★★☆☆☆
Two Stars

Life of Pi is a new, ‘magic-realist fable’ with academy-award winning Ang Lee as director and a huge digital-effects budget. What could go wrong? Well, a lot, is the answer. Don’t let the stirring electric drums of Sigur Ros and Coldplay (the cheek…) in its international trailer delude you – or the fact that it contains the only ‘pretty’ bits of the entire film.  If you want to see Life of Pi, you might be better off watching the trailer on YouTube instead. 

It gets off to a tortuously numbing start, which pointlessly illustrates Pi’s childhood in India. I know it’s called Life of Pi, but I don’t know if Lee’s literal attempt at a birth-to-mid-life-crisis timeline was the way to go. Sadly, this numbing doesn’t seem to subside once Pi’s actual journey begins. Even the disaster scene of the shipwreck seems futile – and frankly very mundane if you’ve ever seen Titanic. Which we all have. At 20 minute intervals I found myself glancing around at my fellow sufferers, updating my Twitter feed and re-re-checking the release date of Django Unchained.  If this was the rate Pi was going to live his life, it could have been 2013 by the time I left. I hoped it was 2013 by the time I left.

As a further criticism to this, we cannot expect the most radical and genius of wit to arise from a PG film, but at the same time, this does not justify the excruciating surrogates which surfaced. Yes, the schoolboy ‘pissing’ pun on Pi’s (hilariously witty) full name ‘piscine’ did make a few 8 year-olds crow with laughter, but I, along with the premiére-seat pensioners at the back, wasn’t even going to try to change my deadpan expression. When I found myself smiling, it was at the shots of overfed hippos grazing to a badly, badly judged majestic overture.

So, what is good about Life of Pi?  If nothing else, its digital effects are incredible. The CGI tiger Richard Parker is remarkably lifelike and so should be, starring as the supporting act – or even protagonist. It wasn’t hard to be on a more similar wavelength as those tiger-shaped pixels than the infuriatingly irrational Pi.  Lee does also succeed in breaking the stagnancy of Pi’s journey by whisking us now and then into a glittering and kaleidoscopic unreality (not always making sense), which somewhat illuminates Pi’s daily, and frankly quite pedestrian, lifeboat ritual. Why that whale illustrated in the trailer turns fluorescent, God knows. And even still, the whale’s visual perfection does not, in any way, justify IMDB’s ludicrously high rating of 8.4, which surpasses even James Cameron’s Avatar. It is, without doubt, an optical masterpiece though. What I expect happened was that Lee got a bit too happy over the CGI, and forgot he was supposed to be directing a film. Not an incongruous, 2 hour long advert.

The cherry on top of this cinematic let-down though was, without doubt, its infuriating / anticlimactic / ‘…really?’ / void ending. As the screen fades to black, the spectator silently wills that Lee will pull something startling out of the bag at the last second: Reversal of expectation? Catharsis? The return of Richard Parker? Unsurprisingly, the audience is left (in my experience, at least,) exasperated. Pi’s wife in Canada isn’t even his childhood sweetheart: a satiating ending which even the simplest of films could master. Yes, that girl whose name we can’t remember, but who for some reason was allowed to consume at least 15 minutes of valuable screen time.

If anything, the film is a bombsite (or shipwreck) of unanswered questions and ambiguity. With a middle-aged Pi banging on about ‘believing in God’, and a junior-school Pi trying to follow three religions, you’d think the teenage Pi would encounter one or two instances of divine intervention. Apparently not. So, does the story make you believe in God? Not really. Does the story make you believe in anything? Thanks to the film’s superfluous digital effects, I’d be inclined to say no. If you’d like to pay £7.45 for post-trailer betrayal and a trippy daydream (nightmare?) go and see Life of Pi.  If you want to watch a film, go and see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

It was an ambitious move on the part of Emmy the Great and Tim Wheeler to schedule their special London Christmas gig on the same night as The Pogues’ only UK show of 2012. After all, ‘Fairytale of New York’ has been cemented in the country’s musical consciousness as everyone’s favourite Christmas song since before Emmy picked up a guitar. But on the 20^th December, 2012 the night before the apocalypse (as Tim repeatedly reminded the audience), one of indie music’s cutest couples managed to capture the Christmas spirit perfectly for everyone who crammed into Scala.

The audience was given a clue as to what the night might bring when Emmy, possibly fearing that her fans might be suffering from boredom, came on stage in between the two support acts to talk about the book series ‘Sweet Valley High’, which is for "teenagers and people with, you know, hearts", in her words. After a brief reading from the book, which is about a girl with an evil twin who is identical apart from "a mole on her left shoulder, ew", Emmy proceeded to list the many and outlandish deaths which occur throughout the series including "Luke, silver bullet". And that wasn’t the end of the out-of-the-ordinary warm-up acts: after the two support bands, Pete the Magician took the stage, performed a few unorthodox card tricks involving a loaf of bread before stripping down to nothing but colourful underpants, a vest, a sweatband and socks, then leaving to rapturous applause.

From then on, it was all Christmas as Emmy & Tim, arriving on stage to an instrumental cover of ‘We’re Walking In the Air’ complete with electric guitars, launched into their re-released Christmas album, ‘This Is Christmas’ with tinsel on their microphones and a light-show of snowflakes playing across the walls. Christmas is a time for otherwise unbearable cheesiness, and they certainly managed that, gazing into each other’s eyes throughout ‘Snowflakes’. But the humour of the night was key, and continued with ‘(Don’t Call Me) Mrs. Christmas’, a lament on behalf of Santa’s wife, a very neglected woman this time of the year ("probably shagging an elf" according to Emmy, which "might not be so bad" according to Tim). Another highlight of the pair’s incredible showmanship came when the lights went down and the surround sound went crazy to introduce ‘Zombie Christmas’; terror reigned as the support acts came on stage in horrifying make-up and staggered into the crowd hunting for brains.

Their Christmas album wasn’t the only source of material though, with Emmy & Tim drawing on classics such as ‘Sleigh Ride’, as well as The Ramones’ ‘Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want To Fight Tonight)’ and even E17’s ‘Stay Another Day’, a thoroughly surreal experience complete with arm-swaying and lighters in the audience. Inevitably, the show closed with joyful dancing and singing along to ‘Fairytale of New York’ before the whole cast of Emmy & Tim’s Christmas extravaganza came on stage for a final bow. Apparently they intend to make this a tradition so, to quote one of the pair’s songs, "see you next year".

This was it. All other events had been leading up to this one moment; all
other paths led here. It was my beginning, and there would be no going back.
Next stop, Broadway. That’s right, I was playing Mary in the school nativity.

My commitment to the role could not be denied – ask my parents. For
weeks I had walked around the house cradling the toy that would be baby Jesus, despite it looking suspiciously like a rag doll. However this didn’t matter, as I was in the zone. Everything was rehearsed (you couldn’t just wing this kind of thing), and although Rahoul was a less than convincing Joseph, I knew that I could compensate for this, and it would be glorious.

Because it really does matter, the nativity, and for a long time I wasn’t sure why: living in a 21st-century secular society, why do schools across the country persist in putting little children through the embarrassment of re-enacting the birth of Jesus in a stable? Is it the lack of budding children’s playwrights? Perhaps. But really, it’s all about establishing a hierarchy early on in children’s school life. We all know it’s not about the Northern Star, or Angel Gabriel. It’s barely about Jesus; it’s about who gets to play Mary and who gets to play the Donkey. It’s about hierarchy people.

This was the first, and indeed the last year, I bagged the starring role of
Mary; before then I’d always had a less than conspicuous role. Once I was even a snowman, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t in the original story, it being set in Bethlehem, AD 1 and all. Another year I was one of the three wise men, and given a beard courtesy of a board marker. I know what you’re thinking: ‘One of the three wise men? Not bad!’ But I was the one with the myrrh, and as Life of Brian teaches us, that’s the one no one cares about. Thus, the year I became Mary was quite a step up on the hierarchy – the ultimate step in fact.

So I don’t know what happened – the pressure of being at the top of the
hierarchy perhaps – but on opening night in the school assembly hall, I lost it. As Rahoul and I approached the two chairs on which we were to sit, he sat on the wrong chair. My chair. The better chair on which it had been agreed in rehearsals I would sit upon. He sat on Mary’s chair, not even Joseph gets away with that.

The saintly composure I’d been perfecting for several days went out the
window; the three wise men backed up in fear, and the boy playing the tree in
the corner quivered as I directed Joseph, with the use of contemptuous shouting and a pointed index finger, to sit where he was meant to. I thought I’d styled it out pretty well. He sat on the correct chair.

However, looking back on the video now, as I hear the laughs of the
parents and see Angel Gabriel roll his eyes to the heavens I wonder to myself
if it was all worth it. Sure, it was glorious, and the rest of my performance was
faultless, as I was at the top of my game. But alas, is this what childhood is about? Should anyone be given such a powerful position at such a young age? I don’t know, but just like all young stars, I melted under the spotlight, and brought what could have been a beautiful acting career to an abrupt end. I don’t know what happened to Rahoul.

There’s a great moment in the final episode of Misfits (Series 4) which stands out for me: the gang are pondering how to break into a nunnery (long story, but imagine a pretty classic Misfits set-up), only for one of them to suggest they actually use the superpowers that originally formed the concept for this series.

All agreed, one of the four, Finn, mutters, "We should really use them more often". It’s a great line, characteristic of the series’ self-deprecating humour and an awareness of the different direction the plot has taken (of which, more below). In fact, it was funny enough that it almost undermined all my reservations about the recent series. But not quite.

Series 4 of Misfits has been a slightly patchy affair, somewhat crippled by the departure of almost all the original cast members, with the last remaining figures done away with by about halfway through the series. The shifting nature of the central group and the departure of long-standing characters means that there was too much time that had to be spent in introduction, and it was only by the final episode that the group dynamic seemed to be nailed down.

It isn’t that this series wasn’t without its good points; an episode centred around a murderous besuited bunny golfer was a highlight both in terms of visuals and action, while in another episode, introducing a third, psychotic double for multiplier Rudy nearly proved a masterstroke, but it fizzled out rather anticlimactically, and it was disappointing that Rudy had no cathartic final confrontation with that part of himself.

The new characters slotted easily into the show’s world, drawn quickly and clearly: angsty Finn, stubborn Jess, amnesiac Abbey and Alex, the mysterious barman, joining Rudy, (and his morose double Rudy 2). And certainly, the show lost none of its aesthetic or tone; sharp banter, greying filters, bleak, concrete disaffection and ultraviolence. 

But that one throwaway line still says a lot to me about how much the series has abandoned its roots. When Misfits began, the primary storyline was the ‘superpowers’ that the main characters had, and how it changed their lives, but by series 3, when the cast were given new powers, the protagonists’ powers seemed largely irrelevant to that action. In the latest series, the powers given actually seemed perfunctory: while previously they related to some aspect of a character’s suppressed desires, now they just seem slightly random. 

The original cast wondered whether they received their powers for a reason; as it turns out, they didn’t, and subsequently an apparently unlimited number of people (seemingly dependent on how much fresh plot-material is required for any given episode) were given powers too. Of the original cast three died, one was imprisoned in Las Vegas and one moved to Africa off-screen. Everything those characters went through, all the trials and tribulations essentially amounted to nothing – and it’s hard to stay enthused about a show that doesn’t seem to have any purpose or direction, or even any belief in meaning at all- the bleak cityscape seems, somewhere in the course of this series, to have obscured even the faintest rays of sunshine. 

I may be being slightly harsh; series 3 had wrapped up a lot of the loose ends, and the departure of the cast presumably wasn’t the writers’ ideal situation either. And with the new cast members established, series 5 (if commissioned) has a solid chance of delivering a more consistent and cohesive programme. And the series has still been a lot of fun to watch, but it just seems like with a lot of what originally made the show so refreshing (superpowers; innovative inclusion of social network activity and videos online) has either been scrapped or has become stale with overuse (violence, crudity and bleak tone) to a point where the series seems like a (much darker) shadow of its former self.