Any Other Business: Part LIX

As the title suggests, so forth.

A Blacklist Darkly

Well, that was … unexpected. The unintentional season 7 finale of The Black List aired on Sky One last week. And it was half-live action, half-animated. Not at all the expensive rotoscoping over live action of A Scanner Darkly, but clearly that was at the back of someone’s mind as they tried to figure out how to finish the story with the remaining dialogue being phoned in by the actors, and a limited budget to render them and their environments accurately. Leading to such wonderful innovations as little title cards telling us the narrative and emotional import of the facial expressions of the animated characters when there was no time or money to actually make the avatars tell the story that way. One hopes that this approach is not going to catch on…

Golfgate, moral hysteria, and No Deal Brexit

Imagine a world where nobody in the media was allowed to use Twitter or report on Twitter. Imagine a world where government did not respond clumsily and frantically to frenzies whipped up by the tiny fraction of very loud people who use Twitter. In this world the Cork Examiner might still have taken out Dara Calleary, a target that remains highly suspicious, but not Phil Hogan. Instead the Twitter-led moral hysteria brigade have excelled themselves, and Phil Hogan is gone. Now nobody should cry over the end of Phil Hogan’s political career. The man was a boor of long standing and his disastrous quango Irish Water will outlive him. But to go now. For attending a dinner that was perfectly legal. As the Atlantic reported yesterday the rich in America are saving oodles of money because they have nowhere to go right now. If functions which separate people into groups of less than 50 and give them different exits, entrances, and toilets, are to be verboten because somebody might go mental on Twitter – who benefits? The hotels that cease to host such functions and shut down? The staff who cease to work such functions and go home? This is the self-defeating performance of austerity in another guise: where a billionaire decides not to buy a new yacht for fear of it being seen in a poor light, and a number of yacht-builders go on the dole because of the optics. So… less than 6 weeks to go until a deal needs to be ready to present to a top level EU gathering to approve Brexit with an actual trade deal. And the EU has no Trade Commissioner. And whoever comes in, with less than 6 weeks to appoint someone, will be totally clueless as to their brief as opposed to being on top of it from being there all thru the Brexit farrago. Good Job Everyone!!! A satisfying bout of righteous crucifixion during the silly season, and, well, come January, when we will be battling the flu season, the seasonal spike in patients on trolleys in hospitals, a surge in coronavirus as we all stay indoors without any preparation for proper ventilation, and probably another total lockdown we look forward to the final kibosh: 3 weeks of empty shelves, and an eternity of higher prices thereafter, as No Deal Brexit arrives like a tonne of bricks and all our imports from England become hugely expensive, and all our supplies perforce must come thru France at greater uncertainty and therefore a new model of supply chain management involving the resurrection of warehouses which don’t come for free, we can all content ourselves with the knowledge that the Bad Man Was Made Quit and that makes it all okay.

You really mean that this Spotify list is so highly classified you damn people would kill to keep it a government secret?!

Spotify these 60 songs for a 70s mood

Edwin Starr – War // Talking Heads – Life During Wartime // Blue Oyster Cult – Don’t Fear the Reaper // David Bowie – Station to Station // David Shire – The Taking of Pelham 123 theme // Led Zeppelin – Kashmir // Lou Reed – Sweet Jane live // Boston – More Than a Feeling // Iggy Pop – The Passenger // Bob Dylan – One More Cup of Coffee Before I Go // Creedence Clearwater Revival – Who’ll Stop the Rain // The Beatles – Across the Universe // Simon & Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Water // Arvo Part – Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten // The Doors – Hyacinth House // Bob Dylan – Tangled Up in Blue // Blondie – One Way or Another // Roxy Music – Love is the Drug // Talking Heads – Psycho Killer // Creedence Clearwater Revival – Up Around the Bend // The Doors – LA Woman // Lynyrd Skynyrd – Freebird // ABBA – Voulez-Vous // David Bowie – Starman // T-Rex – Children of the Revolution // Kansas – Carry On My Wayward Son // Alice Cooper – School’s Out // Blondie – Heart of Glass // Stevie Wonder – Superstition // The Rolling Stones –Brown Sugar // The Clash – London Calling // Pink Floyd – Us and Them // Led Zeppelin – The Rain Song // Creedence Clearwater Revival – Have You Ever Seen the Rain // Bob Dylan – Shelter from the Storm // John Lennon – Imagine // Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody // The Doors – Love Her Madly // ABBA – S.O.S. // Blondie – Call Me // The Kinks – Lola // The Buzzcocks – Ever Fallen in Love // The Who – Won’t Get Fooled Again // John Williams – Jaws theme // David Bowie – Life on Mars // Van Morrison – Moondance // The Band – The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down // Lou Reed – Satellite of Love // John Williams – Superman march // David Bowie – D.J. // Gil Scott-Heron – The Revolution Will Not Be Televised // Lou Reed – Walk on the Wild Side // Talking Heads – Memories Can’t Wait // David Shire – All the President’s Men finale // Glen Campbell – Rhinestone Cowboy // ELO – Mr Blue Sky // John Williams – Star Wars march // Led Zeppelin – Stairway to Heaven // The Knack – My Sharona // The Sex Pistols – Pretty Vacant // ABBA – Waterloo

Any Other Business: Part LVII

As the title suggests, so forth.

Ventilation is the new Masks

The Atlantic was months ahead of the government here, and in many other countries listening to the WHO’s idiocy, in recognising the importance of everyone wearing masks in preventing the spread of coronavirus. So I have a sinking feeling when they publish two articles one after the other on the importance of ventilation, which nobody wants to address. The coronavirus is an airborne disease and yet it took forever to wear masks here as a step against it, instead there was an obsessive focus on hand-washing and surface-cleansing, despite the fact that fomite transmission of the coroanvirus is negligible; the super-spreading events globally all involve people unmasked indoors spraying each other with their vocal stylings – singing, speaking, coughing, or just breathing.

Venue, ventilation, vocalisation: These are the three Vs to look out for, and all of them spell doom for the winter.

Pubs cannot open here because it’s too dangerous to have a lot of people indoors for a short space of time, but it’s a priority for the government to open schools here because it’s not too dangerous to have a lot of people indoors for a long space of time. So tell me, how exactly will schools operate in the winter months here without any consideration for ventilation? How can a serious plan not flag providing HEPA filters for crowded confined spaces?

Well, Mrs Peel, I think we deserve to listen to some good music after all that running around, don’t you?

Spotify these 60 songs for a 60s mood

John Barry – The Ipcress File // The Lovin’ Spoonful – Summer in the City // The Beatles – Drive My Car // Bob Dylan – Most Likely You Go Way And I’ll Go Mine // Led Zeppelin – Ramble On // Maurice Jarre – Lara’s Theme // Quincy Jones – Killer Joe // Donovan – Mellow Yellow // The Kingsmen – Louie Louie // The Turtles – Happy Together // The Kinks – Waterloo Sunset // The Beach Boys – God Only Knows // The Rolling Stones – Under My Thumb // The Doors – Moonlight Drive // Elmer Bernstein – The Magnificent Seven // Jimi Hendrix – Purple Haze // The Kinks – Sunny Afternoon // The Chordettes – Mr Sandman // Donovan – Sunshine Superman // The Who – I Can See For Miles // Jimi Hendrix – Are You Experienced? // Led Zeppelin – What Is and What Should Never Be // Creedence Clearwater Revival – Run Through the Jungle // Jefferson Airplane – White Rabbit // John Barry – Capsule in Space // The Rolling Stones – Gimmer Shelter // Cream – White Room // Donovan – Hurdy Gurdy Man // Led Zeppelin – Bron-y-aur Stomp // Dave Brubeck – Unsquare Dance // The Kinks – Dedicated Follower of Fashion // The Byrds – Turn Turn Turn // The Rolling Stones – Ruby Tuesday // Petula Clark – Downtown // Quincy Jones – Soul Bossa Nova // Betty Everett – The Shoop Shoop Song // The Beach Boys – Good Vibrations // Ennio Morricone – The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly // The Who – Pinball Wizard // Bob Dylan – I Want You // Simon and Garfunkel – Mrs Robinson // The Beatles – Help // Creedence Clearwater Revival – Fortunate Son // Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited // The Beatles – Paperback Writer // The Beach Boys – Wouldn’t It Be Nice // The Mamas and the Papas – California Dreamin’ // The Beatles – Here Comes the Sun // Miles Davis – It Never Entered My Mind // Jimi Hendrix – Voodoo Chile // The Who – Baba O’Riley // Simon and Garfunkel – America // Creedence Clearwater Revival – Proud Mary // The Doors – Light My Fire // Herbie Hancock – Cantaloupe Island // Tom Jones – Delilah // Quincy Jones – The Self-Preservation Society // John Barry – Goldfinger March // The Doors – When the Music’s Over // Simon and Garfunkel – The Sound of Silence

Any Other Business: Part XLVI

As the title suggests, so forth.

Just in the nick of time!

I almost didn’t notice it but the Horror Channel are re-running The Time Tunnel from the very beginning in their Sci-Fi Zone. I for one shall be tuning in at 12pm tomorrow for a triple bill. Irwin Allen’s 1960s shows were re-run in the late 1980s and early 1990s on Channel 4 and Sky One and I have very fond memories of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants, and The Time Tunnel. Having been highly impressed in the last few years by re-runs of The Avengers, The Man From UNCLE, and The Invaders I’ll be interested to see how this stands up. In particular when I was originally watching the show I was totally unaware that Lee Meriwether, who played scientist Dr Ann MacGregor, was Catwoman in the 1966 Batman movie. And if you think a triple-bill on a Saturday afternoon is overdoing it then I merely say you can’t excuse yourself on the basis that you possibly have anything else to do at this particular moment in time.

Who fears to take The Strokes Test?

Back in January Stephen Errity sent me on Evan Rytlewski’s provocative tweet (https://twitter.com/Evanryt/status/1215008355149856768) about what he called The Strokes Test: Would people still care about this band if their best album did not exist?  It is meant to knock out The Strokes but it also gravely endangers Nirvana, because of their tragically truncated discography. Pixies survive the test because if you get into an argument over whether Surfer Rosa or Doolittle should go then you are still left with either Surfer Rosa or Dootlittle to place beside Bossa Nova and Trompe le Monde. Talking Heads survive the test in style because if you get into a spat over Fear of Music, Remain in Light, Speaking in Tongues, or Little Creatures as their best album you are still left with three great albums and several more to boot. A similar embarrassment of riches occurs for the Beatles, the Doors, Led Zeppelin, U2 and REM. But, and here’s a nagging thought, what about the Beach Boys? Absent Pet Sounds from their discography and what remains? And once you dwell on that you realise you could say the same for Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Kinks and the Who. Any band with a number of great songs that never truly perfected the art of making essential albums is imperilled by the test.

And normal service has been resumed…

We are a week into the social distancing shuttering of the country and yet the government won’t admit what we all know – a more perfect lockdown is coming. The universities have abandoned the 2019/20 academic year; it’s over, classes, exams, something something online, don’t bother coming back to campus, have a good summer, see you in the autumn, maybe. The schools patently will be told to stay out until the Easter holidays begin, and then, sure why not take off all of April, and well, you know, May is kind of freewheeling into the end of the year anyway so who really needs it. Yet officially everything is still just on the mother of all pauses until March 29th. Are we supposed to take that seriously? Are we meant to believe all pubs and cinemas, cafes and theatres will re-open on that day and we all breathe a sigh of relief that we shut down that pesky coronavirus good? How does it help to keep the citizens of the country engaged in an idiotic guessing game? When will the actual status red lockdown begin? March 30th? April 1st? What is the point of Leo Varadkar embarrassing himself and us by going on national television on St Patrick’s Day to plagiarise Winston Churchill? You do not become a statesman for our time by appropriating a resonant phrase from a statesman from another state at another time anymore than I would become Dan Rather by ending all these posts with the single word – Courage. Yet Varadkar decided to tell us what we already knew about the coronavirus, fail to elaborate on economic aids for people thrown out of work, and did not announce a lockdown – which one would have thought the only reason for such a state of the nation address. Instead he told us the Emergency was ‘likely’ to continue past March 29th. Good to know.

Courage!

From the Archives: I’m Not There

From the pre-Talking Movies archives.

Crazy/Brilliant, that’s not an ‘either/or’ approach to this film where you’ll consider I’m Not There to be either crazy or brilliant. No, it’s ‘both/and’, this is one of the best films of 2007; yes, it features one of the craziest concepts ever to cobble together enough financing to get made but its execution is superb in every respect. To even attempt an explanation of the structure of the film would be madness as writer/director Todd Haynes does not follow chronologically the career of Bob Dylan but cross-cuts between different aspects of it. At no point is Dylan’s name mentioned, this is not a biopic, it is inspired by his music ‘and many lives’. It could have been an unholy mess but the intercutting of different actors and settings makes perfect sense in its own deranged fashion.

The story begins with Ben Whishaw as the poet Dylan answering police questions about himself and doing the whole Greenwich Village routine. A guitar-picking black kid calling himself Woody Guthrie is Dylan’s earliest hero-worshipping incarnation, he becomes Christian Bale’s uncanny impersonation of the protest singer Dylan while Heath Ledger’s mumbling actor Jack Rollins is the embodiment of the mid to late 1960s Dylan, drunk on his own fame, married but endlessly womanising and refusing to engage with the world in his songs because it can’t be changed. Richard Gere is the outlaw Dylan trying to escape into a mythical Old West while Bale returns as the late 1970s Dylan embracing evangelical Christianity. Cate Blanchett steals the acting honours by doing a tremendous version of the Dylan that toured England in 1966 and was given the hostile reception recorded in DA Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back.

Todd Haynes redeems the disastrous hash he made of depicting glam rock in Velvet Goldmine by using this demented set-up as a means to make Dylan’s songs incredibly fresh. Woody Guthrie’s early dirty blues rendition of ‘Tombstone Blues’ sets the scene for terrific use of many songs, probably the best of which is ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, which is made to seem a sarcastic attack on Bruce Greenwood’s sneering BBC journalist Mr Jones. The song is subsequently dissected by the Black Panthers for hidden meanings. That could be a metaphor for this film. Haynes has produced such a rich ensemble of performances (even minor turns like David Cross as Allen Ginsberg and Julianne Moore as Joan Baez), beautifully re-created film styles, and tremendous evocation of golden-green rural America (as well as capturing the disoriented vibe of Dylan in Britain in 1966 – the moment when the Beatles appear in a Help! pastiche is priceless) that this is a film which will repay subsequent re-watching and that should be seen by all Dylan fans, or people with any interest in pop culture, or…hell just anyone who’s awake!

5/5

From the Archives: The Killing of John Lennon

From the pre-Talking Movies archives.

This film should not have been made as, apart from the dubious taste involved, it is deeply uncinematic. You could have someone read The Catcher in the Rye for two hours over an art installation style collage of alternating images of cornfields and New York City and it would be just as cinematic as The Killing of John Lennon. It would be a sight more interesting and would provide just as much genuine insight into the psyche of Lennon’s assassin Mark Chapman. Jonas Ball, who bears a startling resemblance to Rules of Attraction star Kip Pardue, is extremely mannered as Chapman. He confuses wild-eyed stares into the camera with insight into an extremely troubled mind, while director Andrew Piddington confuses exhaustive amounts of voiceover and detailed reconstructions of crime scenes with dramatic interest and momentum.

The problem with this film is its lack of context. We do not get an insight from the point of view of any other characters into the gradual decline of Chapman’s mental health, if that is indeed what happened. Instead all we get is a solipsistic voiceover by Chapman ‘justifying’ his actions by endless references to the hidden messages he finds in JD Salinger’s classic novel The Catcher in the Rye and his repeated self-pitying mantra that in finding his purpose in life, he lost himself. If Mark Chapman was a deeply troubled individual with a psychiatric condition he deserves sympathy but not freedom as he would still be dangerous. However the disturbing thought that can’t be shaken when watching this film and listening to the endless ramblings drawn from Chapman’s own diary entries and criminal testimonies is that there’s nothing wrong with him at all.

Was he merely a loser who at the age of 25 realised how to get out of taking any responsibility for the rest of his life by achieving a life of incarceration, and fame at the same time, by attaching himself to an icon? Just as John Wilkes Booth will always be remembered for assassinating Abraham Lincoln in a theatre, and JFK’s memory will always have the dark shadow of Lee Harvey Oswald hanging over it, so the John Lennon story ends with Mark Chapman…indeed the police chief who protects Chapman from lynching by an angry mob in the film explicitly references Lee Harvey Oswald. Chapman’s first journey from Honolulu to NYC to kill Lennon ends when he has an emotional epiphany while watching Ordinary People. This is a perfect point to walk out of the cinema as things only become more aggravating afterwards. Ultimately this film is so boring that when the timeline ‘12 hours 49 minutes left’ arrives you will wish Chapman would just shoot Lennon already and get it over with. No more savage indictment of this dubious undertaking could be made.

1/5

From the Archives: Across the Universe

Another rummage through the pre-Talking Movies archives uncovers Julie Taymor’s under-watched and under-appreciated Beatles musical featuring the under-appreciated Joe Anderson.

Liverpudlian dock worker Jude (Jim Sturgess) travels to Princeton in the 1960s to find his long lost GI father but moves to New York with Max (Joe Anderson) and falls in love with Max’s sister Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood). When Max is sent to Vietnam, Lucy’s political activism tears her away from Jude…

Musicals, like Westerns, seem to be experiencing something of a renaissance. But both genres are nowadays farcically burdened with justifying their conventions and director Julie Taymor never quite establishes whether people are just going to burst into song randomly like in 1950s musicals or in archly contrived scenarios like 2002’s Chicago. Instead she throws both styles together, which works fine for the most part, but this is definitely more Moulin Rouge! than Chicago. Be warned, there’s a good deal of the overt theatricality you’d expect from a director with Godlike status on Broadway. The use of ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ is fantastic as Max is accosted by a poster of Uncle Sam and choreographed sergeant majors at his army medical exam before a visual gag far too good to spoil here. However, this use of CGI and wooden masks presages the utter nonsense that begins when Bono arrives to sing ‘I Am the Walrus’. The use of photographic negative and trippy imagery that takes over proceedings quickly becomes very irritating and makes the running time of the film seem grotesquely overlong.

A simpler early sequence best exemplifies the cleverness with which Taymor approaches the songs. The extremely poppy ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ is transformed into a slow minimalist heartbreaker of a song as lesbian cheerleader Prudence (TV Carpio) serenades the lead cheerleader while footballers tackle each other as a tumbling chorus. If you don’t like this sequence then you will hate this film and most probably punch the person behind you who mutters ‘That’s Awesome!!’ Taymor at her best is able to wring unexpected meaning from the over-familiar songs and brings out the sadness implicit in Lennon and McCartney’s fondness for minor key compositions. At her worst she completely loses the realism of the Jude/Lucy love story and the sly wit in making the songs emerge organically from action, indulging instead in symbolical visual zaniness that plays like a bad 1960s Roger Corman exploitation film.

Jim Sturgess as Jude can sing but he lacks charisma and Evan Rachel Wood is good as Lucy but not good enough to carry him, she should have really have been playing opposite Joe Anderson who is wonderful as the raffish Max. It takes heroic resolve to overlook Taymor’s wayward psychedelia but she does return to the realism of musicals so that the finale has a nice emotional oomph with the end credits a neat pay off for a gag we’ve been waiting for the whole length of the film. No I’m not going to tell you what it is, go see it yourself.

3/5

Notes on Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood

Director Quentin Tarantino’s eleventh movie was the film of the week much earlier today on Sunday Breakfast with Patrick Doyle.

This movie, like so much post-Pulp Fiction Tarantino, is aggravating. It’s bloated running time of 2 hours 40 minutes is completely unnecessary and could be trimmed; first off by getting rid of the preposterous amount of driving while listening to the radio, dancing around to music at parties, and dancing around listening to vinyl at home. All of which music is present simply to allow Tarantino curate his obscure cuts for 1969 music. You’re not going to be troubled by The Beatles, The Doors, Creedence Clearwater Revival or The Who here. Secondly you could save time by cutting all the material involving Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate because QT has no interest in giving Robbie anything substantive to do as Tate or in depicting the gruesome Manson Family murders which allegedly this film was meant to revolve around. Charles Manson makes one appearance, and there’s an extended sequence with Brad Pitt visiting the Manson Family at home, but that’s not what this film is about – it’s 1960s Birdman. Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt are at the top of their game as fading star Rick Dalton and his loyal stunt double Cliff Booth; DiCaprio playing an incapable character, and Pitt a very capable one.

Listen here:

Notes on Yesterday

Richard Curtis’ Beatles rom-com Yesterday was the film of the week much earlier today on Sunday Breakfast with Patrick Doyle.

Danny Boyle may be the director but this is a Richard Curtis film, and it would be much better if it weren’t. A world in which The Beatles have been erased from existence save for the memory of one struggling musician is a high concept comedy, but Curtis insists on making it a ho-hum rom-com. Kevin Willmott’s CSA showed that you have to rein in the butterfly effect for alternate history because everything would become unfamiliar. Would the Beach Boys be as important without Pet Sounds, their riposte to the Beatles? Curtis displays no such interest, save an Oasis joke, in exploring the butterfly effect of his own bloody high concept. Kate McKinnon is the most reliably comic element of this film, and she is lip-smackingly playing a caricature record executive – Hunter S Thompson’s famous jibe mixed with notes of her SNL Hillary Clinton. But then all the characters in this film are caricatures. This poses a problem when Curtis wants you to care about the romance as if it involved characters with some humanity.

The romance is already scuppered by Jack (Himesh Patel) and Elly (Lily James) patently having the chemistry of hopeless dreamer and dutiful girlfriend in the opening scenes, until it’s bafflingly revealed they’re just friends. They do not hold themselves as fast platonic friends like Holmes and Watson in Elementary. When she complains she always wanted more, and Curtis writes improbable scenes doggedly making this fetch happen he, like Nick Hornby in Juliet, Naked, defies the felt experience of human nature. But this aggravating drive to the grand romantic gesture reaches a new low for Curtis. GK Chesterton once quipped that art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere. I draw the line at Curtis; in the vein of his Doctor Who episode in which he shamefully zipped Van Gogh to the future to hear Bill Nighy valorise him then returned him to the past to kill himself to general hand-wringing; resurrecting the murdered John Lennon as septuagenarian sage giving Jack a pep talk to make the finale’s grand romantic gesture. No… No. No. No!

Listen here:

The Boss Baby

Alec Baldwin is the star of the show as the voice of the titular infant in an animated comedy aimed at a surprisingly niche audience.

Tim (voiced in Wonder Years style narration by Tobey Maguire) has a perfect life. Loving parents, who sing him ‘Blackbird’ as his own personal song, a faithful alarm clock that talks to him in the dialogue of Gandalf, and an active imagination, obviously. Which is ruined when a baby in a business suit pulls up in a taxi, power-walks into the house, and demands attention at all hours of the night and day from his parents. When Tim discovers the baby can talk, and does so in the voice of Alec Baldwin, he tries to figure out what is the what before his parents’ love for him is entirely consumed by the demands of the boss baby…

The Boss Baby is a curious creature. Baldwin’s delivery of “Uh-uh, cookies are for closers” is one of a handful of jokes aimed at parents, the other pick being Baldwin’s query if Tim’s parents are actually Lennon & McCartney when he complains how they are now singing his personal song ‘Blackbird’ for the baby. But there is precious little here for parents. Indeed, there is at times precious little for children either. There is, mercifully, none of the usual Dreamworks shtick about how the most important thing in the world is to just be yourself, but instead there’s a message targeted at what can only imagine is a fairly niche child audience. 7 year olds dealing with jealousy at a new sibling. Indeed if a 7 year old was dealing with jealousy at a new sibling they might be as irritated as a cinephile by the painfully protracted ending in which Tim and the Boss Baby get what they want, but…not what they need.

2/5

Glee: The 3-D Concert Movie

Glee: The 3-D Concert Movie is less concert film, featuring most of the cast of Glee performing in character, and more socio-political manifesto by Ryan Murphy.

The film opens with backstage interviews with the Glee cast. Oddly some of them stay in character and some don’t. Their character names then flash up on screen during their on-stage introduction and Artie stays in his wheelchair just to hammer home that they’re performing in character as New Directions, sort of. If the film wants to refer to the performers by character name, I’m happy to oblige and save myself a visit to IMDb. Proceedings begin, of course, with the trademark god-awful cover of Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believing’. The words ‘of course’ apply to most of the numbers. This is a greatest hits package of songs that the show has affixed to particular characters, all of whom get the chance to step up and strut their stuff.

Miss Holliday cameos for one Ce Loo song, but Mr Schuster is conspicuously absent. Puck, Mercedes and Artie all get to show off with solo songs but the most notable turn is Britney’s energetic performance of ‘I’m a Slave 4 U’, which is outrageously sleazy, and leads to the thought that 3-D works well for horror and animation but is perhaps also something that could enhance musicals. Not that it works particularly well here, the choreography is too basic for there to really be anything to show off, but there are moments when it adds something. But while they fail to exploit the third dimension these are good performances – Mike Chang can dance! As indeed can the other secondary characters. But then the lead characters can really sing. Rachel belts out ‘Firework’, and, as Nadine O’Regan has noted, Katy Perry’s lungs resemble those of a blue whale.

Regrettably this is not solely a concert film. There are endless inserts following three Glee fans. Apparently Glee cures Asperger’s, makes dwarves (their term) popular and enables gay students survive high school. Apparently I hallucinated three hilarious pre-Glee seasons of Ugly Betty valorising a hopeless nerd, celebrating difference and positively depicting a fabulous high school student… Lady GaGa’s ‘Born This Way’ is the show-climaxing statement of socio-political intent, but Glee cannot sustain this solving-all-the-world’s-problems-with-a-soft-shoe-shuffle pomposity – what could? Glee is just a TV show with glaring limitations. It’s a blender which flattens all music. Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ and Massive Attack’s ‘Inertia Creeps’ would all emerge sounding the same, as deeply over-produced pop. I previously criticised its lack of ambition beside Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe, and here Kurt performs ‘I Want to Hold your Hand’ – precisely as Taymor reinterpreted it! Even their innovations are derivative!!

This is a genuinely enjoyable concert, but the documentary segments are actually mildly disturbing…

2/5

(P.S. Stay on after the credits for another signature song…)