MikePadgett.com

• Director: James McTeigue
• US/UK, 2005
• 

By the third instalment, ordinary audiences had just about enough of The Matrix and its red pills, digital rain and ringing telephones. Certainly there were strong themes underpinning that trilogy, but old Neo did a bit too much dodging of slo-mo bullets and not enough exploring metaphors. However, in V For Vendetta, the Wachowski Brothers set aside the sullen monotone of Keanu Reeves - hardly a masterly mouthpiece - and put forth V, a literate, Fawkesian loner who propounds polemic while swishing shortswords.

Credit for the originality of the story goes to graphic novelists Alan Moore and David Lloyd. In a dystopian, near-future Britain, a fascistic government rules the nation by fear and surveillance. Sounds more than a little familiar, doesn’t it? The key to it all is a young woman called Evey Hammond. Natalie Portman infuses her protagonist with humanity but little sympathy. Indeed, whilst she portrays the agony of Evey’s imprisonment and interrogation with extraordinary directness, many of the scenes she shares with the enigmatic V are rather flat. It’s a curiously uneven performance. The Stephens Fry and Rea do good turns in supporting roles and Sinead Cusack manages to turn a few lines of script into a exercise in dignity and understatement. As the eponymous antihero, Hugo Weaving has a tough brief, delivering a range of emotions from behind a mask.

High-concept movies can be a hard sell and this stops well short of Orwell (even when John Hurt reprises his 1984 Big Brother role), lacking the tension and claustrophobia of the graphic novel. Like so many of these “comicbook movies”, the filmmakers were looking for a broad audience instead of the truth. It’s a shame that V For Vendetta is about the extent of Hollywood’s bravery.

• Director: Guy Ritchie
• United Kingdom, 2000
• 

After Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels sold so well and Snatch showed that the grotty London gangster motif had mileage, Ritchie’s career seemed to go downhill fast. Perhaps it was because his limitations were exposed by unfamiliar material. Or maybe his vampire wife had taken too many creativity transfusions from him. Whatever the reasons for Guy Ritchie’s perceived decline, that perception may yet prove unfounded.

And lest we forget, before the hideous Swept Away and the dismissed Revolver all was grimy gold. Ritchie freely admits that much of the screenplay for Snatch comes from the leftovers of Lock, Stock and the two movies have been twinned ever since. So, having attracted Brad Pitt, Benicio Del Toro and Dennis Farina from across the pond, Ritchie gathered together most of his usual suspects and reinvented the wheel.

Among the many highlights of Snatch include Pitt’s beautifully rendered “pikey” accent, pop-eyed psycho cum East End thug Brick Top (Alan Ford), the late Mike Reid’s faux-Jewish family and yet another terrific soundtrack. There are nods here to Scorsese, De Palma and even John Woo. Time will tell if Guy Ritchie can return to take his place as an equal among them.

We took a train down to London recently to visit J’s sister.

It turned out to be a rare hot weekend in the midst of this disastrously wet summer.

But was London hot stuff? Find out now, after the jump…

For the first time in about five years, I will be taking to the wheels of steel again.

I’ll be joining the 6 Feet Underground collective at the Cathouse at the Brixton Telegraph for a special gig as a guest for the night.

Back when I was playing nights as a student to earn enough money to fund my degree, I used to be into Detroit techno and old skool Chicago house.

Now I will be dropping a selection of the weirdmess of sounds I’ve managed to accumulate in the years since, little of it what you would call dance music.

But it will be nice to hear some of my favourites out loud, a rare opportunity that I could not miss myself, never mind all the lucky people who willhopefullybe dancing to them and possibly wondering what on earth these unusual musica are!

So see you down the Telegraph, Brixton Hill, November 26th at midnight!

J and I have threatened to visit the National Gallery (and London galleries in general) for some time now, missing out on Hopper and Lempicka into the unfortunate bargain.

Finally, after such an uncharacteristically prolonged prevarication, or perhaps just laziness, we made it last Saturday, accompanied by J’s sister, and it was certainly worth an hour on the train with an unruly child kicking the back of your seat.

The National Gallery was not as large as I expected but that was a definite plus. We tended to avoid the middle sections that included Romanticism, Baroque and Rococo. At present there is a special exhibition dedicated to Peter Paul Rubens, but as with our last trip to the Royal Fine Arts Museums in Brussels, I still find all the swirling decoration of the Baroque style unpalatable.

The NG’s Quattrocento and High Renaissance collection is excellent. Early on in your wanderings through the western wings, you cannot help but be bowled over by Leonardo’s extraordinary Virgin and Child with St Anne. Perhaps the very fact that it has never been finished lends it such allure. St Anne’s face is truly luminescent.

Of the many highlights to be found deeper into the western wings, Agnolo di Cosimo’s (known as Il Bronzino) marvellous, allegorical “Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time” (shown below) strikes a particular resonance now a few days later. Angular, busy and beautifully coloured, the painting has a charm that few paintings surpass.

I had been looking forward to the Gallery’s one half of Uccello’s Battle of San Romano, a work that was truly seminal in its efforts to render perspective and immerse the viewer in the climactic battle between the Florence, its enemy Lucca and the latter’s allies. It did not disappoint, and the scale of the painting is awesome.

Other paintings I could now happily see in life rather than the pages of a book included Bellini’s “Doge Loredan”, Antonello da Messina’s “Saint Jerome In His Study”, Dieric Bouts’ “Portrait Of A Man”, Canaletto’s “The Stonemason’s Yard”, “Sunflowers” by Van Gogh, Caravaggio’s “Supper at Emmaus”, Van Eyck’s “The Arnolfini Marriage”, Holbein’s “The Ambassadors” with the weird skull, and “Portrait of a Young Woman” by Rogier Van Der Weyden.

These were just a few, of course, that we enjoyed during a great day on the whole.

Hotbed of the venerable London moccasin scene, Richmond has got it all. From Wagamama to Crabtree & Evelyn, all the shops were packed this weekend with the thirtysomething fritterati of our great nation’s capital(ists).

More after the jump…