A Single Man

This is a treat for all the ladies who lust after Colin Firth... ‘A Single Man’. The directorial debut of fashion designer Tom Ford and based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood.

Firth plays George Falconer, fifty-something English man working in Los Angeles as a college lecturer during 1962, the period of the Cuban missile crisis. A role for which Firth has got an Oscar nomination. George is also gay.... but relax ladies, there may be kissing but there are no tongues involved and no steamy sex scenes.



George is a man wracked with grief and is struggling to come to terms with the death of his long term partner Jim (Matthew Goode) in a car accident. George lives life as if in a trance, slightly detached from everything, going through the motions of life.

The whole film takes place over a single day, eight months after Jim’s death and is replete with flashbacks that as usual truly addle my mind. This day is the day he decides that he cannot carry on as he is. We see him putting his affairs in order. Meticulously arranging his insurance policies for people to find, leaving money for his housekeeper and buying bullets for his gun. Today, he decides, the bullets will end his pain.

Meanwhile he is stalked by one of his students, Kenny (Nicholas Holt), as well as being picked up by a young Spaniard, Carlos, who's keen to jump into his car and beyond. He arranges to spend the evening with his close friend, and fellow English exile, Charley (Julianne Moore), yet still he is not distracted from his intended task.



Unfortunately he just can't get comfortable enough to kill himself or in a way that won’t prove troublesome for his housekeeper. This introduces a moment of humour into the film which lightens the tone slightly but also seems slightly unfitting.

It’s an enthralling film but the one thing that stops you really getting drawn in is that unlike with George, who you do get to know, you never really get to know his dead partner, Jim. This means you never really quite feel his pain but then Charley has the same feeling and she did know him. When it comes down to it, Charley, who is divorced and equally alone in LA, is simply miffed that he will never be the red blooded heterosexual male that she thinks she needs. She fails to grasp the magnitude of his relationship with Jim and her assertion that his sixteen years with Jim wasn't real love but was ‘just a substitute for the real thing’ doesn’t go down well with George. This is sixties America, not a good time to be gay. George wasn’t even invited to Jim’s funeral and only got told of the accident as an afterthought.



After a enjoyable but non-sexual evening with Kenny, George seems to decide that life might be worth continuing with after all. He puts away his gun and burns his letters of goodbye, only then to be struck down by a heart attack. Life’s a bitch.

A good film and one full of fine detail. Well crafted and well acted. They've obviously tried to make it Oscar worthy. Oooh I’m a cynic.

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

‘Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll’ is of course the new biopic of the late Ian Dury. Personally I was never a great fan of his music but I was still intrigued enough by the man to go see the film. I knew his life would make an interesting story.

Ian Dury contracted polio at the age of seven, most likely from a swimming pool during the polio epidemic of 1949. This resulted in him spending a year and a half in hospital, including six weeks in a full plaster cast, followed by an extended stay at a institution for disabled children, which resembled a prison and whose ethos was to toughen their 'inmates' up. A view further endorsed by Dury father, Bill (Ray Winstone) who aside from seeming to abandon his Son in the institution also believed in encouraging his son to stand on his own two feet and callipers. It was his sufferance of polio and his resultant treatment that probably moulded Dury into the determined and uncompromising man he became. If he felt he missed out on his childhood was lost, he was about to make up for it.

Golum himself, Andy Serkis, plays the role of Dury putting in a passionate and brilliantly believable performance. Serkis is uncannily like Dury and no mean singer either, performing all the songs himself along the real Blockheads.

Early on we are introduced to his first band, ‘Kilburn and the High Roads’, who are rehearsing at his home. Their session is ‘disrupted’ by the birth of his son upstairs. The film then takes us progressively through his career and chaotic life whilst throwing in flashbacks, animation and live performances along the way. It's all very well done.

His first band soon implodes but out of that he meets groupie Denise Roudette (Naomie Harris), who becomes his girlfriend, and Chaz Jankel (Tom Hughes). Jankel, a talent musician ten years younger than Dury, takes on the task of fashioning Dury's offbeat lyrics in to the songs that would make him fame as Ian Dury and The Blockheads. No much is actually said about their chart success, although we do get a demonstration of how quickly things can go awry once stardom is achieved.



The film is much more interested in his complicated relationships which Dury struggles to reconcile with his music career. Dury and his father; Dury and his women (his long suffering wife and his girlfriend); Dury and his Son, Baxter (Bill Milner of Son of Rambow). Baxter appeared on the sleeve of 'New Boots And Panties' with his father. Re-enacted here.



Dury is not a good role model for Baxter. Initially alienated by his father, he becomes increasingly in awe of his rebellious father and starts to mirror him and becomes a regular truant from school. In fact did he ever go? Baxter goes somewhat predictably off the rails.

Always the absent parent, Dury moves in with Denise and they live in a tower block in Vauxhall. A tower block that he calls ‘Catshit Mansions’. All the while he continues to do things in his own anarchic way, practising his well honed ability to rub people up the wrong way.

Then keen to give something back to people with disabilities like him, Dury records the notorious 'Spasticus Autisticus' as his contribution to 1982's United Nations Year of The Disabled. It is perhaps good intentioned but is subsequently banned and brings him into conflict with the Spastics Society who disagree with his assertion, passed down by his now late father, that people like him didn't want sympathy, they wanted respect.

Overall, it’s an excellent and playful film, just like its subject matter. Never sentimental although it had plenty of opportunities, had it wanted to be. Towards the end, as presumably Dury approached his own end, he died of cancer in 2000 at the age of just 57, he himself appears to regret nothing. ‘The only thing I've missed is a few buses’ he declares.



The end credits roll to Serkis’s rendition of ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful’. Good stuff.