On Ben Affleck as Batman

So, Ben Affleck is to play the new Batman in Man of Steel II, in which he will presumably confront the titular not-Superman with a Batmagnet of some description.

Or not.

So, is Affleck the man for this job?

On the plus side, he's an Oscar-winning actor, although the Oscar was actually for directing. He has also won or been nominated for more than his share of acting Razzies, but again to look at the flip side, they were all for terrible movies, and therefore not entirely his fault.

He's been good in some stuff, although I've never been blown away by him, and the memory of Daredevil haunts me. He was perhaps, as has been noted, the bomb in Phantoms.

So, is he a good Batman? Maybe. I think he could do it, but I've never seen him in anything that would make me certain. In particular, in a Batman vs Superman film, he needs to pull off some serious ambiguity, which actually plays more to Afflecks dramatic strengths than the weaknesses he displayed as a straightforward action hero in Daredevil.

I guess we shall see.

The Lion in Winter

Prince John: "He's got a knife!"
Queen Eleanor: "Of course he has a knife. He always has a knife. We all have knives. It's 1183 and we're barbarians.

Based on James Goldman's play (and, with Goldman writing the screenplay, preserving pretty much all of the dialogue), The Lion in Winter is a domestic comedy-romance transformed into grand tragedy by the fact that the family in question are the Plantagenets; Henry II (Peter O'Toole), his scorned wife Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn), his rebellious children, Richard (Anthony Hopkins), Geoffrey (John Castle) and John (Nigel Terry), his mistress Alais (Jane Merrow) and her brother, King Philip of France (Timothy Dalton). The play was not successful prior to the release of the film, but unusually it did very well afterwards, due in no small part to the strength of the script.

The cast, as you can see, is spectacular, and the production design is lavish, but it is Goldman's dialogue that sparkles, in particular in the many confrontations between the two leads. O'Toole as the mercurial Henry goes from playful to curmudgeonly to snarlingly overbearing with barely a pause and never the slightest warning, while Hepburn plays Eleanor with a sharp and brittle strength. The rest of the cast are no less worthy of note, many of them in very early film roles preceding long and distinguished careers. Hopkins' Richard is a picture of chivalric nobility, and in his moments of defeat has a truly affecting look of wounded pride. Castle's Geoffrey is overtly the weakest performance, so much so that its strength only shows when one realises that Geoffrey is supposed to be the forgettable - and forgotten - one. Terry, later to play Excalibur's Arthur, is here a weasely presence, appearing very much as a lesser analogue to Dalton's beautiful, reptilian Philip. Merrow is sort of the straight man of the piece, never really knocking heads with anyone, but plays Alais and her devotion to Henry with conviction.

The action of the film is limited to one castle and a few days over Christmas in 1183, with eldest son Henry, the Young King, recently dead and the older Henry yet to name another heir. Plot and counter plot fly back and forth, secrets are revealed and past cruelties raked over as Henry pushes John, Eleanor pushes Richard and Geoffrey pushes himself.

Tightly directed and superbly played, the film is a corker, well worth viewing, if it's new to you, or re-viewing if it isn't.

Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters

You know what; I've found while writing this blog that I like European movie posters more than the English ones.

Anyway, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief was a big disappointment to me as a movie, coming to it as I did from the perspective of a fan of the books. I was, however, optimistic of the possibilities of Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters, as the trailers suggested a more faithful adaptation, bringing in many of the overarching elements that I felt were missed from the first film. I was therefore keen to see it and more-or-less persuaded Hannah and Andrew (and thus Arya) to come along.

I therefore feel bad that I didn't like it more than I did.

Now, don't get me wrong, as a movie I enjoyed it more than the first, and although I can't say for certain whether that is because I had lower expectations, I think it was, in itself, a better movie.

There were fewer things that really frustrated me in this one; mostly it was little niggles. The absence of Clarisse from the first movie made her sudden appearance as Percy's long-time rival slightly jarring, and the use of a nameless and not-at-all-as-tall-as-the-sky hekatonkheires in a minor cameo sadly suggests the removal of Briares from the plot moving forward. I was also saddened to see the cursed blade misidentified, the relationship between Luke and Annabeth basically excised and the non-appearance of Backbiter.

Overall, my biggest disappointment was that Silena Beauregard and Ethan Nakamura were chucked into a one-scene appearance. This means that Ethan's plot-critical role looks to have been struck, along with Silena's key relationships, especially with Clarisse, which seems to be a recurring theme with any narratively significant relationship that doesn't involve Percy.

On the other hand, Clarisse was good, and I loved her zombie crew and styling nautical coat. Moreover, Percy himself is nicely controlled, where it would be easy to play him far too arrogant and cocky. Overall, in fact, the cast is solid, and the effects are very pretty, especially the Hippocampus.

The Wolverine

Saturday brought another cinema trip for the family, and this time it was The Wolverine, the latest in the X-Men franchise. As with Origins: Wolverine, Marvel went back to the well with the only movie character with sufficient chops to convincingly carry a solo movie, and once again it is his immortality that is the centrepiece of the drama.

Summoned from self-imposed exile in rural Canada to say goodbye to Yashida - the good-hearted Japanese prison officer whose life he saved in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, now a billionaire tech mogul with his own ninja clan - Logan is asked to allow the transfer of his healing power to Yashida, saving the old man and rendering him mortal. Then people die, stuff explodes and Wolverine kills a mess of people, all the while agonising about his promise not to hurt anyone else after being forced to eviscerate his beloved Jean Grey in X-Men 3.

The plot that follows is almost - but to the film's credit, not quite - lost in the seeming endless barrage of hyperkinetic ultraviolence. The love interest is almost perfunctory, but after talking to Hannah about it, I wonder if that isn't deliberate. Overall, the film is better and more interesting than either Last Stand or Origins.

Arya-Rose's review: She loved the lid of her mummy's large cola and spent the entire film playing with it.

There is, as ever, a mid-credits stinger setting up the next film, in this case Days of Future Past. It looks interesting, which is more than I've been able to say of any forthcoming X-Men movie in a while.