Starter for Ten

Starter for Ten is a 2006 film, based on a novel by David Nicholls (who's best-selling novel One Day is currently being filmed), starring a young James McAvoy.

The film follows the story of Brian (James McAvoy), the son of a widowed single mum (Catherine Tate) who is driven to escape his sleepy seaside town and head to university in Bristol to study English in 1985 by wanting to 'know everything', something that he began to be connected to through watching University Challenge. When he arrives he meets the Rebecca Epstein (Rebecca Hall), a Jewish activist against the changes in Thatcher's Britain and Alice Harbinson (Alice Eve), a very posh and very attractive young woman. He also finally manages to muscle his way on to the university's University Challenge team, much to the chagrin of the captain Patrick (Benedict Cumberbatch).

I quite enjoyed it. There are flares of comedy, as can be expected from Nicholls, whose novels are among my favourites, as well as a touching examination of family, friendships and relationships. Brian is driven by the memory of his father to succeed, and his interactions with his friends from home Spencer (Dominic Cooper) and Tone (James Cordon) show the way he is moving away, and yet is attached to his friends. Spencer and Tone are also representative of the growing unemployment rate of the 1980s, a situation which is being mirrored here. Brian is also 'a typical guy' in his attraction to the pretty but vacant Alice, over the lovely Rebecca, and it takes the majority of the film for him to realise that Rebecca was his soulmate.

McAvoy's performance is very good as a lightly comic but driven young student, and it was interesting to me to see him do a proper comedy, considering the only films I've seen him in tend to be more dramatic, such as Atonement. Again, I really enjoyed Rebecca Hall's understated performance, and Dominic Cooper is brilliant in the supporting role of Spencer, a guy who we get the hint of being quite smart but who lacks the motivation (or support) to do anything with his life. I also enjoyed Benedict Cumberbatch playing the obsessive, smarmy Patrick, and Mark Gatiss' cameo performance as the legendary University Challenge host Bamber Gascoigne.

All in all, whilst it is quite a small film with a gentle comedy edge, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Sherlock-'A Study in Pink' & 'The Blind Banker'

After being bombarded with tweets, facebook status', magazine articles and radio programmes praises this modern-day Sherlock Holmes, I have finally sat down and watched the first two episodes 'A Study in Pink' and 'The Blind Banker'.

Created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss (the men behind Doctor Who), this is the famous story of Sherlock Holmes re-located to modern day London.

Doctor Watson (Martin Freeman) is a veteran of Afghanistan, struggling to adjust to life in London. Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a 'Consulting Detective' who drives DI LeStrad (Rupert Graves) and his team around the bend with his constant interfering in their cases. They are bought together by a mutual friend, as both declare themselves to be bad flatmates.

Within moments of moving in together, a spate of four apparently unreleated suicides fill the papers. All four people take the same poison, and yet the victims (a wealthy businessman, a teenage boy, an MP and a Welsh media lady) have no apparent link. Holmes manages to solve the message scrawled on the floor next to the Welsh lady in pink, get hold of her suitcase (which he deduces she must have due to the splatter of mud on her tights) and track down her mobile phone.

'A Study in Pink' is solved with quite a chilling ending. Although the killer is motiviated by pretty typical motives, when one looks at CSI and Law & Order-estranged family relationships, terminal illness-it is the idea that he could 'pass by unnoticed' as a taxi driver, which is most disarming.

The second episode 'The Blind Banker' has more of a far-out plot. A bank chairman (Bertie Carvel), an old university friend of Holmes, calls him to his bank to examine some graffiti. This graffiti is then linked to the murder of their Hong Kong chief trader and a freelance journalist. It then evolves that an ancient Chinese crime ring are hunting down people who have a link to an expensive item that has been lost from the black market of smuggling antiques in which they trade.

Perhaps it plays off the success of the Guy Ritchie film, but this adaption of Sherlock Holmes is quite brilliant. Cumberbatch is wonderfully eccentric, slightly arrogant and, as is the case with many very intelligent people, appears slightly out of touch with normal behaviour-especially regarding relationships. As Watson, Freeman brings a quality of exasperation with the world to the part, and it is through his association with Holmes that his world begins to come back to life.

Really it is Cumberbatch and Freeman's show, yet good support is offered by Graves in the form of the reluctant police chief, Jonathan Aris as the forensic officer Anderson who loathes Holmes, Louise Brealey as the coroner who is quite taken with Holmes, Una Stubbs as Holmes & Watson's landlady and Zoe Telford as Sarah.

I found the nods to the original text quite brilliant; the idea of having Baker Street as a proper apartment in London, Holmes being on a 3 nicotine patches a day in order to stave off his smoking addiction. There is also the interesting fact that today a close relationship between two men instantly arouses the belief that the men must be gay, as opposed to friends or colleagues.

Now I'm in the same position as a great many other people in the country, totally gripped and eagerly awaiting the conclusion in Part 3.