I do, obviously, but then I have the manners and sensibilities of an elderly Victorian gentleman. But the man described above is real; I had the misfortune to sit near him as he pulled his phone out every half an hour to make sure he was keeping his Facebook status current or whatever the fuck. And it occurred to me as I fumed and arranged my arm to block the light and, naturally, failed to confront the witless cunt, that the battle was already lost, was lost some time ago in fact.

Because, it’s not just cinemas, is it? It’s everywhere now. People walk down busy streets staring straight down at their phones, the world moving aside for them. In restaurants and pubs, people leave their phones out on the table so that nothing is missed. Notifications and messages and incoming calls trump every conversation, every person, every intimate moment: all are put on hold so that the phone can be attended to because far worse than not having any messages is the thought that you might have some messages, and be missing them because your phone wasn’t to hand. It’s why Orange feels comfortable urging customers to abandon their phones, even if only temporarily; it makes the brand look socially responsible and light-hearted but they know nobody’s going to take their advice.

That’s why the cinema is now a place where people use their phones, because everywhere is a place where people feel they can use their phones. The next generation of cinema-goers will have grown up in a world with omnipresent mobile devices; not having your phone out in a cinema will be the unusual case.

Importantly, for cinemas to survive, they’ll have to cater for the likes of them, not for the likes of me. I’m not a good customer; I might attend regularly but I’m not a family of four, I don’t attend 3D screenings, I don’t buy popcorn, sweets or drinks, I can tell when a film is being projected poorly and I’ll stop attending if it continues. All any cinema gets from me is the bare minimum of the ticket price and maybe the price of a coffee.

The cinema chains have made it clear where their target market lies by heavily pushing 3D over 2D, by moving ticket sales to the food and drink area, by scrapping ushers and projectionists and other moderating, quality-controlling elements. They might trot out those Orange adverts before every film but cinemas want the kind of customer that can’t sit for 30 minutes without checking their phone, because if those people feel they can’t go to the cinema without being able to do that, they won’t go to the cinema. Cinema owners have already started considering how to allow patrons to use their phones. They’re not about to deploy signal blocking technology and bouncers for my benefit.

So, unless there’s a large-scale societal shift in the way we use these devices, and I don’t see any reason there will be, phone usage in cinemas is just going to be how things are. Those of us who think a cinema should be a silent, dark place will have to content ourselves with watching everything three months later than everyone else, in the privacy of our homes, where we will use our phones during the boring bits just as everybody else does.

Everything here is as you would expect from a Joss Whedon-written, Drew Goddard-directed film; snarky tone; Whedonesque dialogue; affectionate awareness, and subsequent inversion, of genre tropes; Amy Acker. Cabin is similar in tone to final-season Angel, in which Angel & Co. took up residence in the offices of an evil law firm and where a lot of the comedy came from the horrible and frightening filtered through layers of corporate process and tedium, making things all the more horrible from the casual way people went about genocide; just a job, after all.

Like most Whedon material, Cabin is constantly funny, a little scary in places but never enough to qualify as real horror, never overstays its welcome and would benefit from multiple viewings to spot all the gags. If there’s a criticism, it’s that Fran Kranz’s stoner character is overly broad; laughing at someone stoned might be funny for a few minutes, but stretching it over a full film sends you dangerously close to Judd Apatow’s territory.

Related posts:

1. Review of Kenneth Branagh's Thor
2. Serenity
3. Some thoughts on The Avengers

The film is attractive, all fairy lights and clockwork and steam, but every time a 3D shot gets thrown in I found myself distracted by it. It’s ironic that a film that’s fundamentally about THE MAGIC OF CINEMA features so much alienating and fourth wall-breaking camerawork; every time a character reaches into the screen or looks straight into the camera it reminds me that the shot was made for 3D. Scorsese tries to keep things varied but it’s still all so bloody obvious: trains, crowds of people, scenery, even a load of feet at one point, all heading straight for the camera; it might work in a 3D context but in 2D it screams YOU’RE WATCHING A 3D FILM YOU LOSER.

Beyond the pointless 3D showboating, the film has nothing; Hugo is a confection. The character of Hugo himself is bland and watery and it doesn’t take long for Chloë Moretz’s “Golly, I love adventures and books and secrets!” schtick to wear thin. There’s a few supporting characters involved in some minor romantic subplots but they could have been removed and nothing of value would have been lost, and Sasha Baron Cohen is grating and unfunny. Generally, I mean.

Once the clockwork mannequin plot is resolved — early and underwhelmingly — all the film has to carry it along is a superficial history lesson on Georges Méliès and a bit of preaching about the value of film preservation, complete with the fetishising of film stock and analogue projection that seems to plague film-lovers of a certain age, grumbling about the inexorable rise of digital.

I expected to like Hugo, but I felt like Scorsese was standing over me, slapping me around the face with a roll of film shouting LOOK AT THE MAGIC ISN’T THIS MAGICAL AREN’T YOU GIDDY? I was left wondering why Scorsese didn’t just make a documentary on Méliès and early film instead; he could have gone into more depth, presented a more coherent argument for the value of physical film, elaborated on film preservation and restoration techniques, perhaps touched upon his own restoration of The Red Shoes. Hugo tries so hard to be magical and to convey the sense of wonder that the director obviously feels for the medium, but ends up boring, trite and pointless.

In Stargate Universe Carlyle played the bitter and mean-spirited Dr. David Rush. A sullen, sarcastic Scot, he had all the best, nastiest lines, he had all the worst character traits and had a ruthlessness that made him the only interesting person on board. Not evil per se, but the interests of the rest of the crew were secondary to his own. He was always fun to watch, and there was nobody else in the cast that could match his wit. Rush probably wasn’t the character you were supposed to sympathise with, but he always ended up being the one you were rooting for.

So that was why I watched Stargate Universe, and now it’s why I sit through Once Upon a Time.

Once Upon a Time, a series where a load of fairyland characters are unknowingly trapped in small town America by the evil queen, is about as average as Stargate Universe, perhaps a little more so. Dodgy scripts and performances, sloppy storylines and bizarre lurches in tone that see light comedy moments up against a woman having WHORE painted on her car, the show is almost relentlessly, intentionally bland and unenjoyable.

But then there’s Robert Carlyle, playing Rumpelstiltskin in the fairy tale world and a sinister property tycoon in the real world. As Rumpelstiltskin he seems to be having more fun in that role than anybody else in the history of all roles, ever. This series of clips of every single laugh he’s made during the show so far sums up what you can expect. Carlyle plays the part in full-on pantomime mode, seemingly the only actor there who realises that that’s probably what they’re supposed to be doing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6G-wwS8arU

In the fairy tale flashbacks you get Carlyle on acid. In the real world scenes he’s essentially reprising his Stargate role; scheming, manipulative, not directly evil but always placing his own interests ahead of anyone else’s. Again, most of the best lines are his, puncturing the earnest and irony-free American performances every step of the way.

I don’t know why Carlyle is slumming it in these shows; an actor of his calibre could be and should be getting more high-profile roles. Whatever the reason, it’s a win-win for the audience; we get to watch trashy tv and we get to watch Robert Carlyle acerbically slicing every episode open. I’d love to see him take on a more respectable series; Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire or Treme perhaps. Until then, I’m happy to watch him taking Snow White down a peg or two.

Moans about the title being trimmed to lose the ‘of Mars’ suffix are churlish in light of what the film really is: an introduction. For most of the film, Carter is just John Carter of Virginia and all he wants is to get back to Earth. The film is his journey to become the character he’s better known as, and besides, if you’re going to moan about anything then moan that the title wasn’t ‘A Princess of Mars‘ seeing as that’s the title of the source text OR IS THAT JUST TOO GIRLY FOR YOU, EH?

So, John Carter is an origin story, because all SF and fantasy film adaptations must be first presented as an origin story, though in fairness when your source material is 100 years old it’s probably ok to assume some unfamiliarity. Carter is introduced as a down-on-his luck spectator, harrassed by Captain Bryan Cranston who seems to be in the film only to be the butt of some admittedly good physical gags. In fact, for a film that can be a little po-faced there’s a fair bit of comedy early on, and I wondered if Andrew Stanton’s experience with silent comedy in WALL·E helped for the cute scene in which Carter learns to walk in the reduced gravity of Mars.

It’s when Carter has reached Mars that the film’s pace picks up, and it’s like watching A Phantom Menance but directed by someone with taste and talent. Visually, the film is amazing; effects are consistently excellent, ranging from four-armed, 15ft-tall, green-skinned natives to sweeping views of dead landscapes and steampunk cities. Action sequences, with Carter effortlessly bounding across buildings and single-handedly fighting whole armies, are thrilling.

The cast is strong: Taylor Kitsch is a little too young and smooth to pull off the ‘grizzled and broken Civil War veteran’ look convincingly but comes into his own once he gets his shirt off and starts bounding about the place. His counterpart is Lynn Collins, whose character seemed to be everything at once — a princess, an academic, a sword fighter — until her role degenerated into the ‘princess to be rescued’ standard, destined, one way or another, to be married off to a virtual stranger. Ciarán Hinds adds a touch of flat-faced angsty gravitas and Dominic West does his best though did seem to be acting from the chin a lot. Mark Strong is MARK STRONG as usual and James Purefoy needed to be in the film a lot more.

John Carter isn’t as bad as you may have heard, and perhaps not as good either. At the time of writing, opinions seem to have polarised, with critics rushing to hate it more than their peers, and defensive audiences being unusually forgiving of the film’s flaws. The film does have flaws, but they shouldn’t distract from what is, at heart, a great Saturday morning popcorn film.

Related posts:

1. Review of Tomas Alfredson's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
2. Review of Rise of the Planet of the Apes

While I’m not dismissive of the post-Jim Henson Muppet films — I think that Christmas Carol is not only one of the strongest Muppet films but the best adaptation of A Christmas Carol there’s ever been — I concede that they’ve been stuck in a bit of a rut these last few years, so I was looking forward to seeing what a new team could put together.

The Muppets is a strong return to form. While Amy Adams and Jason Segel are disturbingly and unpleasantly saccharine, the script is funny, the songs are superb, the fourth-wall breaks often and I look forward to future generations not recognising any of the celebrity cameos. Seriously, go back and watch the original films – Edgar Bergen? Milton Berle? Cloris Leachman? Tommy Godfrey? Peggy Aitchison? That last one doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. 20 years from now, who will recognise Selena Gomez? I don’t even know who she is today.

My only issue with The Muppets is that I could never shake the feeling that the target audience was me, an adult who was a child during during the ’70s and ’80s. The film lays on the references to times past, with jokes about modems, New Coke and Molly Ringwald alongside references to the old show and classic Muppet films, placing it firmly in the “Hey, remember Thundercats?” school of conversational gambits. Space-hoppers, eh? What were they all about?

The conceit of The Muppets is that the cast are no longer relevant to children today, so it’s unfortunate that by the end of the film they haven’t really shown otherwise. Instead they’ve shown that, like modems, New Coke and Molly Ringwald, their relevance is limited to thirtysomethings like myself.

I loved the film, I loved hearing The Rainbow Connection and seeing the classic Muppet intro sequence again, but you know what? I can see those on Youtube as well. So, I’m hoping the next Muppet film doesn’t rely so much on reminding me of things past, and works a little harder on something new.

Related posts:

1. Review of The Secret of Kells
2. Review of Duncan Jones' Moon
3. Review of X-Men: First Class

In place of Neo-Tokyo we have contemporary Seattle, and in place of Kaneda and Tetsuo we have Matt, Andrew and Steve, three typical American high-school students who gain telekinetic powers due to reasons. Chronicle takes what could be a by-the-numbers ‘power corrupts’ story and, with plenty of character development and enjoyable set-pieces, turns out something far more interesting and personal, similar in style to Monsters, District 9 and Stake Land.

Chronicle has been described as another ‘found footage’ film, in the same vein as The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, but this isn’t really the case; by the final act so many different cameras are in play that it’s clear that nobody has collated and spliced together all this footage and that Chronicle is more of an ‘as it happens footage’ film.

This spin on the found footage concept helps keep the film interesting. As the teen’s powers and confidence grows so does the visual complexity of the film, helping to stave off ‘wobbly camera’ fatigue and allowing us to see the characters doing the filming. Introducing multiple cameras, and making good use of the fact that so many of us now carry around HD video cameras as a matter of course, allows for some tension-busting action sequences that put some summer blockbuster films to shame. A vertigo-inducing sequence in the clouds is a stand-out moment, but the entire third act is all nail-biting action.

A too-saccharine coda lets the film down slightly at the finish line, and the mouthy American teen tone can grate a little to begin with, but those flaws aside Chronicle is a spare, tight action drama well worth your time.

Related posts:

1. Review of The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
2. Review of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows
3. Review of Kenneth Branagh's Thor

Fortunately the restaurant itself is pleasant and professional; light, airy and staffed with waitresses who recognise Mervyn Peake. At that time of day the place has that sleepy vibe you often get in hotel restaurants as most of the people in the room only put their shoes on 30 seconds ago and haven’t had a chance to have a really good scratch and stretch yet. I always find it relaxing seeing people paying by writing a number on a card and that being enough. It’s as if the entire payment system works on the honour system. Nobody checks the signature, they just add whatever to the bill of Room n at the end of their stay and hope it all works out. I stayed at a hotel once where some wily rogue managed to tag a three course meal for two onto my room, so it’s not a perfect system. Fortunately I was able to prove that on that night I’d been a single man eating cashew nuts out of the minibar so myself and the staff just laughed it off, albeit with somewhat bitter laughter on my part.

The St. John Hotel breakfast menu is heavy on the sturdy, meaty dishes with a couple of offally options for the extreme breakfasters. This isn’t a place to go for the traditional Full English or Eggs Benedict; instead you get devilled kidneys, blood sausage and beans, boiled eggs and anchovy toast or the simple bacon, eggs and fried bread. This is a menu of Hemingwayesque brevity, the simplicity of each listing belying the depth of the flavour. Blood sausage and beans were rich and porky; bacon, eggs and fried bread turned out to be a pile of half a dozen rashers and three fried eggs on a broad slab of sourdough. Devilled kidneys were a generous portion served on thick toast with gravy and a vague sense of Joyce.

There are lighter options; granola, prunes, fruit and yogurt. I’m sure they’re all fine and, in keeping with the rest of the menu, more substantial, interesting and flavourful than they might sound at first but I won’t know until I start breakfasting with or near someone with a significantly smaller stomach. Fruit juice gets its own listing in the food menu rather than the beverages menu which baffles me, though not enough to order it of course. I imagine this is just there to cater for people who are visiting from the ’70s.

Related posts:

1. Breakfast at Côte, Highgate
2. An open letter to St. John Bread and Wine

Enough of that, though; this was a year or so ago and isn’t relevant. This is just the prologue, the There and Back Again to the main article’s Fellowship of the Ring. There’s a period after my first visit where the place closed down and the premises were taken over by squatters but, like those bits in Rings where five pages are devoted to an Elvish poem or some shit, it’s safe to skip over this period without worrying about missing anything.

So anyway, The Bull re-opened a few months ago without the squatters and the Stepford Staff and became a much more attractive proposition. Spread out over two floors with some open fires and sofas the place doesn’t ever get too claustrophobic or uncomfortably crowded (admittedly that’s coming from someone who’s ideal pub has a patronage of just one, i.e., himself). It’s airy yet atmospheric though if you get sat by the fire then you will be in danger of combusting as it gets pretty enthusiastic some times.

Every meal I’ve had so far has been a success; rib-eyed steak with beer-glazed onions and chips; stuffed chicken breast with mash; pulled pork with jalapeños and pineapple. Starters tend to be interesting, with raw tuna tacos, smoked lamb’s tongues and breaded sweetbreads on the menu; it takes a brave pub to serve up the thymus gland but The Bull managed to pull it off. There’s also starters for the normals; ribs and wings and whatnot.

Special mention must go to a bourbon-glazed fillet steak, perfectly cooked and accompanied by a wedge of blue cheese bread and butter pudding, which I didn’t realise was a thing that could even exist. Basically a plate of pure umami, and as such it nearly brought me to tears.

Normally I wouldn’t mention the beer, because, you know, pubs, they serve beer generally and it’s an unremarkable thing to comment on. There’ll be a couple of ales by Fullers or Shepherd Neame and the rest will be all, I don’t know, Fosters and Stella Artois or something else that normally gets bought by the crate in Sainsbury’s to be consumed in front of the TV while the sport is on.

The Bull is different; in addition to a wide range of beers from Bavarian trappist monks and Brooklyn breweries, The Bull brews their own under the name of The London Brewing Company. My standard choice is their Best Bitter, but I’ve since enjoyed their Galena Red, their dark Winter Ale and a Christmas ale brewed with mince pies and brandy and officially named ‘π-eyed’, bringing some much-needed mathematical constancy to the micro-brewing world. There’s also a lighter ale named ‘Golden Mean’, which makes me think someone there has at least a polytechnic education behind them.

I can’t explain what they’re like in more detail as any conversation about the hoppiness of a beer, or lack thereof, makes me fall asleep faster than the drink itself. Sorry about that. They’re all pretty good though.

Related posts:

1. The Victoria, Highgate
2. Breakfast at Côte, Highgate

So, I hadn’t planned to see the Spielberg-directed The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn but after a cold stomp across the Heath it seemed like a good way to calm myself down after becoming enraged at the entire grasping, over-priviledged population of Hampstead getting in my face, and it was going to be that or a documentary on Joyce Vincent which probably wasn’t going to help my mood.

Tintin turned out to be excellent. I can’t tell you how well it stands as an adaptation of the comics — it’s possible that Tintinologists will watch the whole thing spluttering with rage at clothing inaccuracies and not enough racism — but as a film in its own right it had pretty much everything I’d hoped for. With its c1940s setting it’s all machine guns, motorbikes and globe-trotting for clues; Secret of the Unicorn ends up feeling more like a good Indiana Jones film than most Indiana Jones films. The action is thrilling and a Steven Moffat-drafted script subsequently polished by Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish sparkles.

Everything looks and sounds great. The almost-photorealistic nature of the animation, usually used to generate nightmarish images of Tom Hanks, is pretty good here because the characters tend to have facial hair and long noses and whatnot and look like the exaggerated cartoon caricatures that they are. The only one letting the side down is Tintin himself; by lacking any distinguishing features besides his quiff he’s left with a blank, doughy face and looks like he’d be happier leaning against a shack, playing a banjo. It doesn’t spoil the film, but it takes some getting used to.

Related posts:

1. Hot Fuzz
2. Review of The Secret of Kells
3. Review of Rise of the Planet of the Apes