Rating: 0.5/5.

Back in 2010, the original Human Centipede was a cult film for the morally depraved, and a reluctant must-watch for those who, like me, got tired of reading all the Facebook statuses alluding to the ‘horrors’ their friends had supposedly seen, resulting from the film’s unique premise of stitching three naked, kidnapped people together on their knees, mouth-to-anus, so that they share the same digestive system. If you haven’t heard that before, you may need several moments to let that sink in.

I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the sequel until I saw its poster and the tagline, “100% medically inaccurate.” That seemed to me like a big middle finger at the idea of cinematic veracity, the notion that a film has to be plausible to be worth a watch. Now that’s a movie I’m willing to get behind (so long as no one else is behind me, surgically.) And following the furore over the BBFC’s banning and subsequent unbanning of the film, curiosity got the better of me. And then did terrible things to the cat.

The plot is mostly concerned with Martin Lomax (Lawrence R. Harvey), a night-shift car park attendant, who is hopelessly obsessed with the mythos of the original film and dreams of the construction of a twelve-person centipede of his own. Gone is the clinical aesthetic of the original movie with the unhinged Dr Heiter, and in its place we have a mentally disabled mute who orchestrates an orgy of blood, nudity, muffled screams and, of course, faeces. Where the first film blazed a new path for the subgenre of body-horror, this sequel is just self-glorifying torture porn of the worst kind, following the already exhausted blueprint for protracted close-ups of mutilation, defecation, sexual abuse… ad infinitum.

Its insatiable desire to offend is both pitiful and laughable. “Look at me! Look at me!” it shouts, and then when you eventually do, it realises its own inadequacies and doesn’t know what to do next, so throws in some sandpaper-assisted masturbation for no known reason. It all seems very childish; though it does shock in parts (particularly a scene I’ll simply entitle ‘barbed wire rape’, which has disturbed my sleeping patterns ever since), surely horror films should strive for more than this? It fundamentally lacks any sense of drama, pacing, or emotional depth. Even the directorial decision to shoot in black and white angers me with its gratuitous sense of artful pre-eminence. Congratulations, Tom Six, your Palme d’Or is in the post.

The only redeeming feature I could find (or perhaps I was desperately trying to focus on something other than the next inevitable scene of ligament-cutting and anus-slicing) was all the dark oozing, reminiscent of Hitchcock’s use of chocolate sauce in the infamous shower scene of Psycho, which brings to mind a fleeting tie between the psychopathic mood of Norman Bates and Martin Lomax: both share parental issues and instincts towards senseless cruelty. But to make this shaky comparison is to give credence to a film that has no real point, even if it parodies popular culture with its ever-so egotistical metanarrative and shameless name-dropping of directors like Quentin Tarantino. When you add it all up, Human Centipede 2 is not just morally vacuous and ridiculously slapstick, but it is also one-dimensional and dull. That’s perhaps its biggest crime. With torture sequences failing to compensate for his lack of storytelling finesse, Tom Six’s creation is void of true art and a relentless waste of time. It’s not so much an exploitation of cinema as an exploitation of audience.

I love Grindhouse cinemas. London’s Prince Charles, Oxford’s Phoenix, and Leed’s Hyde Park Picture House are venues offering cheap tickets (the Prince Charles boasts prices as low as £1.50), intimate atmosphere (plush seating, theatrical décor, option to purchase alcohol) and, most importantly, great films. These venues are a joy for the true cinema lover and offer a welcoming breath of fresh air from the blockbuster, money-making, and honestly naff, rip-off merchant mainstream cinemas (you know the ones). Grindhouses delight in showing double bills, cult films, presenting themed-evenings, sing-a-longs, Q & As, and many different classics.

This weekend my girlfriend and I visited and enjoyed Hyde Park Picture House’s ‘Best of British UK Short Film Competition’: 100 minutes composed of ten short films from different directors on different topics but, together, forming a collage of British life. We sat in the balcony amongst several of the films’ directors with our voting sheet. Below is a rundown of what was on offer. 

Fixing Luka was a tender and emotional story set in a fairy-tale world with the characters being represented by animated puppets. It dealt with a sister’s attempt to ‘fix’ her autistic younger brother but ends in her eventual acceptance of him as he is. A visual and aural treat that left the viewer captivated and enthralled by the film’s world.

Abuelas masterfully utilised the technique of stop-start camera animation to explore the story of one grandmother awaiting the discovery of her granddaughter who was born in a concentration camp in the 80s and adopted into a military family during a time of loss and identity crisis for the Argentinean population. A delicate portrayal of how a real-life tragedy has affected one woman, it made one remember the stories of one’s own grandmother. The stop-start technique is beautifully taken advantage of to correspond with the story-teller’s old age, adding a shaky elegance to the story. 

Long Distance Information is set on Christmas Day and is a dark comedy that uses the format of a long distance phone call between a father and a son suffering from a strained familial relationship. As the father and son exchange boring and obligatory seasonal small-talk it soon dawns on both that a wrong number has been dialled and each man actually has no connection to the other whatsoever. The film did what a great short film should and built toward an emphatic ending that left the cinema shocked and laughing. 

Into the Garden of Glass and Steel was my personal favourite. It is a documentary slowly and beautifully exposing the modern architecture of Canary Wharf whilst a dramatic reading of words from J. G. Ballard are laid over the top. Shots of crowds of faces mingling amongst the modern constructions are combined with boldly spoken descriptions of them being elements of a failing nervous system. The emptiness of mass-market consumerism is strongly evoked with ample shots of busy escalators as the narrator remarks that moral decisions are not needed to be made any longer. They are built into the system. As the film ends, the speaker states that these buildings are not for humans now but for their eventual absence. 

Falling is supposed to be an abstract exploration of human interaction through movement. A male and female figure perform acrobatics against a black backdrop before colliding and performing with one another. This one left me at a loss and seemed to fade away before it had actually made a significant comment – perhaps that was the point.

The Fox elicited cries of disgust from my girlfriend, as we watched an old woman masturbate to the mating howls of foxes in her garden. After the sexual depravity, she cuts her fur clothing up and constructs a fox outfit. Then she enters her garden to live among the foxes. The film ends with the mating cry once again. Nice. 

Paper Hearts, like Long Distance Information, used the convention of short narratives building towards a shock ending by following the dysfunctional relationship of a father and young boy who makes the upsetting discovery that his father is homeless.

Baby was another personal favourite. It begins with a young Russian woman witnessing a small robbery at a bus stop. After alerting the victim to the crime, the robber begins to follow her. He follows her onto her bus and tries to make friends with her. The longer he follows her, the more the young woman’s, and the audience’s, feelings towards him turn from disgust and fear to warmth. He eventually follows her into her house and an almost-gratuitous sex-scene ensues. The film is clever in that it acts as a microcosm for the build-up and disintegration of a relationship whilst also leaving questions as to sexual and mental health unanswered.

Fifty was a shocking and nerve-wracking exposition of several characters sharing a bus-ride together which explored the different degrees of relationships – both internal (between man and girlfriend) and external (man and world) – which builds to an unsettling climax that uses the technique of CCTV footage to comment on urban violence in Britain. 

Mad Dogs and Englishmen was my girlfriend’s favourite. I thought it looked like a Red Bull advert on crack but could see the exploration of British patriotism it was trying to convey. My girlfriend liked it because of its bizarre and inoffensive humour. 

The Film Festival was a real delight and was a nice break from watching a whole film. You don’t always want a big meal of only one food type. Sometimes a tapas is nourishing and exciting. However, given its small bite-size portions it left me, for one, desiring just a little more.

The last few years have seen a huge growth in popularity for Wild Beasts. After being nominated for the 2010 Mercury Prize for their second album, Two Dancers, they released a third album, Smother, to further critical acclaim earlier this year. When I spoke to lead singer Hayden Thorpe about this ascent he remarked upon the comfort and security that it has brought to the band: ‘We play better when we know people are listening. When you have a lot of doubters in the room you have to play twice as hard and be more confrontational but now we have rooms full of people who are hanging on our every note and we’re really enjoying that connection.’ Although they were pipped to the Mercury prize by The XX, Thorpe was keen to acknowledge the importance of their nomination in granting them this stability. ‘It’s been a gateway [to our music] for large groups of people. The mainstream in Britain is really clogged up and stifled. There seems to be a lot of real dirge which gets in the way of a lot of music which contains more heart and meaning.’  

Indeed, the fact that Wild Beasts did not win The Mercury Prize is arguably a positive thing. They seem to thrive when faced with adversity and the success they have achieved, in spite of the divided opinion on their perceived theatrical style, has given them greater conviction in what they do. At the forefront of many of these criticisms was the issue of Thorpe’s falsetto vocal; an issue that he was keen to address. ‘People want the truth. I don’t know why so many artists sing in a voice not their own; technically correct but soulless. There’s no connection there. I feel proud and strong that people are voting with their feet but I still feel that there are so many people out there who could benefit from other music which could fill them with meaning to a greater extent than the flash in the pan stuff that they’re being made to digest.’

The frustration Thorpe feels with the current mainstream music scene is certainly apparent. In a recent interview with The Independent he said that it was still an ambition of the band to be played regularly on Radio One. There is a sense that this thirst for greater success and recognition is driven by the fact that the band are considered unlikely to be able to achieve it. When asked about the likelihood of this ambition Thorpe was positive. ‘I certainly think it’s possible but it’s got to be possible on our terms. My big issue with Radio One is that it’s very unforgiving and follows a very narrow view of what pop music is. I think the way they do it now is really archaic. It’s aged, it’s over, it’s old. We’re in a new era now.’

Thorpe explained that after Wild Beasts finish their current tour they intend to take some time out before releasing any more material: ‘It’s not really time off, just taking longer to write. We’ve earned the indulgence to enjoy the writing process and that’s what we formed a band for: to make songs together. You realise the scope and the possibilities and you swim in this ocean of ideas. You just need to decide in which direction to swim.’ What with their desire to bring their music to a more mainstream audience it will be very interesting indeed to eventually hear in which direction Wild Beasts choose to go. 

It’s impossible to avoid this, so let’s get it over with: just what has happened here? As The Times put it, the Dostoevsky of the streets of America is now venturing into the world of magical family adventures. The maker of Raging Bull and the leader of modern neo-noir, violence-galore realist cinema is filming a child-friendly colour-extravaganza. Is there any end to the late-life evolution of Martin Scorsese?

Apparently not if Hugo is anything to go by, and not for a minute should anyone think the change of focus means a change in quality. Hugo is easily as wonderful as a piece of art as any of Scorsese’s earlier efforts, and it is, of course, his most joyful film by quite a way.

That’s barely a surprise. What’s shocking is only that he can even do heartwarming cinema, and do it this well. Taxi Driver and GoodFellas might indeed be savoured for centuries, not least by this reviewer, but, my God, what a cost they may have come at. Namely, our being deprived of the maestro of the mob movie spending a lifetime rivalling Disney and Pixar for sweet childhood sentimentalism. If by the end of Hugo you haven’t let a tear slip down your face, or at least allowed the widest of smiles steal over it, then I insist on a visit to the hospital: your heart may have stopped functioning.

Leaving aside the decadently rich visuals, what’s just so marvellous about Hugo is how the childhood adventure gets wrapped up with cinema history in a way that makes the film turn into a glorious, Narnia-esque lecture. The subject of intrigue starts off as a broken automaton that an orphan living in the walls of a Parisian train station is desperate to fix, believing it will reveal a message from his late father. Before long, however, this evolves into an uncovering of the secret life of the owner of a toyshop in the station. Played by Ben Kingsley, this old man turns out to be none other than Georges Méliès, an early artistic innovator who has only retrospectively been recognised for his contributions to cinema. This allows for some small but fascinating insights into the history of film: from seeing how early prints were coloured, to learning how the first ever screening involved a train arriving at a station, the sight of which made the audience duck for cover as they expected to be run over. This is all a personal interest of Scorsese’s, of course, as a chief player in the world of film preservation. Here he gets to share some of that passion with us, and in doing so he gets us on board with overwhelming ease. His love for cinema is irresistibly contagious.

I’ve read several reviews expressing doubts about the ability of children to enjoy the film’s focus here, but I imagine it’s sufficiently interspersed with scenes involving Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest clumsy persona to keep even the youngest eyes hooked. Cohen’s character is a mean, all-suspecting station inspector, constantly on the lookout to catch Hugo up to no good. It’s a clear homage to the silent, Keaton-esque personalities that dominated cinema in the early 1900s, and it works a treat as punctuationfor the main narrative thread.

This is also the best (and probably the only good) use of 3D since Avatar. We’re treated to several of those trademark swooping tracking shots, particularly memorably in the opening scene. The impression of depth is no doubt useful here, and I respect the choice of embracing new technology. The jury is still out, however, on whether it’s worth the cost of nose-ache from carrying the weight of two pairs of spectacles, and the loss of brightness in those vibrant visuals that naturally accompanies the darkening glasses. If I see it again I will happily opt for 2D, and that second viewing can’t come soon enough. Hugo plays out like a dream. It’s a bundle packed tightly with history, comedy, a dash of magic and a dollop of warmth, and as the generations are united on screen, they’ll be united in the cinema too.

On the day I saw posters advertising New Year’s Eve – a blatantly opportunistic bullshit romcom packed with A-Listers, coming to us from the creators of Valentine’s Day — and a trailer for the new Mission Impossible (read: a new two hour recording of explosions and car crashes) — I also saw Moneyball.

On these posters I saw evidence of how Robert De Niro has traded in his status as cinema God and Scorsese muse for big pay-cheque, artless nonsense. Even worse (at least De Niro is old, and thus perhaps entitled to cash in on a long, prestigious career) is Tom Cruise. What happened to the dazzling young man of A Few Good Men, Eyes Wide Shut and Magnolia fame? Gone, apparently, and content to star opposite Cameron Diaz in mindless spy films.

Which brings me on to Brad Pitt, who provides the starkest of contrasts to these two actors and seems set on single-handedly proving all prejudices about the interests of Hollywood actors wrong. His recent run of roles, apparently inspired by a desire to make his kids proud in the future, is only rivalled in quality by DiCaprio’s. Just think: he has worked with Iñárritu on Babel, Malick on The Tree of Life, Fincher (for the third time) on Benjamin Button, the Coens on Burn After Reading, Tarantino on Basterds and now, in what’s being sold as The Social Network 2, the magnificent Moneyball.

The similarities between the two films turn out to be minimal. Both are, indeed, heavily dialogue-driven and revolve around serious boardroom meetings, and once more we have a delicious Sorkin script. But any assumption that the lines here are going to be equally rapid-fire fast and belief-defyingly witty turns out to be misplaced. Brad gets to spout out a handful of put-downs and discussion-enders, but nothing on the scale of Zuckerberg. When they do arrive, though, there’s a deeply amusing hint of Aldo Raine that sneaks through in the smirks of superiority. Pitt plays Billy Beane, a failed youth baseball prodigy that settles for management, but faces the difficulty of competing with teams with $120m budgets, contrasted with his measly $40m. Hiring an Economics major, his aim is to use stat-crunching methods to construct the mathematically perfect team, finding value in the market that’s invisible to the naked eye. He wants to do the equivalent of getting Wolves to win the Premiership, and in attempting to reduce an allegedly beautiful game to the bare bones of number analysis, he is of course ridiculed by old hands for perverting the sport, and also for dooming his club.

It’s a true story, and it’s all just quite remarkable. They may not quite manage to win the title, but we do see how after months of back-room manoeuvring Beane turned the world of baseball on its head. His Oakland team won 20 games on the trot — an all-time record – and inspired countless changes of tactics by other teams in the transfer market. The joy of Moneyball is to see the internal team politics and the struggle to try something new. There are thankfully few triumphant, Invictus-style victory scenes, and indeed there are generally few scenes of the sport in question being played. When there is, the music stays calm, not seeking out any faux spine-tingling emotions. Instead we’re just left with Brad, smirking and fighting the system, and loving it when he gets the last laugh.

On December 6th, David Guterson, author of Snow Falling on Cedars (1994), was awarded the 2011 Bad Sex in Literature Award for his version of Oedipus, Ed King, beating Stephan King and Haruki Murakami among others. The award was begun by The Literary Review in 1993, and is given to ‘draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.’ (One might excuse the modern novel by pointing to the Canterbury Tales; Chaucer’s ‘Merchant’s Tale’ features a young bride copulating with her lover in a tree (vividly realised with the phrase ‘and in he throng’). Past recipients of the Bad Sex past award include familiar names like Melvin Bragg, AA Gill, and John Updike (who, along with Philip Roth, has merited a lifetime achievement award).

Like the Bulwer-Lytton Prize, awarded annually for the worst prose, the Bad Sex Award is an anti-prize. Unlike the Bulwer-Lytton Prize, the Bad Sex Award nominees are not entered by tongue-in-cheek submissions. It takes the mickey out of writers we are accustomed to seeing as literary figures. Guterson’s sins, according to the Guardian’s reporting, includes using ‘quaint, prudish terms’ like ‘front parlour’ and ‘back door’, euphemisms like ‘the family jewels’, and having ‘the beautiful and perfect Ed King…ejaculate for the fifth time in twelve hours, while looking like Roman public-bath statuary.’

Perhaps it would be better in the committee’s opinion if writers emulated the close-lipped insinuations of Evelyn Waugh. In Vile Bodies sex occurs – presumably – in the gap between Nina’s saying ‘Oh Adam’ and ‘I don’t think that this is at all divine…It’s given me a pain’…’

Can sex be written well? It often balances between the extremes of banality and pornography. As a physical process – like the feeling of running, or childbirth – we are grappling with words which are clearly inadequate. Bedroom chat sounds painfully flat when repeated or written down.  

Whatever the struggles of writing sex, it is a relief in a world of literary prizes – and the literary establishment can easily take itself too seriously – to mock it all. The winners of the Bad Sex Award must like it or lump it, knowing full well that those who are sour or prickly look like wet blankets. To his credit, Guterson seems to have accepted the prize with relative good humour. He knows he will be read anyway.