Wizardhood (2016)

In 2016, Tim Stiefler edited all eight Harry Potter films into one single 78-minute movie. It’s a great work of editing, telling one lean story instead of seven busy ones. This is the tale of Harry versus Voldemort. That’s not to say it’s all Voldemort-centric scenes - by no means! But that’s the core, and that’s the story ’Wizardhood’ serves.

It’s edited together with incredible economy, cutting out anything that doesn’t sell the overall narrative of the series. The entire second half of 'Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone' (2001) is cut. The film sets up Harry at Hogwarts, Harry vs Snape and Harry vs Malfoy - but the whole climax, the confrontation with Quirrel and Voldemort is deemed unnecessary. I was surprised, but it works. That’s part of the joy of watching ‘Wizardhood’ - finding out how little you can get away with. ‘The Chamber of Secrets’ (2002) and ’The Prisoner of Azkaban’ (2004) are over almost as soon as they begin. We don’t need all the details. We just need the core.

I'm glad to say Minerva McGonnagal still gets plenty of good bits

It sounds like it ought to be an awful rush, but it’s anything but. This isn’t hectic or bitty, nor composed of short, perfunctory scenes.  Sure, you could do it that way - a supercut including far more subplots and moments - but it would be unwatchably fast and untidy, an overwhelming experience like ‘2Everything 2Terrible 2: Tokyo Drift’ (2010). The choices here make it a far better film than it could be in less-artful hands. Each moment is given adequate time and atmosphere. This is a film to watch and enjoy. Astonishingly, it feels well-paced.

I’d recommend this to anyone interested in making films, and learning how shots and cuts tell stories. It’s a chance to see how much can be removed from familiar scenes, and how this lets them serve a different purpose and mood. Harry’s first experience with brooms is included, with a large portion of the action cut from the middle. There’s room in the movie for action, but not here. It still serves its purpose - though the students’ cheer at the end feels a little unearnt. However, cut forward 30 minutes and 6 movies, and the same students cheer for Harry in the room of requirement, in a way which seems far better merited. I’m glad the earlier celebration stayed, so the latter moment could echo it.

Just as gradual and intense a build-up. This is the midpoint of the film

Other parts keep their meaning and their mood - Dumbledore’s final moments feel just as careful and gradual and cold as they always did. There must be a lot removed from that scene, but it feels like it was always this way. It retains its power. Heck, ‘The Deathly Hallows (part 1)’ (2010) is a movie largely about drear waiting and despair, with Ron running away before eventually returning - and over the course of fifteen minutes that whole story is told here, retaining its full power. To be honest, this cutdown is my favourite telling of it.

Huge swathes are cut away. Lupin and Sirius and Rita Skeeter are gone. The Dursleys are never seen. But they’re no more ‘missing’ than Ludo Bagman. This is Harry Potter without any Deathly Hallows. They’re important to the books, but they’re details ‘Wizardhood’ can do without.

Harry grows old before your eyes. It's like watching the beards grow in 'Das Boot' (1981)

I love these books, and I delight in all that the movies added to them. Of course, they were always imperfect renderings, because it’s nigh-impossible to make a full length novel into a movie without sacrificing either the plot or the characters. It’s why I prefer ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them’ (2016) over the full gamut of Harry Potters - it’s trying to be a movie, not a book adaptation. Since I can accept the abbreviations in the movies, it's easy to warm to this great abridgement. It takes what was good about the films - the strong central performances, the design and imagination and direction, and distils them into something strong and satisfying.

Wizardhood can currently be seen here, and I hope it remains there to be seen for a long time. A few days later it's been taken down, for copyright reasons. Understandable, but it's a good work on its own merits, so I hope you find a way to view it, within reason.

Tune in next time for a review that isn't by me that isn't of a film!

Man Alone (2005)

Today I’d like to comment on an obscure student-film by someone who became famous for something else - ‘Man Alone’ is an ambitious piece of juvenilia directed by Jonathan Higgs, lead singer of British art-pop/electronic-rock band Everything Everything.  If you’re not familiar with the band, I can only recommend them: I harbour a burgeoning enthusiasm for their three albums, and I was fortunate to get along to one of the concerts of their current tour this weekend.  It’s prompted me to revisit this film, which my aunt passed to me about six years ago.  In those days the band had only put out their debut album, the similarly-titled ‘Man Alive’ (2007).

The director co-wrote this with Tom Astley, who I’ve found to be mysteriously ungooglable.  It shares quite a bit with senor Higgs’s musical career: for one thing, it regards humanity’s violence, self-destruction and numbing materialism - familiar topics from 2009 single ‘My Kz Ur Bf’, (which juxtaposed the America of war with the America of soap-operas), and large tracts of their 2015 album ‘Get to Heaven’; for another thing, the film contains a number of songs, some of them featuring fellow band-member Jeremy Pritchard, (presumably on keyboards, bass and backing vocals).  These songs are sadly few and far between, but they show off the singer’s ingenuity and falsetto, albeit in fairly crude forms.

Some Scottish monks rebuke God's second son.

The story opens with a song - one of five, which acts as its main info-dump: after world war 4, culture has become homogenised, and history has been banned.  The story begins after about 40 minutes, when God turns up, with an appearance which I will not attempt to describe for you.  He arrives in an extended flashback to a Scottish monastery in Roman times.  God speaks like a vocoder - sometimes beautifully, sometimes like an 80s Cyberman.  He occasionally uses ‘thou’ to mean ‘thee’, and declares that Jesus has failed, and that His second son, Timorous, must be raised in utter silence.  But as narration tells us, ’Timorous had a dark secret, the discovery of which changed the future for all mankind'. After a few minutes of monastic backstory, the story returns to the future, and switches to a hunt for a lost holy tune (like the lost chord, but hidden in a Roman latrine under a Horse of Truth), and God’s second son is ignored entirely - not so much as a mention - for the next hour.

Once the lost tune is found, it isn't really clear what we should hope for or expect from the remaining half-hour.  The main character goes on a bloody rampage for reasons that I didn't quite grasp.  Like a lot of the film, it reminded me of  ‘Na Srebrnym Globie’ (1977), a bleak, violent Polish sci-fi - in both cases I didn’t really understand what was happening, but knew that was probably my own fault for not paying close enough attention, but that was the film’s fault for being very long and difficult.

“Holy Hell!  The goddamn mainframe laid out before me like a kids’ playpen area on the back of some Kellogg Seafood Matey Cakes circa 1978.  Hell, a long time ago - but jeez!  No time for reminiscing!” - the director, as Jean Baptiste de Golde

The movie is two-and-a-quarter hours long, which is astonishing for a very-low-budget amateur work.  Back in the early 2000s, I knew a lot of people (some of whom were me) who talked big about shooting and editing a feature-length movie, so senor Higgs and his production team deserve credit for sheer persistence.  There are, of course, problems with very-long films by the bold and ambitious.

The film does astonishing things, but rarely in a way that any audience would ask for.  It achieves this on some fairly basic equipment - the sort of sound and picture quality you might expect from the end of the last century, compounded by some audacious colour-grading in post-production.  However, in contrast to most student films, it’s all splendidly focussed.  Individual shots show great promise and style.

An immortal monk (Tom Astley) reveals the truth.

There are genuinely interesting ideas behind the story, and a good ending.  I get the impression the thing was made in a very different order to the way that they're presented, and that the writers and cast had a change of heart about the kind of film they were making part-way through - at times, the script and performances believe themselves to be in a very broad comedy; at others this is a dour monastic horror to be taken as seriously as possible. Scenes of the delicious and delightful are interspersed with full hours of exposition, wondering and impotent crossness.  I wish the tone could have been more consistent in one way or another.  When it was all working, it reminded me slightly of 'Southland Tales' (2006), with its bizarrely satisfying mix of styles to present an action-packed near-future satire.

I do think there's a fantastic shorter film to be had here feature to be had here.  Jonathan Higgs went on to direct his own music videos, so we can be sure he has the necessary talent and vision, when he doesn't have to fill this kind of duration.  If it had been made a bit later, further into the Youtube age, this could have been broken into episodes; it's a fairly episodic storyline, and would be easier to palate in smaller chunks, and it could have made a merit of its developing tone.  Then again, perhaps I'm missing the point, and wanting an avant-garde film to be more accessible.  At this level, it's hard to know what parts of the production are deliberate art, and which are just convenience.

Mason Coop (Mike Carswell) plays out humanity.  A little googling tells me Carswell
put acting behind him and started making rustic furniture and besom brooms.

I'll reiterate the good points - the songs are excellent, and their proto-Everything-Everything sound is the film's great merit.  There's some good comedy, and some memorably bizarre scenes, as when the hero is beaten-up by a giant egg.  The film's very existence is impressive, and the film contains some good ideas and reveals.  The end - in which the hero suffers agonies for the chance to redeem humankind, but chooses not to - is a strong, well-presented concept, and I can see why so much of the rest of the film was produced to give it context.


P.S. To the best of my knowledge, this film is available to watch nowhere.  I've written about it here largely because it's a curio, and I think some people might like to know that it exists, or existed, even if they can't see it.  There's little or no information online about this film - perhaps it's been deliberately blotted out.  According to the closing credits, the soundtrack used to be available on CD.

P.P.S. I'm still unsure whether the film is 'Man Alone' because a man is alone, or because man, alone, is responsible for such depravity, or because the casting is overwhelmingly male.  'Man Alive' is much easier to grapple with, and much more rewarding.

The Adventures of Food Boy (2008)

Yesterday, my bandmate Pez urged me to look out ‘The Adventures of Food Boy’ on Netflix.  I can’t remember quite why the recommendation was made, but the concept entranced me: a boy suddenly learns that his family has the magical power to produce food from their hands.  What sold me on the film was a description of a scene when, attempting to run for ‘class president’ (which is a thing, in America), young Ezra Chase (for that is his name) accidentally shoots hams out of his hands.  Hams which strike his hated rival in the face.  Hams.

I spent a few hours mulling over this concept.  The idea was intriguing: food from nothing, hams from hands.  Spontaneous food-production is a fantastic notion.  You’d never go hungry again.  Heck, you’d never need to go food-shopping again.  Assuming a £20 weekly food shop, you’d be running on a saving of a thousand pounds a year, and you’d be a position to hand similar savings to everybody around you.  Engaged by a homeless person?  Ham ‘em!  Cold, cold Winter?  There must be some flammable foods you could produce and burn.  Oatmeal, perhaps, or bread?

The prospect was incredible.  You could wring a great drama out of it.  Or would this be another ‘Bernard’s Watch’ (CITV, 1997-2005), something far more satisfying in the imagination than on the screen?  Inevitably, the reality was disappointing.  Or, it was as expected; I knew from the off, this would not be beautiful art.  A star-and-a-half rating on Netflix, and the recommendation I received yesterday was more along the lines of a damning indictment.  The luscious hams I’d imagined were not great hunks of meat, they were wafer-thin processed stuff.  Hanky-meats.

Food Boy cowers in bread.

Ezra seems to find very little joy in his magical powers.  Unpredictable mustard ejection isn’t really his bag.  He has a dream, a slightly boring dream, of getting into an Ivy League university.  Do teens really get excited about that sort of thing?  Specifically, cool movie protagonists, and the sort of kid who would choose to watch a film called ‘The Adventures of Food Boy’.  Also: there are no adventures in this film.  He goes to school; he wants a career; he plays a little golf and wants to work on Wall Street.  There’s a jape, a scrape, even an antic, but no adventures.  This is no Buckaroo Banzai, no Priscilla, neither Rocky nor Bullwinkle.

How is it as a film?  Well, it’s clearly working to a tight budget.  They’ve hired a school and got a good number of extras, but there’s precious little left for the special effects.  The conjuring catering, which ought to be a visual feast, is weakly.  You can make a lot of magic with a little imagination and a good grasp of editing, as we saw in 'Orphée' (1950), but almost every apparition in this film is done the same way, with drainpipes in the sleeves.  It’s easy to guess, and it wouldn’t wow a toddler.

The movie as it appears on Netflix is in tall-screen, and seems to have been framed with this in mind - a strange rarity in the late noughties, when even made-for-TV and straight-to-video had gone widescreen.  (I have since found a widescreen version on Youtube while gathering screen-caps, but a lot of the shots seem to have been planned for 4:3).  The film is occasionally loud (with a musical score that belongs in a cooler film) and colourful - Ezra’s friends by-and-large fail to distinguish themselves, but they each have their own colour, and dress in a range of outfits around that simple theme.

Sandwich cutaway!

The other place that colour comes to the fore is in the movie’s real highlight - the highly stylised, very low budget flashbacks to famous food-wizards like the Earl of Sandwich.  These are played out on a very small stage, perfectly fitted to the film’s aspect ratio, and with all the set details painted on flat wood or cardboard.  It’s something you rarely see outside of 20s German expressionism or The Tent Stop of ‘Playdays’ (CBBC, 1988-1995).  These strangely-acted interludes really made the film, for me.

It’s not a wonderful movie, but after the dreary opening 22 minutes (which contain no food magic, and no hints that food magic will appear) it was sufficiently engaging to keep me going for the full 90.  Despite the food theme, don’t be tempted to watch it while dining, as there are a few instances of vomiting, pseudo-vomiting, and other culinary vulgarity.


P.S. The film has a strong moral which we hear articulated several times.  I like films with morals because their existence means the world will get better and we'll all be okay.

2013 Dies!

Well, that was the year of The Penciltonian.  What an exciting time!  What a world of adventures!  What!  Why?

I had hoped never to watch another film again, but the bright lights and colours have drawn me back.  Since the official end of the project and the blog, I've found myself compelled to watch the following motion pictures, which I report here in order to wrap up the year:

Iron Sky (2012)

This is actually a far more appropriate end to The Penciltonian than whatever the actual end was: an exciting Finnish/German/Australian/kinda-American film, riffing on a lot of the German movies I've been watching (even 1943's 'Münchausen', which I'd thought pretty obscure) and slathered in modern-style Wagner.  An action comedy about space-Nazis, an enjoyable and necessarily broad satire, which didn't end as I expected.

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

On St Christmas Eve's Day, I actually saw a movie on the BIG SCREEN, something I had failed to achieve through the body of the year.  It's an excellent telling of the story, and is pretty close to being a perfect film.  Attractive, exciting, amusing and moving, and the muppets work surprisingly well alongside human actors, without seeming unduly ridiculous.  I'm sure I had more to say about it, but Christmas.

Witchfinder General (1968)

What a jerk!  I've always liked the Puritan style, and have seen photos from the film and admired Matthew Hopkins' hat and fine array, but he was a horrid fellow.  This film sits neatly alongside 'Häxan' (1922) and 'The Passion of Joan of Arc' (1928) as a tale of misidentified witches being beaten up by unchristian Christians - and it joins my beloved 'Winstanley' in being an inspiration for 2013's surprise hit 'A Field in England'.  This is a film of really horrible, hard-to-watch violence (which seems entirely appropriate, given the subject matter), and Pertwee-era-style crash zooms (which seem less appropriate).  Vincent Price IS the Witchfinder General.

War and Peace (1956)

I watched the first hour of this, but became immensely irritated.  It wasn't terrible, but it was slow and unexciting, and I'm no longer obliged to watch slow, unexciting films.  I have the liberty to escape such things.  I also grew aware that the film was not at all the best way to take this particular story.  As much as a massive, massive book is daunting, a film that boils a massive, massive story down to a few hours and makes it feel like any other romance, is a less appealing and less helpful prospect.

A borrowed and wearying cat on me, and upon you all.

So, what does 2014 bring?  I tried to make a list of my predictions, but the list started out frighteningly bleak and full of catastrophe (which celebrities will die, this year?), before becoming a sequence of portents of doom and stars of ill-omen, so I stopped making the list and wondered whatever was wrong with me.  2014 will be very lovely.  Amen.

Münchausen (1943)

I've seen films made during wartime from Britain, America and France, so I was very keen to find one from Germany.  I'm aware there were other countries involved in World War II, but these are the four we see in 'The Longest Day' (1962), which seems a fair criterion for The Penciltonian.  'Münchausen' is a lavish comedy made by order of Joseph Goebbels, to prove that Nazi Germany could rival anything Hollywood could produce.

The film tells the story of Baron Hieronymous von Münchausen, the famous teller of tall tales (or as he's presented here, man of bizarre adventures).  He rides on a cannonball, wins the love of the Empress of Russia, and travels to the moon, where he learns that time works quite differently to how it does on Earth.  It's a story that suits the colour and ambition on display here, and the inventive film-craft available in the country that produced 'Metropolis' (1927).  It's a lavish tale, intended to rival 'The Wizard of Oz' and 'Gone With the Wind' (both 1939) for splendour, so accordingly the movie is full of the most astounding hats, costumes and model shots.

The Baron meets the fastest man in the world

At first it seems we're watching the Baron in the 18th Century, but we soon learn that an apparent descendant of his is holding a costume ball, so the old-fashioned costume and music give way to automobiles and electricity, and what seems to be a black character played by a white actor turns out to be a white character whose make-up comes off easily.  There's a pleasing artificiality to the film, right from the start, which excuses some of the fantastical stylisation of the rest of the film.  The modern day Münchausen tells the story of the famous Baron, and we flash back to all manner of unlikely adventures.

The body of the film is full of the bizarre antics and prop comedy I'd expect from 'The Goodies': a wardrobe of clothes get rabies and attack our hero, a bugle is too cold to sound a note but once it warms up indoors it plays incessantly until stamped to pieces, and a giant pastry is opened to reveal a dwarf playing a tiny harpsicord.  It's a very silly film, but it's more fun than funny.

Münchausen, in a fez, meets a eunuch in I-don't-know-what-that-hat-is-but-oh-my.

Hans Albers plays Baron Münchausen, and gives his best performances in quiet close-ups rather than the wild action sequences.  I'm inclined to think he's a bit too old for the role: this is a character who wishes for, and gets, the gift of ageless immortality for as long as he wants it.  He looks about sixty, so seemingly has eternal youth without the youth.  It's like watching the latter half of the Roger Moore era of James Bond, with a hero running around and seducing women a fraction of his age.  Münchausen even meets an aged Giacomo Casanova, the implication being that Casanova has grown too old to be chasing women, while the Baron has retained his mojo.  The women grow older while Münchausen stays the same, and one is forced by her family to join a convent, a fate from which the heroic Baron notably doesn't save her.

It's an lively and watchable film, but doesn't quite live up to the movies it seeks to trump.  It gets more interesting as it goes on, with a memorable trip to the moon where a babies grow on trees, and people's heads galavant without bodies, and fashions are just amazing.  There, Münchausen's trusty servant ages to death over the course of a few days, and the film suddenly seems less ridiculous, and really rather sad.  "The moon is a rather exhausting star," as the Baron notes.  It this film, death (in males, at least) seems to be something that should be chosen.  Dying suddenly in the heat of battle seems acceptable, but choosing mortality seems to be the ideal.  Since the film was ordered into existence by the minister for propaganda, I wonder how close that was to the dominant philosophies of forties Germany.

On the moon, a friendly disembodied head with amazing hair sits on a flower.

I'm glad to have sought this film out, as, though I've watched a great many German films for this Penciltonian project, there was a large gap between the early films of the twenties and thirties, and the later ones from the eighties onwards.  My knowledge of the nation's output seemed to disappear with the rise of Nazism, and wasn't restored until decades of apparently awkward post-war Heimatfilm had gone by.  Perhaps that was for the best, in terms of quality: I've been watching films from the best eras of German cinema.

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Dragnet (1987) and Ghostbusters (1984)

Friday, with a chill dog, Streebek with salad

For four months now, it's been established that as soon as we had some hot-dogs in the house there would be an evening of hot-dogs and 'Dragnet', a reasonably enjoyable comedy based on a very sober old-time radio police-procedural of which I'm tolerant, even fond.

The great novelty of the original is that tries to present a realism, with characters umming and ahhing and making irrelevant or domestic conversation, just like in the real lives of police officers.  Time is taken while people walk from one side of the office to the other.  Joe Friday, the cop at the series' heart is not flamboyantly adventurous or heroic, he's a serious-minded public official doing his job.  It was the first radio series to be so dry, earnest and factually-based, so its main appeal in recent years (if I may call 1987 a recent year) is as an object to be parodied.

Friday and Streebek undercover as typical criminals

In this movie, Dan Akroyd plays Joe Friday, the nephew of the radio original, but very much the same in character.  He's obsessively precise and disciplined, and takes no time for fun, so his world is shaken up when he's partnered with the wise-cracking Pep Streebek (Tom Hanks), who is, by his standards excessively liberal.  I'm inclined to think Hanks overplays his role, making Streebek rather more manic than is needed: the concept for the film seems, originally, to have been pairing a ridiculous character with the intensely serious Friday, but Akroyd is too warm, and Friday too fun, to be a straight-man to Hanks's Streebek.  Indeed, Friday is so odd that he would have better been paired with somebody a little less hysterical.  Too often Hanks seems to be trying to steal the scene, where he could more profitably have shared it.  Akroyd is too good and too subtle to let his scenes be stolen.

In no time the two find themselves embroiled in a web of crime, a vast network of villainy known as P.A.G.A.N., criminals who engage in orgiastic dancing while wearing majestic goat-leggings and chanting 'kill the good', who impersonate police officers and seem to be linked in some way to the charismatic clergyman Jonathan Whirley, a fine performance by Christopher Plummer, who happens to be one of the actors I most like to watch.  It's a wonderfully clear-cut world of good and evil, and it knows it.


Oh, and a couple of weeks later we watched:

Ghostbusters (1984)

...which it seems only reasonable to mention at the same time, it being another fine eighties comedy with Dan Akroyd in a leading role.  If you haven't seen it, I shall explain in brief: there are some ghosts and some people who bust the ghosts and you should certainly watch it today as it is an embarrassing hole in your education that will be enjoyable to fill.

But of course you've seen 'Ghostbusters', and isn't it excellent?  I really haven't a word to say against it.  It was just the thing to test out the new television (the old one having perished of old age), and I could watch it again tomorrow, if this Penciltonian project wasn't pressing me toward less familiar years.

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Orphée (1950)

I watched this film by accident as I had in mind that it was released in 1949, a gap in my chronology, rather than 1950, in competition with 'Julius Caesar'.  In ways I cannot properly define, though, it feels more fifties than forties, so perhaps I should have guessed.  Forties films had an agreeable broadness to them, a roundness and a slightly theatrical character to their dialogue and performances, while 'Orphée' joins the fifties in enjoying a sort of realism, a sharper, harder beauty.

There was a romantic and fantastical flavour to 'Les Enfants du Paradis' (1945), for instance, and even 'Went the Day Well' (1943) had a niceness against which to offset the brutality of war.  'Orphée' is quite different, giving us an incredibly grounded world, with Orphée himself a poet of the plainest kind, an unpretentious, rather humourless fellow.  His home-life is almost kitchen-sink drama, though not so grim as that makes it sound.

Orphée slumped at the mirror.

And into this uncommonly believable France comes death herself.  She's utterly practical, and is as likely to be driven in as automobile as she is to enter the underworld through a mirror.  The special effects are excellent by merit of their simplicity.  Nothing is excessively fancy: the world of the dead, though dream-like, is plainly bomb-ruined France.  Death's employers are not flamboyant or demonic, but a small board-room of sober, suit-wearing bureaucrats.  The fantastical parts are as entrancingly plain and unostentatious as the domestic, and so come across as far more impressive and memorable than they might have been with fancier effects.

Since I've already covered 1950 (whoops) I'll leave my comments short.  And through further administrative bungling I've ended up with a small backlog of fifties films from consecutive years, so over the coming week you can expect Penciltonian comments on 'The African Queen' (1951), 'High Noon' (1952) and 'The Robe' (1953).  And if I can watch something for 1954, I'll have completed the decade.

Beaurocracy beyond the mirror.

P.S. Wikipedia's page on the film calls it 'Orpheus'.  It seems terribly rude to translate a character's name in the title.  I'm sure anyone with the slightest interest would be able to guess that it's the same name, and the opening minute of the film makes the link between the story we're about to see and the ancient myth quite explicit.

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The Crow (1994)

Eric Draven (Brandon Lee †) rocks out on a rooftop, because he can.

So, some guy called Eric rises from the grave on the anniversary of his death to wreak a bloody revenge on his fiancée's murderers.  On the basis of that pitch I was wary of the film, expecting it to be distressingly horrific and charmlessly dour.  As it transpired I was quite mistaken: 'The Crow' turned out to be excellently enjoyable, with a genuine wit, warmth and lightness of touch.  The heroes are extremely likeable, enviably cool, and share a friendship that's appealing to watch.

The villains, on the other hand, are outlandishly despicable, and seem to constantly invite their own destruction.  Not in the ridiculous and pantomimesque way we saw in last week's 'Battlefield Earth' (2000), but through a habitual disdain for everyone not in their gang, almost a violent snobbery, expressed through exploitation and extreme physical abuse.  The villains are cool too but, unlike in the later 'Battlefield Earth', never threaten to eclipse the Heroes.  Indeed, if I've one criticism of 'The Crow' (which, as you may note, I'm rather taken with), it's that the gang of villains are on the back foot from the start.  The format of the film is invulnerable Eric Draven busting their asses, which means that, though the baddies present a substantial threat to society, there's really no prospect of our hero losing.  The villains are doomed.

Sarah (Rochelle Davis) and Sergeant Albrecht (Ernie Hudson)
Eric's friends and allies, down at the hot-dog stand. 

It's a visually striking film, and had as significant an effect on the fashions of the alternative and gothic scenes as did 'The Matrix' half a decade later.  The film has the flavour of Batman noir, a tone at which early-nineties cinema excelled.  Watching this, I also realised where the 'Doctor Who' TV movie two years later stole all its most memorable shots and images.

It was a particular delight watching this film so soon after the aforementioned 'Battlefield Earth', that superficially exciting plodder in which no two elements complemented one another, as it showed up this film's wonderful consistency.  Here the sound and picture, dialogue and story, mythology and character all work together to make something that's amply enjoyable to sit down and watch for a couple of hours.  I'm rather surprised it took quite so many years for this film to be set before me, and I'll be glad to see it again.

Myca (Bai Ling) enjoys gouging out eyes.  She's a villain, by the way

P.S. I'm aware that almost any film would probably delight me after 'Battlefield Earth' (2000).  Even if I'd watched 'Doctor Zhivago' (1965) straight afterwards (to pick a well-made film that I nonetheless don't enjoy at all), I'd probably have come away saying it was great fun and sparkling with wonder.  Nonetheless, I found 'The Crow' to have many merits.

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Hey look, optical media!

Peer Gynt (1941)

The Bøyg!

I claimed a while back that I'd never seen a film made in the forties that wasn't excellent. It seems I misspoke, as a half-decade ago I saw this low-budget silent film of Ibsen's once-famous play.  It isn't by any means wretched, indeed it's quite a work of art, but I wouldn't call it the perfection of beauty, the joy of the whole world.

I was watching then for its star, the seventeen-year-old Charlton Heston. Watching it now, to stand for the year of 1941, it seems more interesting, and rather innocuous: a silent film in the forties! Made so late, it's able to stand on its own merits, not joining with the fevered rush for grander scale that we saw at the end of the twenties, nor hampered by the need to set up microphones.

Peer Gynt works rather well as a silent film. Notoriously, Edvard Grieg wrote incidental music for the original play which was too loud to include alongside dialogue, but too good to miss out. The solutions, I suppose, were to present the thing as a ballet - rather a pity when you could have Ibsen's dialogue - or, at last, as a silent film, with Grieg's music throughout, and a with well-judged amounts of intertitles.

There is, by the way, no chance that you don't know the music I'm talking about.

A child Peer begat in his imagination turns up in the real world

When I first saw this, I didn't know the story of Peer Gynt, and assumed, for the first half, that this was just a tale of a lusty jerk called Peer who goes around bothering people a bit.  I was surprised and excited, then, when Peer goes inside a mountain and discovers the Bøyg, a massive flying head.  Alarmingly, though the rest of this is a silent film, the Bøyg speaks its dialogue aloud.  Like 'Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors' (1964), a pastoral story of rural romance turned out way weirder than I'd given it credit for.

The first half is, I think, extremely good.  For the film's back-end, I had to turn to the Internet to find out the plot, a few key points of which seem to be absent.  Gone from the play is the suggestion that Peer has lived his life as a troll, and his climactic encounter with the devil and eventual death.  As it is, there's no reunion with Solveig, which strikes me as rather a pity, and the story pretty-much ends with Peer meeting a button-moulder, who critiques him as a person, and, it seems, as a fictional character.  It's an appropriately odd end, but no real way to resolve the story or the themes.  It all looks very nice though.

Featuring Lake Michigan as Morocco.  Here, 'Sir Peter Gynt' gives a picnic.

My favourite intertitle, since this is a silent film, reads as follows: 'Peer returns to a Norway of chaos and desolation'.  Before remembering that the film is indeed Norwegian in setting, the slide caused me to entertain the notion that 'a Norway' was the generic term for a chaotic and desolate locale.  Since then, I've been seeking opportunities to apply the phrase: 'since you got those kittens, the place has been a Norway of chaos and desolation', 'since the regular arson attacks began, the Sheffield ski-village has been a Norway of chaos and desolation', or 'they need to get someone in to sort out those public toilets: they're a bit of a Norway'.

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On this DVD set, in a quality that is mediocre yet sufficient, one may find this 'Peer Gynt' and Bradley and Heston's other notable collaboration, a rather fine 'Julius Caesar' from 1950.  There are also a number of episodes of 'Studio One', a series which cut classic novels and plays down to 52 minutes and shot them as-live on video with a multi-camera set-up.  It's a bit strange, being so used to America's glossy TV output, to see some that wasn't shot on film with a single-camera, but there's plenty to enjoy in these very concise productions of 'The Taming of the Shrew', 'Wuthering Heights', 'Jane Eyre', and my favourite 'A Bolt of Lightning', in which he plays James Otis, who said "no taxation without representation," and threw the Boston Tea Party.  It's out of print at present, but if it comes back and you share my strange fascination with the acting style of Charlton Heston, you may like to give it a go.

Xanadu (1980)

Kira makes an unexpected appearance on an LP cover

Xanadu!  This lively 1980 romance features ample disco music by notable artists, but was until lately mentioned on Wikipedia's list of Films Considered the Worst Ever. So what's wrong with it?  Is it really bad, or just 'so bad it's good'?

There's certainly a division to be made there. 'Plan 9 From Outer Space' (1959) is often counted as a 'so bad its good' campy classic, but in fact is poorly wrought and, worse, boring.  It's considerably more entertaining to watch 1994's 'Ed Wood' and imagine what 'Plan 9' might be like than struggle through the thing. A film needs at least a base level of good, clear storytelling to be worth the watching.

Gene Kelly enjoys a mirror.  'Xanadu' would love to be 'Singin' in the Rain' (1952)

'Xanadu' is not a boring film, so most of its other quirks are excusable, at least when watching for corny entertainment.  'Not boring' probably ought to be qualified.  The plot is very, very slight.  In short (which is to say, in full), a heavenly muse (Olivia Newton-John) comes down to inspire two guys (Michael Beck and Gene Kelly) to open a 1940s/1980s-crossover-themed roller disco.  She and the hairier of the blokes fall in love, which is forbidden.  It's a musical, but the songs really have no impact on the story, and serve mainly to make up the duration. When a song starts, so does a dance sequence, lasting for at least three minutes even where there are no more than twenty seconds of choreographical innovation.  The greatest of these sequences, by some margin, entails shop-window dummies coming alive and jiving in a variety of costumes while Gene Kelly tries on different glitzy outfits.  It's like 'Spearhead from Space' and 'Time and the Rani' together in the same sandwich.

Mercifully most of the songs, and at least one of the dances, are amply entertaining to sustain the viewer. The Electric Light Orchestra, who had completed their move from prog to disco with the previous year's 'Discovery' here contribute five songs, all of which I have on 45s somewhere about.  There's also a duet between Cliff Richard and Olivia-Newton John (O.B.E.), which is unexciting by comparison but is set over a charmingly laughable sequence of images; and an ON-J solo piece, 'Suspended in Time', which I fast-forwarded through.  In it, the muse stands in a flamboyantly boring set and sings the song, without incident, dance, or so much as a change of shot.  The most static performance in a movie musical since 'Climb Every Mountain', and is a work of lesser merit.

Kira in... Muse land?  Heaven?  Valhalla?  The Eighties?

The film has a strong message, but doesn't illustrate it very well.  It wants to tell us that you should live for your art, and if your employer is telling you to cut out your artistic flair and work efficiently for cash you should resign on the spot and go forth to make beautiful things.  In actuality, the painter who resigns to chase his muse ends up co-owner of a disco, which isn't really what he wanted, and seems to leave him as a businessman rather than an artistic innovator.  Perhaps the message is that when you fall in love you can give up on all your other dreams as they'll no longer matter, but that's not a very nice message at all.

It's an unusually relaxing watch, since it's almost wholly devoid of conflict. The film is a long sequence of things turning out ok, with only a fairly slight and dramatically unsatisfying attempt to build up tension towards the end as a disembodied Zeus attempts to forbid Kira and Sonny from loving one another in anything but the most distant and platonic fashion.  When the end comes it doesn't feel triumphal.  ON-J sings 'Xanadu', the title song and the best, but the film fails to end.  More music comes, and with it more dancing.

It's a fun film, and I can see why it has its dubious reputation yet continues to be watched.  Nobody in the production team seems to have looked at the dances and set-pieces and asked themselves whether they're good enough for inclusion in the film, and so a story about true artistic inspiration embarrasses itself by being tacky and bizarre.  It's implied that 'Xanadu', the roller-disco of the title, is an artistic achievement to rival Shakespeare or Mozart.  The film, however, isn't.


P.S. Saskia's verdict on 'Xanadu': you might like it more than 'Zardoz' (1974).  It's so, so inoffensive and friendly.

P.P.S. Roller-discos look cool but I can't imagine many drew in enough punters to sustain themselves - at least not once the seventies were over.

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The film and the title track, if you can be tempted

Metropolis (1927)

The film looks better than this: I photographed my TV to get screen-caps
Still, what a wonderfully symmetrical city.

When I first told people about this hundred-films-from-a-hundred-years project, quite a lot of them told me I ought to watch this.  I almost didn't, so stubborn am I - but I remembered having liked it when I first saw it a few years ago, and didn't fancy my chances of finding a better or more interesting film to represent 1927 (though 'Napoleon' might have been exciting).  You probably all know about 'Metropolis', even if you haven't seen it, so I'm a mite concerned you will have heard it all before.  I'll try to be brief, though I may not succeed.

Freder sees somebody more beautiful

Freder, the wealthy, handsome and oblivious son of the master of Metropolis, accidentally discovers that his garden paradise is built over a vast dystopian undercity of oppressed, exhausted workers, whose whole grey lives are dedicated to their tedious labour.  The film is an allegory, by the way.  He falls in love with Maria, who offers a particularly Christian hope to the workers, persuading them not to despair or revolt, but to wait for the Mittler - the mediator, or Messiah.  As it happens, Freder is that Mittler, and pretty much gets to be Jesus and Moses at the same time, and defy the modern Tower of Babel.  It's a bit like 'The Matrix' (1999), if you can imagine the film without the computers.

Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who I'd so enjoyed as King Etzel (you know, Atilla the Hun) in 'Die Nibelungen' (1924) appears here as Rotwang, the archetypal mad scientist, whose science seems to made primarily of magic.  Rotwang has created a maschinenmensch, a mechanical version of Freder's dead mother, but chooses to model her face on Maria.  Thus, Brigitte Helm gives the film's most amazing performances, playing both the incarnation of charity and humility, and the sultry robotic succubus who makes the tuxedoed upper crust pant with uncontrollable lusts.

The Maschinenmensch and Rotwang.
His name, in German, denotes rosy cheeks, not a rotten wang, by the way.

So, it's an opulent sci-fi epic, of Biblical character, and it's set in a huge futurist city of extreme angles and stark lighting.  Fritz Lang pulls out all the stops to make the thing look magnificent, even filling the model-shots of the city with working cars, trains and aeroplanes.  Even the intertitles are bolder than usual, as they gleam with light, or drip with blood, or scroll up or down between shots of elevators.  The editing, too, is far more advanced than I've come to expect from the silent era.  Lang takes the montage technique we saw two years earlier in 'Battleship Potemkin' (1925) and does it faster, less literally and more psychedelically, if one can be psychedelic in monochrome.  Clue: one certainly can.

Silent films never looked better.  I don't think that's overstating matters: this film is the absolute peak of the silent era.  This is much more ambitious than anything made in the next decade, as the advent of sound, which began in earnest with the same year's 'The Jazz Singer', set back cinema's visuals significantly.  By the time studios and audiences had adjusted to the change, colour and widescreen had sent the movie in completely different directions. There could never again be anything like 'Metropolis', and it could never be challenged on its home ground.

The most exciting intertitle.

P.S. I seem to have failed to give you any screen-shots of the larger sets or more beautiful parts of the city, mainly because my photos all looked very terrible indeed.  Here's the trailer, then, which may knock your socks off.

P.P.S Since I've managed to post about a 1910s film followed by a 1920s film, I'll see if I can get through ten consecutive decades like this.  The next two films are from 1935 and 1944, and at least one of them is excellent.

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Once more, the film looks nicer than my screen-caps suggest.  Screen-capping a blu-ray is a tricky thing, so I ended up photographing my CRT's screen with a cell-phone camera.  The real film looks beautiful - except the recently recovered scenes, of course, which can only be properly described using the Bristol Stool Scale.  Discover for yourself!

The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003)

Who determined that men must wear their hair short?  Someone, somewhen must have decreed it, and done so with great power.

These are the films that made me grow my hair long.  Everybody here (and in 90 per cent of this adventure, 'everybody' is synonymous with 'all the male characters') - the wizards, the men and the dwarves, have long, magnificent, flowing hair.  The hobbits have rather less, but still a good deal more, I'd say, than the male average when the thing saw release.  How I admired the hair (and the general style and bearing, but the hair seemed both achievable and symptomatic) of Aragorn, of Elrond, of Gandalf the Grey, the most magnificent.

It's been long and short ever since.  It takes time to make it long but I ill care for it, or the pressures of 21st century Britain demand its loss.  I think I'd still be glad to grow up to be Bilbo or Radagast (but now, you see, I'm talking in the wrong film), but am wary of letting my pate come to resemble that of Grima Wormtongue or Jimmy Saville.  Ah, you cry, this is not a hairdressing blog.  Indeed not!  Shall we return to the matter at hand?

The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

Sean Bean is Boromir.  Doomed, of course.

Well, you've all seen these films, perhaps several times at ever-increasing lengths, so there's little I can tell you about the content.  The big surprise, rewatching this first part, is how real some of the locations look.  I've always accepted the grand locations augmented by CGI and cunningly composited model-shots in the later films, without consciously registering that this is how they were put together, but the places roamed through in 'The Fellowship of the Ring' feel like real places you could visit - as if anybody with a camera and a few Orcs could go and gather the same footage, without having to find a portal to a real fantasy kingdom to get the scenery they're after.  Only a handful of slightly dodgy slo-mo footage seems to date the film, the remainder seeming magnificently timeless.

The fellowship is peopled by excellent characters, well-cast.  Four hobbits, two men (one dark and handsome; the other Yorkshire and treacherous), a wizard (Gandalf, of course), an elf (Legolas manages to be stylish, effete and dully humourless all at once) and a dwarf (Gimli is somehow very Scottish and very Welsh at the same time - an excellent combination).  For some reason, this is the only one of the films where we see dwarves other than Gimli.  Presumably they're occupied somewhere else during the ensuing world-war, but they could have made a few of the battles much less precarious if they'd done as the Elves do and sent a couple of battalions to Helm's Deep or Pelennor Fields.

A friend of mine, who presents the Minute Doctor Who Podcast, suggested that Elijah Wood was poor casting for Frodo, and that this was the films' greatest hindrance.  It seemed a curious suggestion to me - perhaps because I watched the films long before reading the books, so to me he is Frodo and Frodo is him.  The vibrant relationship between him and Sean Astin's Samwise Gamgee is the heart of the films, and everything else is window-dressing - even the battles, even Gandalf, even the pretty lights and colours of the Balrog and the fireworks and the eye of Sauron.

The Two Towers (2002)

Frodo, perhaps about to kill slimy old Gollum.

So the Fellowship fell to pieces.  I expected this film to show them taking separate routes only to be reunited and carry on as before, but by the time this sequel starts, they're irreparably divided, like Earth in the time of Peleg, and we're following several stories at once.

I'll take this chance to say something about sequels, as it seems to bear some relevance to this blog and experiment.  I'm meant to be looking at a hundred films from a hundred years, but it doesn't seem quite right to take up three per cent, and three consecutive years, on The Lord of the Rings - a fine series, but one with a very consistent style.  It's better, perhaps, to count it as one big film, and tie it to just one of those years, allowing me to re-use 2001 for 'Moulin Rouge' and 2003 for 'Good Bye Lenin' (for instance).  I'll apply the same thinking to my 1971-3 trio of Shaft movies.  If I didn't go with this sort of thinking, I'd be able to have a long weekend binge of the canonical Bond movies and wipe out almost a quarter of my 100 films at the expense of variety.

Back to 'The Two Towers', then.  A sequel without new characters would be a pointless thing (please let me know if you can think of any good examples), and two fine adventurers enter here.  Firstly, the cadaverous form of Theoden, from whom Gandalf (if I may spoiler a spoiler) exorcises Saruman, and who subsequently gets his groove back, once he realises that his obviously evil servant Grima Wormtongue is evil, obviously.

I can't easily screen-cap blu-ray, so I photographed my TV.  Does it show?

Secondly, Gollum: seen in the distance in 'The Fellowship of the Rings', but a hero and a villain from here on.  Just as we've gotten used to Frodo and Sam adventuring alone, the relationship is shaken up by this CGI monstrosity.  Sam, who's been nothing but hearty good-humour and encouragement, suddenly reveals a nasty streak, despising this slimy churl, a creature who alternates saving the day and threatening murder.  It's an arresting, horrible yet sympathetic performance which owes at least a little to Peter Lorre in 'M' (1931), and it's not without reason Gollum is still so celebrated and impersonated.

There's a great deal of fighting, here as in the threequel.  I still can't tell where the real soldiers and sets end and the models and CGI begin, so I'm content to say the sequences work as impressively as intended.  Everything's beautifully designed and strikingly attractive.

Starting in this film, Aragorn has a choice of two wives - a storyline plumped up considerably to make the lack of women in these films less embarrassing.  Of course, since Aragorn is royal, and this is the real Olden Days, he could probably fix the problem with bigamy - or since he and Arwen are both very long-lived, he could marry Eowyn first, wait for her to grow old and die, and then marry Arwen.  Perhaps I'm being unduly unromantic making such practical suggestions, but I thought it worth suggesting.  As it is, Aragorn gives his full attention to his sword and his battles, perhaps waiting to see who survives before ironing out the destiny of his loins.

The Return of the King (2003)

Andy Serkis is a real person, not just the puppeteer of Gollum

'Return of the King' holds my two favourite scenes of the trilogy. First, before the film's title dares appear, we're treated to Gollum's back-story, as Smeagol and Deagol fight over the newly-found precious.  It was an unexpected delight, watching this for the first time in the cinema, to see Andy Serkis in the flesh.  An appropriate reward, I think, for his years being motion captured - his voice and movements were celebrated, but only here is his face seen.

My other favourite scene is the one with the beacons - a moment the book covers with half a sentence, but which in the film is a beautiful triumph.  Here, grizzled old Denethor is most reluctant to call for aid, but young Pippin scrambles up to light the city's waiting bonfire beacon, and once its flames have grown, we see another light spring up on the far horizon in answer.  The camera flies over distant and inhospitable mountains as beacon answers beacon, the signal going out for aid, calling stations presumably maintained for this purpose for many generations.  It's an awesome, surprisingly emotional sight.  Like the defiant singing of La Marseillaise in 'Casablanca' (1942), it gives me a thrill of hope in the midst of desperation.  For me, this is the best part of the eleven-hour adventure.

Frodo just gets dirtier and dirtier in these films, and not in a saucy way.

Watching the films in their extended form (as seems appropriate), it's easy to grow a touch fatigued during this final instalment.  The first two went up from three hours to three-and-a-half apiece.  'The Return of the King' was already three-and-a-half hours long in the cinemas, which felt about as extended as was required, and so ends up almost four-and-a-half hours in duration.  The ending sequence, which was derided (unfairly, to my mind) is under twenty minutes in length from the destruction of the ring to the start of the credits - not inappropriate when compared either to the extent of the adventure that precedes it, or to the equivalent portion of the book (more than forty-thousand words, not counting the appendices).  Twenty minutes seems about as long as one can acceptably make an audience cry with a mix of sadness, merriment and relief.  Each strand is tied up, everyone goes home, and Frodo, Gandalf, and Bilbo in his dotage resolve that they must leave Middle Earth forever.  For a happy ending, it is very sad.

Nine years later, enough time has past since this massive epic that I very warmly welcome 'The Hobbit', by way of a prequel.  But that, as they say, is another story.

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You would think that the extra capacity available in a lavish blu-ray box-set would allow the inclusion of both the extended and the sensible editions of these films, wouldn't you?  Nope.

Sleeping Beauty (live belly-dance)

I've always thought of belly-dancing as a mildly saucy novelty - a sorbet between more substantial acts, or a bit of background colour in films.  When I was invited along to see the first ever belly-dance production of 'Sleeping Beauty', I was somewhat wary, but intrigued.  There was a thrill to sitting in the theatre, knowing I was wholly ignorant of what would ensue, of what manner of story-telling lay beyond the red-orange curtains.

I found myself at the theatre, having been invited by friends who were, unfortunately, encumbered by illness and unable to attend.  I wasn't alone, as three other friends had likewise had the idea suggested to them, but none of us knew quite what to expect.  Crucially, where this would fall on the line between ballet, kabuki theatre and pantomime?  Would this be two solid hours of dancing?  Would it be exciting?  Amusing?  Terrifying?

The programme (I was stingy here, so looked over my neighbour's shoulder to read his copy) filled in a few details.  Jenny Muhlwa had a dream, a compulsion to bring belly-dancing to the masses, to show it to be be a legitimate way to tell stories.  Belrobics had been formed, a circle of linked belly-dancing groups, of all ages, around Sheffield.  They came together to show their work, their moves, and their bellies.

The curtains opened and the bellies began.  The stage was dominated by a rather magnificent backdrop painting of the Taj Mahal.  Bar a couple of chairs and a crib-full-of-baby, this was the full extent of the set.  This production was all about the dancing.

Here ensued dance after dance, belly after belly, the jangle of coin-belts, a pageant of rich saturated colours, and the pallid Winter flesh of Britain.  This whole production, cast mainly with keen amateurs, seemed a commendably un-self-conscious show.  Now, I would be daunted to show my battenberg-filled belly in public, knowing myself not to be honed and toned to society's impossible standards, but the dancers here were bolder than I, and not bound by such miserable restrictions.

I feel ill-qualified to comment on either quality or style of dance, as I've pretty much ignored it as a medium, and my own engagement with it has hitherto been restricted to the odd ceilidh and a few seconds of alarming movement half-way through the music video to 'The Princess I Never Knew'.  What I can say is this, that the dancing was enthusiastic, energetic, joyful and hypnotic, with each of the groups coming forward with scenes and set-pieces.  I hadn't expected so much variety within belly-dancing - or rather, I hadn't realised it could hold my attention for two full acts without growing repetitive.

There were many memorable images within the extravaganza of undulation and shimmying.  The good fairies with their huge wings moved with a grace and fluidity, and impressed more than I might have expected from such elegantly simple props.  The dancers playing thorns deported themselves very well, and were the best costumed, by merit both of looking much like thorns, and looking not very much like belly-dancers; thorns aside, this did seem to take place in a kingdom made up entirely of belly-dancers (as opposed to, say, a kingdom made up of people who happen, in this telling, to be belly-dancing).  One particular highlight was a dance near the first act's end, in which the evil fairy works the eponymous Aurora like a puppet - showing off the dynamism of the two dancers' movements and the precision of their timing.  This was a too-rare moment of interaction between characters, not that the others didn't dance together - just that they didn't dance together.  Here was a piece of good drama within the dance.

Act two gave us a male character, and thus a male dancer in a cast of sixty or so females.  I was a little daunted by the prospect, through concern that finding a male willing to belly-dance might have resulted in resorting to somebody very terrible indeed.  But no, the man danced with all due passion, virility and grace - though I found his character, as in many tellings of this story, unpalatably arrogant, a man driven by his lusts rather than inherent heroism.  Thankfully, in what was either slight mistake on the part of the dancers or a brilliant faux-ad-lib, the prince and the awoken beauty bumped rather suddenly into one another, and shared a laugh more human and less calculated than much of the production.  Perhaps they were merely enjoying themselves.  I hope so.

So, do I foresee a time when going to the belly-dance will be a Christmas tradition for many?  I certainly like the idea, and there's a joy to any new tradition.  It's as good a way as any to tell a story, and for now the novelty of it makes it intriguing, so I'll be very glad to return to next year's productions.  There's a lot to be said for all forms of physical theatre, and I'm keen to see how this company will develop.  I particularly liked the mix of dancers at different levels of ability and complexity, the production bringing learners and professionals together under the same discipline and with the same gusto.  I've sometimes found dancers who dance so extraordinarily that I can hardly believe I belong to the same species, but watching 'Sleeping Beauty' I felt anybody open to the experience could learn to belly-dance.  Do excuse me if I don't, however.

P. S. You can see Belrobics in action on their Youtube channel 

P. P. S. I hope you'll excuse me sullying the purity of this blog's focus on film, but it is nearly Christmas.

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Belrobics staged the first ever belly-dance production of 'Sleeping Beauty' at the Montgomery Theatre, Sheffield, 20th-22nd December 2012.  I've no doubt they will return in a matter of months.