About forty minutes into ‘The Expendables’, Sylvester Stallone’s thoroughly stupid tribute to the heyday of 80s action heroes, the film makes an unexpected and surprisingly scathing attempt to review itself. Jason Statham and Sylvester Stallone stand in the shadows of a doorway, taking photographs of the generic South American country that the infuriatingly over-familiar plot requires them to infiltrate. Statham breathes heavily, turns to his sweaty 64 year old companion, and asks, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ Then, in a moment of uncharacteristic intelligence and candour, Stallone confesses, ‘Everything.’ This seems a rather unforgiving assessment of his own film, and perhaps overstates its meat-headed awfulness. Still, as pithy self-reviews go, it’s not entirely inaccurate.

The plot – so groaningly over-familiar that it threatens to collapse under the weight of its own clichés – follows a titular group of mercenaries, led by Stallone, who are offered the job of putting an end to the rule of a cruel dictator in the fictional South American country of Vilena. Not that the name of the country matters; it could have been called Genericnationia or Kerplunkistan and you wouldn’t notice the difference. Still, the evil general must be stopped, and so the team accept the job. Statham and Stallone scout out the country and meet the general’s beautiful, disloyal daughter, Sandra, whose introduction genuinely involves a soft-focus shot, slow motion and some romantic music. The army soon start attacking our heroes, who manage to escape, but in doing so they leave Sandra to her fate. Stallone can’t bear this (he’s fallen in love with her since they met half an hour ago) and so the team return to finish what they started.

At its heart, this film seems to be a mastubatory and self-indulgent exercise in nostalgia, harking back to the good ol’ days where action films lacked any hints of depth or moral ambiguity. The production notes confirm this, boasting that the film aims to resurrect a time in movies ‘when men were men, combat was mano a mano and the story was believable.’ Well, two out of three ain’t bad. It’s certainly true that men are indeed men in ‘The Expendables’, and there’s plenty of ‘mano a mano’ action to go around. It’s like watching several raw slices of thick, vein-covered steaks punching each other and mumbling frequently indecipherable dialogue. Yet the occasional (and presumably unintentional) result of this abundance of testosterone is the rise of unmistakable undertones of homoeroticism. Men shoot each other, men stab each other, men punch each other, men tattoo each other, men even recite poetry to one another. It’s ‘Team America’ meets ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’. And the dialogue doesn’t exactly help matters – lines such as, ‘You two aren’t going to start sucking each other’s dicks are you?’ make the innuendo of ‘Carry On Matron’ look positively Shakespearean.

In interviews, Stallone has boasted how the script went through over 100 drafts. This is worth dwelling on for just a moment. It took 100 drafts to come up with something this headache-inducingly stupid, with characters so one-dimensional that no amount of 3D retro-fitting could possibly save them. Crucially, Stallone seems aware of the stupidity of what he’s doing – there are sporadic bursts of self-awareness, most notably when the anonymous army his team are about to fight and, predictably, slaughter are made literally faceless by the application of face-paint – yet this only compounds one’s frustrations. The action simply isn’t good enough for the film to be thrilling or exciting (much of the blame for this lies with the sub-Bourne ultra fast editing), while the levels of self-aware humour and irony in the script are so basic and predictable that it falls a long, long way short of satire. As a result, ‘The Expendables’ falls between two stools, just slightly too self-aware to be a big dumb action flick, but far too moronic to become an intelligently ironic tribute. Couple this with several staggeringly bizarre moments – the highlight of these being the film’s ending, with Jason Statham reciting ‘poetry’ – and some frankly repellent and simplistic political standpoints, and the result is a great, incoherent, mumbling mess of a movie. It’s not quite true to say that ‘Everything’ is wrong with this picture, but Stallone tries his best to make sure it comes pretty damn close.

Generally speaking, a press conference will stereotypically be populated by hardened hacks, cynical about their work and the celebrities they have been sent to interview, desperate to catch out the interviewee on anything which might qualify as a scoop. When faced with Sylvester ‘Sly’ Stallone, Jason Statham and Dolph Lundgren (best known as the evil Russian opponent in ‘Rocky IV’), however, a room full of journalists will suddenly turn rather polite, even enthusiastic. This may have something to do with the actors’ physically imposing statures – they tower over the room at a collective 18 feet – yet it isn’t just fear that wins over the hacks. Instead, the surprising truth is these beefy action stars are polite, funny, intelligent and (in Lundgren’s case) even a little shy.

Such politeness is not necessarily expected by all, particularly as we have already been subjected to ‘The Expendables’, the film they are here to promote. It’s a loud, brash, and extremely stupid film, so bursting with testosterone and manliness that you leave the cinema intent on starting a fight with a passer-by or shooting an endangered animal. This is primarily due to its stellar action cast: alongside Stallone (who co-wrote and directed the film), Statham and Lundgren, The Expendables stars Jet Li, Steve Austin, Randy Couture, Terry Crews (from those incredible Old Spice adverts) Bruce Willis and even Arnold Schwarzenegger. Stallone is the first to admit that he struck gold with the ensemble: ‘I could never have afforded Bruce and Arnold [25 years ago] – I mean, that would have been the whole budget of the movie… Jason – well, he’s a lot of money but well worth it. I mean seriously, £100 a week! It’s unbelievable!’ He laughs, and, whether because they’re charmed or terrified, the room full of journalists laugh along with him. ‘But things have changed now. I mean, prices are dropping rapidly. You are lucky to get work, so people who were getting ten million are down to two, and they’re going, ‘Thank you.’ But this was all favours; it was done really low budget, some of these guys almost worked for nothing… I certainly couldn’t have gotten Arnold and Bruce back then. Not a chance – ever. Just too expensive and too busy.’

However, as well-connected and liked as Stallone is, he wasn’t able to get everyone he wanted. ‘At one time I wanted Ben Kingsley as the bad guy and Forest Whitaker… And then we called Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal, but they had different ideas about their careers. I did the best I could!’ Stallone laughs again, and it’s just as infectious. Regardless of the film’s final quality, there is a sense that Van Damme and Seagal missed a trick by turning him down. Few action movies have been so hyped, due in large part to the formidable cast, even without the muscles from Brussels and the pony-tailed Buddhist. This has led to a high level of anticipation amongst action aficionados, and Stallone is certainly aware of the enormous expectations. ‘It’s a lot of pressure, because sometimes you come in with a film and you’ve got a major turkey and it’s not even Thanksgiving. It’s bad. But this time, this is the other end where there’s great expectancy, and I didn’t expect this when we started making this. So you want it to live up to expectations.’

In some ways, it’s surprising a film like this even got made. Stallone seems a little frustrated when he reveals how the film industry is no longer willing to take chances. ‘Nowadays, there’s no more, ‘I’ve got a gut feeling. I’m going to take a gut chance, and I know everyone will say no but I’m going to try it anyway.’ Well, that’s gone, it’s now all very scientific and now every actor is going to be weighed up to see what they bring from different territories. It’s like a math project.’ Then again, the pitch for The Expendables is a fairly straightforward and, it must be said, intriguing one – in describing it, Stallone, Statham and Lundgren all repeatedly come back to one phrase: ‘old school’. The cast saw it as a chance to return to the simpler action films of the 1980s, complete with physical stunts, big explosions and no subtlety in sight. For Statham – at 37 years old the relative youngster onset – such straightforward simplicity was a relief: ‘The good thing about when movies get made when Sly’s there, in control, is that he shoots a lot of the stunts in the camera. A lot of action directors of today tend to rely on the movie as a visual, and it becomes very boring because it’s a lot of CG and people don’t really care too much about it. So when you’re doing an action movie that requires real men doing real action, it’s an opportunity to do that, and that’s all we’re looking for. We can’t wait to get stuck in and do that kind of stuff.’

Stallone is keen to point out Statham’s commitment to such realistic action, and recalls how, ‘Jason does an action beat and he’s very physical – you’ll see it in the [DVD] documentary, his hands were in ice and he keeps leaping onto baked ground over and over, and he keeps wanting to do it, but I said, ‘Stop, stop, stop.’ Then the next fella who has to do it, his stunt guy, says, ‘Thanks a lot.’ It keeps building, and that’s why you have such a physical, physical, testosterone filled movie, because men are just naturally competitive and they want to keep upping the ante… You had to be tough on this show.’ But there must have been stunts that even the action-hardened cast refused to do? Statham pauses, before proclaiming, ‘I won’t wear a flowery shirt, no.’ Is there anything Dolph Lundgren is scared of doing? The 6ft 5inch Swede thinks for a moment, then, in his first comment of the afternoon, mutters, ‘Saying too much at a press conference.’

On reflection, such reticence isn’t particularly surprising from a star known for brawn rather than brains, yet Stallone reminds us that Lundgren is a PhD graduate in Chemical Engineering and a Fulbright Scholar, while the star of Rambo and Rocky isn’t too dense himself. Although he laughs off any suggestions of complexity in his art – advising one questioner to ‘go with Christopher Nolan, pal; I’m just guessing my way through this!’ – when discussing films in general, he seems surprisingly eloquent, effortlessly pulling apart studio politics and casually referencing the philosophy of Joseph Campbell. With this intelligence in mind, it is of particular concern whether Stallone is able to justify the huge swathes of violence in his film. He doesn’t seem surprised by the question. ‘I believe that the violence is very justifiable… The one thing in my films is to only kill people who really need to be killed, or [have] killers killing killers… Let me put it this way: the ones who deserve it get it – and get it good – and the ones that go after women get it really good, you know what I mean? People say, ‘Well isn’t that overkill?’ and I say, ‘Well, I’m not going to have a man having his way with a woman and wrecking her life, and then just shoot him with a bullet. It’s too civilised. He’s going to feel real pain.’ And I think the audience has this cathartic feeling… So I don’t feel guilty about it at all.’ He stops for a moment, then laughs, ‘But if you want me to, I will.’

It’s with little comments and quips such as this that Stallone manages to endear himself to interviewers, even those – myself included – who found his film far more banal and stupid than the mind behind it. Disappointingly, he later reflects how he no longer feels the need to pursue dramatic or complex roles: ‘I have kind of done my mind movies, and probably I think people are not really that interested in seeing me do that any more. I think I am past my prime in doing drama… Maybe it becomes a kind of pathetic cry out to be recognised as a serious dramaturge… I did my little moment, and am very proud of my drama, in ‘Rocky Balboa’, which is about as deep as I can go.’ Despite this self-deprecation, he appears to be much more than just another meat-headed action star, and seems capable of far greater things than just running away from explosions in slow motion. It would be a great shame if, at 64 years old, Sylvester Stallone really is content to expend his considerable talents on ‘The Expendables’.

After teasing us all with a series of promising single releases, Californian trio Best Coast have put out their debut album, ‘Crazy For You’. Fronted by cat lover and ’60’s enthusiast Bethany Cosentino, and backed up by her former childhood babysitter Bobb Bruno and drummer Ali Koehler, Best Coast give off a surf-rock, lo-fi buzz and emanate laid-back cool.

Inspired by the girl groups of the late-1950s and ’60s, Cosentino writes lustful, wanton music ‘about weed, my cat and being lazy a lot.’ The first track and most recent single, ‘Boyfriend’, moans on with a rather charming immaturity about an unattainable crush, while ‘Goodbye’ is louder and angrier, berating her lover for his long, neglectful absences. ‘Summer Mood’ is a woozy, grouchy grumble which calls up wasted warm days spent indoors and bored; ‘Our Deal’ is a cry-on-your-best-mate’s-shoulder number with a catchy, beachy vocal hook at the end.

The album’s paranoid flitting between bright-eyed puppy-love and sulky, grudging apologies leaves the listener both captivated and at a loss for what to expect. This is never more apparent than in tracks eight and nine, ‘When The Sun Don’t Shine’ and ‘Bratty B’. The former has Cosentino prostrate, clutching desperately at her lover’s ankles, forever reaffirming her love; the latter is a regretful, brooding lament after a break-up, descending into sullen repetitions of ‘I miss you’ while Bruno jabs out a steady, sombre melody.

The longest track on the LP (a whopping three minutes two seconds) is surely the most artful. ‘Honey’ carefully layers clever harmonies over a muted Bruno and opportunistic drumming from Koehler; the result is a dark, sexy clamour. But yet again, the mood swings drastically to caffeinated hyperactivity, as ‘Happy’ thumps away with rather annoying tachycardia. Two-thirds of ‘Each And Every Day’ is similarly aggravating, taunting the listener with pointless, puerile mockery, but a break in all the leg-pulling brings calm and a cute sing-along verse bubbles forth. The bonus track, ‘When I’m With You’, saves the album from a weak end with a return to the duskier sound of ‘Honey’ combined with classic surf-rock riffs.

‘Crazy For You’ is a very accomplished record, although at times the sudden shifts in mood threaten to derail the train. Despite these slight frustrations, it is all the same very listenable; Cosentino’s voice is enchanting, the lyrics simple but memorable, the lo-fi sound amiably old-fashioned. Ultimately, Best Coast resonate with a teenage and immature noise, and threaten to do big things once they’ve grown up a bit.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about crying in the cinema, mostly spurred on by the release of Pixar’s ‘Toy Story 3’. If you haven’t seen it (shame on you, it’s been out for weeks and it’s brilliant) I won’t ruin the ending, but I will say that you should be prepared to feel your eyes misting over (if not a complete fit of bawling). Yet as I sat there, it suddenly stuck me just how strange what was going on around me was. We were a group of hundreds of strangers, crammed together in a darkened room and unleashing a level of emotion that we usually try and keep from almost everyone.

Think about it. Outside of the cinema, how many people have seen you cry (infancy not included)? I think I can count the number on my digits. Maybe that’s just me being some sort of emotionally repressed tin man figure, but I don’t think so. I have at least some friends and have only been around three or four when they have been crying. And furthermore, how often do you cry at all? Of course some people are more open with their emotions than others, but I’d guess that, for most of you, crying isn’t a daily or even weekly occurrence. Thinking back over maybe the past five years I’d say there’s a realistic chance that I have cried more in the cinema than not (the more I write, the more I think that I: a. must spend less time in cinemas and b. seriously rethink parts of my life). Now this is probably not the case for you, but the ratios must be a lot closer than we might expect.

So what is it about the cinema that does it to us? Are our emotions so easily the playthings of directors and producers that they can exert some sort of Derren Brown mind control on us? We are all totally aware that the characters in front of us are fictitious, yet they are producing a reaction in us that we save for the most real and personal times of our lives. In the ‘Toy Story’ films they don’t even look like people, having instead been generated by a man sitting for hours alone in a room with a computer. This realisation verges upon the creepy.

But it’s not really that, is it? The people in Hollywood know that they cannot simply pull a lever that says ‘Poke Tear Ducts’ and produce films that will set their audiences off. Instead it is empathy that makes films connect with us emotionally. The end of the trial in ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ (which has been freely available to watch for nearly 50 years – if you haven’t seen it, shame on you) makes me well up every time I see it. As the black community of Maycomb stand to show their silent respect for a man who has tried in vain to push against a wall of prejudice, I begin to blub, and I’m lucky if I haven’t stopped by the end of the film half an hour later. It’s fairly obvious that I am not living in 1930’s Alabama, nor do I have any experience of suffering under such racial prejudice, but the film is convincing enough to transport its audience to a world where everyone can understand and be moved by the tale. It is empathy that I feel, not for the fictional characters but for what they represent: the far too real spectre of prejudice.

This is why it’s ok to cry at the cinema. The tears aren’t for the story that’s being weaved but for the realities behind the curtain. It is why you probably won’t see anyone cry at ‘Alien vs Predator’ – it’s rather difficult to empathise with Aliens, Predators or one-dimensional humans. The films that make you cry are, more often than not, the really good ones. Real thought and emotion must be put into the characters for you to be taking any out.

As I was watching the end of ‘Toy Story 3’, I noticed something quite strange. The group of children sitting in the row in front of us, whose attention had been fixated throughout the film suddenly seemed
to lose interest in the last moments. Feet were swinging, arms waving and one even removed his 3D glasses. The last scene means nothing to children still playing with their toys, while it means everything to those of us who’ve reached the day where they must be put away. For our generation, the empathy runs even deeper; it’s not just the symbolism of Woody and Buzz, but a genuine loss of a brilliant set of characters and films that we must also let go. There are few more important things to have a good cry about than that. And don’t worry about anyone seeing. Chances are the person next to you is weeping behind the 3D glasses as well.

As you take your seat for this most recent staged version of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, you will first notice a cat in tight black furs playing a violin and swinging on the bars of a cage. A Soviet-style placard will boast the name of the capital where the action takes place: MOCKBA (Moscow).

The setting is 1930s USSR in the arrogant age of atheism. But with the arrival of the Devil and the recent “publication” of a work on Pontius Pilate, the Soviet characters of the play are thrown into the dark and twisted world of the religious and the magical.

The whole design of the play is clever and sexy, with ostentatious make-up and costumes against a minimalist backdrop. A great performance of Margarita by Cassie Barraclough conveys the stifling atmosphere of this bureaucratic nation; she is a woman struck down by love for her Master, a severe hero character played by Ollo Clark. The fated lovers must have dealings with the ominous crowd of the Underworld in order to at last regain their freedom.

There is music intermingled with straight theatre and, although the cast are not a professional dance troupe, the exciting choreography makes a very stimulating and enjoyable watch. Matt Monaghan curiously pulls off his role as a talking cat, and Satan himself (Max Hoehn) is as much a comic anti-hero as he is treacherous.

There are moments of sobriety when the labours of a young Christ are seen in detail. Jonnie McAloon looks pure and tortured in his role of Yeshua, fighting the cynicism raged against him by Pontius Pilate (Joe Bayley), and these ordeals of the Biblical beings are paralleled by the agony of the modern lovers. Yet this is a political satire which should entice some laughter, and so the director manages to steer the tone of the play from the sombre to the height of absurd.

The plot is slightly unhinged by the rapidity of the story-telling, and the jumps between dialogue and musical farce are disorientating, but none of these criticisms weaken the play as a whole. The acting is strong and this adaptation of the Bulgakov novel by the student crew is ambitious and praise-worthy. The play is not in real-time and may be deemed complicated, but my advice to the viewer would be to leave rationale behind at the Box Office to become submerged in this world of madness and beauty.

The Master and Margarita is playing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival C Soco Venue, August 6th-August 30th. Go to www.oudsdobulgakov.com for details.

Wolfgang Tillmans’ work is effortlessly cool. He came to prominence capturing the clubbing scene of the 90s and in 2000 went on to become – with critics voicing just the right amount of indignation – one of the youngest artists to win the Turner prize, and the first to do so with photographic stills. But to describe something as fashionable is to duck one question and to raise many more. Fortunately Tillmans’ new retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery is proof of substance to match the style.

Tillmans’ casual approach (no doubt an agonised affectation) is almost his undoing. Some pictures are taped to the walls, others held up by big bullfrog clips. Tillmans is testing the boundaries of gallery art, challenging our expectations of photography and installations; but what was revolutionary for his Turner show is now in danger of becoming lazy and predictable. While the presentation brings an important sense of intimacy, tangibility and spontaneity to the exhibition, it also highlights a certain incoherence at its heart. The Serpentine Gallery is a beautiful space, but it is also a slight one. Its four rooms, gloriously lit by the sun streaming in from Kensington Gardens, demand tight editing. Tillmans instead adopts a kitchen-sink approach to his retrospective. A clear structure is hard to pick out.

It seems, however, that this is precisely the point. The artist is not presenting a particular theme or interpretation, because that is not how life works. Tillmans is at his most dull when he is at his most obvious, as three mixed-media collages in the central room make plain. On flimsy plywood tables, recalling half-hearted museum vitrines, Tillmans illustrates issues such as the persecution of homosexuals, but the stories told give too much away. Far better are photojournalistic works such as Heptathlon. Here a superficial blandness becomes an insistent and compelling call to probe further. Is the athlete’s distant gaze one of intensity or apathy, focus or detachment?

Tillmans photography has an egalitarian medium, which is to say that anyone can take a picture of anything. Such is the quality of his eye, however, that this never becomes a boring or indiscriminate principle. Eierstapel shows a precarious tower of battery eggs in crates. Hardly promising, but the play of light off the eggshells gives the photograph a pristine, pixellated luminosity. For an artist who made his name with shoots for fashion magazines like the Face and i-D, the power of Tillmans’ nature photography is striking. Though he retains a keen commercial eye (as a night-time picture of Times Square illuminated by Nike signs shows) these shots are merely insipid advertising in comparison to compositions such as Nanbei or the Wald series. The latter, a collection of blurred sepia C-prints, gradually reveals the outlines of a dense forest. It is impenetrable, majestic, and somehow threatening.

The range of subjects covered across Tillmans’ career has led the artist to focus increasingly on the act of observation itself. His more recent work, centring on the chemical processes of photography, is a real success. Constellations of colour-saturated abstractions dot the walls. Huge prints show the creation of colour in Tillmans’ darkroom, as chemicals spread across canvas like blood through water. Here are the beauty and magic of photography’s basic materials.

The strongest piece, Dan, unites the figurative and the abstract elements of Tillmans’ work. A man reaches to the ground, caught in an oblique, balletic pose. The photo seems off-angle; it has a strange momentum of its own as limbs and a background of crawling ivy orbit a shock of orange hair. Not all the exhibition works as well, but on form Tillmans has a singular ability to reconcile culture and nature, the fashionable and the fundamental.

Wolfgang Tillmans at the Serpentine Gallery, London W2. Until 10th September. Admission free.

Throughout the history of cinema, an ancient and relatively ignored phenomenon has existed, and occasionally flourished, right under the noses of innocent movie-goers. It facilitates the production of truly terrible films (not such an extraordinary occurrence in Hollywood, admittedly), yet incredibly, its jurisdiction is not restricted by space or time. Instead, this cinematic, syphilitic Time Lord is able to visit previous masterpieces and irrecoverably damage them beyond all recognition, rendering them forever unwatchable. And most curious of all, it is a phenomenon which appears to stem from an unwittingly suicidal impulse in filmmakers. It is, for want of a better term, directorial retroactive sabotage.

Put more simply, it is the act of a director making such a bad film, such an atrocious, insulting, awful, diarrhetic plop of a movie, that all his or her previous films, regardless of their quality, are immediately tarred by the same brown brush. They become terrible merely by association. This is, thankfully, a relatively rare occurrence, but can be observed nonetheless, so long as the director’s style is consistent. If certain techniques that were employed so successfully in one film are then used to unintentionally terrible effect in another, the quality of the former unfairly takes a hit. It is perhaps most noticeable, and certainly most notorious, in the case of George Lucas. The original ‘Star Wars’ trilogy became the Bible for certain lonely, fat boys (and some girls), and for thirty years, it remained, for them, an infallible and utterly perfect gospel by which to live their lives. They would wear a dressing gown around the house with the hood up, in slovenly imitation of a Jedi, they would make lightsaber noises whenever wielding anything long and thin (‘ooh, matron’, etc.) and they would practice for hours in front of the mirror, trying in vain to perfect the self-assured cockiness of Han Solo. But then, after three decades of happy obsession (and a good deal of crippling loneliness), George Lucas waddled back onto the scene to announce three new films, all written and directed exclusively by him.

The subsequent disappointment is well known and documented extensively, including the memorable over-reaction of one fan who, upon exiting a screening of ‘Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace’, cried out to the waiting journalists, ‘George Lucas has raped my childhood!’ You’d think the title’s multiple colons would have offered him a clue beforehand as to where the artistic inspiration for the film originated from. For those who had worshipped the original trilogy, it was as if God had cashed in on the record-breaking success of his first book and written ‘The Bible 2: Jehovah’s Revenge’, in which Jesus comes back to Earth as a ninja to snap the necks of all the unbelievers, whilst having his magic powers explained away by midichlorians. Leaving aside the fact that a ninja Jesus would be awesome, the fact remains that for millions of people, the gospel of their youth had been torn to shreds.

Although it’s painful, we must stay on George Lucas a few moments longer (after which we shall rapidly dismount him), for he is also one of the few directors in history to go back and substantially tamper with his previous films. Ignoring the nasal, asthmatic protests from his fans, Lucas physically and knowingly engaged in retroactive sabotage. Not only this, but his big sweaty hands were also not restricted to just one franchise. Working together, he and Spielberg dual-handedly pulled the good name of Indiana Jones through the mud with the thunderously stupid ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’. The title once again reflects the film’s quality, over-long, over the top and thoroughly unmemorable as it is. Fortunately for us, the previous films have just enough charm and resilience to survive this ordeal, while the sheer awfulness of the fourth film serves as a reminder of just how good the previous instalments were.

Unfortunately, retroactive sabotage is not restricted to films of one franchise. If the director’s style is distinct enough, his entire back-catalogue can be ruined. The most glaring example of this would be Quentin Tarantino, who, after two masterpieces (‘Reservoir Dogs’ and ‘Pulp Fiction’) and one underrated gem (‘Jackie Brown’), came dangerously close to volunteering this violent, sweary and magnificent triumvirate to the unforgiving retroactive treatment with ‘Kill Bill’. By upping the violence, foul language and stylistic ticks while accompanying it with an infantile and shallow script, Tarantino was placing his earlier work in grave danger. Fortunately, his three best films pretty much survived this treatment, just as they had survived the flood of imitation Tarantino films that infected cinema in the late nineties, with their non-linear narratives, pop culture dialogue and a bit of the old ultra-violence combining to no real effect. Yet Quentin is nothing if not persistent, and so, three years later, he triumphantly unveiled his coup de grâce: ‘Death Proof’. Appropriately enough, it involved several enormous car crashes. In one fell swoop, Tarantino rendered utterly impotent everything that had made his first three films so stylish and impressive, and his failure offered yet another example of this tragic cinematic phenomenon.

For would be filmmakers, there is one of two possible lessons to be learnt here. You must either avoid a noticeable style that pervades all your films, thus neatly avoiding the possibility of accidentally ruining your earlier work – as exemplified by Danny Boyle, Rob Reiner, Alfonso Cuarón and many others – or, if you insist upon maintaining a distinctive style, you must also maintain a high quality for all of your films. Very few manage the latter option, though some have succeeded, including Guillermo del Toro, Pedro Almodóvar and Christopher Nolan. Yet even if a filmmaker ignores these options and does commit retroactive sabotage, that is not necessarily the end of the story. Quentin Tarantino may have shot himself in the foot (and other more painful places) with ‘Death Proof’, but, against all odds, he managed a magnificent return to form with ‘Inglourious Basterds’, bringing his first few masterpieces back to their original quality. It is perhaps the first example of a new and encouraging phenomenon: retroactive redemption. One can only hope it catches on.