Deborah Ross

Deborah Ross is the chief film critic of The Spectator

Wednesday

Deborah Ross

Bombs and butts

Charlie Wilson’s War 15, Nationwide Mike Nichols’s latest film is a mixed bag and a stuffed bag and, incredibly, none the worse for either. In its rat-a-tat, rapid-fire 95 minutes you get bombings, mines, refugee camps, casualties, hot tubs, Playboy cover girls, arms dealers, cocaine, scandal, Tom Hanks’s naked butt (surprisingly delicious; peachy), CIA agents, world presidents — and all in a movie that is partly serious political satire and partly just a hoot. A film about America’s covert funding of the mujahedin in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan a hoot? Listen, I know a hoot when I see one, and this is a hoot. OK, so who is this Charlie Wilson and what exactly is this war? Good question. Top marks.

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Just get over it, love

Closing the Ring 12A, Nationwide It would be good to be able to think of something nice to say about this movie, if only out of respect and affection for Richard Attenborough, who directed it, but what? Nope, it’s just not possible. This so badly stinks. It is just so, so awful. After the screening I attended, the press were most generously invited to enjoy a glass of champagne with Lord Attenborough at a venue around the corner, but I could not go. Usually, I’m spectacularly up for a free glass of champagne. Ask anybody. But what if I were asked what I thought, and I could not think of anything nice to say, just as I still can’t now?

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Night of disaster

Honestly, Polish films. They come over here, open in cinemas — our cinemas; your local Odeon — and, if that weren’t enough, they are smart and they are funny and it shouldn’t be allowed. What is the government doing about this? Does the government even know exactly how many Polish films are actually coming over here, and stealing our audiences? It’s obscene. Why doesn’t someone put a stop to it? I, for one, would not be recommending The Wedding if I could help myself, but I can’t. Alas, self-discipline has never really been my thing. The Wedding is, thankfully, no My Big Fat Polish Wedding, which would be very tiresome indeed. Even the Greeks couldn’t pull that off.

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Restaurants | 8 December 2007

The new champagne bar at St Pancras Station — sorry, St Pancras International — is said to be the longest in Europe, which is fine, although I pity the poor person — a workie, probably, they get all the duff jobs, if they get any jobs at all — who had to find this out. ‘Hello, this is England calling. Can you tell me how long your champagne bar is, please?’ Perhaps it even aimed to be the longest champagne bar in the world but the workie quit after Europe, saying, ‘Forget it. Don’t you realise work-experience kids are only meant to fool around on the internet while everyone in the office ignores them?

Deborah Ross

Insight denied

Mark David Chapman killed John Lennon on 8 December 1980 as he returned to his New York home after a recording session. As Lennon entered his apartment building, Chapman drew a pistol, called out to Lennon, then shot him several times. This film, based on Chapman’s own journals as well as various transcripts, is told almost entirely in Chapman’s own words, beginning with an opening, raspy voiceover that goes: ‘There was no emotion in my blood, there was no anger, there was nothing. It was dead silence in my brain; dead cold quiet. He looked at me, he looked past me. And then I heard a voice in my head. It said “Do it, do it, do it” over and over again.

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Traditional fare

As the holiday season is all but upon us, I thought I would take a moment to reflect on Christmas movies of the past and the standards that have been set. There was one called Jingle All the Way that I liked very much indeed. It was about a man of foreign heritage who spoke in a heavy accent and had to go shopping for a Turbo Man toy for his son. This man was most amusing as he kept falling over into a fountain and even dropped a pile of packages on to a lady’s head and broke her hat. There was also a postman in the film who chased the man, and they both made fools of themselves. There was another excellent film, Elf, in which a man wore a green tunic and yellow tights in Manhattan and got arrested!

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Restaurant

From our US edition

My partner has bought a wood. Seriously, he has. He simply came home one day and said, ‘I have something to tell you.’ Oh good, I thought, he’s leaving me. Now at last I can get on with my life. ‘I’ve bought a wood,’ he said. My partner likes the outdoor life and camping. He’ll often go off for a few days, big rucksack and frying-pan bouncing off his back. I tried camping with him once but ended up sitting in the car for two days with the heater on, crying and wishing I was in John Lewis. I guess I am more the indoorsy type. He has, it turns out, bought four acres of beech and oak in the Chilterns, Buckinghamshire. Would I like to visit it? ‘You bet!’ I lie.

Deborah Ross

Botched job

Tell me, what hope is there left in the world when Harold Pinter, Michael Caine, Kenneth Branagh — and maybe Jude Law, should you wish to count him in — can come together and make a film as sterile, mindless, pointless and wearisome as this? I’d like to bang their heads together. I’d like to know just what they were thinking of. I suppose it looked good on paper, but even so. Once I’d gone beyond gasping at how anything could be this fatally amateurish, even my boredom got bored. Boredom, some say, is the greatest critic of all, although I wouldn’t go that far. Kenneth Tynan was very good, and Pauline Kael.

Saturday

Deborah Ross

A small jewel

Well, it’s not as good as Monica Ali’s book. I’m not convinced it does the book justice. I didn’t think it captures the book. Is it true to the book? And blah-de-blah-de-blah, but if you want my advice, which you should, as I am very good at advice: ditch the book. This is a film and should be judged as only that: a film. A film adapted from a book is no longer the book, just as milk made into cheese is no longer milk. It’s become something else, in and of itself. So there is really only one question and that question is this: is Brick Lane a good film? Yes, it is. It’s not flashy or showy and it is not going to knock your socks off, but it’s a small jewel of a film: gentle, languorous, humane, and acted with the utmost sweetness.

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Restaurants | 10 November 2007

Do you remember when, the other week, I went to St Alban, got lost and ended up in the wrong restaurant entirely, where I said, ‘Am I in St Alban?’ and was told, ‘No, we’re Divo, a Ukrainian restaurant. St Alban is over the road’? Well, what I didn’t say was that while in Divo I looked about me and thought: ‘Hello, hello, hello, what is going on here?’, which I bet you thought only comedy policemen ever said to themselves, but haven’t I just proved you wrong? I do believe I have. Anyway, I call my old pal Robbo (you remember him — he’s the one from ‘Leeds’, which I still can’t place — have you heard of it?) and ask if he’d like to come along. ‘What sort of restaurant is it?

Deborah Ross

Simple minds

This film is described on the posters as ‘a powerful and gripping story that digs behind the news, the politics and a nation divided to explore the human consequences of a complicated war’. Should you encounter this poster and should you have a marker pen upon you, you may wish to add graffiti beneath: ‘You wish.’ Is this vandalism? I would not consider it so. I would consider it only fair that the British cinema-going public is warned in this way. And while you are there, you may even wish to add: ‘This is tedious and insulting and barely even a story.’ Perhaps it was made more with an American audience in mind but, even so, are they this simple-minded? We all know they are always at least five hours behind, but this much?

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Poor Cate

Already, the word is out that Elizabeth: The Golden Age isn’t up to much, and it isn’t. It may even be a dog’s dinner although, I should stress, not our dog’s dinner. Our dog, Woofie, likes sushi, which he eats tidily with chopsticks before cracking the top of his crème brûlée with a teaspoon. You’ve never met a dog more particular. But I would certainly use ‘dog’s dinner’ in the way it is generally meant, as in such a mess. Now, the question is: where to start? OK, how about the paralysing banality of the supposedly romantic scenes? How about the Queen inspecting her face in the mirror and berating it for its wrinkles when she doesn’t have any; not the one?

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Restaurants | 27 October 2007

St Alban, 4–12 Regent Street, London SW1 St Alban is the latest restaurant from Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, who have almost mythic status as restaurateurs, and rightly so. They are, after all, the team that at various times have been behind The Ivy, Le Caprice, J. Sheekey and The Wolseley but never Garfunkel’s, which is weird but, hey, if it ain’t broke why fix it? This newest opening is on Regent Street but not on the groovy bit. It’s on the sombre, shopless bit south of Piccadilly Circus, and on the ground floor of a block so dreary and anonymous I miss it several times. At one point I even end up in a different restaurant entirely. Is this St Alban? ‘No.’ You’re not St Alban? ‘No.’ Who are you then? ‘Divo.

Deborah Ross

Cut-throat world

This is either a seriously good film with some flaws or a seriously flawed film with some good elements. I am hoping to work out which it is by the finish of this, otherwise I will have denied you a proper ending, and we all know how irritating that is. Eastern Promises opens with a throat-cutting slaughter in a barber’s shop — and why wouldn’t it? This being a David Cronenberg film — and then almost instantly cuts to the bloodied birth of a baby. Life and death, death and life, and all of it pretty brutal and all that. Nothing new here. Nothing to write home about. But, thankfully, the plot speedily and greedily surges forward.

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Familiar fantasy

OK, here we have a fantasy film and I absolutely hate fantasy films. They bore me to hell and back, plus what if one day I don’t actually make it back? What if I end up stuck for all eternity in some place where, for example, everyone insists on speaking Elvish and having three-day message-board conversations about the story arc of Blake’s 7 or the nuances of Quidditch before going back to work on the helpdesk at the library? I accept this is probably my limitation; that my imagination is a dried, shrivelled-up husk of a thing, which does makes it simpatico with my face but does not make it simpatico with this particular genre. But there you have it and there I have always had it.

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Restaurants | 13 October 2007

From our US edition

Now, let me see if I can get this right. My sister’s husband has a brother who has a friend who is friends with a couple in Zimbabwe who read The Spectator and are ‘very big fans’ of mine. I think that’s it. Anyway, might I email them, just to say ‘hello’? They’d be really chuffed. So I email and say, naturally, that should they ever find themselves in London they should get in touch and we’ll go out to lunch and, blow me, if they don’t then turn up in London (on holiday) saying: ‘Well . . . ?’ It’s not them who worry me. I’m sure they are the most delightful people, as they prove to be.

Deborah Ross

Shut your mouth, dear

Now, listen, and listen good, or I’ll come round and box your ears. Should anyone happen to say to you, ‘Shall we go see The Nanny Diaries tonight?’, you must answer, ‘No.’ There should be no need to embellish this. Just say ‘no’. It’s very simple. Practise it now. No, no, no, no, no. Should you not listen, and should you allow an ‘OK’ to pop out, you will not only prove yourself the lily-livered, pathetic, no-good shmuck I have always suspected you to be, but I will also have to box your ears — I know where you live — and I do not want to box your ears. Don’t you think I’ve got enough to do?

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Saved by Jim

Although And When Did You Last See Your Father? is probably not a great work of cinema, and may not even be a work of cinema at all — it could easily be 90 minutes of above-par Sunday night telly — it is touching and the cast are wonderful. That Jim Broadbent, can he do anything wrong? I don’t think so. I think he could recite the menu from Pizza Hut and somehow make it not just a must-see event, but poignant, too. How does he do that? I have no idea, as I know little about anything, but I do know this: Jim Broadbent saves this film, if it is a film, from what could have so easily been mush and sentimentality at every turn. And When...

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Gorgeous George

Michael Clayton is one of those American films about American lawyers doing American lawyer stuff which isn’t usually my kind of thing. And, anyway, didn’t money-hungry men in neat suits stop being cool or interesting in about 1982? But you know what? This is a pretty decent corporate thriller: tense, exciting, involving, and best of all it stars George Clooney, who is just so hot. I recently read he’d broken a foot in a motorcycle accident and just in case he happens to be a Spectator reader — and why not?; all the best people are — I would like to say this: ‘George, I am willing and ready to nurse you. Further, I know about feet as I have two of them and would have another, if only I knew where to put it.

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Not great western

3:10 to Yuma has everything you might want from a western apart from anything original or interesting, and as for Russell Crowe, he’s actually pretty crap. Obviously, I can’t say what the director, James Mangold (Walk the Line), who apparently fought hard to make this project, was thinking of. What shopping to get in on his way home? Do we need milk? Cat food? But the result is both dull and deeply unnecessary; a stinker.