scott's characteristic full-pelt visual style. DiCaprio's performance recalls his stint on Blood Diamond and Crowe yet again does a variation on The Insider.

There's a fairly horrific torture scene involving Leo and hammers towards the end; he's been on record as saying he got sick for three days afterwards.

"We did that (scene) in the middle of some medieval torture tomb. There was some kind of horrific dust in the air"

Official site is here

Body of Lies opens October 10th

Brideshead Revisited [The Review]

It’s a tale of bedeviled aristocrats, catholic guilt and large palatial residences that played very well in 1981 when it became a British TV staple and more-or-less introduced the world to Jeremy Irons. Eyebrows were raised when this remake was announced; the New York Times has already called it ‘Brideshead Regurgitated’.

Despite the success of Atonement, a more-or-less a straight crib of both the book and the original 1945 novel by Evelyn Waugh, is there really a need for the honied sirops, the curds and whey, the wasps in the jam jars, of such hysterical and nostalgic feasts? Well – just look at the news. Nostalgia sells when the world seems to be turning itself to the business of ruin.

Brideshead Revisited is the story of a fairly ordinary young middle-class man Charles Ryder who goes up to Oxford in the 1920’s and is immediately drawn into the social circle of a louche, gay aristocrat named Sebastian Flyte. Flyte is highly unstable and prone to alcoholism, but Ryder is seduced by him, especially, like a Jane Austen heroine, when he sees his house at Brideshead. But on a trip to Venice Ryder is drawn to Sebastian’s equally seductive sister Julia, and Sebastian embarks on a drinking frenzy which never comes to an end. The film begins and ends in WWII when Ryder has been billeted at Brideshead and moons around the empty, decaying grandeur of it all remembering the past.

Director Julian Jarrold is necessarily reaching for a high standard here. Some of the casting is better than the original. Some of it is worse. The best moments are when Ben Whishaw (as Sebastian) and Emma Thompson (as his mother Lady Marchmain) are onscreen. The worst are turns by the otherwise splendid actor Michael Gambon, doing a kind of Ricky Gervais impersonation as Lord Marchmain (a role rather better inhabited by Laurence Olivier), and by the chief casting of Matthew Goode (Matchpoint) as Charles Ryder, who gives a performance so lumpen and unappealing that the mystery of why everyone throws themselves at him becomes the elephant in the very large silk-wallpapered Drawing Room. This character always was a winnying arriviste but somehow Jeremy Irons still made him appealing.

It’s a long film at 132 minutes and the magnificence of the original TV series was that it allowed the story to breathe. Here Ben Whishaw (who camps his character up substantially compared to Anthony Andrews version) disappears far too early in the film and what we are left with is the dreary, dank melodrama of the endgame; miserable marriages, catholic deathbed scenes and so on. The lightness of the Oxford years, and the stolen summers at Brideshead, have been trimmed back. And it’s a mistake. Despite the presence of a scriptwriter as good as Andrew Davies (Bridget Jones), the roll of the story has been misjudged and weighted towards the theme of guilt.

That said, this film is perfectly good in many ways. And it’s also perfectly pointless. As predicted.

** Two Stars Out of Five

Already released in the US, Brideshead opens in UK cinemas October 3rd

The Late Lost Heath Ledger

Quite unknowingly, I was present at the last piece of filming that Heath Ledger ever did. Or rather I was a hundred yards away listening to a band playing in a Clerkenwell pub. There was Heath Ledger at about eight o’clock on a Saturday evening in London, wrapping some scenes for The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus. Three days later he was dead.

My friends kept popping out of the pub to go and watch him filming on the road. I never quite got around to it. Perhaps I was feeling a bit jaded. Perhaps I’d been to too many movie sets and talked to too many actors. He’d always be around, after all.

You could see an early sneak clips here, but in the last few hours the video seems to have been removed.

Ledger’s role, you may remember, was subsequently divided out between Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law ( who by the way donated their earnings to Ledger’s daughter Matilda – Ledger had not revised his will at the time of death to include his new-born little girl).

Anyhow, here's the official movie website