But worst of all, you’ve let yourself down…

Occasionally I get exercised to write about stuff I don’t like. These posts are rarely about things I didn’t like beforehand, but almost always where I’ve been disappointed, most signficantly by someone or something whom I had previously respected, trusted or admired.

Marketing is often a mission to manage expectations. Does the product match up against the claims of your concept or advertising? Apparently  Terence Malick’s 2011 film The Tree of Life attracted significant audiences last year among people who saw Brad Pitt feature strongly in the trailer, but then who left after barely 20 minutes, aghast by Malick’s beautiful but arthouse meditations on the creation of life and the nature of what is divine (and the relative lack of Brad Pitt).

Lego is surely one of the greatest brands of all time. For over 60 years these plastic bricks have entertained and inspired children of all ages all over the world. Iconic in the extreme, it has succeeded in also reinventing itself and moving with the times. Having introduced Space Lego in the 1970s shortly after the Star Wars movie phenomenon and before the real-life Space Shuttle, there are now themed Lego sets for virtually every major film franchise; in fact, it would be almost unthinkable for a studio to ignore Lego merchandising. As a company, Lego is flying. Its last full year report (2010) declared revenue and profits up over 30% vs 2009, and the first half of 2011 continued that sort of growth.

Lego is universal, simple and timeless. It has no language barriers, or even issues of sex, class or development. All it requires is imagination to create, build, rebuild and tell stories. I loved it as a child, and my daughters love it now. As I type this they are creating their own narratives using Harry Potter Lego characters and buildings. Hannah has built a new flying ship out of Hagrid’s hut, and there’s a lot of head-switching between the Death Eaters and the Weasley family.

This Lego ad from a generation ago sums it up perfectly. Anyone can build anything, and it can represent whatever they want it to. Hannah loves both her Lego technic kits which she can now almost rebuild without the instructions to create helicopters and bulldozers and her Harry Potter sets, which are endlessly demolished and restyled to suit today’s ideas.

Lego is cool without having to try to be cool. It’s been used in street art, features in countless spoof Youtube clips, including this beautifully observed version of Summer Nights, and of course, that Eddie Izzard routine. Perhaps most famously(?), the award-wining director Michel Gondry used Lego to transform The White Stripes…

All of which makes my groan of disappointment more heartfelt when I see stories like this one. Not content with their brand being timeless and sexless and perfect in almost every way, the maestros at Lego have evidently done some (too much?!) research that says girls don’t like Lego enough, because they also play with Polly Pocket and Barbie and Bratz.

So, no doubt targeting some unpleasant measure like “share of playroom occasions”, the Lego people have launched Lego Friends, a depressing copycat against all those other brands that try to tap into girls’ modes of play in which relationships and sharing are all important (as opposed to boys who build things and blow them up). Do they not realise that Lego does this already? With film characters and generic scenarios (farms, cities, homes), Lego already fulfils everything a child’s imagination needs to run riot. It lets my daughters plan wedding parties for Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley, as well as fight battles against dragons and Death Eaters.

You don't need to to this. I don't care what the research says. It's wrong.

Apparently not… now girls can have their ‘own’ Lego ‘Friends’, who ignore the timeless, genderless qualities of the brand, who ignore the brand’s differentiation through simplicity, instead opting for stereotypical clichés that already exist from floor to ceiling in practically every aisle of most toy stores. Instead of appealing to the imagination inside every boy and girl, these new ranges appeal to constricting cultural ‘norms’ in which young girls are assumed to want to be teenagers, in which their toys leap from being babies (dolls) to teens with breasts and makeup and low self-esteem, and in which the world-view horizons are crushingly mundane. Can they go no further than the Shopping Mall or pet shop? Is this Lego’s failure to inspire us, or a sad indictment of our own failure to inspire our children?

And in amongst all this Lego has created a rod for its own back. By making these Friends so stultifyingly contemporary, they will be forced to update them with every shift in technology and fashion. “Your Lego ‘Emma’ has only got a 1st Generation iPad… LOSER”.

Lego has disappointed me, in many different ways.

• This campaign is reactionary, defensive and weak, and seems to betray a lack of confidence in its own magnificence.
• It’s unnecessary, utterly avoidable: their products and brands are fabulous and always have been
• They’ve reduced themselves to a lowest common denominator. Other brands go for the fashion route because they have to, because they don’t have what Lego has. This will be short-term and forgettable. Lego will endure and thrive.

Last summer we had a family trip for my daughter’s birthday to Legoland at Windsor. I was at least partly dreading it, because I get nauseous when companies try to sell me a bottle of water for £3.50 or photos from a ride for £12. It was busy, but it was terrific. The Lego landscapes are fantastic and there are brilliant adaptations of the Lego philosophy into real experiences: you can drive a Lego Fire Engine and control a Digger. There are Lego castles and trains. Even the Lego shops are brilliantly stocked with hard-to-find sets. It is a terrific day out.

Hannah's 9th Birthday: the helicopter with a millionairess pilot. She thought of that idea by herself. Who needs Lego Friends?

I love Lego. I have a Lego Indiana Jones figure keyring, which should say pretty much everything about my relationship with the brand. But this, Lego Friends, is depressing, demeaning and so, so disappointing. In true parenting style I shall try to ignore such bad behaviour, and reward their otherwise fantastic behaviour with all the other sets my daughters love to play with, every day, every week.

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Everywhere is walking distance, if you have the time…

I’m lucky to live in Tetbury, a bustling (sometimes) market town in the heart of the Cotswolds. Within a few minutes of leaving my front door I can be chatting with our excellent butcher, enjoying a pint at one of several different pubs, taking my daughters to the library or school for new discoveries, or striding across open fields. And of course despite being blessed with a richness of opportunity on our doorstep, we realised at the end of last year that we didn’t seem to ‘get out enough’. We visited friends all round the country, went camping and so on, but we didn’t seem to ‘get our boots on and just go for a walk’.

So that has become our unofficial family resolution for 2012: or, at least Rachel and I are making a conscious effort, and the girls so far have been eager to join us (perhaps the relatively mild weather and promise of hot chocolate and cake when we return has something to do with that!).

As is often the way with New Year Resolutions, we got off to a good start. We were staying with friends in Harpenden, and on New Year’s Day set out along a footpath that follows an old railway line. Perhaps because it’s Harpenden, this path was properly tarmac-ed, a perfect route for our younger daughter to try out her Christmas Scooter and practise balancing on two wheels.

The very next day we really shrugged off our Christmas routines by actually leaving the house before noon. In fact, we were striding towards the edge of the Cotswold Escarpment before 11am as we left the carpark at Dyrham Park, a stunning National Trust property between Tetbury and Bath.

We followed paths very familiar to us from previous visits down to the house, but then walked back up the hill through the trees and the deer park. We didn’t see any deer up close, but it was a really lovely walk with marvellous views across to the River Severn. The weather was closing in, which kept us focused as we climbed the hill back to the car.

This route is part of a whole series of National Trust ‘one-mile-walks’. I think this is a pretty ‘long’ mile…

Image taken from http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/walks

The National Trust has long been championing the natural beauty of the UK and the benefits of getting outdoors more. I reckon they’re bang on the money, and their website and social media feeds are well worth a look.

And then this weekend, after a marathon but rewarding session of decluttering virtually every room in the house, and re-felting the roof of our garden shed (!?), we went out closer to home, down what we know as The Old Rope Walk in Tetbury, out into Preston Park. Again the girls had their scooters, but the path was a bit muddy for generating any real speed… On the way back we were able to scavenge in the woods and come home with a massive sack full of twigs and fallen branches for firewood kindling.

We’ve already got our eye on a tramp around Woodchester Park for next weekend. In the meantime, I’m enjoying parking a bit further from the office each morning. I get to walk down the hill into Bath along part of The Cotswold Way and across Victoria Park; not too shabby at all…

Expect further updates during 2012: I reckon this is a resolution that will be pretty easy to keep.

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I told you we should have got him a hat…

I think I watched just over 70 films in 2011. Some of these I watched more than once (usually the ones my kids liked on DVD). Some were ‘re-viewings’ of things I’d first seen years earlier, but most (more than 60) were new to me. Only a handful (Tangled, The King’s Speech, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Arrietty, The Adventures of Tintin) were on the Big Screen. As such, most   of my favourites were not originally released in 2011, and indeed I saw none of the list below in the cinema.

I’ve also revelled in Mark Cousins’ astonishing (if more than occasionally infuriating) The Story of Film: An Odyssey. Shown over almost 4 months on Channel 4, it covers an amazing amount of ground, with often breathtaking side-by-side shots and comparisons between modern films and their influences, captivating interviews from around the globe and a perspective on world cinema like I have never seen before. Sadly, it’s not available for viewing from 4OD, but I recommend it to any budding cinephile if only for its historical perspectives (but beware of Mark Cousins’ very distinctive style of narration…!).

Anyway, my favourite films I saw last year, in rough chronological order.

Red Riding (2009)
Already this is a bit of a cheat, as it’s actually a trilogy of films made for television. Grim, dark, bleak, violent, they are terrific character studies set around a fictionalised version of the 1970s / 80s in Northern England. Everyone smokes, swears, drinks and are corrupt, especially the policemen. Based on novels by David Peace, these are tough stories.

Un Prophète (2009)
Marked by the tremendous performance by Tahar Rahim, and several scenes of heart-pounding tension, this is an epic tale of survival and ambition within a brutal French prison.

I saw another great ‘prison’ film last year; The Escapist stars Brian Cox and is well worth your time…

Bloody Sunday (2002)
Perhaps the most harrowing film I’ve watched since ‘Grave of The Fireflies‘. The opening act is filled with dread, as we already know the brutal outcome, it’s an exercise in claustrophobic film-making. Expert hand-held camerawork and extreme close-ups combine to make the viewer feel intensely close to the action. You can feel the soldiers’ breath, smell their uniforms. You can feel the bleakness on the barricades and in the sparse concrete. As stones rain down upon the troops’ vehicles, the noise is deafening and the tension palpable. When the tension breaks and the shooting starts, it’s terrifying, a massacre made all the more vivid by having the HQ Commanders realise too late what might be happening, the tragedy of unarmed civilians (or at worst stone-throwing kids) being shot in the back. James Nesbitt is terrific as Ivan Cooper. His idealism turns quickly to shock, horror, disbelief and righteous anger as he sees his friends murdered by The State. This was a massively important film before The Savile Enquiry finally verified its storytelling is much closer to the truth than anything The British Army had tried to peddle before. It’s still an extremely important and visceral retelling of a pretty shameful day.

Network (1976)
How I got to be a 42 year-old so-called cinephile without seeing this film sooner is a mystery: it should be required viewing. Peter Finch barnstorms his way through the film as a TV newsreader on the verge/in the fullest throes of a breakdown. William Holden is terrific as the old-school boss, and Faye Dunaway is terrifying as ‘television incarnate’. There are so many brilliant scenes and lines it’s hard to single some out, but I laughed out loud at “It’s The Network News Hour – with Sybil The Soothsayer”, and at the contract negotiations between the Network Production Execs and the Revolutionary Communist Terrorist group… Prophetic, chilling, funny, brilliant.

Off the back of this and prompted by various tributes on the death of the director Sidney Lumet, I also watched Dog Day Afternoon, The Verdict and Serpico,  all of them brilliant, important films.

Monsters (2010)
This is a terrific achievement of real independent, low-budget creativity. Gareth Edwards developed the concept, directed, operated the cameras, did all the special effects at home, and probably booked the taxis too. It’s an almost-completely improvised drama with a similar feel and tone to District 9. The creation of a world filled with extra-terrestrials is brilliantly done, and the emotional and physical journey of the two lead characters through this landscape is really well told. There’s unease and tension aplenty, as the threats seem to come both from the rarely-seen monsters and the human military. The final scenes are wonderful, and are moving on all sorts of different levels. A tremendous piece of work. I can’t wait to see what Edwards does next.

Submarine (2011)
I loved this gem of a film. It’s funny and occasionally moving. It’s surreal and sometimes jarring. The writing and direction from Richard Ayoade is remarkably assured for a first feature, with stylish flourishes that (IMHO) never intrude on the film, but enhance it. The unreliable narrator, Oliver Tate, is a fabulous creation, full of teenage angst, self-centred to a fault (the scenes where he imagines his own funeral are breathtakingly honest and hilarious), but also painfully self-conscious. The coming-of-age elements are handled sensitively, and indeed by the end we’re not sure if he really has come of age or just learned a couple of lessons about dealing with stuff. The supporting cast are terrific, with Paddy Considine stealing scenes and Sally Hawkins looking like a shop mannequin. Noah Taylor is heartbreaking / infuriating as Oliver’s father, Yasmin Paige is great as the capricious Jordana, and Darren Evans makes the most of his comic lines… Sort of like Juno but better, like Son of Rambow but with more panache, this is a treat.

 

Panique au Village / A Town Called Panic (2009)
This was a complete surprise and all the more joyous for that. Old-school children’s toy figurines are animated, creating a world unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The nearest I can get is something like Terry Gilliam’s most bizarre work.
The main protagonists / housemates are Horse, Cowboy & Indian. When the latter pair unwittingly destroy the house after trying to buy a last-minute birthday present for their friend, all sorts of panic ensues. Meanwhile, Horse is pursuing a fledgling relationship with the local music teacher (also a horse). There are also thieving creatures from the local pond, a journey to the centre of the earth, a mechanical penguin that hurls giant snowballs and a fight at a disco. Surreal, hilarious, and often magical.
“I told you we should have got him a hat”.

 

Attack The Block (2011)
I came to this as a massive fan of Joe Cornish, and hoped against hope it wouldn’t disappoint. It’s inspired by and builds on genres from sci-fi to horror, comedy to social satire, and is wonderfully constructed, shot and performed.
The gang of teens are beautifully portrayed, and we’re given just enough clues about their backgrounds to understand where they come from, where the good is within them, and why they’re trying to break out for themselves. Scene follows scene with dynamic shots, gripping action, and a lot of genuine threat. Cornish does terrifically to make us dislike the kids for their initial crimes but also to root for them throughout. And he doesn’t get sentimental about killing people off – there’s plenty of bloodshed.
This is a fabulous directorial debut, proper cinema. Why can’t all films be this good and this much fun?

 

True Grit (2011)
I haven’t seen the John Wayne original, but this is The Coen Brothers at the top of their game: a very simple story told with such depth, richness and a wonderful cast of characters that it connects and resonates way beyond the basic plotline. Hailee Steinfeld is fantastic as Mattie Ross; tough yet vulnerable, wise-cracking but deadly serious, more than a match for virtually every adult she comes across. Jeff Bridges chews up scenery beautifully, while Matt Damon is great as Texas Ranger “LeBeef”. As with every Coens’ film, the supporting cast are universally watchable, in even the smallest roles. The cinematography and writing are also exemplary, with evocative 19th century dialogue and speech patterns alongside suitably gritty and dirty frontier towns. Every shot contributes to the mood and development of the story. Perhaps my favourite Coen Brothers film after Fargo.

 

Dancer In The Dark (2000)
Perhaps my favourite Lars von Trier film, a mix of his usual hand-held camerawork and grim storytelling with Hollywood Musical interludes that are bizarre to say the least. Björk is the director’s lead female ‘victim’ (taking a similar role to Nicole Kidman in Dogville and Emily Watson in Breaking The Waves), and her performance is astonishing, perhaps the best of all three of those.

 

Other notable mentions could include two (more) revenge films: the stark Romanian/Hungarian Katalin Varga and Paddy Considine’s tour-de-force in Shane Meadows’ excellent Dead Man’s Shoes. Jennifer Lawrence was outstanding in the beautifully bleak Winter’s Bone, and Mike Leigh was on fabulously understated form with Another Year, and I really enjoyed George Clooney in Up In The Air.

2012 is already shaping up well, as I was given a wonderful Michael Powell/Emrich Pressburger DVD Box Set for Christmas, so expect some gushing reviews of timeless classics in the coming months on these pages…!

I would love to receive recommendations for things I’ve missed, or things I certainly should not miss: I’m really going to try and see Hugo with Hannah… Given I only make it to the cinema a few times each year, what should I book a babysitter for now?

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