Pigheaded

The Size Zero Debate. It makes a good headline. Those eye-catching Zs, the hissing sibilance, the obligatory picture of the underage model with her jutting clavicles and shrunken wrists. Once again we are in the throes of the twice yearly carnival of international catwalk shows which, since the death of anorexic model Luisel Ramos two years ago, have been plagued by the sibilant spectre of Size Zero. The models are now under as much scrutiny as the couture and any designer who books a coterie of skeletal teenagers is vilified in the press for their complicit role in promoting, if not glorifying, anorexia nervosa. Madrid caved to pressure and imposed a ban on underweight models but the major players: New York, Paris and Milan continue to venerate the x-ray figure and deny the existence of breasts, hips, flesh, all the trappings of a womanly body.

And now theatre land has weighed in on the debate (if you’ll excuse the pun.) Neil LaBute, the playwright perennially dubbed ‘cuddly’ by interviewers, has given us Fat Pig, a heavy handed attack on the cult of Size Zero and neurotic dieting. The play opened in March and the provocative subject matter and media-friendly cast ensured comprehensive coverage in the Sunday broadsheets. Fat Pig was trumpeted as a savage polemic on our narcissistic culture.

The title is contentious, the premise slight. Tom (Robert Webb,) who is thin, falls in love with Helen (Ella Smith) who is not. She is the Rubenesque, fleshy bottomed, plump-cheeked heroine of the piece; the eponymous fat pig in the eyes of Tom’s obnoxious workmate Carter (Kris Marshall.) Jeannie (Joanna Page) is Tom’s skinny, neurotic ex who opposes the match. LaBute’s characters are meanly drawn: the three thin characters are monsters: self-obsessed, inconsiderate and consumed by the New York cult of mineral supplements, gyms and alfalfa sprouts. Buxom Helen is warm, funny, kind and self-sacrificing. It’s a fairy story turned topsy-turvy where the ugly stepsisters are good by dint of being ugly while Cinderella is a bitch because she is thin.

Robert Webb is a suitably confused Tom, both smitten with and ashamed of Helen, but he falls too often into the truculent, adolescent mannerisms of his alter ego Jeremy of Peep Show, a character he has been playing for too long. Kris Marshall does a convincing New York drawl and is suitably viper-like, a villain in a Calvin Klein suit, flashing predatory grins and casting critical eyes over skinny Jeannie’s backside. Joanna Page as Jeannie is neurotic, demanding and wholly unsympathetic with an accent that is American by way of Cardiff, South Africa and possibly Bratislava. Her accent is so peripatetic as to be distracting and at its worst, incomprehensible. The dialogue is sub-sitcom pilot, relying on coarse fat jokes (obesity as the last refuge of the politically incorrect scoundrel) and clunking, implausible exchanges.

In the final scenes we hope for redemption, lessons learnt, and chocolate cake with double cream for all, but the play ends with a bathetic display of moral cowardice that is both unsatisfying and lazy. Fat Pig is too childish in its morals to be a true attack on the modern malaise: fat equals good, thin equals bad, there is no happy medium. Worse, the play is guilty of complicity in the cult of the body beautiful it aims to attack, with its cast of photogenic TV stars, ill-suited to their roles and unable to command a West End stage. The cast take their bows in swimwear; Helen shrouded in a sarong so as not to offend delicate sensibilities. The relative nobody Ella Smith is superb; the others are just dead weight.

This article first appeared in TCS

Emin in Edinburgh

I had intended to write in praise of Tracey Emin; a riposte to the naysayers who dub Emin all that is wrong with British art or who hold her accountable for the degeneracy of female youth with her used condoms and botched abortions. I was all set to put my head above the parapet and declare myself a fan of Emin with her patchwork, cross-stitched, Women’s Institute materials and her skinny, scraggly draughtsmanship. I was going to put her detractors in their place and condemn them for their timid, narrow-minded, suburban understanding of contemporary British art. And then I saw the exhibition.


20 years of Tracey Emin at the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art certainly fulfilled the promise of its title. Two decades seemed to have passed by the time I emerged from the final gallery. I felt old before my time. Disillusioned. The retrospective is vast, interminable, and unrelieved by any hint of charm, beauty or subtlety. Her art is not one that breathes its import gently or that requires reflection; its an art that cries ‘Look at me! Pity me!’ like a petulant toddler unwillingly on the weekly supermarket shop. Ten, eleven, twelve rooms which wallow in self-pity are too much for even the most charitable and forbearing of souls to bear. If by room four you are not mentally chastising ‘Stiff-upper lip,’ ‘Make do and mend,’ and ‘Get over it!’ then you are a  patient soul.


But why the change of heart? How could a stalwart champion of the artist, who had always fought Emin’s corner when dinner party philistines called her crud or chavvy, suddenly find herself tutting and irritated by Emin’s attention seeking antics? It’s a question of scale. In the past, an etching here, a drawing there, a blanket at the Tate, a mono-print in a private collection, had been enough to convince me that Emin was an artist of insight and nuance. Emin’s skinny limbed figures in their self-conscious poses express with lyrical economy all the awkwardness and sexual clumsiness of youth while her blankets with their bold messages of anguish, hurt and disappointment are heartbreaking; the child’s security blanket emblazoned with all the betrayals of lost innocence. But room after room of Emin is another matter altogether.

Viwed en masse, her oeuvre descends into a morass of piteous misfortune; a solipsistic Grand Tour through Emin’s childhood traumas, her adolescent traumas, the traumas of her twenties, her thirties and so on. Lest we be unconvinced of the many traumas of her life we have a brief digression into the various traumas Emin imagines she suffers in the womb. It is a life unrelieved by sun-shine, optimism, joy or indeed any sense of proportion. Cunt Vernacular, a video diary detailing Emin’s miseries and sexual misadventures charts in horrible detail, month by month, year by year, the sexual abuses, physical sufferings and psychological privations of a seemingly attractive, successful, and financially independent woman.


This is not to make light of Emin’s experiences: sexual abuse, nervous breakdown, a tendency towards self-destruction, all of these are curses which can mar and destroy lives. But to pursue these themes, to devote one’s entire working life to recreating them in paint, or ink, or clay, to assemble them into a retrospective, well, the whole enterprise descends into solipsistic self-regard. No lessons are learnt, Emin replaces one abusive boyfriend with another, seeks out another sexually aggressive partner: it’s all grist to the artistic mill.

Emin is mistress of that most self-obsessed of idioms; the diary entry of the fourteen year old girl who believes that no one ever has or ever will suffer like she suffers. Most girls of fourteen grow up and live to be embarrassed by their self-centred ramblings. Emin has never grown up and hers are the vernacular and pictograms of the teenage diarist, fascinated by her periods, by boys and the sinister mechanics of sex. Like the poet U.A. Fanthorpe, Emin cannot help but smear, whether literally or figuratively, every facet of her creative output with her own bodily secretions: blood, sweat, shit and tears all flowing from the splay-legged creature Emin conjures to represent herself.


Rave reviews are no good to Emin. She thrives on abuses and insults; her art relies on her being a victim. So, at the risk of being a facilitator, an enabler, a purveyor of further scars on Emin’s already lashed back, I pronounce the show a failure, a self-centred, ugly, prolix catalogue of the unwanted and self-inflicted wounds of a joyless life.

The Fires of Hell - The Chapman Brothers at the White Cube

In the aftermath of the 2004 MOMART fire, the national press wallowed in schadenfreude, warming its hands over the embers of Britart and the charred remains of Tracey Emin’s tent, Damien Hirst’s Charity, and the Chapman Brothers’ Hell. ‘Didn’t millions cheer as this ‘rubbish’ went up in flames?’ crowed the Daily Mail while the letters pages were filled with the Pooterish response of Middle England: the disgusted-of-Tunbridge-Wells brigade who saw the immolation of the scatological excesses of the YBAs as a fitting bonfire of the vanities.

Four years on from the immolation of Hell, and the Chapman Brothers are back with a new version of the inferno, vaster and more horrible than the first. This time round it’s Fucking Hell; a two-fingered salute to the pre-Raphaelite loving middle-class. This is no mere exercise in juvenile obscenity-mongering, but a relentless and seemingly infinite pandemonium of evil and suffering. Nine glass vitrines stand in the shape of a swastika, once an emblem of eternal life and now, since the Nazis, a symbol of inhumanity. Each is filled with a monstrous regiment of toy soldiers, their uniforms emblazoned with swastikas, their features and bodies contorted as they heap atrocities on one another. Here, a phalanx of soldiers assembles with spears embedded in their eyes; there, severed heads are savagely tossed in the back of a Jeep. Score upon score of soldiers form rank, racked and bent double beneath the weight of physical and psychological tortures. Spliced creatures with two heads and Catherine-wheel arms career across cratered battlefields, while in one gut-churning Golgotha of a case, dismembered corpses lie six deep in a slurry of blood and sewage.

The violence is nauseating. Forget the bums-on-seats sadism of Torture Porn and Grindhouse cinema, this is the stuff of nightmares. The emaciated G.I.s and Wehrmacht troops recall the cavorting, grinning skeletons of the danse macabre and the Black Death carnival. In one diorama, troops converge on the ruins of a Greek temple whose pediment is filled, not with gracious muses, but with a frieze of maimed and mutilated infantry.

Plastic vultures hover expectantly over each grisly vignette, their bloodshot eyes feasting on the mass graves and scenes of genocidal fury. The day I visited, a lone housefly buzzed above the vitrines like some vengeful spitfire, a pestilential presence sucked in from the street by the stench of carrion rising from the White Cube killing fields. Spend too long in this charnel house, this claustrophobic basement, amongst so many unholy martyrdoms, and a creeping sickness sets in, leaving you reeling, polluted and ashamed.

The adjoining exhibition of landscape watercolours ought to be a breath of fresh air; but the thirteen twee landscapes, the preserve of the lady watercolourist, are the work of Adolf Hitler. How do you reconcile these mediocre daubs with the orchestrator of the Holocaust? We want our villains to be monsters and it is a source of endless disconcertment that the great dictator, the creator of a Fucking Hell on earth, had a fondness for saccharine views of the German countryside.

Hitler’s watercolour idylls have been covered by the Chapmans with Crayola rainbows, butterflies and love hearts, and other faux-naive scribbling of the nursery school. ‘If Hitler had been a hippy, how happy would we be?’ asks the exhibition title. Their detractors call the Chapmans ‘puerile’ or ‘adolescent,’ likening the language of Fucking Hell to that of a Warhammer set or Airfix model, or comparing the defacing of the watercolours to schoolboy graffiti. But these Brothers Grimm are no pedlars of teenage fantasies, theirs is not the wet dream of the high school killer or video game assassin, theirs is a vision of hell to compete with Virgil, Dante, Bosch or Rodin, a chilling rendering of apocalypses past and still to come.

Californian Condor seeks n/s, gsoh female with large wingspan for propagation of the species

It is the unfortunate disease of the Londoner to dub anything outside the confines of the M25 ‘provincial.’ Paris and Rome are pale imitations of our great metropolis. Leeds and Manchester are veritable backwaters. Cambridge is dismissed as a mere hamlet, scarcely on the radar of the London cosmopolite. But Cambridge, it turns out, can more than hold its own against London’s cultural leviathan, at least as far as baffling contemporary art exhibitions go. Three Days of The Condor, currently nesting in Kettle’s Yard, surpasses anything the capital has to offer in terms of sheer oddity.

The Swedish artist Henrik Hakansson, a dedicated bird-watcher and environmentalist, has turned Kettle’s Yard into a temporary hide from which to observe some of the world’s most endangered bird species. There are MDF ramps to navigate, electric cables stretched across the floor, and bird song tweeting intermittently though gramophone speakers. Google printouts are blu-taced haphazardly to a wall, while in one room, a stuffed bird rests in a glass coffin. It is on loan from the Natural History Museum but looks suspiciously like the parrot wielded by Clouseau in Revenge of The Pink Panther. Some of these birds are flying perilously close to the fate of the  Dodo. In the poignantly titled exhibit Lonely Hearts Club, Hakansson has prepared a dossier on each of the mate-less birds in the manner of a professional match-maker.

The lonely bachelor Sphix Macaw is beyond the help of any dating agency. Hakansson captures the macaw calling vainly for a mate in a film reel which plays on a shaky loop. Touching though these scenes are: the macaw singing to the moon, a Condor flying fruitlessly through the empty skies, they can’t compete in a post-Attenborough age. If this were an Attenborough documentary, the macaw would perform a Macaranan mating dance, plumage splayed in a heroic display of pomp and machismo. Hakansson’s macaw perches forlornly on a branch, and that, for several hours is about it.

The internet printouts are disappointingly symptomatic of the latest affliction to hit the contemporary art scene. The Tate Britain recently came into possession of some Xeroxed papers by the artist Bethan Huws; an artwork that quite literally wasn't worth the paper it was printed on and these lazy photocopies have spawned a slew of imitators. Hakansson’s Google search results on endangered bird species are unenlightening and devalue the environmental message.

Heart wrenching though the plight of these birds is, Hakansson is no Attenborough, he’s not even a Bill Oddie and in an age when we are spoilt by Life on Earth beaming images of polar bears on melting ice caps and snow leopards hunting on the Siberian tundra direct to our TV screens, a mournful macaw tweeting in a lachrymose sort of way is desperately uninspiring.

Call me a philistine, call me an environmental fascist, but as I listened to the soporific tweeting I found myself guiltily re-hashing the infamous Monty Python sketch: This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It has expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot.

Angel of The South (Bank)

There is a survey trotted out by journalists to illustrate the dearth of knowledge amongst the general public about contemporary British artists. It goes like this: one hundred people are stopped in the street and asked to name a living British artist. Of those hundred, 94% quote Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin: respectively the enfant (now middle aged) terrible and ladette of British art. The remaining 6% of votes are apportioned thus: two votes for Gilbert and George, one for Rachel Whitehouse (it’s Whiteread but marks for trying,) one for Picasso (dead and Spanish,) and two for Anthony Gormley.

The survey goes one step further: each participant is asked to name a work of art by their chosen artist. Without exception all nominators of Hirst choose ‘The Shark Tank’ and all champions of Miss Emin ‘The Bed’ (the Rachel Whitehouse fan also plumps for Emin’s masterwork.) The two Gilbert and George fans cannot not name a single work by the duo and the Picasso aficionado suggests‘Sunflowers’ (that’s Van Gogh: French, and also dead.) Full marks though to the Gormley fans who not only displayed admirable originality and artistic nous for rejecting Emin and Hirst but who correctly identified Gormley as the artist behind The Angel of The North.

In the wake of Gormley’s Blind Light at the Hayward Gallery in London, I would hope that a second survey would reveal a contingent of Gormley converts: someone needs to release the stranglehold that Emin and Hirst hold on the imaginations of the general public. It is a superlative exhibition possessing both style and substance in an age when too few contemporary artists muster anything more than the former. The focus of the exhibition is the human body. Not the body’s visceral workings as extensively catalogued by Emin nor its inner psychological yearnings, but rather an examination of the body in relation to its environment. Claustrophobia and agoraphobia are the watchwords here. Life-size lead casts of Gormley’s own body are imprisoned by iron spikes or perch atop rooftops along the North and South Banks annihilated by the vastness of the skyline.

The eponymous piece of the exhibition is a 20ft glass room filled with thick water vapour generated by ultrasonic humidifiers. Its aim is to disorientate. Gormley likens it to ‘being on top of a mountain or at the bottom of the sea.’ Visibility was said to be no more than two feet, in reality it was a matter of inches. The peasouper conditions reduced visitors to cripples, shuffling forward incrementally, hands outstretched, searching for a wall, a fixed point by which to navigate. The space is small enough to keep fear at bay. How different it would be if the experiment was reproduced on a larger scale; the clammy isolation magnified ten or fifteen times, the exit panic-inducingly distant.

The space is no less impressive from the outside. You watch as those trapped inside emerge from the swirling mists, flatten their palms against the comforting solidity of the glass walls, summon their courage and stride off again into the unknown. One gorilla in the mist had daubed ‘HELP!’ in the condensation of the glass striking a humorous note in an otherwise disquieting exhibit.

Less successful was Gormley’s Space Station, a 27ton steel structure tilted precariously on its axis and perforated by square openings. Gormley likened it to a ‘dark, labyrinthine, prison’ and also to the compressed, foetal form of a human embryo. Try though I might, squinting as if looking for the unicorn in a Magic Eye picture, the foetal form remained hidden.

Upstairs, this foetal motif is used to greater effect. Matrices and Expansions is a collection of suspended works in stainless steel, their tentacles interlacing with all the intricacies of coral. They recall hornet’s nests or a chrysalis and within their tendrils, a human-shaped void is discernable, floating like a laboratory specimen, not waving but drowning.

The crowning glory of the exhibition is Event Horizon. Thirty golems, life-size casts of Gormely’s own body, stand atop buildings on the North and South banks, over a distance of 1.5 sq km. From the Hayward’s terraces you can spot them; one atop the National Theatre, one on Waterloo Bridge, another atop the Royal Festival Hall, like a latter day Terracotta Army, standing sentinel over the heart of London. More disturbingly, their precarious stations at the precipices of each building suggest incipient suicide leaps into the abyssal Thames. It is a superlative and innovative staging of a sculptural installation, animating the buildings along the river banks and uniting the disparate styles of the North and South. The sentinels are due to be removed when the exhibition closes. I wish they could remain, not only as river guardians, but as permanent reminders that there are greater forces at work in modern Britain than Emin and Hirst.

A rave review for Kylie? She should be so lucky

Pity the poor custodians of the new Kylie exhibition at the V&A. For theirs is a hard lot. Not only must they contend with the heaving throngs of Kylie fans all fighting to get a look at those gold hot pants, but they must do so while listening to Kylie’s entire back catalogue, on a loop, eight hours a day, seven days a week, for the next five months. So, to the strains of Now We’re Back Together, I climbed the East Stairs of the V&A and ventured into the high camp world of Miss Minogue.

Apparently, and this is news to me, Kylie is a fashion icon on par with Gianni Versace and Vivienne Westwood, the last two subjects of V&A costume exhibitions. In the Autumn, the V&A will unveil The Golden Age of Couture, profiling the 'New Look' of Christian Dior, Hubert de Givency and Cristobel Balenciaga.  But Kylie is not now nor will she ever be a tastemaker on the Balenciaga/Versace/Dior scale. So why then is she the subject of a major retrospective at the V&A?

Because she’s popular, of course, and as Waldemar Januszczak put it, there is a lamentable vogue among the nation’s art institutions for ‘catering to the tastes of the average Heat reader.’ Unlike Januszczak, I have no objection to such transparent, populist tactics. There’s always an outside chance that somewhere between the Kylie, the café, and the gift shop a visitor might stumble upon some proper art (by which I mean art that wasn’t worn to the Brit Awards.) But there are ways and means. This retrospective is an epic act of lazy indulgence on the part of the V&A. There has been no attempt at originality or ingenuity in the display of costume, no effort at revelation, and no pretence that this is anything more profound than a feature in Hello!

Despite contributions from Alexander McQueen, Karl Lagerfeld, and John Galliano there is a cheap, shoddy look to the clothes on display. A lycra mini-dress by Veronique Leroy could have come straight from the bargain bin at Jane Norman, while a pink chiffon number from Chanel trimmed with ostrich feathers was more Soho Drag-Queen than Rue St. Honoré . Most hideous of all was a yellow marabou bolero last seen on Sesame Street's Big Bird. Most of these outfits were never designed to be seen up close and personal. An aggressively sequined number that might have looked fabulous on a distant stage, appears tarnished at first hand. A feathered and plumed dress which moved like a dream on MTV just looks mangy and moth-eaten in the flesh. Only a Helmut Lang couture creation, all cascades of pleated crimson chiffon, held its own under the gallery spotlights.

The designers who steal the show, however, are Dolce and Gabbanna who designed the wardrobe for Kylie’s sell-out Show Girl tour. Among the D&G outfits on display are a sumptuous black velvet appliqué dress with a ten foot long train, a midnight-blue star-spangled bustier, and several of their signature silk corset dresses. Also on show are Dolce and Gabanna’s original Show Girl design sketches. Far be it from me to be prescriptive but wouldn't a Dolce and Gabanna retrospective have been more diverse, more adventurous, more culturally exciting than this rummage through Kylie’s cast-offs? And talk about populist! Oscar dresses, condemned advertising campaigns, Madonna, Naomi Campbell, Mario Testino, Victoria Beckham, Chloe Sevigny, Giselle, Charlize Theron…Need I go on? A D&G exhibition would have shed light on a hugely influential and innovative fashion partnership while also appealing to that all-important Heat reading demographic. Instead we have to make do with the lazily curated Kylie, an exhibition as skimpy as those infamous gold hot-pants.

From Brideshead to B*llocks

In the Summer of 2005, the infamous artistic double-act Gilbert and George were chosen to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale. These Saville-row attired doppelgangers were sent as ambassadors, as emissaries, as representatives of our great nation. And what did the dynamic duo offer up for the arbitration of those snooty Europeans? 25 images featuring their V-sign flicking selves. Rule Britannia.

It could have been much worse. In the context of Gilbert and George’s repertoire of motifs: of which semen, excrement, urine and the word c*nt are the perennial stalwarts, a few V-signs were very much the lesser of several evils. But is this really the best we can do? Does this artistic paring, obsessed as they are with bodily emissions and expletives, really represent the pinnacle of artistic creativity in 21st Century Britain? Nicholas Serota certainly seems to think so.

The Tate Modern is currently host to a two-hundred image strong retrospective spanning G&G’s forty year career. The exhibition is so extensive that it spills out of the gallery space into the concourse, vestibules, and café of the fourth floor. That’s an entire floor of Tate Modern devoted to poo, expletives and spermatozoa. What must foreign tourists think of us?

Now I’m no puritan when it comes to art. I’m all for boundary pushing. If Piero Manzoni wants to defecate into eighty small glass jars in the name of art, then let him. If Tracey Emin wants to discard her used condoms on the floor of the Saatchi Gallery, then so be it. What I do object to is artists who pursue the same scant, infantile, attention seeking ideas for the entirety of their careers. What this exhibition makes abundantly clear is that Gilbert and George happened upon a rather good idea circa. 1969 and then proceeded to flog their dead horse for the next four decades. The same urban street scenes, the same expressionless self portraits, the same sexually explicit phrases, over and over again. The most galling thing of all is that the duo’s earliest collaborations yielded some sensational work. But sensational soon turned to sensationalist and well, you know the rest.

The first two rooms of the exhibition are devoted to these early works; ‘charcoal on paper sculptures’ (that’s drawings to you and me) some 13ft in height. These depict the young Gilbert and George on a jaunt to the green and pleasant English countryside, a world away from the urban East End of their later work. In subject these recall those early Et in Arcadia Ego passages of Brideshead Revisited. The long grasses and reeds of a river bank are rendered in hasty charcoal strokes evoking the stir of wind on pasture.

But Arcadian country scenes do not a headline make and so Gilbert and George turned to shock tactics. Their Dirty Words series debuted in the early 1970s. These grainy black and white shots of profane graffiti, toy soldiers, and urban decay make striking images. Like much of Gilbert and George’s work they would make great album covers or bill-board adverts, but that does not necessarily amount to great Art.

Here’s the truth of the matter: Gilbert and George aren’t bad, they’re just limited and endlessly repetitive. They have also lost all power to shock, try though they may with countless images of ejaculating phalluses. Even the BBC, that bastion of the establishment, has now produced a documentary entitled ‘I Love the C-Word.’ Gilbert and George are no more daring than the ten-year old boy who shouts naughty words in the school playground; a fitting metaphor given that Tate Modern's turbine hall is currently over-run with playground slides.

The legacy that Gilbert and George leave behind amounts to nothing more than a few hundred images glorifying distasteful bodily functions and a handful of beautiful drawings no one will ever remember. Leaving the gallery and walking along the South Bank I found myself irresistibly drawn to a suitably G&G verdict : What a load of Sh*t.

From The Sublime To The Ridiculous

Sometimes a film comes along, like a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day, that restores your faith in the often vacuous, money-grubbing film industry. Michel Gondry’s Science of Sleep did just that: intelligent, inventive, thought provoking, all the things a film should be. But sometimes a film comes along that is so unintelligent, so uninventive, so brain-atrophying it makes you want to suffocate yourself in your popcorn. No prizes for guessing which category the newly released Epic Movie falls into.

I wanted to like Epic Movie, I really did. I like the occasional bit of low-brow tripe along with my Napoleonic portraiture and high-concept installation art. I love a good old spoof. Hell, I’ve watched the Naked Gun trilogy and Blazing Saddles more times than I’d care to admit. So, believe me when I say that I really, really, really wanted to like Epic Movie. Really.

Epic Movie comes from the team who brought you Scary Movies 1,2,3, and 4, Not Another Teen Movie, and Date Movie. The first two Scary Movies and Teen Movie are amusing in their own puerile way, but by the time Scary Movies 3 and 4 and Date Movie rolled along the franchise was beginning to smack of desperation and yes, the aforementioned money-grubbing. Now we have Epic Movie a last (we can only hope) ditch attempt to cash in on the success of its older siblings. It is unrelentingly, unapologetically, unashamedly ghastly from start to finish. I haven’t seen actors so embarrassed to be part of a film since Ewan Macgregor cringed his way through Attack of The Clones. Jayma Mays does her best Anna Farris impression but whereas Farris treads the fine line between air-head bimbo and shrewd comedienne, Mays falls off the tight rope altogether. She pouts, and lisps, and minces, and trips, all the while failing to elicit so much as a giggle from the audience.

The publicity bumf credits Epic Movie as ‘a comedic satire of films that are large in scope, reputation and popularity.’ So that’d be: Da Vinci Code, Lord of The Rings, Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean etc. Depressingly, whenever the writers run out of Jack Sparrow, Willy Wonka, or Narnia jokes they resort to fart gags and getting-kicked-in-the-balls jokes, the last refuges of the comedically bankrupt. There was one prolonged ‘humorous’ urinating sequence that actually had me trying to slash my wrists with the edge of my Calippo.

So, what’s the verdict? As a film Epic Movie is irredeemably awful but as a lesson in 101 Ways to Kill Yourself Using Only Cinema Snack Products, it is truly a master class.

In Between Dreams

Other people’s dreams are, without exception, fantastically boring. One’s own dreams, of course, are endlessly fascinating in a solipsistic sort of way. Bearing this in mind, Michel Gondry’s new film Science of Sleep was going to have to pull out all the stops to impress. It falls into that same category as Being John Malkovich, I Heart Huckabees, Mullholand Drive or Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind (also Gondry) films which jettison narrative cohesion in favour of wilfully incomprehensible plots and garbled philosophy. But whereas I Heart Huckabees was as hollow and charmless as they come, and Eternal Sunshine suffered from unsympathetic leads, Science of Sleep is charming in an ingenuous, Gallic sort of way. It’s Amelie, but on acid. And with cellophane.

So here’s the plot: Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal) has moved to Paris from Mexico where he attempts, in his own sweet, ineffectual way, to woo his neighbour, the prickly Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsborough.) Standing in the way of his seduction are his lecherous boss Guy and his surreal, Dali-esque dreams which increasingly encroach on his waking existence. After that, things become a little more nebulous. There are the dreams themselves; not the sort you get from over-indulging in camembert, but bad-trip, Lucy-In-The-Sky-With-Diamonds dreams. It’s never quite clear where these dream sequences end and real life begins, which puts us in the same position as bewildered and frustrated Stephane who finds himself acting out his subconscious fantasies and waking up to the aftermath.

And the cellophane? Where does that come into all of this? Stephane’s dreams are realised in true Here’s-One-I-Made-Earlier-style, all cardboard tubes, felt, papier mache, and yes, reams of cellophane. It is this ‘unmitigated whimsy,’ as Mark Kermode put it, that may irritate many cinema-goers. Some may see these forays into Blue Peter territory as poor compensation for an insubstantial plot; all style over substance. Nevertheless these Surrealist dream interludes with their Arts and Crafts trappings are arrestingly beautiful and earned the designers Pierre Pell and Stephane Rozenbaum the award for Best Production Design at the European Film Awards.

As existential comedies go, Science of Sleep is far superior to any of Mullholland/ Malkovich/ Huckabees, with its combination of off-beat humour, a magnetic lead turn from Bernal and intriguing visual effects. So, would I recommend it? Yes, if you like that sort of thing; existential comedies are something of an acquired taste. Just be prepared for strange dreams.

London, Paris, New York

For a girl who once considered venturing outside Zone 1 an intrepid adventure, I have been living a remarkably jet-set lifestyle in recent months: Marrakesh in October, New York in December, Paris in January. In the course of racking up these airmiles I couldn’t help but notice certain essential differences between the great cities of Paris, New York and my native London. But how best to communicate my sweeping, spurious and stereotypical observations?

I’ve always been rather taken with Craig Brown’s ‘We, You, They’ series:

‘We concentrate on the food
You enjoy the silence
Their marriage is on the rocks’

‘I can still fit into these old trunks
You are holding in your stomach
He should wear a shirt’

And so, in the spirit of doing nothing whatsoever to improve international relations I would like to share my reflections on these three capitals. With apologies to Craig Brown.

Londoners drive on the left
New Yorkers drive on the right
Parisians see how the mood takes them

Londoners feed the pigeons
New Yorkers call in the exterminators
Parisians have pigeon pie for breakfast

Londoners clean up after their dog
New Yorkers hire someone to clean up after their dog
Parisians are knee deep in merde

London is a hive of activity
New York is gridlocked
Paris is an accident waiting to happen

Parisians enjoy a croissant

New Yorkers grab a bagel
Londoners regurgitate last night’s doner-kebab

Paris’ tourists make the pilgrimage to Notre Dame
London’s tourists ride the Millennium Wheel
New York’s tourists visit the Apple Store

London cabbies know the roads
Parisian cabbies know the language
New York cabbies barely know how to drive

Parisians enjoy the finer things in life
New Yorkers invented the Cosmopolitan
Londoners have their stomachs pumped

Londoners admire Shakespeare at the Globe
Parisians applaud Giselle at the Palais Garnier
New Yorkers cheer on the players at Madison Square Gardens

Paris is the city of romance
New York gave us Sex and the City
London’s teen-pregnancy rate is through the roof