Popcorn double feature

Two new films this weekend, both at lovely Curzons, one a triumph, the other a bore. Capitalism: A Love Story is the latest Michael Moore. I know Moore divides as well as conquers. I happen to be on his side, and have written before about the disgraceful body fascism employed by some of his critics (the venerable Philip French was moved to describe him in this way in his downbeat review of Capitalism in today's Observer: "Meanwhile he struts around, pot-bellied and badly shaven, in ill-fitting jeans and scuffed baseball cap ..." - what is this, a fashion parade for thin people?), but I do understand why he's not to all tastes. His scattergun approach to editing and presentation may not stand up under the microscope of close scrutiny, but his heart is in the right place, it's good that somebody is making films like this, and he reaches a wide audience. He is a polemicist, just one who happens to be entertaining with it. Some don't like him because he's left wing and successful/rich, which is apparently the highest form of hypocrisy. This doesn't bother me: he's making films that expose America's gun laws, foreign policy, healthcare system ... they may preach to the choir to an extent, but he remains a thorn in the side of corporate America and could easily have shut up and retired by now. He hasn't. He's still needling.

Those who find the sight of Michael Moore distasteful and would prefer it if he looked like Robert Pattinson or George Clooney, there's less of him in his more recent films, and less again in Capitalism. And there are fewer stunts. A bit of megaphone action and the now traditional dealings with security guards at revolving doors, but when you see Moore in this one, he's either interviewing someone or revisiting Flint, Michigan, and gazing thoughtfully at some rubble where an industry and a town used to be with his dad. In relating the recent bank bailout to Roger & Me, Moore provides a neat circularity (the simple message: every film he's made has been about capitalism); also, he depicts his childhood as happy and abundant, and no doubt does so through rose-tinted thesis-making spectacles, but at no point does he big himself up as a poor, working class hero; though his dad was an auto worker, they lived well, as many working families did in 1950s America. It's not the first time Moore has presented utopian images to help prove his gloomy point (remember the kite-flying Iraqi children in Fahrenheit 9/11?), but since these images are personal, it does what all great documentaries do, it focuses the bigger picture on individuals. It's not the first time he's shown evictions either, but these "foreclosures" have become more and more common, and it's the hard reality of being turfed out of your house that better illustrates the subprime crisis; we can sling mud at bankers all day, but that makes the issue more abstract. See a family set fire to the furniture they can't fit in the back of their truck as they load up and head off for ... where? ... is image enough.

I was moved by much of Capitalism. Unfortunately, the happy ending - Obama's election - although a hint of the people rising up, doesn't work, as Obama hasn't yet done very much. This is a shame, as the two upbeat stories Moore uses to shows us that all is not lost - both depicting people power (ie. unionisation, Moore's favourite drum to beat) - are far more effective. Frankly, I think you can guess by now whether you're going to enjoy this film. If you think you will, you probably will. If you think you won't, stay away.

By the way, you can, I'm delighted to say, still read the transcript of my interview with Moore at the NFT in 2002, when Bowling For Columbine was released. It was a real treat to do, and to go for a Chinese meal with him the night before.

Ah well. The Last Station had all the makings of a decent historical drama: fine cast, a nice bit of literary heft and an unploughed narrative furrow ie. the battle for Tolstoy's will between his idealistic disciples and his aggrieved and fruity wife, Unfortunately, it's dull. I actually found myself resting my head on my hand; never a good sign, and the cinema was packed with enthusiastic old people. James McAvoy, Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer gave real spark to the opening scenes, but the story itself turned the story into a to-ing and fro-ing game of blame tennis, and as Tolstoy's death approached, I found myself willing it on. Pity. This was a clever way of doing a literary biopic: avoiding showing its subject actually writing anything and focusing instead on his legacy, but the bedroom antics between Plummer and Mirren were excruciating, and you were left with a series of arguments in ornate rooms. By the way, it was set in Russia in 1910. Nobody smoked as much as half a roll up through the entire film. My question: is this historically accurate? My guess would be that pipes would be belching out smoke pretty much 24 hours a day. Was Tolstoy anti-smoking? Or was this some kind of health and safety version of pre-revolutionary Russia? I'd love to know.

For all London-based lovers of the Curzon: check out the Curzon Soho's Midnight Movies slate. Edgar Wright hosted one of Death Wish 3 the other week, and they have a disco-based Candy Darling one coming up on Friday March 19 for the Warholian among you, and a Barbarella cocktail evening on April 30. (Apologies to those not in London, but there are some benefits to living here, to counter the mess, the engineering work and extortionate house prices.)

Dead air?

Is 6 Music really on death row? Nobody actually knows for sure, and speculation and paranoid rumour have been rife for some time. But it's looking worse this morning than it did when I left the building at 10am on Wednesday. Well, the news broke last night, when the Times announced that 6 Music was to close and those that were still up went a bit nuts. The full story, by Patrick Foster, is here, but the thrust is this: the BBC will close two radio stations in an overhaul of services to be announced next month. The piece uses the word "will," not "might" or "may" or even "is expected to". Its unequivocal tone is what makes it so scary.

We all know that DG Mark Thompson is being forced to make cuts to appease readers of the Daily Mail and the Tory government-in-waiting, who think that the £3.6 billion annual licence fee is being wasted on some programmes and stations that they don't watch or listen to. The bashing of the BBC has long been a national sport among the media conglomerates who control the Rest Of The Media, corporations with fingers in multiple pies that chuck money at redesigns and failed ventures every day but are only accountable to their shareholders. Because of what used to be called "the unique way in which the BBC is funded", the private sector want the BBC to be cheaper and better and have the means to lobby for this outcome; the own all the newspapers. Any medium reliant on advertising income is suffering in the recession. They're bound to be pissed off that one of their major competitors doesn't have to rustle up ads. (Except the likes of Radio Times, for whom I also work, which is run out of the profit-making wing, BBC Worldwide, as a wholly commercial venture - more blurring of the public/private lines that started under the previous Tory government, who demanded the Corporation pay for itself. It's since come under fire to making too much money. A lose-lose situation. Close some things down, quickly!)

The Times piece says, "In a wide-ranging strategic review, [Thompson] will announce the closure of the digital radio stations 6 Music and Asian Network and introduce a cap on spending on broadcast rights for sports events of 8.5 per cent of the licence fee, or about £300 million. He will also pledge to close BBC Switch and Blast!, leaving the lucrative teenage market to ITV and Channel 4. But BBC3, which is aimed at 16 to 35-year-olds will not be touched."

The question is - and it really doesn't matter in the broader scheme of things - how come Patrick Foster has read this report, which is due to be made public next month? There are jobs at stake here. This is not about me - I just freelance for 6 Music, and have been thoroughly enjoying doing so since just before Christmas - most of the people who work at the network, day in, day out, doing a death-defying job with less resources and less warm bodies than any other comparable 24-hour music network while attracting some of the biggest names in music and receiving full support of the record industry, are on staff, or contracts. I worry for these people first, and for the loyal listeners second, with my own interests a long way down the list. I am like one of those media conglomerates - I have fingers in many pies; that's how the self-employed survive. To axe 6 Music and Asian Network - that's two entire radio stations, think about that for a minute, it would literally strip away two options on your DAB - seems sensational to me. I understand that cuts must be made, and that you can make an argument for or against any of the digital services ("Why don't they just shut BBC3?" say wags - but BBC3 is a fantastic training ground for new talent, whether you watch it or not - I don't listen to Radio 3, but I want it to exist), but my guess is that it's a lot less complicated to do the maths by chopping out entire organs than to put the body on a better diet.

The report has been drawn up by the BBC's director of policy and strategy, John Tate, who apparently co-wrote the 2005 Conservative manifesto with David Cameron. I present that simply as a fact. It seems - if the Times has actually read the report - that BBC2 gets a budget hike as long as everybody stops spending money on posh imports, like Mad Men. Frankly, as long as somebody shows Mad Men, I can live with this. (Most of my US imports are watched on FiveUSA and Hallmark anyway.) I'd rather not watch it with adverts, but I can always wait for the box set, or speed through them - oops, look at me contributing to the commercial sector's woes with the fast forward button Sky put on my remote control for me. It's so confusing!

I thought 6 Music's death had been greatly exaggerated, having emerged from the BBC Trust report with a clear brief: to ramp up the specialist music content. Brilliant. We can do that. (I speak as someone who co-hosts a Saturday morning show where the onus is very much on the other stuff.) It seems my optimism was misplaced.

Of course, we should all sit back and take a pinch of salt; the Times pieces is necessarily written and published from a stance of wishful thinking, and may not turn out to be gospel. Rupert Murdoch is easy to paint as the villain, as he's foreign and he broke the unions and gave us Page 3, but he also gives me House and Caitlin Moran, and as a media ogre he's no more against the BBC than whoever runs the Guardian Media Group, a media conglomerate to whom I happily give £1 every day, and more than that at weekends (I paid a pound!), and for whom, very occasionally, I work. I do the odd piece for the Times. I subscribe to Sky. It's complicated. But I love the BBC to the very marrow of my bones and always have done. Anything that chips away at its authority, its creativity, its inclusivity, its ability to inspire, its mission to serve and its dominance in the specialist fields of excellence and stimulation is, to my mind, bad. If they'd announced that they were closing 1Xtra and CBeebies I'd be just as pissed off, and they literally do not cross my radar. It's not just about my friends losing their jobs, it's about a prevailing storm.

Batten down the hatches, lovers of diversity and cleverness. As I always say, those who seek to give the BBC a good thrashing for being a Communist and having some croissants at its meetings and paying really good presenters some money for doing their job will be the first to write to the letters pages of the Times and the Mail and the Telegraph when the Today programme is sponsored by Immodium Plus.

Breakfast time

Two days in for Shaun Keaveny at breakfast on 6 Music, 7-10am, which meant a 5am alarm, a 5.30am Prius, a 6am cup of instant coffee at the office, a 6.30am meeting with the team, and a 6.50am handover with Chris Hawkins [round of reciprocal applause]. It's an absolute killer on day one, when your clock's all out and your head's on upside down, but I must admit, going to bed at 8pm last night made day two so much easier to cope with. I truly take my hat off to Shaun and all the other breakfast DJs, who make a routine and a lifestyle of it. I only had to do it for two days and it damn near wasted me.

Of course, the early shift would have been a lot less painful had I not been committed to two full days of brainstorming a new sitcom straight after, both days, 10.30am-5pm, followed by my Radio Times stint at the end of this afternoon, on top, which took me up to 7pm. I was flagging a bit by the end of today. Hey, I don't need your sympathy - it's all work, and if I don't work, I don't eat, and I'd rather be eating than not eating. But once again, working at the heart of 6 Music, my view is galvanised: this is an inspirational little radio station, with cool and enthusiastic people - like the two breakfast teams - working at it, and I wonder if it might be in its prime right now? Certainly the access and the interaction and the sheer swagger of the operation, combined with a more varied spread of music, a higher class of listener, and the freedom to be as spontaneous and amateurish as me on a near-daily basis and power a show on pure adrenalin and fun, makes it a unique operation. Long may it continue.

Collins & Legge

Not really. But Michael Legge and I are teaming up for a couple of Edinburgh work-in-progress shows at the Hen & Chickens in London's N1, on April 18 and 19 (starting 9.30), and May 31 (starting 7.30). As they are works in progress, the shows themselves could get better, or worse, so take your pick whether to go the earlier or later ones. Tickets go on sale TONIGHT at MIDNIGHT. We'd love to see you.

Pretty pictures

Going to see lots of films at the moment, but too busy working to actually write about them. But hey, it's Oscars run-up, so let me take this opportunity to catch up with three that have awards-season form. A Single Man is one of my favourite films of 2010 so far, a singular piece of work, based on a 1964 novel, set in 1962 just after the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Christopher Isherwood, which, despite being a key piece of gay lib lit, nobody I know seems to have read. (Perhaps you had to be there.) It's an intrinsically gay film, in that it's about a gay man who loses his gay lover and risks a gay affair, and even his one meaningful friendship with a woman is affected by his gayness. And yet, it's not a gay film at all, it's a film about grief, loss, love and lust that just happens to be about same-sex grief, loss, love and lust. I'm not spoiling anything to say that it begins with the news of the loss - a scene in which, after all these years of mucking about and narrowing his eyes, Colin Firth gets to act. With his face. This is not stage acting, this is screen acting; it's all in the tiny nuances. These minutes are worth an Oscar - or a Bafta - on their own. The detail that makes the scene is that the family of Firth's lover, who he's been with for something like 14 years, don't want him at the funeral. This stings, and reminds us that the world was very different in 1962, even if you were on a trendy Los Angeles college campus. Tom Ford is a fashion designer. I know this, even though I care nothing about fashion and have only heard of fashion designers. (I have heard of Alexander McQueen, and accept that he was clearly good at his job, but I don't connect with him in the way that I might an actor or a writer.) I sort of don't care what Tom Ford was, or is - can he direct? Well, he has directed Colin Firth to his first acting awards, and teases honest and full-blooded performances from Nicholas Hoult and Julianne Moore, so he's doing something right. And A Single Man is an exquisite looking film, as you might expect. It is neat and tidy and tailored, but that's because the main character is neat and tidy and tailored, a neatness and tidiness and tailoredness that masks the fact that he's in bits. Some have accused the film of being cold and distant; I felt the opposite. It's Mad Men-on-sea.
Hey, I thought Eddie Murphy had finished wearing fat suits and caricaturing black people! Ha ha. That is my little joke. Precious has been around for a while now, and if you've seen the trailer, you've seen the film, and if the trailer puts you off seeing it, you're probably best off not seeing it - this is not for the socially squeamish. Based on another novel that nobody I know has read, it's an unshowy film that moves at the sluggish, incidental pace of real life, with occasional bursts of action which, sadly for Precious herself, are usually bursts of rage or cruelty or pain. Again, some have accused the film of indulging in social and racial tourism, in that unless you live below the poverty line in an ethnic ghetto where a foot hovers constantly over your chances you are necessarily going to be viewing another world. But isn't fiction all about taking us to other worlds? (The film is set in Harlem in 1987, although you'd hardly notice that it's a period piece beyond the lack of cellphones.) This is a soul movie. It works like all the best soul music: it's simple, it's emotionally charged and it comes from here. Gabourey Sidibe and Mo'nique deserve all the praise that's being heaped upon them - especially Mo'nique, as she has to play the monster without turning this into a horror movie - but all the girls in Precious's special education class are excellent, too. If it was all misery, it wouldn't work, but it's not. In the trailer, Paula Patton's angelic teacher says, tearfully, "Your baby loves ... I love you," to a sobbing Precious, and it's the Soul Moment - but you need to understand the context.

Well, I've never read The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, but I know people who have, mainly women, and they seem to greatly admire its tale of a 14-year-old girl raped and murdered in a small Pennsylvania town in 1973 who watches over her grieving family from a waystation between here and heaven. I am unmarried to the original text, so approached the film, directed by Peter Jackson, without prejudice. I thought it looked intriguing and would be a nice change from all his CGI stuff. Oh dear. He seems to have opted to fillet a rather bleak story and remodel it into a kids' fairy tale. It's a 12A, which is fine, so is A Single Man, and that's for grown-ups. Saoirse Ronan, aged 14 when she filmed it, is a luminous presence, and does a pretty good American accent too, but she is neither here nor there in a film where two films are poured into the same jug and just swirl around but do not mix. One film is a kitchen sink drama about a girl being murdered by the local weirdo (Stanley Tucci with a comb-over, identified as the killer from the beginning, thus making any tension about his capture flimsy and uninvolving); the other is a gloopy, Yellow Submarine-style fantasy about the gap between heaven and earth, which, instead of some kind of terrifying limbo as it initially appears, quickly flowers into a kind of paradise with trees and grass and beaches and sunshine, where huge symbols crash into view - ooh, look, the model ships-in-bottles that the girl's dad used to make as his hobby are now giant ships-in-giant bottles and they're in the sea and they're smashing against the rocks, subtly symbolising that all is not well in her father's world and the fact that, oh, he's smashing the bottles in real life. It's like Terry Gilliams sneaked into the editing suite and inserted bits of one of his films into an episode of Waking The Dead. It's surely significant of the film's cowardice that there is no mention, not even a hint, that the girl has been raped in the film. The nature of her murder is also skirted around, but that's not a problem, as she is dead. It's as if the awkward sexual assault aspect would spoil Jackson's film about the afterlife. Having her murdered is OK, but not raped as that's a bit icky. So we have a film about a serious subject - death - that's rendered ludicrous by wishful fantasy. Please tell me the book had a bit more heft and depth.

Now, back to work. Although I am on BBC News at 6.30 tonight, talking about the Baftas, so banging on about films and work collide.

Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice

I'm on nights all week, sitting in for Gideon Coe, 9-midnight on 6 Music, and it's cosmic. We have the lights down low, nice hot cups of green tea, maybe a biscuit or a cheeky Double Decker, either me and Mark, or me and Justin, there's barely another soul in the building, you're entitled to a Prius home at the end, and it's just fabulous old concert recordings and session tracks and nuggets thrown in like a track from Ostrich Churchyard here and a Young Marble Giants track there, and I get to hear more recent stuff that actually merits an ear like Felix or Tune-Yards or the Dum Dum Girls, or something ridiculously obscure like the Liggers from a Manchester Musicians Collective compilation. If the BBC Trust want less celebs and more music, which apparently they do, then they should listen to Gid's show; it's the station remit in an approachable hat. It's been a pleasure playing with it, gentlemen. Oh, and look, Steve Lamacq popped in for a chat before his Radio 2 show tonight to tell us about Gyratory System, a nightmarish experimental jazz trio he saw by mistake. And then we played a Happy Mondays session, Public Enemy and Elvis live in Vegas, 1970. NEVER SHUT THIS NETWORK DOWN, YOU IDIOTS!

Scrumdog millionaire

Saw the new Clint Eastwood movie Invictus on Friday. He directed and produced it, which is usually cause for celebration these days. It stars Matt Damon as actual South African rugby captain Francoise Pienaar and Morgan Freeman as actual South African president Nelson Mandela. Because I can't stand rugby - to me, it's a team sport seemingly entirely free of grace and mainly packed with big fellas running into one another - I had no idea South Africa won the rugby World Cup in 1995, but they did, and it was clearly a big deal on two levels: one, they were a bit shit, and two, they were mostly white, a fact that became conspicuous when Apartheid ended and Mandela launched his vision of a rainbow nation. Thanks to Invictus, I now know this. I also know that Pienaar is a man without a personality but with a wife, a mum and a dad, and that Mandela was a bit lonely and a workaholic and liked to have a bracing walk at 4am every day without fail. There's not a tremendous amount more to learn.

I thought Invictus was underwhelming and dramatically thin. It is handicapped by being a sports movie. Sport movies don't usually work - certainly not team sports anyway. Boxing has a cinematic quality, so does running, albeit only in slow motion. Football simply cannot be captured in drama, and nor, it seems, can rugby. (I love This Sporting Life, but then again, there's not that much rugby in it.) Beyond the sport, it's sort of about Nelson Mandela getting on with taking the reins of power, which involves making black and white security men work together, and attending some meetings, and making some speeches in his iconically slow, measured English. Freeman, who looks nothing like him, makes a decent stab of doing the voice. Damon, who looks nothing like Pienaar, does the same. It's not so much acting, as impressionism.

Anthony Peckham, the screenwriter, seems so enamoured and dazzled by the iconic celebrity of his two main characters, he doesn't bother to fill in any of the other ones, and yet, one of the characters speaks very slowly and the other one says nothing of any consequence on or off the field. In order to be swept up by the film's broad-brushstroke drama you have to be very easily pleased by the fact that post-Apartheid South Africa was nicer than Apartheid South Africa, which in a fundamental sense it was, but don't expect any subtlety or surprise. The initially awkward white rugby players sit young black kids from a township on their shoulders in a sequence that feels authentically like a bank advert. The white security guards learn to like the black security guards, united not by anything dramatic - as, sadly, nothing dramatic happened to Mandela in 1995, despite the fear of incident at his public appearances and a hokey low-flying aircraft that we know posed no threat - but by, well, getting on with their largely boring work in small offices. I think you are expected to admire and forgive Pienaar's white family when they take their black maid to the Cup Final, but this presupposes you see it as redemptive rather than patronising, which is how it comes across.

Clint Eastwood is a monumentally competent director and that's not faint praise. He is not showy or pretentious or tricksy, he does not grandstand, and he famously shoots as little film as he can, but you cannot argue with his best work. I thought Letters From Iwo Jima was brilliant, for instance, as was Unforgiven, obviously: two seriously good genre movies. Invictus proves that he is not scared of big stadium scenes. But he fails to make the rugby matches exciting, resorting to slow motion, naturally, when in a corner, and the obligatory scenes of people watching the telly. Too late he decides to show us the scrum from underneath and turns up the volume on the animalistic grunting, but this seems tokenistic, and what's he trying to say? That it's a brute, primal sport? Where has this observation been hiding? This Sporting Life begins under a scrum; its first thought is of the violence and the machismo of rugby. Invictus wants us to buy rugby not as a contact sport, but as a metaphor for community. See how the little black boy is eyed suspiciously by white security guards outside the stadium but ends up celebrating with them when the Springboks win the Cup - this is no more profound than when the grey ash descends across Los Angeles at the climax of Volcano, and, hey, black and white people are turned one colour.

This film's heart is in the right place, but it's deadly dull, its 12A certificate earned only because of strong but infrequent language. And, next to District 9, a science-fiction film made in South Africa by South Africans and starring South Africans, it has nothing to say about South Africa beyond facts, figures and cliche. And its two key South African roles are taken by North Americans. Meanwhile, both of these North Americans have been ludicrously Oscar nominated for their work. I admire them both, but this is not their best work, and nominations seem to be forthcoming because a) it's Clint Eastwood, and b) it's Nelson Mandela.

Everybody else seems to like it, however, so I must be missing something.

If al-Qaeda had dropped a bomb on the green room of the Bloomsbury Theatre ...

... on the Friday night of December's Godless run, all of these talented comedians, musicians and curators would have been killed or injured, while I was hanging around with them. This fantastic, historic group shot, taken by Des Willie (left to right: Jim Bob, Jo Neary, Stewart Lee, Robin Ince, Richard Herring, Peter Buckley Hill, Waen Shepherd and me) is part of an official New Humanist set which can now be accessed on Flickr. This picture represents the culmination of all those years I've spent hanging around and ingratiating myself with talented comedians and musicians. Look how they let me be in their photographs and appear at their gigs! I am a monument to persistence.