'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

A few visits this week to remodellings. Around where I used to work, there's a whole stretch along the edge of Pimlico which seems to have suddenly gone up in the world, and most shocking of these gentrifications is the Cask. Formerly a dog rough estate pub, I suppose it always had potential if only because the estate in question consists of buildings called Noel Coward House and Aubrey Beardsley House, and looks like a red brick Hanging Gardens of Babylon. And now the old Tram is a genteel, polished wood affair, more gastro than I normally like a pub but somehow getting away with it, and offering booze that wouldn't be out of place at Ale Meat Cider. Approved.
Similarly, North Library's renovation has worked out nicely. Too often library renovations seem to end up with more 'accessibility' and fewer books, but this is the opposite, and while the old shelves are gone, there's a delightfully labyrinthine aspect to the new ones. And, one of the books in pride of place for the relaunch is a shiny new copy of Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire.
Finally, the Silver Bullet, another rubbish pub reborn; it's now the venue which I'd always felt was the one thing Finsbury Park really lacked. It's been there for a while, I was just waiting 'til it hosted a band I wanted to see. Last night was Performance, and they played 'Surrender', so I was happy. Now all we need to do is see about getting all the bands I know with local members to play a local gig for local people there.

Zowie Bowie's debut feature, Moon, perhaps impressed me less than viewers without a science fiction background, because conceptually there wasn't much new to it - but it was beautifully executed. And if you're going to make a film that's pretty much all one actor, who has to be both versatile and mesmeric, then Sam Rockwell is a hard choice to beat.

Russell T Davies' The Writer's Tale is excellent. I know we all loved nitpicking his Who, comparing his scripts unfavourably to Moffat's and so forth - and we were right to do so, and if you come to this book expecting much in the way of mea culpa, you're going to be disappointed. At times, you'll even be shocked by how close he came to being even worse - it's only his correspondent here, DWM's Ben Cook, and Moffat, who dissuaded Rusty from bringing back the sodding Daleks, again, for David Tennant's finale. But this is also the man who wrote Midnight and Turn Left. Who moved heaven and Earth to bring back Doctor Who, and made of it something which the public and - mostly - the fans could love. And this is the behind the scenes story of how he did it, or at least the bit from Voyage of the Damned onwards. It is also a very useful book for writers generally (anything Who-specific is footnoted), not to mention a hefty 700 pages which can be applied firmly to the head of any luddite fool who says the era of the email and text means we'll no longer get collected correspondences. There are fascinating glimpses of stories as they might have been - Planet of the Dead was almost a Star Trek pastiche, or might have brought back the Chelonians long before Moffat did. Kate Winslet was the first choice for River Song. There's a brilliantly slashy Master/Master scene that was never going to make it to TV, but the script survives here. The title 'Death of the Doctor' floated around the main series for a while before ending up on Sarah Jane, as did the idea of a mysteriously empty London from this week's episode. And so on. But the most exciting bit is that sometimes, as Davies is tapping out an email to Cook, he's basically thinking aloud, and we see the exact moment an idea is born into the world. Here you will find the exact moment when it becomes clear that Wilf knocking will mark the Doctor's end. And for all the things I'd have liked him to have done differently, for all the moments where he comes across as a bit of a daft old queen, the abiding feeling which remains is of a man who loves TV in general and Doctor Who in particular, and good on him.

There are plenty of films with two actors playing the same character - usually an older or a younger version of the star. But I can't think of many with four plus actors in the same part. This week, I saw two, and in both cases one of the actors sharing was Heath Ledger.
I was interested in I'm Not There even before I eventually fell for Bob Dylan as a performer rather than just a songwriter. Because biopics bore me so easily - always the same few variations on the old arc - and because this was Todd Haynes, who already did the oblique approach so well with Bowie and Iggy and the rest in Velvet Goldmine. And the two films share more than a little: the transfer of power between different avatars of Dylan reminds me of the green jewel in the earlier film; there's a journalist out to unveil origins, though here it's not the backbone of the plot; above all, there's the question of whether music can change the world, and what happens to the musician if it can't. But the big difference is that Haynes clearly never felt betrayed by Dylan like he did by Bowie. He loves all his Dylans equally - even if, like most people, I was left a little cold by the Richard Gere outlaw Dylan. The others, though...I loved having Batman and the Joker both play the same part (see, Alan? 'The Killing Joke' did have some external resonance after all), then sharing it with the Virgin Queen. And did they know when they cast this, or Bright Star, that Ben Whishaw would be playing both Dylan and Keats, that old lit-crit cliche given (rather handsome) life. So much truer than the standard biopic, and probably not even that much less factual. Though I say that as someone who knows very little about Dylan's life - just enough to wince when he buys a motorcycle.
I'm Not There was planned that way. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was not, but you'd never guess it. I have no idea what was changed in the script, but one can almost suspect that Terry Gilliam, so used to being shafted by whatever cosmic entity it is that likes messing with him, was filming in such an order that he could work around the loss of Ledger. Which would normally mean that instead Christopher Plummer would have died, or maybe Tom Waits, or the lad from Red Riding would have been eaten by foxes or something, but just this once the stupid obstacle in Gilliam's way was one that he could work around. There aren't half some queasy moments, scenes with Ledger's character that gain a whole new resonance - but always in such a way that it strengthens the film. ( spoilers ) among its many other flights of fancy. And such flights of fancy they are! I can't remember the last film I saw which was so visually rich, whether in its worlds of the imagination, or in its London. And it does have to take place in London, doesn't it? The grandest, most fabled city in the world - but also one with grabbing thugs spilling out of crappy pubs, and Homebases insisting you spend spend spend, and its perpetual building sites.
Ashes to Ashes fans should be aware that Shaz gets a small role, but the real revelation is Lily Cole. I knew she was pretty, but I'd never seen her move, or speak, and so I'd never realised she was beautiful, let alone that she could act. Which given that face, and that she's just gone up to Cambridge, seems terribly unfair, but then like the film is so intent on reminding us, the world is full of wonders.

I also saw Crank this week. There's not so much to say about that one; like Shoot 'Em Up it's the action movie distilled to its purest form and injected into your eyeball with a syringe made of guns - smarter than it lets on, while also being the best sort of big dumb fun. During its ITV transmission, there was also an ad for the ITV4 debut of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse - two hours earlier. Well done, ITV. Said trailer didn't do anything useful like inform me of a repeat, but I tracked one down and...well, when I first heard about Dollhouse I thought, hang on, isn't that basically Joe 90 - The Sexy Years? The first episode didn't convince me otherwise but, because it's Whedon, I'm persevering. Even though I realised a while back that if Buffy started now, I don't think I'd make it through the first season.

Recently took delivery of Saint Etienne's delayed new compilation, London Conversations, and have been thinking about how unlikely a band they are. Their danceable cover of hairy old Neil Young's 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart' hit in 1990, the same year as Candy Flip's not dissimilar take on one of the few non-dreadful Beatles songs, 'Strawberry Fields Forever'. Would anyone have expected either of the acts behind these apparent novelties to go on to spend 20 years as one of Britain's most cherished, most quietly trailblazing cult bands? I can't think of such a deceptive start since Bowie first came to mass attention with 'The Laughing Gnome'.
And then a detour in my musings when, last night, cappuccino_kid took me to see Black Box Recorder. Because don't those two bands almost form a subgenre all their own? Two male survivors, who aren't fronting the bands but who definitely need to be on stage, not backroom boys. One frontwoman called Sarah, thought a bit flat by some but recognised by indie boys of a certain stripe as an aspect of the goddess; her stage persona is all about the innocence, maybe with a little tang of experience, but you know she's no puppet. And the songs all inhabit a world of England past. The difference being, Black Box Recorder are the England you hoped was past but fear might not be (behind the stage last night, a Union Jack emblazoned with ROCK AND ROLL NOT DOLE), where Saint Etienne are the past you hope is still there just below the surface (watching the 'Hobart Paving' video, I remember that King's Cross, and I miss it).
Support was Madam acoustic; I swear she looks younger than she used to when hospitalsoup was in her band, five years or more ago.

Interesting that today should bring further confirmation of Stephen Fry's status as a national treasure, as I was already planning to write a little about him, having yesterday read Simon Gray's Fat Chance. Some of you may remember that in 1995, Stephen Fry, then in a play called Cell Mates, disappeared, and was briefly feared to have killed himself before turning up on the Continent (very Black Box Recorder, come to think of it). Simon Gray was the author and director of that play, and aside from having previously loved his Smoking Diaries, I was intrigued by the possibility of A Book Which Didn't Like Stephen Fry. I mean, don't get me wrong, I think he's great, but just as I enjoy Lawrence Miles' anti-Steven Moffat agenda re: Doctor Who, I tend to find devil's advocates fun. Come on, if you'd lived in the ages of faith, wouldn't you have wanted to read The Three Impostors* even if you believed, just for naughtiness' sake? So Gray was royally let down by Fry, and the front cover quote is "Makes Mommie Dearest read like a Mother's Day card" - Mark Lawson, The Guardian. Well, that should have been my first warning. Granted, Smug Slug does sometimes restrict himself to stating the bleeding obvious, but more often he misses the point entirely, and Gray himself notes that "The Guardian, ever vigilant in its defence of truth and the decencies, published an article quoting the unfavourable reviews, neglecting to mention that the Guardian's own reviewer had written both warmly and intelligently about the play." And if there is a villain here it is the media, and the media's delight in reporting what the media is saying without ever deigning to return to primary sources - something of which we see even more these days simply because there's more media and more pages and airtime to fill, with results I'm sure I need hardly list and decry again. Gray does accuse Fry of certain crimes - a tendency to play himself, for instance, whether he is meant to be playing someone else, or just honestly being himself. Well, that's hardly news, and nor is it delivered in terms significantly more damning than Gray uses of himself in The Smoking Diaries. Fry comes across more as a sad figure than a mad one, and more mad than bad - and since he's come out as a manic depressive, none of this really does much to contradict his own acknowledgment of his situation. Part of me's disappointed that there is no anti-Fry book, but mostly I just think 'bless'. And posthumously bless cantankerous old Gray, too. Though the real hero of the tale, would you believe, is Rik Mayall.

*Which reminds me, sbp - any joy locating my copy of the Arthur Machen novel of the same name?