Peter Harrison Planetarium Greenwich
The only planetarium in London, why not take a river boat out to Greenwich and discover the universe this weekend? The Royal Observatory complex at Greenwich Park  combines real images from spacecraft and telescopes with advanced CGI, all projected onto a fully immersive dome, the planetarium can fly you into the heart of the Sun, transport you to distant galaxies, show you the birth of a star or land you on Mars.

Tickets cost £6.50, catch the DLR to Greenwich Station or the river boat to Greenwich Pier. www.rmg.co.uk

Fabric Night Club – Saturday 4th
With music legends and cutting edge live acts this is the ultimate party night out in London. The house, techno, electro and disco anthems will have you dancing the night away. This Saturday features Nina Kraviz, Scuba, George Fitgerald, Eddie Richards and many more.

Tickets cost £20 on the door but advance tickets can be purchased online at http://fabriclondon.ticketabc.com/venues/fabriclondon/
The closest tube is Barbican.

Target the Heart Exhibition
Get in the mood for Valentines next week with this free exhibition in collaboration with the British Heart Foundation. Twenty contemporary artists take the theme ‘Mending Broken Hearts’ and apply it to their art resulting in some beautiful pieces in glass, ceramics, jewelery, textiles and metalwork.

This is a free event at the Contemporary Applied Arts Gallery, nearest tube Tottenham Court Road. www.caa.org.uk

As well as being one of our longest serving teachers at UIC, Michael Joyce is also the fim critic of the Ham&High – one of London’s best known local newspapers. We post his reviews regularly in the UIC Blogs. If you come to London to study English, watching films in English is one of the many things you can do to improve your language skills; we also have regular school visits to the cinema as a part of our social programme, which is easy for us as UIC is right in the centre of London, near loads of cinemas. So, what does Michael think of Sherlock Holmes?

Nobody pretended that producer Joel Silver and director Guy Ritchie’s 2009 version was the smartest Sherlock around but it went over well enough. It was a proudly unfaithful interpretation but done with enough confidence to win people over. (After a run of flops at that point in  oth Silver and Ritchie’s careers, expectations were so low that if they’d successfully tied their laces the shock might have been enough to earn them an Oscar nomination.)

The sequel is more of the same but adds in Moriarty (Harris) and Mycroft (Fry.) So that’s three genius intellects the story has to contain and it’s too many. The film is basically a big dumb, generic blockbuster where occasionally everything will stop for them to do the clever deduction bits. It’s still preferable to a big dumb, generic blockbuster without clever bits, but it does get a bit tiresome being consistently told how  incredibly clever everybody is when a lot of the time their actions are barely more elevated than those in a Vin Diesel movie.

Harris and Fry make for marvellous additions, (Harris wouldn’t look out of place in a proper Holmes movie) though I can’t really buy Downey Jr’s Holmes which seems to be primarily inspired by the paycheques Johnny Depp takes home for The Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Jude Law though is an excellent Watson; watching him here you despair that he’s wasted so much of his career trying to be a serious actor when he could be such a natural star.

Take an early confrontation in which Holmes has to face down four assailants. As the score plays a parody of a Morricone Spaghetti western
score, Ritchie gets to work, dazzling us with close ups, slow motion and frenzied action, all cut together in a giddying montage. But then it’s over and you feel like you missed the whole thing. For all its good points much of the film is like that: all distraction and no action.

Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows. (12A.) Directed by Guy Ritchie. Starring Robert Downey Jr, Jude Law, Noomi Rapace, Rachel McAdams,
Jared Harris and Stephen Fry. 127 mins. ***

Stuck for something to do this weekend? Fancy taking a break from studying English at UIC London? Well take advantage of this free event at Canada Square which showcases two professional ice sculpting competitions, free ice-carving masterclass and a snow pit where you can build your own snowman.

The main competition sees international teams battle it out on 2m high blocks of ice, interpreting the theme of ‘ Winter Sports’. After the main competition, one member of each team will take on a speed sculpting challenge on the theme of ‘Team Spirit’. The creations take life throughout the festival, with the winner announced on Saturday at 4pm.

Visit www.londonicesculptingfestival.co.uk for more information.

Nearest Tube – Canary Wharf.

As well as being one of our longest serving teachers at UIC, Michael Joyce is also the fim critic of  one of London’s best known local newspapers. We post his reviews regularly in the UIC Blogs. If you come to London to study English, watching films in English is one of the many things you can do to improve your language skills; we also have regular school visits to the cinema as a part of our social programme, which is easy for us as UIC is right in the centre of London, near loads of cinemas. So, what does Michael think of Mission Impossible?

Lalo Schifrin’s Mission Impossible theme is surely the finest TV or movie theme music ever. Even more than the Bond theme, hearing it conjures up expectations of just ridiculous amounts of excitement. No film, let alone an M:I film, could live up to it but fourth attempt Ghost Protocol probably comes closer than any of the previous ones.

It’s been a restless series, each instalment  heading in a radically different direction from what preceded it. The third entry, directed by J.J. Abrams, was actually a cracking action film but hampered by the decision to give Cruise’s Ethan Hunt a domestic life and asking its audience to emotionally invest in its outcome. With some cracks appearing in Cruise’s box office appeal No 4 leaves nothing to chance, it positively screams Let Me Entertain You. It’s merciless in its efforts to make you feel good.

While the actual Bond films have gone in the direction of copying the  style of  the Bourne films, the Mission Impossible films have gone back to Roger Moore era 007. If you miss the days when Bond walked into a remote monastery to find it’s an MI5 base staffed by M and Q, then this
is the film for you. The baddy has a laptop rather than a cavernous lair and the fisticuffs are rough and tough, but in most other respects this is a modern day The Spy Who Loved Me or Moonraker: a preposterous, light-hearted, gadget packed, globetrotting adventure with action  sequences in tourist locations and a tissue thin plot about stopping a mad man starting a nuclear war.

After some dazzling animation work (The Iron Giant, Ratatouille, The Incredibles, The Simpsons) Brad Bird brings both flair and originality to the action sequences. Like The Dark Knight some sequences have been shot with IMAX cameras and seeing them fill the 20 metre high Southbank screen is quite a sensation, particularly the climb up the world’s tallest building, the Burj Tower.

The movie moves at a relentless speed, hurtling towards an impressive and inventive climax in Dubai. Pity then that the film still has another 40 odd minutes to go after that. In the aftermath of the Dubai sequence the pace sags for a few minutes which shouldn’t be a problem but in a movie like this, where breathless momentum is all, any moment for reflection is a bit of a killer and it never really recovers.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. (12A.) Directed by Brad Bird. Starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton, Simon Pegg, Michael Nyqvist and Anil Kapoor. 133 mins. **** (if viewed at IMAX Southbank, probably *** anywhere else.)

As well as being one of our longest serving teachers at UIC, Michael Joyce is also the fim critic of  one of London’s best known local newspapers. We post his reviews regularly in the UIC Blogs. If you come to London to study English, watching films in English is one of the many things you can do to improve your language skills; we also have regular school visits to the cinema as a part of our social programme, which is easy for us as UIC is right in the centre of London, near loads of cinemas. So, what does Michael think of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?

First it bores you in subtitles, now it bores you in Eng1ish. For most of its 65 million readers the book is a compelling page-turner; so why on the screen does this murder mystery always seem so dull, so inconsequential, so completely Tuesday afternoon on TV, even with some extreme
sexual violence thrown in?

As a top Hollywood director I can’t see what it is in it for Fincher. He did this kind of sleuthing to better effect in Zodiac. Steig Larsson’s Millennium trilogy is a hot property but a thankless one; like the Harry Potters they just don’t fit on the screen. Perhaps trying to make hit  movies from awkward material is the challenge that excites Fincher: it’s like The Social Network with a little more action and a little less talk.

It starts with an impressive credit sequence that shames most of the recent Bond efforts, which raises hopes but then it limps into the story and all those expectations quickly disappear. Fincher shoots it well enough, there are a few really good scenes and overall it’s an improvement on
the Swedish film version but it’s still a long old slog, a lot of earnest endeavour for very little reward.

Craig often makes for a dull and earnest star turn but he is actually rather engaging as Blomkvist, crusading left wing journalist. It is his best non Bond lead performance since Layer Cake.  After losing a humiliating libel case to one of Sweden’s richest and most powerful businessmen, Blomkvist is employed to investigate an ancient family mystery by another of Sweden’s richest men. It’s the murder mystery equivalent of vanity publishing. In the title role as the pierced, punky researcher who assists him, Rooney Mara is certainly committed, but limited and a touch obvious in acting style. It doesn’t help that she looks just like chief hobbit Elijah Wood.

People worldwide identify with and love this character, this slight, resourceful woman who will not bow to patriarchy, but her film personas don’t seem real somehow. In the context of this movie’s plot, the horrific rape she endures is entirely gratuitous, it’s there just provide a pretext for her to illustrate her defiant, vengeful spirit. She’s also that most marvellous of modern narrative cop outs, a master computer hacker:  anything can be resolved with a couple of clicks on the keyboard; the Girl Who is a Tattooed Deus Ex Machina.

The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo. (18.) Directed by David Fincher. Starring Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgard, Robin Wright and Steven Berkoff. Opening Boxing Day. 158 mins **