After my notes on the season opener, I thought it only fair to report back on how season 4 of BBC3′s supernatural drama Being Human is faring with its new-look line-up.

It’s still hard to tell exactly what the show will look like once it settles down, as each of the three episodes so far have been so very different: there was the epic, apocalyptic season opener; then there was the transitional second episode which introduced (and dispatched) new characters; but now with season 3 we perhaps finally get a taste of the show’s medium-term destination, and it looks to be a return to the mix of domestic flat-share comedy and supernatural thrills and action that was its hallmark when Being Human first made it onto our screens.

If this is the case and is sustained, then it’s excellent news. I’ll be honest and repeat my earlier assertion that the show had found it increasingly difficult to rediscover that sublime early balance between comedy and drama, fun and chills that worked so well in its rookie season. As the story of Mitchell and George got ever more serious and involved over successive seasons, the lighter moments of relief got squeezed out along the way. The chance to get back to the show’s roots is to be seized with both hands.

No wonder then my favourite scenes were in the greasy spoon café, where new boy Hal (or Lord Harry, as it turns out we should be calling him!) suffers the indignity of cleaning out the fat fryer and having to take orders from Tom the werewolf. Their odd couple scenes are an echo of those of Mitchell and George from better days, but if anything the chemistry between the two characters is even better than it was between the original duo. Mitchell was always the alpha male of that relationship, whereas with Hal and Tom it’s far harder to pin down who is actually “on top” at any given time.

Tom may be somewhat low on the intellectual scale side of things, but he is more comfortable in the modern world than Hal and he’s a more assertive and physical presence than his lupine predecessor George ever was. George was actually a bit of a wet fish in between his monthly transformations, which was difficult for the show to write around; but Tom has a second job as a vampire slayer which means if anything he’s actually far more interesting when he’s not being all fur-and-fangs during the new moon. His habit of keeping stakes to hand just in case Hal gets feisty – which you know he’ll use on his flat “mate” in a flash – becomes a nice running joke. I wasn’t wild about the character of Tom in season 3 and viewed his addition to the regular cast for season 4 with some considerable apprehension, but given space the part has blossomed and Michael Socha’s playing has won me over.

And I’m a huge fan of what new cast member Damien Molony is doing with the character of Hal. He’s compulsively watchable even when not required to say or do much on screen, from the way he stands – uptight and distraight – in front of the fat fryer, genuinely appealing for Tom to stake him in order that this purgatory of the working day shall finally be over (let’s be honest, we’ve all had jobs like that) to the simple, small details such as the way he handles the TV remote control just like your grandparents would (they understand what it is, they can use it, but you can tell by the degree of concentration and suspicion with which they aim and press the buttons that it’s really some sort of suspicious alien artefact to them.) Molony brilliantly juggles being a notionally superpowerful vampire with being a vulnerable guy totally out of his depth, prone to OCD tendencies and who is afraid of everything – most of all himself. His prim and proper 50s manners are a hoot and I can’t wait to see how he plays off the lewd and crude Adam, when the teenage 80s vampire returns in a few weeks time.

For all the fantastic work setting up the character, it’s a shame that the writers have let down Hal in the plotting department where he seems to have inherited Mitchell’s hand-me-down plots: he’s a vampire with a blood-soaked past seen through historical flashbacks, but now trying to kick the habit like a reformed drug addict always on the verge of a relapse. He’s also notoriously famous in the vampire community, and the bad guys try and win him back in order that he can lead them – all of which are stories we saw Mitchell play out through the earlier three years of the series. Have they really run out of inspiration for something different to do with Hal, or is there something in the overall Being Human story that requires these Mitchell-esque qualities to be present in order to move forward?

Elsewhere, the show is still suffering from being a bit of patchwork quilt and feeling a bit fragmented, as though still shattered into pieces by the events of the season opener. The newly minted female ghost from the future we saw in episode 1 has made only the briefest of appearances in episode 2 and nothing at all in episode 3, and instead we have the unexpected arrival of a new ghost (Kirby, played by the always-entertaining James Lance this time in a hilariously bad fake wig.) Having dispatched one Big Bad in the form of Griffin in episode 1, the series built up the new threat of Fergus (Anthony Flanagan, always good in sneering bad guy roles) only to now abruptly dispatch him at the end of episode 3. As for the promisingly amoral modern PR vampire Cutler, there’s no sign of him this week at all. Instead, we do get the unexpected return of Regus the Vampire Recorder played by Mark Williams (from the Harry Potter films.) I was frankly dreading his return after the character was written far too broadly comedic in episode 1, but he works better this time around and has a much improved script to work with, so it actually works out very well, Indeed, I rather took to him and cheered that his little cameo run in the show got an unexpectedly happy ending. As happy as the undead can get, at least.

The other big problem with the show at the moment is the character of Annie. While Lenora Crichlow herself is fantastic as ever, she is really being undermined by the writing. She’s supposed to be protecting young baby Eve from the vampires, but despite explicit warnings from Regus she wanders off alone with the baby to the park where she is easy prey for Fergus. Really, the writers (and Annie herself) need to understand that she’s no longer the dizzy, empty-headed newbie she was three years ago and rather is now the senior member of the team, the main protagonist and in charge of the serious business of looking after Eve. She needs to be more fully in command and assertive, especially while “the boys” are basically dithering around trying to sort themselves out and in no position to take the lead. I suspect this may indeed prove to be one of the key character arcs of the season, and the moment when she made a key intervention in a fight and sent a knife flying seemed particularly portentous. Lets hope so, or else I might start wishing that she had joined the character exodus at the start of the season and that it’s a shame the lovely Pearl didn’t stick around longer.

All the same, the show as a whole is sorting itself out and finding its feet (or paws) as quickly as anyone dared hoped. There are still issues of course, and still a concern in my mind that it could yet all lurch off in a totally different direction at any second, but in some ways that’s what gives it an edge and makes it worthwhile continuing to watch. And it’s definitely worthwhile doing that, that’s for sure.

Currently airing on BBC3 on Sunday nights. The DVD/Blu-ray will be released on 23 April 2012.

I didn’t realise it when I saw this film as a kid, but what a total mess it proves to be. It was made in the aftermath of Star Wars’ explosive impact on the box office, and all the studios were suddenly desperately scrambling to find their own sci-fi blockbuster. They started wildly lashing out in panic, knowing that the sci-fi mega hit was the way of the future but still completely unsure what exactly it was about Star Wars that had made it such a massive hit. So Universal repurposed a TV pilot by the name of Battlestar Galactica into a copy-cat rip off; James Bond was dispatched to space in Moonraker; Paramount revived an old TV franchise for the worthy-but-dull Star Trek: The Motion Picture; and Roger Corman recognised George Lucas’ pilfering of Western classics and followed suit, remaking The Magnificent Seven as Battle Beyond The Stars.

With a four-decade history of making family-orientated fantasy films, Walt Disney Studios should have been in the best position of all. But what they came up with was The Black Hole, a film that shows the symptoms of the film industry’s blind panic and is practically a playbook for how not to make a scifi film. It starts with some 2001-ish “proper science” with scenes of zero gravity and explanations of what a black hole really is, but then immediately sets about misunderstanding and abusing every single concept. Suddenly there’s gravity; a probe ship can return from a trip to the black hole where – it’s just been explained – not even light can escape from. Characters can wonder around in open space and suffer only a a bracing wind and a light frosting. ESP powers are thrown in just as something cool to communicate with over a distance instead of a mobile phone.

The film can’t decide whether to go for the sort of grandiose longeurs of 2001 and Star Trek: TMP or for the shoot-em-up blasters of Star Wars. Scenes with the robots are strictly for the kids (the lead droid has the stature of R2-D2, the voice of Threepio and the exaggerated wide eyes of Bambi), yet an early line of dialogue references Dante and the closing scenes explicitly play on the vision of hell from Inferno, which goes straight over the head of 95% of the audience. One of the main cast deaths is a particularly nasty implied moment even when kept mainly off-screen and certainly far too horrific for any Disney film. There’s a prolonged final sequence at the end clearly intended to mirror the hallucinogenic star trip of Dave Bowman at the climax of 2001 – only it’s too literal and stuck with the poorest effects of the entire film, suggesting that either the budget or the schedule presumably had expired by this point.

It’s the script that is particularly dire: the basic storyline is a rehashing of Disney’s own 1954 hit 20000 Leagues Under the Sea with Dr Hans Reinhardt as Captain Nemo, but the character quickly degenerates into a stereotyped Bond villain (of the Stromberg/Drax variety) complete with silent robotic henchman Maximilian standing in for Oddjob/Jaws. When Reinhardt meets his end by being flattened by a large video screen that simply falls off the wall of his command deck rather than anything the nominal heroes do, it feels this is surely an attempt at laugh-out-loud black meta-humour; except it isn’t.

There’s not a single line of dialogue in this film that doesn’t come across as painfully wooden, the sort of exposition that no one would ever say in real life but exists simply in order to info-dump necessary data into the heads of the poor audience. The characters are likewise two-dimensional cut-outs, and not one of them is remotely likeable. It takes some doing to extract such truly terrible performances from a world-class cast that includes Maximilian Schell as Reinhardt along with Anthony Perkins, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Forster, Yvette Mimieux (from George Pal’s The Time Machine) and Joseph Bottoms (the juvenile lead of the film, treated like a child despite the actor being 25), but the writers (Jeb Rosebrook and Gerry Day) and director (Gary Nelson) manage it between them. Poor Roddy McDowell – voicing the inevitable post-Star Wars likeable droid Vincent – is given a script that consists literally of witless clichés and eye-rollingly bad quotations. No wonder he dropped the screen credit, as did Western movie veteran star Slim Pickens.

Of course, at the time the target audience (young boys like myself who wanted any scifi they could get in the wake of Star Wars; and who left the theatre to excitedly buy the comic book and the action figures of Maximilian and Vincent) didn’t much care for the script anyway, as long as the effects were good. And for their day, those optical effects in The Black Hole really were pretty spectacular – as evidenced by the Doctor Who team still thinking of this as the touchstone for their own black hole sequence. The FX have not aged well, however, with the matte lines very apparent and the photographic processes employed seemingly having a detrimental effect on large sections of the film stock, which have turned a sickly green-sepia colour at least on the evidence of this DVD release. Still, fair’s fair and there’s some good visuals among the misfires, such as the opening computer graphic wireframe (simple stuff now but the longest such animation used on screen up to that time); the derelict US Cygnus is an impressive model (which explains the long, dull tracking shot spent establishing it); and the scene where a flaming meteor rolls down the central section of the ship has an impressive sense of scale and substance (even if it makes precisely no sense from a scientific reality point of view.) And of course, the black hole itself does look cool as it’s continually glimpsed out of the windows, churning its way remorselessly through an unending diet of doomed stars and planets.

But the reality is that this is a film where pretty much nothing works anywhere near as well as it’s supposed to – even the music. The legendary John Barry supplies a memorable and grand main theme, but unfortunately it’s a bit too memorable: it’s hard not to think of the scores for Moonraker or Dances With Wolves from which it feels that it’s been ripped from. And then it’s repeated ad nauseum throughout the film, with little regard for the on-screen action its accompanying: this slow, majestic score plodding along at its own speed makes for a very odd background to an on-screen fast-paced futuristic laser battle between humans and robots.

By the time you’ve reached the end of the 90 minutes, the score has been infuriatingly overused and you just want it to stop. Pretty much the same as the feeling you have about the whole film, really, which really only goes to show that sometimes you really shouldn’t revisit and look too closely at childhood memories lest they deeply disappoint.

This story from the fourth season of the show originally aired in the UK on New Year’s Eve 1965: Honor Blackman had moved on (and had starred in Goldfinger) and Diana Rigg had taken over as Emma Peel alongside series stalwart Patrick Macnee as John Steed. And the two are on excellent form even this early on in their collaboration, sparking off each other quite delightfully in a completely equal partnership that must have come as a shock at a time when women’s equality was still more aspirational rhetoric than everyday reality.

The script by Roger Marshall has some crackling dialogue with multiple quotable lines (“I like a wine that bites back”; Steed: “How’s your connection with industrial science?”, Peel: “Well oiled”) perfectly played by the duo. There’s also a typically intriguing premise: in this case, birds falling out of the sky for no reason but feared to pressage the release of a deadly pesticide that could annihilate all animal and plant life in the area – a concept perhaps even more darkly relevant today even than it was in the 60s.

Unfortunately the show quickly loses interest in the premise and much prefers the jauntier idea of the villains of the piece going for a country hunt – with Mrs Peel as the fox. The guest stars (including William Franklyn, Jack Watson, Charles Lloyd Pack and the ever-lovely Aubrey Morris) all seem to be playing this for broad comedy, with only the two regulars managing to pitch their performances at the optimal pivot point between drama and laughs, at least outside of a very odd hallucinatory scene (“I prefer you clean shaven”) and the obligatory whimsical epilogue (“What happens when we run out of ballast?”)

While delivering on the dialogue and premise front, the script doesn’t bother with much plotting beyond that: Steed and Peel’s investigative method is to wander around the countryside and happen to bump into just the right people, and be at the right place at the right time to stumble upon the key clue, all without any real effort or sense. It comes as a surprise to find the show so thoroughly lightweight even in what is usually described as its heyday.

But what anyone will notice compared with the earlier episode I reviewed, “Mr Teddy Bear” filmed three years earlier, is just how much more technically sophisticated this production is by comparison. Where before everything was studio-set and filmed as-live with mistakes left in and flight sequences limited to a basic prat fall, now we’re shooting on film stock and almost everything is on location. When the cast get on their horses for the hunt, it’s real horses galloping at full speed on real fields (and in an era when stunt doubles were usually painfully evident, it seems that by and large it’s the principle cast on horseback and acquitting themselves admirably throughout.)

It’s still black and white – colour didn’t arrive until the next season – but the monochrome doesn’t take any of the shine off the polish off this production. And as a reminder of Steed and Peel at their finest, it’s a tremendous example.

Let Me In is one of those films that it would be easy to despise on principle sight unseen, seeming as it is to be one of the growing number of films that is less of an artistic endeavour as it is a business/financial exercise to exploit the mass audience who are too bigoted to waste their time watching a film in a non-English language and too lazy to spend two hours reading subtitles. On the face of it, Let Me In exists only to put English words into the mouths of its characters, and is otherwise tasked to do as little harm as possible to the property the producers have bought up. There’s a caption at the start that says “Los Alamos, New Mexico” but once that text fades from the screen it could be literally any snowy locale in the world for all that a sense of place is invoked. It could even be right back in Stockholm.

I did happen to see the original film, Let The Right One In, at the cinema when it came out. Even though it’s a critically lauded and award-winning film, I have to say that I more admired its chilly, brittle excellence than I did truly warm to it – comments that I also applied to director Tomas Alfredson’s follow-up movie, the remake of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The first half of Let The Right One In is glacially slow and I confess that I actually nodded off on a couple of occasions when I saw it (it could just have been at the end a particularly long and tiring week, however!) That was three years ago however and I haven’t re-watched the film since, so I’m not able to make a particularly close or accurate comparison between the original and the title-adjusted English-language remake Let Me In by American writer/director Matt Reeves (best known for Cloverfield.)

Certainly the iconic scenes that I do remember from the original are all present and correct, and rendered with all due reverence: the botched bloodletting in the forest, the feral attack in the underpass, the discovery of the body in the ice, the events at the hospital and the climax at the school swimming pool. The main location – an apartment complex with a snow-covered central common area dominated by the child’s climbing frame – is virtually interchangeable with the look-and-feel of the Swedish version.

The first hour of Let The Right One In was an exercise in subjecting us to the horror of everyday life (the 12-year-old hero’s friendless existence, alienated from his divorcing parents and subjected to merciless bullying at school) which is cranked up when the arrival of a new neighbour gives rise to the implication of child abuse and mental illness before slipping into the realisation that there is an actual serial killer at work. Only in the second hour does the film get its teeth into the more supernatural aspects and go for some full-throated vampire horror, which attains heightened levels of believability largely because of the suffocating realism of the first hour.

Let Me In follows a similar structure, but seems more aware from the start that it’s a horror film (appropriately, given that it was the first film under the relaunched Hammer brand now behind The Woman in Black.) It plays more overtly with the familiar genre tropes from early on, rather than suckering us in with the red herring of this being just another coming-of-age urban drama. While this makes the film rather more conventional and lessens the growing shock of the second half of the film’s events, it does make the first hour more tense and gripping. I didn’t nod off at all this time, although that first half is still slow enough to make me fidget more than I’d like.

In its attempts to become a more polished Hollywood-style production, the film does lose some of the quirkiness of the original, however. In particular there’s no sense of the dark humour that I remember running through Let The Right One In: the botched killings by the henchman were blackly hilarious, and the scene where a corpse is cut out of the ice and winched into the air in the background of a dialogue scene is disturbingly but definitely laugh-out-loud funny. That is lost in the remake: the ice block scene just plays like a flat CSI moment; any moments that might cause any black humour are flattened out. It’s a shame, and leaves the film rather more one-note than is altogether good for it.

But Let Me In does have some some definite strengths of its own. The two leads – Kodi Smit-McPhee as Owen and Chloë Grace Moretz as Abby, the girl next door – are exemplary, as indeed were the original performances of Kåre Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson as Oskar and Eli. The new film removes the scenes where Owen/Oskar spends the weekend in the countryside with his father (which badly broke up the claustrophobic feel of the boy’s life at the apartment complex and school) and instead the father is only present as a disembodied voice on the telephone. When the boy tries to reach out to his dad about what’s going on, the voice quickly turns it into a reason to rail against his ex-wife’s marital failings and he instantly stops listening to what his son is trying to say: it’s a horribly authentic moment for anyone who has seen a divorce close-up and which really sells the isolation the boy is experiencing. Similarly the mother’s face is never clearly seen: she’s shot from behind, or in shadow, or from below with her head cut off by the top of the frame. She is a body in the film but not a person, and there is no maternal comfort to be found here any more than paternal comfort is to be found at the end of the phone line.

The downsides are to be found in the CGI effects: the original had some practical wire work stunts that were low key but far more creepy than seeing CGI creatures suddenly jumping around. There’s also an odd faltering at the very end of the film: after the excellent nerve-shredding search of the apartment complex by the police, the film then switches to the swimming pool for the climax, but it’s almost as though the producers got nervous about what they were about to depict (basically, a massacre of 12-year-olds in a school setting – you can see why it might have given a mainstream US studio pause for thought!) and end up doing it as quickly and off-handedly as they can get away with, rather than the startling and shocking denouement of the original. It’s a shame that Let Me In loses its nerve at the last and leaves such a limp final impression.

Is it worth seeing? Yes, sure, why not: it’s a decent film with some undoubted merits of its own. It doesn’t screw up the source material by any means, and is one of the better remakes of a foreign language hit that Hollywood has managed. As for the Blu-ray, it’s frankly average: high definition does very little for it as the film is intentionally soft and lacking detail for much of its running time, although there’s nothing wrong with the transfer itself and all the dark nighttime scenes are solidly rendered. (I only got the Blu-ray as it was making up the numbers in one of those “buy X films for fifteen quid” offers, but the now cut-price DVD would be more than adequate for the purpose.)

Of course, it’s still hard to forgive that change of title. The original name of the novel and Swedish film, Let The Right One In, was a reference to an 80s song title by Morrissey that was also a riff on childhood alienation, making it immensely appropriate for the subject. The American version robs the title of those extra shadings and instead goes for the vampire-specific Let Me In and as such is emblematic for what foreign films lose when being translated into Hollywood-ese. For all the remake’s surprising good points, its still a diluted and diminished shadow of the work that inspired it. See the original Let The Right One In first, and only then – if you want – try Let Me In for context.

When last we left BBC3′s cult series Being Human it was with a very big problem: the arc of season 3 had inexorably built up to the point where one of the major characters of the show, John Mitchell (Aidan Turner) finally hit the end of the road. My last words in the review of that episode where that “[series creator Toby] Whithouse may just have written a cliffhanger from which Being Human can’t be saved,” after the screen went black with Mitchell staked and remaining series regulars George (Russell Tovey), Nina (Sinead Keenan) and Annie (Lenora Crichlow) left confronting the newly arrived Big Bad, über-powerful “Old One” Edgar Wyndam (Lee Ingleby).

At the start of season 4, the absence of Mitchell proves to be the least of the show’s mounting problems. Sinead Keenan has also left the show over the hiatus, her character reportedly brutally murdered off screen in a very unsatisfactory end for someone who has been carefully built up into a key part of the series. Lee Ingleby also evidently proved unavailable for this season and is similarly – and equally frustratingly – dispatched off-screen. This disjointedness is a major body blow to the show and to be honest a real black mark against the production team for not pre-empting the transition better, because any longtime fan can’t help but feel gravely cheated by the fact that everything set up at the end of season 3 is jettisoned out of sight in such a manner.

Small wonder then that Russell Tovey has also decided to call it a day and handed in his notice, although he commendably at least shows up for a one-episode swan song to give his character a proper send-off. But the fact remains that at the end of this first episode of season 4, we’ve lost three quarters of the regular cast who were the heart of the show; only ghostly Annie remains, and despite the ever-delightful playing of Lenora Crichlow the character has always been the least substantial (pun intended) of the line-up. The producers end up promoting the previously recurring character of werewolf Tom (Michael Socha) into the main cast as a necessary move to bolster what’s left of series continuity, but I have to confess that I never warmed to him in season 3 and don’t regard this as a particularly welcome development – although his thuddingly unsubtle hints about wanting to move into the shared house were some of the warmer, lighter moments of the show.

With Wyndham also gone, we get a similarly jarring reset on the adversary front: a sudden new vampire nest, with a new chief vampire by the name of Griffin once again falling back on the old trick of posing as a police inspector – an oddly unimaginative revival of the character of Herrick from past seasons. Even in the hands of the classy and creepily effective Alex Jennings this is a bit of deja vu too far, and when Griffin is suddenly dispatched at the end of the episode (by the oddly deus ex machina means of a hitherto unsuspected fatal vampire allergy to werewolf blood – if we’d known that in the past three years then stories could have gone very differently!) you wonder what the point of him was in the first place.

Maybe this bit of Herrick-redux is to give us a brief respite from the frantic restructuring work that’s going on elsewhere in the show. We now have an out-of-the-blue eons-old vampire fable (written on human skin parchment complete with nipple!) as the series’ overriding arc. It feels like something rather out of Blade and Underworld and bleeds into a time-jumping sub-plot to 2037AD and a Terminator-esque bleak view of the remaining human resistance losing to the superior vampire invasion forces. This requires the future rebel leader to time travel back to ‘present day’ (albeit as a ghost; this isn’t science fiction after all!) to change history in order to murder an innocent baby whose name is not John Connor but might as well be. Or maybe that’s what’s happening; it was all rather odd and confusing, as if we’d wondered into a completely different TV programme.

Mark Williams (from the Harry Potter films) shows up in the odd role of Vampire Recorder that is frankly too broadly comic for the context of the rest of the dark and harrowing episode; somewhat better judged was timid newly-turned vampire Dewi (Darren Evans) who has a ‘Stake Me’ sign taped to his back by his mocking companions. And best of all is Monroe star Andrew Gower’s introduction as Cutler, a younger and more modern vampire than the old school Griffin who combines irreverent humour with a steely sense of danger and who should prove to be a very worthy and interesting adversary for the heroes to play against. Unless he’s also written out by the start of the next episode – right now, who can tell?

In the meantime there’s still the problem of what to do about the hole left in the show by Mitchell’s departure. Apparently Craig Robert’s teenage vampire Adam will make a brief return to the show later in the season, but in terms of a full-time replacement for Aidan Turner we’ve yet to be properly introduced to the character of Hal played by Damien Molony. It appears that he’s part of a vampire/werewolf/ghost flatshare far older than the one we’ve been watching over the last three years (and therefore far more successful in managing to be low-key and stay out of trouble for decades.) That this supernatural Unholy Trinity is located in of all places my old home town of Southend-on-Sea in Essex is especially weird for me.

There’s a nice “Bizarro parallel universe” feel to the brief scenes we get with this new triumvirate: Pearl the ghost is from the 50s, while the werewolf is an elderly barber whose body can no longer withstand the physical effects of the lunar transformation. Hal himself is immediately established as very different from the dangerously swaggering and tortured Mitchell: he seems more upper class and vulnerable, a Shelley-esque poet-type who has been carefully hidden away from the real world and who wears his emotional sensitivity on his sleeve. But now he knows that this idyll is coming to an end, and he is patently afraid of what will happen to his small supernatural family in the days to come. Molony has big shoes to fill but he does it well, quickly establishing himself as something very different from his predecessor while managing to captivate the necessary attention and steal the requisite scenes to give him the appropriate presence of an incoming series regular right from the start. Mitchell’s departure really has become a surprisingly small problem in the grand scheme of things.

So there’s definitely some good stuff happening here, and overall the show is doing probably the best job possible in the circumstances given the destabilisation caused by so many abrupt personnel changes. It’s also being commendably ambitious and audacious in the way that it’s trying to reboot the show and reorientate itself to its enforced new circumstances, rather than just going for any ‘safe’ and more familiar options.

But right now, my main problem is that I have no idea what show it is that I’m watching: what it’s meant to be or where it’s going, what form it will take when (if?) it settles back down again. With all the changes it’s having to push through, the show has had to sacrifice any claims it previously had to my established ongoing loyalty; only time will tell whether the new characters, cast and plot will win the revamped show the investment of new loyalty in its own right. Jury’s still out on that one: but I’m intrigued enough to stick with it for a while yet to see whether it succeeds in coming together or not.

Currently airing on BBC3 on Sunday nights. The DVD/Blu-ray will be released on 23 April 2012.

Well, any concerns that I had that the show was giving Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen) an unfeasibly easy ride of it early in the season have been comprehensively dismissed by the frankly bleak and nihilistic end of series 1. The government still stands and Nyborg remains Prime Minister with her political convictions actually reasonably intact, but in order to make that happen she’s ended up jettisoning pretty much everyone and everything else that she once deemed important to her.

It’s hard to know what message we should be taking away from Borgen. It started off as a “decent people can be in politics too, and can make a genuine and positive difference” affair analogous to The West Wing; Now the moral seems to be a return to Lord Acton’s timeless “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” as we see the devastating impact the office of Prime Minister has had on Nyborg. She has started to become everything that she came into the series railing against. All that we admired about her in the early episodes – her compassion and empathy, her determination to do the right thing, her devotion to her husband and family – is now gone, submerged to what she perceives as being the greater good which involves first and foremost prioritising staying in power.

When Philip (Mikael Birkkjær) tells her he wants a divorce, she’s so removed from it that she doesn’t even say a word in protest: instead, you can see the wheels immediately start turning on “how do I manage this from a PR point of view?” She doesn’t flinch from firing her closest ally Bent Sejrø (Lars Knutzon) from the Cabinet. And when the jovial, dead-eyed permanent secretary Niels Erik Lund (Morten Kirkskov) cheerfully tells her that he’s finally removed Birgitte’s PA Sanne from the office – just hours after Sanne was personally entrusted with babysitting Birgitte’s son Magnus – Birgitte doesn’t even respond: she’s emotionally dead, having spent the episode in a cynical and deceitful attempt to manipulate the media over just the sort of “happy families” interview that she decried her predecessor for trying with his own wife only a few episodes earlier.

Is the series intended as an explanation of why politicians are like they are? That the process and reality of power inexorably results in exactly the sort of politicians we detest and that it’s not their fault, they started off well-meaning? If so it’s a very sad, downbeat and hope-less summary of politics. Who, after watching this show, would want to risk their home lives, friends and family, morals and even sanity in the endeavour of trying to “do good?” Only those who seek power for its own glory would want to follow Nyborg down the path she’s taken.

Are we even, at this point, supposed to still be on Nyborg’s side and view her as the hero? Or is our support for her supposed to have ebbed away in just the way that her poll ratings in the show have done? It’s been interesting watching the comments of fans on social media and columnists in the mainstream press, where the predominantly female commentators are still firmly in Birgitte’s corner and decry the selfish actions of husband Philip. And yet I can’t help but wonder that if the genders weren’t reversed, wouldn’t a male Prime Minister acting like this be widely seen as the villain of the piece and the female spouse seen as valiantly standing up for the family, the kids, and the right thing to do (even with the presence of an extramarital affair)? Borgen challenges us to think deeper about such issues than we’re used to or comfortable with.

The penultimate story, “Divide and Rule”, did another interesting thing that caught me by surprise: the writing and cutting of the early part of the episode explicitly made obvious the intended parallels between Nyborg and the young TV journalist Katrine Fønsmark (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen), making it clear that both were committed professionals who couldn’t help themselves but be immersed in the detail of an issue, driven by the certainty that they would spot things that others wouldn’t and that only they could do the job right. During the series, Katrine has also sacrificed her chance of a family (with an early abortion, then breaking up with her fitness instructor boyfriend, and now finally washing her hands of Kasper) in the pursuit of her work, because like Birgitte she believes in it absolutely. But while Birgitte is now a long way down the path of throwing everyone and everything overboard in order to be able to continue in office, Katrine sticks to her principals and ethics and chooses instead to resign rather than to tolerate a gross abuse of journalistic principals by her station boss.

I think we’re meant to admire Katrine’s determination and sense of character more than Birgitte’s at this point. How odd to have a show dare to suggest that a journalist can be a hero in this day and age! The press room scenes have become increasingly strong and important, with scalpel-sharp economical exchanges on the issue of the day allowing us to see how the government’s well meaning policies instantly appear cynical and underhanded to the media and to the public. But it’s not as clear cut: Katrine is young and only has herself and her career to think about, while Birgitte has the sense of the weight of the whole country bearing down on her. She can’t allow herself to walk away; she is trapped by her own sense of obligation and purpose, the knowledge that if she leaves then things for everyone will be so much worse for everyone in Denmark. She has become a tragic prisoner of the office that she inhabits, while Katrine still has her freedom.

All in all, the final two episodes were very strong indeed and didn’t flinch from the implosion of Birgitte’s world. “Divide and Rule” was even more startling in the way that it seemed ripped from this very week’s UK newspaper headlines: massive defence overspends, shambolic procurement, allegations of ministerial corruption, bribes and conflicts of interest; and Birgitte’s new tendency to micromanage and be unable to leave her ministers to get on with things because she knows that if and when it blows up it will all be blamed on her is right out of the Thatcher/Blair playbook of government. I can’t remember a British TV series that so accurately skewered the current British political scene so well, so to have it come instead from a Danish domestic drama is almost surreal.

The final episode, “The First Tuesday in October”, was the one that really presented us with the break between the reality (broken marriages, a government nominally in power but actually under siege and drifting) and the artifice (the attempted “happy family” TV interview and the soaring, inspiring “state of the union” speech Nyborg has to give to the opening of parliament.) That speech proves so good that even Birgitte’s predecessor Lars Hesselboe (Søren Spanning) appears to have a genuine tear in the eye during it and compliments her on it afterwards – only to turn to reporters and in the same breath decry the empty rhetoric they’d all heard before.

Something else is also made explicitly clear by the sub-plot of the writing of that speech by spin doctor/communications chief Kasper Juul (Pilou Asbæk). My very first review of Borgen a month ago couldn’t avoid using the description ‘Danish West Wing’ somewhat guiltily and somewhat lazy, but in the season finale Kasper couldn’t be more overtly cast in the Sam Seaborn role as he works on finding the right tone for the speech. He seeks inspiration by listening to old Kennedy inauguration speeches on his iPod: but we all know that what he’s really been doing is going home and cracking open the DVD boxset of the President Bartlet administration.

The Borgen/West Wing comparison once felt rather patronising and trite; but at the end of season 1 of Borgen I’d say the comparison has actually been impressively earned and now speaks volumes of the strengths of both series.

Series 1 is now available on DVD. Season 2 will be shown on BBC 4 “in the winter”, either at the end of 2012 or the start of 2013.

The Castle of Cagliostro is no where near the quality of those more recent films, of course: you can see Miyazaki taking his first steps down the road that will lead to his masterworks (which also include Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke) and there are some unmistakably Miyazaki-esque touches to the whole affair, but first and foremost this is a typical piece of animé production line output of the 1970s.

The strange thing is, if I’m twiddling my thumbs wondering what to watch and just happen to fancy a piece of anime, then my instinctive response is to turn not to the masterworks, but instead to the relatively cheap and cheerful The Castle of Cagliostro. How come? Because it’s fun and has no pretensions to do or be anything more than purely entertaining. There’s just something joyous about the way it throws itself into things, starting off mid-caper as cocky master thief Arsène Lupin III is ripping off a Monaco casino only to find that all he’s managed to make off with is a load of counterfeit bills. His search for the person behind the fake money takes him to the Grand Duchy of Cagliostro, where the ruling Count is set to marry Princess Clarisse against her will in order to solidify his power. Oh, and there’s hidden treasure to be found as well.

It doesn’t start off particularly promisingly, with the casino raid done in the distinctive crude and angular animé style of the 70s that we know from inferior cost-cutting TV programmes that were used to pad out the children’s hour on UK television into the early 80s. A scene where Lupin hurdles an obstacle has a ‘twang’ sound effect that can’t help but make you wince. But very quickly thereafter the film takes on a whole new aesthetic – a higher quality, more Miyazaki feel. When the getaway car suffers a puncture, there’s a lovely quiet moment where Lupin relaxes (while his sidekick Daisuke Jigen slaves over changing the wheel) looking at the countryside and the passing clouds; later, Lupin takes a look around the picturesque ruins of the burnt-out Royal palace and it’s exquisitely rendered. It’s as though, now we’re in the Grand Duchy itself, we’re free to be in the true Land of Miyazaki and not the world of the TV serials that he had been working on up until this.

Although the tale is a typical one of dastardly villains with jetcopters and of super-daring-do by the heroes, there’s a sense of underlying reality throughout the whole thing that is unusual: the Grand Duchy itself is lovingly and consistently presented to is, with each new setting and angle within the castle adding to the overall sense of the coherent geography of a real place. There’s a continuity, too, to the characters: Lupin himself was a long running character from manga and from previous films and a TV series co-directed by Miyazaki, and his band of friends was well established; there’s also an arch adversary (Inspector Koichi Zenigata) and a clear history between Lupin and the residents of Cagliostro, but none of it is delved into in any depth in a way that might slow down the jaunty progress of current events. It does, though, make it feel as though this is a fully realised world we’re in.

The whole thing is a delight: pure escapist fun, with no underlying messages or morals to observe, no expectations that this is a towering work of art that one has to admire. And that makes it possible for us to sit back and enjoy it just as pure fun, and ironically to appreciate its artistic strengths all the more for there being no expectation. There’s no problem if your mind wonders, no weighty concepts for us to have to juggle in our minds as we watch. And perhaps that’s why I find it more re-watchable than most any other film that I know.

The DVD is pretty standard; not technically part of the Studio Ghibli line-up, it still manages to do a pretty good job of aping that range’s jacket design and standard line-up of serviceable but far from extravagant extras. I guess in years to come it might follow its Ghibli brethren to Blu-ray high definition, but I don’t think the animation here has the edge of quality that will really make it a significant step-up if it does – it was still early days for the Miyazaki hallmark after all. What we have here on DVD is quite fine enough in terms of clarity and cleanness of the print, although the image frame doesn’t quite fill a true 16:9 widescreen ratio and is blocked-off, so that is definite room for improvement in subsequent releases. Although I tend to loathe dubbed films with a passion, the English language version here is actually very good and lip-syncing in animé tends to be perfectly acceptable in any case, as Japanese animators know to leave mouth movements rather crude and vague for exactly this sort of international distribution. The Japanese original soundtrack is available, as are English subtitled; the differences between this and the English dub can be rather intriguing.

The thing is, it’s probably overly generous to give this film four stars – especially when comparing against the rest of the better-known Ghibli output. But it’s so enjoyable that not only do I cheerfully lavish it with such generosity regardless, I find that simply writing this review has made me want to go back and rewatch it all over again. Very, very few films have that sort of repeat value for me, and that makes this a special gem of a film in my book.

Then he meets his next door neighbour Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her young son Benecio, and he makes – possibly for the first time in his adult life – a connection, hesitant and wordless as it is to start with. When we subsequently see him with Benicio on the couch, both of them watching cartoons and a daffy but open and genuine grin on Ryan Gosling’s face, it’s as though he’s finally acquiring a personality for himself for the very first time. This developing friendship with the mother and son, the possible love affair with Irene and surrogate fathership toward Benicio, is meticulously built up over nearly half the film and is almost engaging and powerful enough to carry an entire movie in its own right.

And then things go horribly wrong; and that initially blank, then sweet and caring nameless getaway driver with the daffy grin is suddenly propelled into some quite shockingly appalling actions, as the film becomes an all-out action/revenge thriller. Having seen his softer domestic side earlier, it’s difficult to know how we are supposed to react to the driver’s psychopathic actions later on as he grows increasingly unravelled, dishevelled and blood-stained. Ultimately the plot echoes the fable of the scorpion (explicitly show in the design on the back of the driver’s distinctive bowling jacket) and the frog, in which the scorpion dooms them both because it’s unable to defy its own deadly nature. It’s no comfort at all to us that the driver is forced into it by the violent actions of others, who include Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks on excellent form as local gangsters. Bryan Cranston is also terrific as the driver’s boss Shannon, a smalltime crook with big-time ambitions and industrial quantities of chronic bad luck.

While watching Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching a modern, hip young Michael Mann at work. The film has the cutting stylish edge of Miami Vice at its height, and the night time scenes on the LA streets reminded me of Mann’s later Collateral (Jamie Foxx chauffeuring hitman Tom Cruise through the neon-lit streets of LA.) One scene set on a beach at night is illuminated by the strobing rays from a light house, which reminded me of Heat and the final showdown between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro lit by the landing lights of airplanes arriving at LAX. I’m a big Mann fan, so the comparison is meant as a compliment, but Mann did get rather too big, epic and grandiose, too overblown and engorged on his own achingly sharp style. Drive on the other hand is back to basics: lean and realistic, packing a punch while looking incredibly cool with a street-smart rather than Versace sensibility. The film has gorgeous shots of LA at night; makes creative use of mirrors and reflections; the lighting and cinematography is gorgeous throughout. It’s a film that demands to be seen in high-definition and is served well by the immaculate Blu-ray transfer. But what is actually being shown to us are very ordinary, everyday scenes of LA with little inherent beauty: shabby apartment blocks, rundown parking lots and pawn shops, dusty roads and greasy garages, cheap clothes and average cars.

Similarly the acting is both highly stylistic and simultaneously natural. There are long pauses where people simply stand and look at each other; but rather than coming across like a scene from a portentous, self-indulgent art house movie it instead feels like a painfully awkward genuine moment between two embarrassed and self-conscious real people. Other scenes are played out in near real time, which introduces long spells of people waiting and watching: not only does this allow the characters to develop in the most subtle ways, it also hugely raises the tension at crucial points – none more so than in the gripping opening pre-title sequence which follows the getaway driver at work during and after a heist.

Overall it’s a film that defies expectations every chance it gets. Whenever you expect the film to take one turn – such as when Irene’s husband returns and you’re expecting an alpha male macho showdown between him and the driver – it doesn’t. The characters shock and surprise you just like people do in real life. Things happen that you don’t expect, or not when or how you expect them. For a film about a getaway driver, the driving scenes are unexpectedly short and fewer than you would imagine; the driver tends to outthink his competition rather than simply going flat-out for speed like any one of a hundred car chase movies would surely do. But crucially, the film doesn’t let us down or disappoint us while it’s playing its head games with us.

This isn’t some big, all-time classic film. It’s small and lean (just 100 minutes is a perfect length in these bloated times) and cheaply shot (not that you’d know it) and all those silences and real time sequences mean that the story never has the space to amount to more than ‘slender’. Carey Mulligan is saddled with a stereotyped “saintly mother and wife” role while the only other female role (Blanche, played by Christina Hendricks) is little more than a cameo. It’s very much a guy film, although Gosling’s early tender scenes with Irene and Benicio will certainly help keep his well-established romantic appeal to the female audience alive and well for a good time to come.

All in all it seems strange that Drive has been quite as lauded and praised as it has, since basically it’s an old-style film noir pulp thriller with not much more underneath its impressive style and magnetic central performance. For some people, that cocktail will still be more than enough to make this a four star film; I’m happy to be in that camp, but also vaguely puzzled that so many other people are, too.

“See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil” had a high stakes threat to the government – the explicit comparisons to Watergate made it all too clear that the discovery of a Special Branch bug in the offices of the Solidarity Party could be fatal to Birgitte Nyborg’s government. It’s an episode where Birgitte (Sidse Babett Knudsen) finally has to accept the painful cost of the political reality of the situation, which requires her to publicly support and defend the deceitful and inept Justice Minister Troels Höxenhaven (Lars Brygmann) even though it means shattering the support and friendship of Anne Sophie Lindenkrone (Signe Egholm Olsen) whom she sees as something of a political protégé. Personally I thought Lindenkrone had it coming: her high-handed pious attempt to being down the government meant that it was she that had set fire to all her own bridges, so she can hardly be surprised when skeletons from her closet subsequently leave her hoist by her own petard dangling above the very flames she lit.

“The Silly Season” broke the usual format by having almost no political storyline and instead focussing on the emotional lives of our main characters. The one minor political strand (about the former Labour leader’s kiss-and-tell memoirs) was really just there to add to the turmoil that spin doctor Kasper Juul (Johan Philip Asbæk) is going through as his past erupts around him in ways that even he can no longer evade. It pays off on the seeds sown in episode 3 and explains why Kasper is a chronic liar, and by the final scenes in the crematorium your understanding of and sympathy for him will have been profoundly heightened. It’s a really strong, powerful episode.

And for once, the two episodes worked well in BBC4′s double header broadcast schedule, thanks to the overarching story of the accelerating implosion of Birgitte and Philip’s (Forbrydelsen II’s Mikael Birkkjær) marriage that ran through both episodes. More than the marital problems, what it shows is just how much Birgitte has changed in the year during which she’s been Prime Minister, and how corrosive the effects of that power are becoming. Now, every scene of her walking through the government buildings has her flanked by advisors who sweep away all mere mortals from her path; outside on the streets, Birgitte is permanently accompanied by two faceless security guards. When she visits the school psychiatrist to discuss son Magnus’ bed wetting, the poor man is subjected to a full body search before the meeting can begin – and Birgitte blithely semi-apologises as though it’s nothing more troublesome than shaking hands.

When Birgitte tries to reach out to Philip, she does it with all the emotion of a forensic committee enquiry into the problem: you can see her political negotiation wheels whirring. She’s so used to being let down by colleagues that she can’t shake the idea that Philip will do the same, with an affair. And finally the domestic and state sides of Birgitte’s world collide head on when the family attempt a disastrous holiday together at the Prime Minister’s official country mansion residence, delivering a coup de gras to the situation. Not that Philip is by any means blameless in this slow motion car wreck: he’s sunk so deep into cuckolded depression that he’s reverted to acting like a sulky teenager, unable to respond to any of Birgitte’s peace offerings except by lashing out in the most damaging ways. It’s a horribly realistic examination of the collapse of a modern marriage between two highly stressed professionals

It seems that the end of the Christensen marriage, much like the end of season one of Borgen itself, is fast approaching.

The first season of Borgen is available on DVD from February 6.

In between there was Forbidden Planet. It’s the most light-hearted of the three or four classics and it has plenty of comedy to leven what is actually a deadly serious high-concept storyline: a spaceship from Earth arrives on the planet Altair to determine what happened to the original exploration team that came here 20 years ago. They find just one survivor, Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), along with his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis). But there’s also an impossibly sophisticated robot that Morbius claims he created himself. Why is Morbius lying? Why is he so hostile to his would-be rescuers, and what secret is he hiding inside his brilliant mind?

Forbidden Planet is easily the most ‘pulpish’ of the four films, with its gorgeous matte painting planetary vistas looking as though they’d popped off last week’s vivid cover of “Astounding Stories”; but it also shares with Metropolis and 2001 a rare sense of epic storytelling allied to craftsmanship at the top of its game, and of a respect for the genre and for the intelligence of the audience missing from the likes of the entirely enjoyable but still wholly B-movie It Came from Outer Space et al.

Forbidden Planet is still hugely influential, even 55 years on. It’s impossible to watch it and not see it as a pilot movie for Star Trek with its military crew of Earth spacemen exploring strange new worlds; indeed, Gene Roddenberry is even known to have said that he wanted to make a TV series out of the film, before he later went on to make his Wagon Train to the stars. Doctor Who picked up some tips as well: watch out for the mention of ‘reverse the polarity’; and the way that the designers of Dalek début story “The Dead Planet” picked up on the film’s very clever throwaway idea of using doorway shapes to imply the aliens’ form. And it’s hard not to look at the hologram representations of Altaira and Princess Leia in Star Wars and not see a direct influence, even before you start seeing how much See-Threepio owes to the character of the spectacularly-designed Robbie the Robot.

While there’s not a huge amount of ground-breaking going on in the FX department (it’s all done using well-established model, matte, stop-motion and animation techniques) it’s still the first time they’ve all been pulled together and done as well as they are here, with as much care and attention as the best craftsmen of the day could manage given such a relatively huge budget. And it’s all in super Metrocolour – a real genre first! But if it’s something truly dazzling and original you want, listen to the soundtrack: not a musical instrument to be heard, but instead one of the most weird, evocative and effective soundscapes you’ll experience in a movie thanks to the shockingly alien “electronic tonalities” created by Louis and Bebe Barron. Their work surely influenced that of Delia Darbyshire in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop when she painstakingly pieced together the notes for the Doctor Who title theme for the first time seven years later. These sounds are part-music, part-sound effect, and the atmosphere they create for sequences such as the march of the unstoppable, invisible Monster from the Id upon the heroes is brilliant and terrifying.

In order to sell some of this outlandishness to mainstream audiences, there’s some crowd-pleasing light entertainment in the film as well that can come over as rather juvenile to modern viewers: the way the senior officers fumble over their first sight of Altaira is like watching 12-year-old boys in the playground stammer over that most alien of species – a girl! – rather than supposedly top-of-the-line experienced military personnel; and the comic scene between the Cook (unusual to see Earl Holliman (a) so young, and (b) in a comedy part) and the Robot getting themselves drunk is played purely for laughs. But then, even the great John Ford had many such similar interludes in his best films, including The Searchers. Perhaps the hardest thing for modern audiences watching this film is that the hero of the story – the straight-talking, no-nonsense captain of the Earth ship – is played by Leslie Nielsen, in the days when he was a genuine leading dramatic actor. We know him best now from Airplane!, The Naked Gun and dozens of other comedies, and it’s hard to watch him in this without expecting him to make a gag or two hundred.

Meanwhile it’s the underlying intelligence of the plot that brings it all back together and keeps it on the right side of being a grown-up A-list movie; and that intelligence is derived from a master, by cheerfully plundering William Shakespeare’s The Tempest for the basic idea and structure underpinning it all and then combining it with some psychology theory from Sigmund Freud. No one could say that any of this was kid’s stuff! It all builds to a terrific and tense climax, beginning with a tantalising glimpse of the monster’s outline through to the final moments where it proceeds to burn its way through every obstacle in order to kill them. For the eagle-eyed among the audience, the significance of a row of lights coming on one-by-one in the background of shot within the Krell laboratory is by itself enough to chill the blood with the dawning realisation of what’s going on.

On the Blu-ray: there’s no doubt that this has been given an impressive restoration, and the picture is nicely sharp and clean for the most part. There are a few isolated incidents of a few frames having fading that’s too extensive to compensate for, and sometimes the optical processes used to create the FX lead to a briefly inferior picture. For the most part the picture is nice and deep with proper blacks, but some scenes can appear flat and lacking in contrast – presumably they were shot that way. Most surprisingly is that a film that you would expect to be lush and colourful is actually dialled right back. I’d say it’s so ‘realistic’ that it’s verging on dull, which is a shame, and I’m really not quite convinced they got the colour saturation settings right on the digitisation process. Maybe it really is just the way it was intended and it’s my own expectations that are skewed from memories of over-saturated TV showings down the years. Even so, I couldn’t help but be just a little bit disappointed, and overall I’m not sure there is really a huge gain in quality over the equivalent two-disc DVD edition of the film that’s also available. There is a full serving of extras to be had on both the Blu-ray and DVD releases, including two quality documentaries on the making of the film and of the state of science fiction in the 50s; further TV and film outings for Robbie the Robot (including the full-length feature film The Invisible Boy); deleted and lost scenes, and trailers (the condition of which shows just how good the latest restored transfer is by comparison, all quibbles aside.)

Basically, if you haven’t seen Forbidden Planet before then it’s absolutely mandatory that you do so – right now. And if you have seen the film before, chances are that this version was a must-buy back when it first came out a couple of years ago.