Now that I have a wee little sprog of my own, bouncing around my apartment like a hyperactive midget that talks faster than Quentin Tarantino, I’ve been revisiting characters from my childhood. One of which is Paddington Bear. Now before he became a whore for Marmite, I remember him from the cute little stop motion animation in the 70s and 80s. Fucking adorable he was, with little hint that he was going to betray his love of all things marmalade and sell his soul to the salty yeast god for some easy cash.


After this, came a cartoon. The bear wasn’t as fucking adorable, but it was an excellent show. It quickly became a staple for my little one and I can now sing the theme tune from memory - fucking kill me and fill every orifice with juicy, juicy marmalade.

Of course, the next step had to be a CGI movie and a bastardised big screen version from Hollywood where Paddington moves to New York and calls himself Grand Central and eats hot dogs and becomes a born again Christian and kills his moocher Aunt Lucy for being a drain on the State and shoots and kills an evil Mr Curry when Mr Curry rats him out to INS.

Wait, that didn't actually happen? Britain and France produced a fun, charming, witty little family film of their own? Fuck yeah!

It’s rare to watch a family film that gets almost every little thing right. Paddington is sweet without being sickly, funny without resorting to the lowest common denominator and charming without having to shamelessly play on your emotions. Sure Paddington’s uncle is killed within the first fifteen minutes, but it’s done in an almost alarmingly matter of fact way. No sooner have we been enjoying Paddington live his idyllic life in deepest, darkest Peru, than he’s running through the trees in desperation, trying to escape from an earthquake.

It’s this disaster that kills Paddington’s poor uncle, and which has Paddington set off to London, leaving his aunt Lucy to see out her twilight years in a retirement home for elderly bears.

Paddington is living life under the false assumption that the English are a warm, friendly, welcoming lot. He obviously hasn’t been listening to the UKIP party and hasn’t been paying attention to our current Prime Minister, David Cameron. We don’t much like Johnny Foreigner, what with his weird ways, his strange food and his emotions. If we open our arms to a few foreigners, next thing we know, we’ll all be speaking Polish or praying to Allah.

There’s a neat little undertone of racism running through the film. Paddington’s neighbour Mr Curry immediately dislikes the bear and worries about ‘jungle music’. Spoken like a true disciple of Nigel Farage. At the beginning you have nothing but The Beatles and Stones playing from the street, but if you let just one bear in, next thing you know, it’ll be nothing but jungle music. Mark my words.

The Brown family, who take Paddington in, are wary of him also. Their new guest is uncouth and messy. He also has an Inspector Clouseau-type skill for creating mayhem out of nowhere. In one scene he manages to destroy the Brown’s bathroom, culminating with a flood that propels the bathtub down the stairs. It’s pure slapstick but it works brilliantly. However, after such a huge accident, there seems to be no water damage in the house. What’s that? I’m nitpicking, especially as the films centers on a talking bear? Fine.

But the core of the film is Paddington’s desire to find a home and to fit in somewhere. He’s not treated with much affection at the beginning. He’s locked up in the attic and told that he’s going to be handed over to the authorities in the morning. But this is the English way. We pretend that we don’t like outsiders. We put up all kinds of walls and obstacles. But deep down inside we always want to help someone out and we’re always capable of being won over.

Which is exactly what happens to Henry Brown, the patriarch of the family. Played by Hugh Bonneville, who plays the odious Earl of Grantham in Downton Abbey, he’s a stiff-assed middle class twat who’s mortally afraid of risk. He wants to ship off the bear as soon as possible; let someone else take care of it. But before you know it, he’s helping Paddington out, dressing up as a woman (which is seemingly the secret dream of every Englishman) and even enticing men into illicit rendezvous to get what Paddington wants. Yeah, the promise of casual sex was a turn up for the books in this family film.

Even Mr Curry, played by the cadaverous looking Peter Capaldi, ends up helping the bear. Sure he wants the foreigner to get the hell out of his country, but he’s appalled when he finds out that someone is planning to stuff the poor wee little caniform. This is simply too much. We English might be suspicious of outsiders, but we don’t want them stuffed! Especially cute bears!

The only thing that doesn’t really work is the villain, played by Nicole Kidman. Kidman is obviously having fun and is trying to summon a Cruella de Ville vibe, but she feels a little out of place. Whenever she’s on screen, the movie suddenly becomes something completely different. But she’s not funny or scary enough to warrant the distraction. She’s a plot device, nothing more.

And the plot, it must be said, with Paddington trying to find an explorer who once visited his aunt and uncle in Peru, and Kidman’s crazy taxidermist who wants to stuff him, is a little weak. But the situations that the characters get themselves in, and the general humour and tone of the film, are delightful. There's a great scene where Paddington is taking the Tube and sees a sign that says 'Dogs Must Be Carried' on the escalator. Of course, Paddington takes it literally and ends up finding a pooch so that he can indeed ride the escalator. Cue the adorable sight of Paddington carrying a chihuahua under his arm.

And the CGI of Paddington himself is a huge success. I was very doubtful that they could pull it off, that he would either look too much like a real bear and would look weird or that he would look too cartoonish. But the animation is terrific and Paddington is adorable. It helps hugely that Ben Whishaw was cast - he lends Paddington the right amount of sweetness and innocence. But then again, Kidman aside, all of the casting is spot on. Even Hugh Bonneville is great! Just don't make me watch Downton Abbey again. Fucking ever!

Baz Luhrmann is not a director I hold in high regard. All of his previous films have either annoyed the hell out of me or given me a blistering headache. He’s a director turned up to eleven, a director who believes more is more, a director who is the enemy of good taste. So colour me surprised when I found myself enjoying his latest offering.

Australia does not have a promising beginning. As is typical of Luhrmann, you’re bombarded with flashy visuals, quick editing and ridiculous acting. There’s a horrible sense of hysteria about the thing. Indeed, the exposition at the beginning is so rushed and so relentless that you feel like someone is shouting at you while slapping you in the face with a leather glove. Are you listening, the film is saying? Are you paying attention? Because I’ve got to get this tedious setting-up-the-story shit off my chest quick so that I can have some fun.

The hysterics extend to Nicole Kidman’s acting. She’s a talented actress but she has another side to her, a side that wants to paint with the broadest brush strokes. For the first hour or so this is the Kidman we get. The one with wild eyes, a shrill voice and exaggerated body movements. But then eventually she settles down and her performance improves considerably.

The problem with the beginning of the film is that it’s a broad comedy. Kidman enters the story as a prissy Englishwoman down under. And before you know it she’s getting hot under the collar about Hugh Jackman’s plan to mate horses and cooing like an idiot at kangaroos.

The kangaroo scene is a good example of just how awful the beginning is. Kidman’s character sees them out of the window of a van and dumbly admires their beauty. And then just as she’s cooing like a gibbering imbecile, one of Jackman’s pals shoots one and we’re confronted with a horrific close-up of Kidman’s grotesquely startled face. It’s exactly the kind of shit I expect from Luhrmann – childish, hysterical filmmaking.

The point at which I began to enjoy the film was when the characters entered the city of Darwin. Kidman’s acting had calmed down and there was little of the broad comedy that had tainted early scenes. Suddenly the film seemed almost comfortable in its own skin.

The first sequence in Darwin boasts some of the film’s best moments. There’s a lovely moment when Nullah, a mixed race child, watches The Wizard of Oz while wearing black face. He does this because it was the policy in Australia to separate mixed race children from their families so that the black could be ‘bred out of them’. This ingenious way of avoiding the authorities made me smile.

The sequence in Darwin is also where Kidman and Jackman fall in love. Previous to this, their relationship makes little impact whatsoever – Jackman is the typical Indiana Jones/Crocodile Dundee-style rogue with a heart of gold and Kidman is a boring toffee-nosed Limey. But in the sequence in Darwin, Jackman suddenly turns up all clean-shaven and looking every inch like James Bond. As a red-blooded, heterosexual male, even I’d be tempted by this hunk of a man.

The scenes in the rain where Jackman and Kidman first kiss are kind of reminiscent of David Lean. Sure Australia is nowhere near as good as a Lean film, but Jackman and Kidman have chemistry and the love scene is surprisingly sexy.

However, it seems to me that Luhrmann is far more enamored with Jackman than he is with his leading lady. Time after time we see lingering shots of Jackman’s toned physique. Indeed, in one of the opening scenes the director’s admiration is kind of ridiculous. As the characters camp in the Outback, there’s a slow-motion shot of a topless Jackman pouring water all over his chiseled body. No wonder Kidman gets so hot and bothered.

For me the film’s peak is a brief montage sequence after the events in Darwin where we see Fletcher feed his boss to the crocodiles. Previous to this Fletcher has been nothing more than a mealy-mouthed henchman to a ruthless cattle merchant. But in an instant Fletcher goes from being an annoying pissant to a cold-blooded psycho killer. And the sequence is perfectly filmed. There’s some wonderful voiceover from Nullah, there’s some great music and there are some fantastic visuals. It’s everything cinema should be – visually and aurally arresting without calling attention to itself.

My second favourite scene occurs after the Japanese attack Darwin. There’s a scene where Jackman wanders the devastated city and finds the bar where he first met Kidman. The music is perfect and there’s some echo-drenched voiceover from previous scenes. Again it’s surprisingly restrained cinema and subsequently has a pleasing emotional punch – Jackman thinks Kidman is dead and this is a nostalgia trip to stab himself in the heart with.

The scene at the bar also serves the film’s political point. At first the barman won’t serve Jackman’s friend, an aboriginal, but after some threats and some screaming, Jackman manages to get equal treatment for his friend. Jackman is a voice of reason in a society where racism and prejudice is always on the surface.

Nullah, the film’s narrator, is also a means for Luhrmann to assuage some of his country’s guilt. Here is a mixed race child who experiences the push/pull of wanting to be with his surrogate white family and with his aboriginal grandfather. The character says that he’s neither black nor white and therefore exists in some sort of no man’s land. But at the end of the film Luhrmann has the child choose his black grandfather over his white family. This seems to be an apology for the harm that the Australian authorities did and a way of illustrating how important it is to retain our cultures – the way that the authorities tried to breed the black out of children was cultural robbery pure and simple.

At the end King George (Nullah’s grandfather) says to his grandchild that this is their country. Yes Australia is their country but the way that he says it seems to be inclusive. Australia, for better or for worse, also belongs to the foreigners who settled there.

The ending notwithstanding, the final act of Australia is kind of a disappointment. It ends with a rather dull child rescue sequence. And the demise of Fletcher smacks of desperation (he gets speared by King George – it’s like Lurhmann doesn’t quite know how to get rid of his villain and so just decides to give him a soap opera death). But that being said, I was still pleasantly surprised by Australia. I found it highly entertaining.

The Golden Compass is a curious film. Based on a not very good novel, it’s neither faithful to the text nor does it try to drastically reinvent it. Instead the filmmakers just fiddle with the chronology of events here and there, omit key scenes and change a couple of the characters a little bit. I can’t imagine the result is satisfying for anyone.

Possibly the most puzzling thing is that the book’s final set piece (a fight between two giant polar bears) is moved to the middle of the film. It’s the most exciting piece of action in the novel and it’s also the emotional climax of the relationship between the young heroine Lyra and her polar bear pal Iorek Byrnison. In the book he travels days and days to rescue her from a rival polar bear King. It takes a while. But in the film he seemingly comes out of nowhere and the fight doesn’t have the high stakes that it should have. The point of travelling days and days to have a scrap with a fierce polar bear King is that he’ll be weak and tired when he finally arrives – he’ll be at a major disadvantage. But in the film you don’t see a journey. Therefore Byrnison just seems pathetic when he can’t put up much of a fight.

Moving the fight to the middle of the film and not showing the journey that Byrnison makes also means that you don’t see the love that he supposedly has for Lyra. In the book his sacrifice is highlighted in a much more successful way – he flirts with death to save her. Here he just risks getting beaten up a little – you never sense that he’s really in serious danger.

I also think that the casting for the voice of Byrnison is all wrong. The filmmakers cast Ian McKellen. Somehow an aged Englishman was not the voice I imagined for a fearsome polar bear. I imagined a coarser, fiercer, more youthful, more unrestrained voice. The filmmakers have obviously tried to hire as many names as they can.

This desire to hire star names extends to having Daniel Craig turn up for a few minutes and for such luminaries as Christopher Lee, Tom Courtenay and Derek Jacobi to play thankless minor roles. As such, the talent on display and the total waste of that talent is another nail in the coffin of this film.

While moving the polar bear fight is the most puzzling decision, changing the ending proves to be the most foolish. In the book, Lord Asriel (played by Daniel Craig), who is obsessed with a material called ‘Dust’, sacrifices a child and moves to a parallel world. It’s kind of silly but at least it packs a punch. In the movie, though, this doesn’t happen at all. The movie ends with Lyra having a conversation with the child who’s going to get sacrificed. It’s incredibly anti-climatic and comes out of the blue. When the screen faded to black, I didn’t quite believe that this was it. Surely there was more. But there wasn’t. Presumably the end of the novel, which is a cliffhanger, was going to form the basis of the beginning of the sequel. But because this film is so bad that sequel may never happen, which makes the ending of the movie version seem even more ridiculous.

I’d be quite interested in hearing what those who have only seen the movie think about the plot. To me, I think the film must be pretty incomprehensible. The concept of ‘Dust’ and daemons aren’t explained particularly well and events seemingly happen at random – the movie doesn’t flow at all; it’s one of the most stilted movies I’ve seen.

But we are given a brief explanation. Dust, this mysterious matter that can be viewed in certain types of photographs, is supposedly original sin. However, this Dust doesn’t form until children hit puberty. Therefore the shadowy religious organisation in the film wants to find a way of preventing Dust from forming so that it can keep people good and pure. To do this, they try and separate children from their ‘daemons’ (every person has an animal daemon/spirit that follows them around). And this daemon is basically a physical embodiment of an individual’s soul. So by separating a child from its daemon, the church is basically trying to perform spiritual castration.

All of this is interesting stuff, but while the idea doesn’t quite work in Pullman’s book, it’s even less successful in the movie. In the book the concepts seem clunky and a little confusing, but here they’re hardly explained at all.

The focus instead, as you can imagine, is on action set-pieces and special effects. And while the action and the effects are fine, they aren’t enough. They certainly can’t hide the clunky writing – none of the dialogue is there to build character; all of it just moves the story along. The script is sterile and exposition filled.

The screenplay also makes Lyra far less heroic. In the book, she’s captured by ‘Gobblers’ (child snatchers who perform daemon-separating experiments for the church) and then pro-actively leads an escape. In the movie, though, she doesn’t start a revolt – she just makes the facility blow up. To me this seems more like Arnold Schwarzenegger shit.

And speaking of Gobblers, they’re handled very poorly in the movie. In the book they’re these scary, faceless monsters that steal children for unknown reasons. But in the movie their true nature is revealed very quickly and they subsequently have none of the creep factor.

But then this goes for the movie entire. Nothing is allowed to develop. Nothing is allowed to build. You just have exposition-heavy scene followed by exposition-heavy scene with some action smattered in-between. It’s a deeply unsatisfying experience.

My brother and I used to refer to Days of Thunder as Days of Chunder (to ‘chunder’ being to vomit). In our estimation, the film was so shit that just to watch a few moments of it would make you regurgitate all over yourself.

So how did it fare this time? Was it as bad as I remembered? Yes. And did I puke all over myself? Thankfully no.

One of the most shocking things about this film is that it was written by Robert Towne – the guy who wrote the masterpiece Chinatown. But then you look at the screen and see that Tom Cruise had a story writing credit. You can just imagine him in script meetings. ‘Yeah, I want a scene where I drive really fast with a shit-eating grin. I want one where I almost die and subsequently learn important life lessons. And I want one where I knob some ginger chick who’s at least two feet taller than me.’

But you’ve also got to remember that this is the same production team that made Top Gun. That means that you shouldn’t expect cinematic excellence. And also bear in mind that uber producer Don Simpson was the sort of man who liked to have prostitutes drink from his toilet as he pissed into it, that he once had fat injected into his penis to give it more girth (unfortunately he ended up with a deformed cock) and that during the filming of Days of Thunder he was experimenting with testosterone implants...in his ass. The theory was that the implants would give him a steady flow of macho energy. Instead they leaked and he went crazy. Mental giants were not in control of this production.

To illustrate this fact, consider the scene where Cole Trickle (yes, that’s the name of Cruise’s character) and rival race driver Rowdy Burns (another great name, and one that perhaps suggests that the character perpetually has the clap) race each other in wheelchairs. You see, earlier in the film, they had quite the rivalry going on and it lead to a spectacular crash. And now that they’re both in hospital, they decide to have a chair race. Yes, they’re primary school children.

However, there’s a scene that’s even more spectacularly stupid than this. For some reason the head of NASCAR invites them to dinner and gives them a set of keys for a car that they can drive over. He does this even though they have serious head injuries and hate each other’s guts. Yes, giving them a car and not having them driven over by a limo would be a great idea. So Rowdy encourages Cole to hire a car so that they can have another race – Rowdy in the car that the NASCAR guy gave him and Cole in the rental. And the two men proceed to race across streets and beaches in their shitty automobiles, ruining their cars. And when they finally arrive for dinner, they no longer hate each other. They share a knowing look that suggests that this vehicular destruction was a substitute for a hard cock up the arse.

By the way, the term for ramming another car is ‘rubbing’. Therefore nearly half of the film consists of men ramming and rubbing each other.

Bearing this in mind, it’s not surprising that women hardly get a look in. Nicole Kidman is a bland prophet of doom who eventually sees the light and realises that happiness lies not with professional integrity but with being a subservient beard. And then earlier in the film we have a scene where Cole and his race team get pulled over by cops. Cole is pushed into the team’s truck and is then groped by a state trooper. It turns out that the trooper is a stripper with a gorgeous set of tits. But you see, just like Maverick was wooed by his woman dressing like a man in Top Gun, Cole Trickle likes some gender reversal too.

Something else that illustrates how disposable women are in this world is the ending. You see, Trickle wins Daytona and celebrates with his beard for about two seconds. But then he sees that Harry, his surrogate father (played by Robert Duvall), isn’t joining in. This makes Cole sad and the two share a little moment. Eventually Harry perks up and the film ends with the two men running after each other with shit-eating grins. Pussy is nice and all, but real ecstasy lies in rubbing another man in victory lane.

Second to the explicit man love, the most amazing thing about Days of Thunder is how stupid Cole Trickle is. He doesn’t know anything about tires or engines. He doesn’t know that you’ll knacker a car if you give it too many revs. How am I supposed to believe that? How am I supposed to believe that a racing driver that supposedly has a few years of experience wouldn’t know that you couldn’t just take a race car and drive it as fast as you can – that you have to have a little strategy? It’s surely too much to ask of an audience.

And then when Cole is injured he’s like a small child. He has to have an MRI and gets a little frightened because no one is talking to him. He then goes on to mention that when he drives he has a man who talks to him all the time. Poor didums needs someone to hold his hand at all times. He probably even needs Harry to tell him how to pee.

But one of the most stupid acts is actually committed by Nicole Kidman. And no it’s not the moment when she decides that Cole can park his car in her garage. No, it’s the fact that she goes on a motorcycle ride with him…without a helmet...after he’s crashed his car and has head injuries. Fuck me running, would you entrust your life to this muppet? A man who can’t control a car and who makes a living by wearing overalls that have Mello Yello emblazoned all over them? He’ll probably crash the bike and then have you piss on his face.

The only thing that saves the film is how outstandingly bad it is. Nowhere else do you find the line ‘we ended up looking like a monkey fucking a football out there’ in it. It’s entertaining for all the wrong reasons. I mean, it has Carey Elwes playing a smarmy scumbag racer. That’s got to be worth something. Not a whole lot, but something. Plus there’s a scene where, after winning a race, and while celebrating his victory lap, Trickle rams Elwes at full speed. Somehow Cole doesn’t receive a life ban for this. Perhaps NASCAR know what a prick Carey Elwes is.

Like a lot of Kubrick films, Eyes Wide Shut suffered because of raised expectations. Here you have a film with the world’s most famous director and the world’s most famous actor, and it’s all about sex. Therefore it must be an amazing two hour bonk-a-thon, right? But instead Kubrick delivered a quieter, more sombre film. It wasn’t the perverted fuck fest that everyone expected.

I can’t say that Eyes Wide Shut is one of my favourite Kubrick films. Some of the acting is poor, the writing occasionally is clunky and it runs out of steam with about thirty minutes of film left, but despite this, it doesn’t deserve the flack that it received from some of the critics – some consider it a piece of shit. It’s not the masterpiece that everyone hoped for, but it’s a mature look at marriage and sexual jealousy – it’s an adult film, but without the capital ‘A’.

The film’s central scene is the one where Alice (Kidman) and Dr Bill (Cruise) smoke a bit of weed together in their bedroom. They begin talking about a party they attended the night before and the members of the opposite sex they were flirting with. Bill was being hit on by some models and Alice was being seduced by a rich Hungarian. They both want to know what happened. But although it begins as a light-hearted discussion, things suddenly become more serious when Bill fails to show any jealousy over the Hungarian. His explanation that Alice is the mother of his child and that he knows she’d never fuck another man, is far too confident and far too smug. So Alice decides to cut him down to size and show how wrong he is. She tells him about a Naval Officer she wanted to fuck. And she wanted to fuck him so bad that she would have given up her husband and her child for him. Suddenly Bill’s happy, comfortable life comes falling around him. He realises that he doesn’t really know what goes on in his wife’s head and that his marriage isn’t anywhere near as solid as he thought it was. He gets smacked in the face with a heavy does of reality – women have just the same sexual hunger as men and they’re just as likely to be unfaithful.

This scene is one of the best in the film. Kidman is excellent in the way that she blasts a hole through Cruise’s smug self-certainty, and Cruise, while listening to Kidman’s story, radiates suppressed rage. For the first time he’s beginning to understand his wife – if he takes her for granted, everything will be over. And he also understands that he can no longer coast along like he used to. He might have a nice apartment with all the trappings of success, but if he neglects to work on his marriage, if he fails to take any notice of his wife and thinks that he’s indestructible, the most important thing will be lost.

To illustrate how clueless Bill is, there’s a scene where Alice and Bill make out in front of a mirror. Bill comfortably and smugly thinks that his wife is thinking about him, but we can tell that her mind is straying – it’s not only men who fantasise about fucking everything in sight.

After Alice’s confession, the film turns into a bad dream. Bill wanders the streets, consumed with jealousy at the thought of Alice being with another man. All he can think about is her cheating on him.

It’s here, as Bill goes from one strange encounter to another, that the film becomes uneven. First of all you have a scene with a bereaved woman who then declares her love for Dr Bill. The scene doesn’t work particularly well because the actress is so bad. She rolls her eyes and stares wildly, but it’s far too over the top. Then Bill bumps into a prostitute who offers her services to him. This doesn’t really work that well for multiple reasons. First of all, the prostitute is far too good looking. Since when have you ever seen a street whore who looks that cute? Then you have the fact that she seems quite clean, that she’s too shy to talk about sex and that she tenderly kisses Bill. It’s strange to say this for a Kubrick film, but it’s far too sentimentalised. I know the film is basically a dream, but even in your dreams a whore wouldn’t be this sweet and innocent.

Thankfully, though, just when you’re despairing, you have the orgy sequence. It’s not particularly sexy, but that’s missing the point. It’s a nightmare. It’s a vision of how despairing ‘free’ sex would be. There’s no passion to it. Everyone has a wall up – everyone’s masked. Therefore the sex is bleak and cold and depressing. This is what Bill thinks he wants. He thinks he wants an easy fuck. But unfortunately there’s no such thing. Everything has a price.

The orgy sequence is a showcase for Kubrick’s mastery of cinematic language. One of the best shots in the film is when Bill looks up to a balcony and we cut to a slow zoom onto a couple of masked figures. Here the film feels like a horror movie – the shot has a quiet dread that few directors could conjure. And then you have Bill’s tour of the mansion. The music, the camerawork and the lighting are all perfect.

The only negative in the orgy sequence is some of the dialogue. At one point a woman comes up to Bill and asks him if he’s enjoying himself. He says that he’s had an interesting look around. It’s banal in the extreme.

But then much of the dialogue is clunky. For instance, throughout the whole of the film, Bill has the habit of repeating what other people say to him. He does it so often that you begin to anticipate it and begin tearing your hair out when he does it for fiftieth time. ‘Would you like to come inside with me?’ ‘Come inside with you?’ Argh!

And like I say, some of the acting is atrocious. I’ve already mentioned the eye-rolling woman, but then there’s Alan Cumming. He’s supposed to be a hotel clerk that flirts with Bill. But Cumming’s accent slips a handful of times and he seems to think he’s in a remake of Are You Being Served? He’s so overwhelmingly camp that I’m surprised that he didn’t just reach over the desk and wank Bill off right there and then. It’s a buffoonish, tic-ridden performance – a complete caricature of a homosexual.

But worse than this are the two models at the beginning of the movie. There’s an English one who sounds plumier than Elizabeth Hurley and who natters endlessly about what a great guy Bill is because he got some crud out of her eye with a handkerchief (more crushingly banal dialogue), and then there’s another one with a silly name who genuinely seems handicapped. Her attempts at flirting seem like the wild flailings of someone with Parkinson’s.

Oh, and have I mentioned that the Hungarian Count is played by someone who resembles an Eastern European Roger Moore? Yes, in a way this is strangely cool, but for a serious film it’s a bit of distraction. The smarm made me almost keel over.

Another annoyance is the piece of music that seems to play every ten seconds. You know, the piano one. The one that sounds like it’s played by a chimp trying to learn to play a musical instrument. He’s so confused by the strange contraption that sits before him that he can only hit a key every five seconds. But yeah, although most of the music is great, this one piece appears over and over again when something ‘important’ is meant to be happening (like when someone is very slowly delivering a letter). A bit more variety was called for, Stanley.

So with all of these distractions it’s sometimes easy to overlook all the great stuff in the film.

Other wonderful bits are the scene when Alice tells Bill about a dream she had, one where she fucked other men and mocked her husband. And then there’s the scene where Bill watches his wife do homework with his daughter. He pretends to look lovingly at her but he can only think about the dream she told him about, and so this idyllic sight has been corrupted for him. And I also love the moments where Bill is stalked through the streets of New York by a strange man. No one can do quiet horror like Kubrick.

And there’s a pleasingly adult message to the film. That we shouldn’t take each other for granted. That we shouldn’t coast along in our lives and assume that everything will be okay. We need to work constantly on our relationships. We need to put the effort in. Because it’s easy to give in to temptation. But what’s more difficult and ultimately more fulfilling, is to maintain a deep connection with one’s partner. I mean, all through the film, almost every character responds sexually to Bill. But what would be the point of any of the liaisons? How would they make anything better? They wouldn’t. So people need to wake up and realise the importance of what they have. They need to stop drifting blinding through life, hoping that everything will turn out for the best in the end, because it probably won’t.

But still, that damn piano music and Alan Cumming and the models and the repetitive dialogue. You almost had another great film Stanley.

I find it quite amusing that so many Americans were outraged that Lars von Trier had the temerity to criticise their country without having visited it. We do it all the time, don't we? Millions of us are quite content to sit on our sofas and criticise China, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Israel and countless other countries without having visited their shores. And we're perfectly justified in doing so. So why should von Trier be vilified for criticising America from a few thousand miles away?

Well, of course, I don't think he should. He's perfectly entitled to his opinion, and those that cry and moan are symptomatic of America's biggest problem – its inability to take criticism without getting its pants in a twist. Surely every great country should thrive on criticism. It should help it grow and develop. But instead America seems to resemble a child sometimes, spouting unhelpful phrases like, "America: love it or leave it" or, "You're either with us or against us." Therefore a film like Dogville, one that refuses to revel in the hollow American Dream, is vital, and it's a film that should be embraced, not shunned.

What the detractors seem to overlook is the fact that Dogville could really be a small town anywhere. It may be the first part in an American trilogy, but the small town values with their prejudices and hypocrisy are universal; they're not exclusive to any one country. Everyone can relate.

The film begins and ends with a God's eye view of the proceedings and it isn't hard to imagine that von Trier is looking down on the characters, judging them. In fact, as Tom (Paul Bettany) himself says, everything is a game, a test, and von Trier is the one pulling the strings.

The game begins when Grace enters the town. The townsfolk are frightened, but Tom thinks it's a gift. He wants to see if Dogville has a problem with acceptance. At the beginning, the citizens are understandably cautious, but they're eventually placated when Grace proves that she can help them out. And so at the beginning she develops a good relationship with the town and its citizens. But even at the beginning the relationship is far from equal. She may like everyone, but she's essential a slave. Yet the townsfolk like her best like this, when she's happily subservient.

As the film progresses, the town is tested further. The police post wanted posters and accuse Grace of crimes that she couldn't have committed (as she was in the town at the time of the reported incidents). But rather than bring everyone together, the town gets cold feet. It wants to help, but only as long as it doesn't put them at risk. Therefore they decide to doubly enslave Grace to make themselves feel better. It's an extraordinary move, but one that is anything but far-fetched. Individuals are brave, but people have a worrying habit of proving themselves to be spineless.

And seeing as Grace affects the status quo, the townsfolk decide to take their frustrations out on her. The men rape her physically and the women rape her psychologically. In fact, the most upsetting scene isn't one of the numerous rape scenes – although Chuck's rape scene does prove the brilliance of the set, what with it showing everyone going about their daily business and turning a blind eye to what is going on - it is instead the womens' abuse of Grace and the destruction of her figurines. It's more than just a physical violation. It's a violation of everything. Her dreams are being smashed right before her eyes.

But why do the people of Dogville react this way? Surely their behaviour is an exaggeration. Well, it is and it isn't. Of course the film paints a bleak portrait of human nature that you might not find down your street, but I think that the film proves that we all have darkness present in us. It only takes the right conditions and the right buttons to be pressed for it to emerge. In the case of Dogville, it emerges for many reasons, but I think the main reason is because Grace shows everyone what they are. Before her arrival, everyone is happily stuck in a rut, but once she arrives everything changes. Everyone is faced with their mediocrity and everyone's lies are exposed. In one scene, McKay (Ben Gazzara), after having finally admitted his blindness, indeed thanks Grace for "showing us who you are", but during her time in Dogville she also forces Bill to realise his stupidity (by playing checkers for him), Liz her unattractiveness (by catching Tom's eye), Ben his loneliness (by providing for him), Chuck and Vera their unhappy marriage (by catching Chuck's eye) and Tom his cowardice (through his refusal to kiss her even though she's admitted her love for him). Needless to say, not everyone likes being exposed. It's hard to face yourself when you don't like what you see. And therefore the person that you're going to punish is the one that made you gaze at your reflection.

The ending is certainly bleak, but I think it forces us to take a hard look at ourselves. How often have we taken advantage of other people when we should have helped? How often have our intentions been selfish? And Grace's final actions suggest one thing to me: if you treat someone like an animal, you shouldn't be surprised when they treat you like one too.