This year we lost Leslie Nielsen, the inimitable comic performer who featured in over one hundred films and countless television programmes but will be especially remembered for his roles in surreal spoof films, such as Airplane and Naked Gun.

Born and raised in Canada, as the son of a Danish-born Mountie and a Welsh immigrant who had moved from Fulham, he trained as a gunner for the Royal Canadian Air Force towards the end of the Second World War, but was too young to be shipped out. He went on to study theatre and music in New York and began his career in 1950s live television, first appearing alongside Charlton Heston for 75 dollars. He moved on to play the leading man in many dramas before finding his true calling, aged 54, in the comic movie.

His impressive CV of serious dramatic roles made him all the more perfect for deadpan Dr Rumack in the 1980 disaster-movie spoof Airplane!. Director and writer David Zucker has described how his greatness lay in the fact that he never ‘winked’: Nielsen played his part in this ludicrous goofball comedy as if he had not the slightest hint of its comedic value. When his character announces ‘This woman has to be gotten to a hospital’ and Julie Hagerty’s character responds ‘A hospital? What is it?’, he replies earnestly ‘It’s a big building with patients, but that’s not important right now.’ The wholly serious delivery of silly lines like these characterised his performance in this hugely successful comedy and went on to become something of a Nielsen trademark.

A new niche for Nielsen and his impeccable comic timing, as showcased in Airplane!, opened up in the form of tongue-in-cheek parodies. Just as Airplane! playfully spoofed the 1970 melodrama Airport and the whole of the disaster film genre, Top Gun and other police dramas came under fire in the joyfully irreverent Naked Gun trilogy of the later 80s and early 90s. Again, David Zucker directed and again, Nielsen’s comic intensity shone through. Indeed, Airplane! had brought back a playful breed of comedy film based upon inventive slapstick, absurd visuals and mischievous wordplay. Already reminiscent of much earlier filmmaking, such as that of the Marx brothers, Nielsen’s films added a dimension of parody and spoof, now that there was such a body of po-faced cinematic work to be imitated and mocked.

The enormously successful Pink Panther films, which began in the 1960s under the direction of the much-revered and recently deceased Blake Edwards, had already began to put Hollywood on this path with Peter Sellers and co parodying the well-worn detective genre. Airplane!‘s breed of comedy is, however, quite distinct from that of the Pink Panther series, as is Nielsen’s deadpan panache from the larger-than-life style of Sellers, who had already established a comic reputation in The Goon Show.

Airplane!‘s laugh-a-minute, incoherent and surreal style of spoof has spawned many similar parodies in its wake, such as the Scary Movie franchise, in which Nielsen himself has made a cameo appearance. Other spoofs, however, have started to move away from the light-hearted, absurd tone of the comedies we associate with Nielsen: whilst Nielsen’s deadpan performance contrasts with the silly chaos around him in his films, some more recent parody films such as Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007) from this side of the Atlantic, have an all-round comic seriousness in their tone and execution whilst some American comedies, such as Zombieland (2009), want to be taken seriously at several points, with genuinely scary or romantic scenes, which make humour take the backseat.

When Leslie Nielsen stars, the comedy of a scene is never muted or relegated to second place. This top-class performer will always be remembered for being hilariously serious and seriously hilarious.

ELLA: I’ve recently discovered just how much I choose books by their titles. I’ve always been a fan of judging by covers: I mean, if I’m going for a light-hearted holiday read, surely I’m far more likely to enjoy something that’s bright and quirky,perhaps with glittery letters, than something that attempts to sell itself with a bland close-up of a generic miserable looking woman in period dress. But it was only last time I looked at what I’d grabbed in the Waterstones 3 for 2 offer – The Elegance of A Hedgehog, We Are All Made of Glue, and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – that I realised how completely incapable I am of buying a book with an ordinary name.

So this Christmas, what bizarre titles will I be hoping to find under my tree? Well, I’ve had my eye on Kate Atkinson’s latest Jackson Brodie novel Started Early, Took My Dog for a while – I love the way she combines chilling murder stories with playful humour. Continuing with the animal theme, I can’t wait to get my hands on Sharon Creech’s Hate That Cat, a long-awaited companion to the unclassifiable poem/novella/diary Love That Dog. And I have to admit a slight curiosity for Coconut Unlimited by Nikesh Shukla, the story ofa group of private-school Asian teenagers who can’t quite pull off the gangster look. I didn’t say the titles had to be good; they just can’t be boring!

Maybe next time a relative asks what I want for Christmas, I should simply direct them to AbeBooks’ ‘Weird Book Room’. A brief glance at the titles on offer, from The Recently Deflowered Girl to Old Tractors and the Men Who Love Them, makes my current wish list look downright conventional.

CHRISTY: Regardless on your stance on the death of the author, writers’ letters are wonderfully fragmented collections of writings on art and craft, fame, and literary gossip, perfectly suited to the irregular reading life of a student. 2010 has been a good year for my obsession. The letters of two literary giants and Nobel winners on opposite sides of the Atlantic, Samuel Beckett and Saul Bellow, are constant attractions at Blackwell’s, as is Philip Larkin’s Letters to Monica and Iris Murdoch: a Writer at War.

Following introductions to Roberto Bolaño and Jorge Luis Borges, I’ve developed a taste for Spanish literature. Javier Marias’ Your Face Tomorrow trilogy – which James Lasdun has called ‘a work of supreme lunacy’ in the vein of Cervantes and Sterne – has won both attention and praise. Marias, who lectured in Spanish literature and translation at Oxford in the 1980s, used the city to serve as a backdrop for his novel All Souls, and I’m interested in the possibilities of his fusion of ‘Spanishness’ and ‘Englishness’. On a more adventurous note, the latest issue of Granta (#113) – attractively lemon-yellow, reminding us that the sun will come back eventually – is dedicated to the work of young and largely unfamiliar Spanish novelists. ¡Feliz Navidad!

We all search for them, even if we might not accept it.
We certainly miss them. And in a cold and dark December night we might even pay for them…

I am talking about emotions, feelgood ones, the kind of emotions you will only get from a perfect night at the theatre with a musical.
How about a classic one? A show where you sing along knowing all the lyrics by heart? Songs such as Do-re-mi, My Favourite Things, The Sound of Music will, I am sure, ring a bell or two.

This production was originally written by Rodgers and Hammerstein and was then adapted into the famous 1965 film with Julie Andrews. Let’s indulge in an unnecessary synopsis of the plot: Maria is to become a nun, but seems to be unfit for the role, and so she is sent to work as governess to the seven children of the naval officer Captain Georg Von Trapp. Thanks to her singing skills, joyful character and utter kindness, Maria conquers the whole family, including the captain. Then comes adventure, love, and, after a few bumps on the road, the inevitable happy ending to the strains of nuns singing. Of course music and the power it nurtures lie at the core of this show, for it is thanks to music that Maria and the Captain discover and face their feelings for each other. It is thanks to music once again that they escape from the Nazis towards the end.

Everything you can think of as entertaining is concentrated in this show: colourful sets and costumes, cheerful and straight forward acting and most of all clear and crisp singing from Maria (Connie Fisher and Philippa Buxton) and the rest of the cast.

In this magical world of music hall glossiness everything seems to work, the relationships are one-dimensional and surprisingly easy, everyone believes in feelings of love and righteousness. Life is simply “a white page to write on” as the song Sixteen going on Seventeen optimistically states. Whether or not you believe in such a rosy vision of life is not the question, it is more about indulging for a few hours, and really, what harm can it do, a little fairy tale in the wintery hour of the year?

The subject of faith should really be incompatible with cinema. The internal, silent struggles of religious men are seemingly completely at odds with visual excitement or insight, while a profound topic can often be dealt with all too flippantly or resolved far too tritely when presented on celluloid. Yet with Of Gods and Men, director Xavier Beauvois has shown that little needs to be said in order to portray compellingly the Manichean struggle between mortality and immortality. It is a film concerned largely with indecision, as psychological and spiritual turmoil are emblazoned painfully across the lined, ancient faces of its ensemble cast, and is a testament to the mantra that less is undoubtedly more.

Set in an Algerian monastery in the Atlas mountains, the film patiently shows us the ascetic, exacting existences of the seven monks who live there. For the first half an hour, the camera merely follows the monks as they go about their daily rituals – praying, bee-keeping, reading, ploughing the fields – and avoids any obvious or forced drama. These are men whose lives are lived at a slower, more considered pace, and Beauvois never allows his film to out-run its subjects. Indeed, the camera rarely moves, while there is no soundtrack or incidental music.

Yet rather than boring its audience, this artistic minimalism and reserve pay off greatly. From the first shot, there is an invaluable sense of authenticity being created, while this is aided by the impressively naturalistic performances of the central cast and an intelligently restrained script. Exposition is never indulged in, as the film shows rather than tells.

Soon, conflict arrives in the form of Islamic extremism. Villagers are being threatened and occasionally murdered, while in one particularly traumatic scene, an entire group of Croatian workers have their throats slit, with Beauvois dislodging the camera from its previously static position to lend the moment a sense of documentary-like realism. This violence that explodes so unexpectedly – and briefly – is completely at odds with the innocent, peaceful existence within the monastery, and is thus all the more effective. With the terrorists as a growing threat to the village and the monastery, the monks struggle to decide whether to return to France or remain where they are, and it is this dilemma that is the main focus of the film.

A great deal of Of Gods and Men is taken up by the silent prayers of the monks, and it is these scenes that are perhaps the most gripping and tragic of the film. The camera watches as men wordlessly kneel, heads bowed, and lingers as the silence gets louder and louder. They pray to an unresponsive, unsympathetic darkness, and Beauvois never hints at any divine presence or revelation, thus introducing an element of tragedy in their devotion. Indeed, the monks themselves acknowledge this fear, with one of the youngest brothers tearfully admitting, ‘I pray and I hear nothing.’

Yet despite examining faith in great depth, this is not a film concerned with the existence of God. Instead, its focus lies with brotherhood, friendship and love, and it deals with these subjects in a moving, subtle way. Its approach to these themes is one of sober maturity and patience, with only the ‘last supper’ scene indulging in anything approaching sentimentality (though by this point, Beauvois has undoubtedly earned the right to do so). Yet despite – or perhaps because of – such reserve in its story-telling, one cannot help but be gripped as time rapidly begins to run out for the monks, and the audience feels increasingly trapped within the confines of the monastery. With the internal struggles of each character etched onto their weathered faces, their dilemma becomes utterly compelling, while their struggle with faith is both fascinating and familiar. In its approach to religious faith, extremism, conflict and brotherhood, it is difficult to think of a film more profoundly relevant to the times in which we live.