David at the theatre

These photos don't do Anita Dobson and Greta Scacchi justice. Their appearance as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford midway through filming Whatever Happened to Baby Jane is a lot more "true to life" than this. They both really do get the look of the actress they're playing, and although neither of them quite finds the right voice - Scacchi falls short of Miss Davis's sharpness and Dobson doesn't quite get the harshness of la Crawford - they do get the tone and the rhythm of their speech closely enough to make the parody work.

And parody is the name of the game here. From their adjoining dressing-rooms they each address the audience as if we are a TV camera. Dobson turns the Crawford smile on and off like a traffic light. Scacchi swears like the abrasive trooper Davis surely was (or, if she wasn't, that's how we want her to be). They tell us about their careers, their failed marriages, their lovers. The "men that got way" (lucky escapes) were Clark Gable from Joan and William Wyler from Bette. Joan admits to That Porn Movie - did she in real life? Bette admits to giving her directors a hard time: did she ever!

Aside from giving us biographical data, what these two great dames mostly do - of course! - is bitch about each other. Joan admits to being obsessed with how she looks both on and off screen - even when playing wheelchair-bound tormented Blanche Hudson in Baby Jane - whereas Bette is happy to look like a madwoman since that's what she's playing. Joan comes into Bette's room a couple of times, oozing treacly sincerity which Bette tries not to notice, but mostly they just "qvetch" to camera.

We've always known Scacchi was a fine actress but Dobson (whom I only know from EastEnders) is a revelation; she has a real gift for comedy. It probably helps that she's playing a character famous for over-acting and even for self-parody. There's a nice moment when she tells the hapless switchboard operator "You'll never work in this town again" and moments later is cooing "Bless you, thank you" to the same poor girl. Scacchi's best moment is when she puts on the ringlets and before our very eyes becomes the weirdly wonderful Baby Jane Hudson.

Bette knows she is the better actress (and how). Joan knows that her gift is for being a Star. We see her signing photos to her fans: she is as loyal as they are. A friend of mine in London had many letters from her, together with a photocopy of the three closely-written pages of instructions that were sent to any hotel she was booked into. These were mostly a list of her preferred brands of bedlinen, booze and biscuits but it ended, in upper-case letters, with a reminder to all the hotel staff not to forget that MISS CRAWFORD IS A STAR OF THE FIRST MAGNITUDE. Actually, she wasn't; that would be Miss Davis, who in this tribute to two of cinema's grand old show-stoppers is given the last word. A very naughty last word!

Bette and Joan is (are!) on tour in the UK. Catch it if it comes anywhere near you. It's a joy.

David at the movies

THE DICTATOR

Sacha Baron Cohen's take on the late and unlamented Col Qaddafi makes for a hit-and-miss movie that misses more than it hits. General Haffaz Alladeen (that 'Haffaz' is pleasingly close to the name of Bashar al-Assad's equally late and equally unlamented dad) is the odious president of the North African state of Wadiya. Stripped of his trademark beard on a visit to New York and replaced by an inept look-alike (Sacha again), the real Alladeen finds himself destitute in the Big Apple. Vegan store-owner Zoey (Anna Faris) saves him from homelessness and helps him reclaim his 'throne' from his Machiavellian adviser Tamir (Ben Kingsley, looking uncomfortable at being in this schlock, as well he might).

That's about it as regards plot. There are some un-PC observations (racist, homophobic, anti-feminist, anti-vegetarian - you name it, Sacha trashes it) but the threadbare storyline and scenes that fall flat leave The Dictator floundering for much of its 90 minutes. Funny moments and one-liners are not enough: a comedy needs sustained scenes of hilarity and The Dictator has hardly any of these. The humour targets pre-teens and the frat-house mentality. In Borat and Bruno Baron Cohen entertainingly satirized bigotry and intolerance in the US; now that he's playing a bigot, satire and entertainment go out the window.

American Reunion (see below!) was rude, crude, well-scripted and generally funny. The Dictator is rude, crude, poorly scripted and nowhere near funny enough.

AMERICAN REUNION

Thirteen years after they graduated (in the first American Pie) Jim and Michelle (Jason Biggs and Alyson Hannigan) return to their Michigan hometown for a high-school reunion. Their marriage has gone a bit flat. Being reunited with Oz and Finch and Kevin and the irrepressible Stifler is a recipe for rejuvenation - and, natch, disaster! Girlfriends fondly recalled - and others best forgotten - are also back in town.

Oz, the sports jock, is now a celebrity TV presenter, and still single. Finch is a global adventurer, also a bachelor. Kevin and Stifler have boring jobs and not much luck with girls. The reunion will bring changes to all their lives. Some old grudges will get an airing and a few lies will be exposed. Stifler's Mom and Jim's Dad are still in town and get a good slice of screen time.

Let's be honest about this, guys: we are expecting - and we get - some extremely gross behaviour! Taking a dump (was American Pie the ground-breaker in this?) is to US comedy what farting is to Brit-coms, and Reunion duly delivers in this yucky area. Jim gets a hysterical kitchen scene, though perhaps not as funny as the one that involved his mom's apple pie in 1999. There are a number of sexual mishaps, though nothing quite as 'outstanding' (if that's the word) as the beer-glass episode 13 years ago.

The years have been kinder to Stifler (Seann William Scott) and Oz (Chris Klein) than to the other guys, and most of the high-school girls still look pretty hot (in the age of botox this may not be surprising). Despite the moments of gross humour Reunion comes close to being a rom-com. Jim and Michelle's marital problems, Oz and Finch and Kevin's quest for love, Stifler's desperate need of friendship: these elements add depth to the storyline and are handled with a degree of sensitivity.

After the tawdriness of most of the previous sequels, this a well-scripted, solidly played return to the form of the first movie. All in all it's a fun reunion for the audience as well as for the cast.

SAFE

What can I say about a Jason Statham movie? It's a Jason Statham movie! A maverick cop turned cage fighter (don't ask why) rescues an 11-year-old Chinese girl from Russian mafia thugs and then has to protect her from Chinese triad thugs and a thuggish squad of corrupt NYPD cops. The girl is a prodigy and has memorized a mysterious code (clue in the title!) that everybody wants.

A Jason Statham movie is cloned from a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie or a Steven Seagal movie (which were in turn clones of Bruce Lee). Kick-fighting, shoot-outs, car chases, subway chases, street chases: it's a formula which pretty well always appeals to its target audience. Statham, not just a toned bod and a husky voice, somehow manages to inject some soul into the characters he plays. Catherine Chan does a nice turn as the sassy kid. Chris Sarandon (fondly remembered as the vampire next door in the original; - and best - version of Fright Night plays the corrupt mayor behind the corrupt cops.

The frantic pace - and Statham's on-screen charisma - are guaranteed to keep the audience on the edge of their seats. Is Safe formulaic? - yes, but it's terrific fun.

SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN

The title tells it like it is. This is a slight but pleasing little British rom-com about a biologist (Ewan McGregor) and a government environmentalist (Emily Blunt) who, in the interests of Anglo-Arab relations (muddy waters!), are assigned to an unlikely project to introduce Scottish salmon into the region that once belonged to the Queen of Sheba. Harriet is worrying about her new soldier boyfriend missing in Afghanistan; Fred is locked into a failing marriage; but of course these two are going to bond in the Yemeni mountains. No one falls for the billionaire Arab fisherman (Egyptian actor Amr Waked) whose mission this is (I did! He could have a starring role in a movie version of my 'Arab Spring' story SHAIKH-DOWN).

Kristin Scott Thomas steals many a scene as a potty-mouthed Whitehall wonk and brought back happy memories of an earlier triumphant British rom-com with some weddings and a funeral. Salmon Fishing doesn't aim for the same dizzy heights as that movie, but the unpretentious script and the under-stated performances are almost in the same league. A feel-good movie with some exotic locations (I don't mean Whitehall) - just what we need in the UK in this wettest of springs!

Wot I'm reading: ALAN BENNETT: Smut

Subtitled "two unseemly stories", Smut is only a little bit ruder than Mr Bennett's usual output and just a little bit - deliciously - crude here and there. The Greening of Mrs Donaldson finds the newly widowed Mrs D. topping up her pension by 'performing' as a pretend patient at the local medical school. She also takes in a pair of co-habiting lodgers who find an imaginative way of settling the arrears on their rent.

We tend to identify Bennett's characters with the actors who've portrayed them on-screen and it's easy to Picture Mrs Donaldson being (beautifully) played by Penelope Wilton or Maggie Smith. Her life is the author's usual rich mix of comedy and tragedy. He manages to work in a few topical gripes about how today's over-stretched and under-motivated doctors and nurses rarely find time to be compassionate or even kind to patients. The story, 100 pages long, is more like a novella and, disappointingly, stops just as Mrs Donaldson is about to take on a new lease of life.

In The Shielding of Mrs Forbes it's Patricia Routledge (in Hyacinth Bucket mode) who comes to mind. The chief protagonist is her gorgeous but confused son Graham who marries plain but resourceful Betty and then gets into a bit of bother to which his wife and his mother, separately, find a solution. This story has as many twists as a soap opera plot; it must surely be dramatized for stage or television.

Both tales are filled with the wry observations about the human condition that are Bennett's very distinctive 'trademark'. Being free to use the electric carving knife is for Mrs Donaldson "one of the several joys of bereave-ment". Mr Forbes worried that his son might be gay because "he had an umbrella at a very early age".

These two stories are, like everything else Mr Bennett puts our way, a joy to read, full of sly humour and the occasional dollop of the milk of human unkindness.

Wot I may stop reading: SERIAL KILLER BOOKS

The murderer in The Night Stalker kills his female victims by placing a deadly device inside their vaginas and then stitching them shut. The devices get ghastlier from victim to victim.

What we have here is the literary equivalent of cinema and TV's "torture porn", which has reached a new peak - or a new low - with the Human Centipede films. In movies we can trace this 'video nasty' element back through the Saw series and Freddy Krueger and the Hellraiser horrors. Halloween is, I think, generally seen as the 'grand-daddy' of slasher films but the genre can probably be traced all the way back to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, aptly the 'mother' of all serial crime stories.

Horror fiction, I guess, traces its ancestry to Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. Hannibal Lecter is surely the headline example of the bizarre serial murderer, at his worst (best!) in the eponymous Hannibal novel (and movie): just think about Mason (the Gary Oldman character) with his hideously disfigured face and the venal Italian detective hanged from a balcony in Florence on his own intestines. Mega-yucky.

Dr Lecter is the villain who is also the hero. Not many authors would risk this. Amazingly, it works. Perhaps because Thomas Harris is an outstandingly good writer; Red Dragon and The Silence of the the Lambs are two of the most exciting crime novels of the modern era; Hannibal, in my opinion, is a Gothic masterpiece. (Shame he lost his way with the next one: Hannibal Rising, a noble failure.)

Stephen King is of course the modern master of horror and another writer of real quality. Chris Carter is only an average kind of writer, and The Night Stalker - compulsively readable, I have to concede, and with quite a few nods in the direction of Psycho - really is no more than a video nasty in book form.

And, just as I'm finding it hard to sit through gross-out movies like the Saw series (I've managed not to see either of The Human Centipedes), I think I'm beginning to tire of crime fiction that crosses over into sick sadistic horror. My two favourite crime writers, Michael Connelly and Jeffrey Deaver, keep readers on the edge of their seats without the need to reach for a sick-bag, and clearly there are many others (not all of them from Scandinavia) who write books that thrill but do not spill.

We've come a long way from Death on the Nile, Dorothy!

Wot I'm reading: WILLIAM CORLETT: Now and Then

It's always a joy to come upon a novel of real quality that you missed out on years ago. Now and Then, published in 1995, is one of those. The Now is 1987, when Christopher Metcalfe, a 50-year-old publishing editor, is drawn back into family life following the death of his father. Christopher's bachelor existence is like a Terence Rattigan play: lunches with authors, drunken dinners with a platonic ladyfriend with boyfriend problems, fractious relations with his catty sister and her boorish husband. He loves his mother but they don't understand each other; Christopher is gay and still locked in the closet.

The Then is the 1950s when as a Fifth Former at a minor Public School in East Anglia he was seduced by Stephen Walker, one of the Prefects. The 1950s was a time when homosexuality, at school and in the outside world, was still very much a "love that dare not speak its name". Christopher, like Leo in The Go-Between, has been shaped - mis-shaped - by this schoolboy romance which has made him fearful of loving anyone ever again. At 50 he is lonely and desperate. He found no other lover after Stephen and does not have a sex life. He decides to try and find Stephen through the school's Old Boys' network.

William Corlett writes with elegance and economy. He captures vividly the painful intensity of first love, "puppy love" - all that longing, not much fulfilment. The bitterness of Christopher's middle age is also sharply evoked - waspish exchanges with his ladyfriend and his bitch of a sister, the void in his mother's life after losing a husband at the end of a hollow marriage. This sad tale is enlivened by some sharp humour and a few spicy teenage sex scenes. The ending, in the beautiful city of Granada, is perfectly judged and will have you falling under its spell!

Wot I'm reading: TOM ROB SMITH: Agent 6

Concluding the trilogy that began with the heart-stopping Child 44, Tom Rob Smith takes us back into the murky Cold-War world of KGB agent Leo Demidov. The double murder at the heart of this story takes place in New York and involves Leo's own family and an eminent Negro singer who has been persecuted in the US for his ideological commitment to Communism. Yes, Smith is revisiting the McCarthy era, modern America's first long dark night of the soul. Dreaming of a better world was not without its dangers, the author sagely reminds us at one point.

It will be fifteen years before Leo is able to get to the truth of what happened in New York. He is posted to Afghanistan in the 1980s in the early days of the Soviet occupation of that benighted land. Against a background of Russian atrocities and harsh mujahedin reprisals, Leo's already strained loyalty to his masters is tested beyond endurance. His delayed quest to unravel the tragic events of 1965 finally takes him to New York, where his unhappy story ends with both a bang and a whimper.

Agent 6 is as densely plotted and elegantly written as any of Le Carre's towering George Smiley spy stories. There's a scene in the Khyber Pass in a hailstorm that chills the reader to the marrow, a trick that was memorably pulled off in several tales by the late great Hammond Innes who was very fond of pitting his heroes against the elements! Tom Rob Smith is emerging - with great confidence and enormous promise - from the shadow of some of our greatest thriller writers.

Wot I'm reading: JOHN UPDIKE: The Widows of Eastwick

Unless his publishers get him writing from the grave (as has happened to Robert Ludlum!) this will be the last novel we see from John Updike, one of the greatest writers of his generation - maybe the greatest. A sequel (obviously) to The Witches of Eastwick, it's a little bit disappointing, but only a little.

Alexandra, Jane and Sukie went their separate ways after their gothic encounter with Darryl Van Horne in Eastwick in the 1970s. Now, thirty-odd years later, all widowed from long second marriages, they rent an apartment together in what was the hot-tub room (scene of many a happy orgy!) in Darryl's mansion, now broken into smaller units. Eastwick is not happy to see them back and one figure from their previous sorcery returns to dispense some rough justice.

These are three wonderful characters, and it's a joy to be back in their company. Unfortunately, it takes Updike 100 pages to get them to Rhode Island (100 pages of mostly 'travelogue': Canada, Egypt, China) and another 100 before the witchcraft - the magic - resumes. The final 100 pages are almost as enjoyable as the first novel was, although the male protagonist is not as charismatic as Darryl (his charisma greatly amplified by Jack Nicholson's performance in the movie version!). There's more sex talk than sex action: two of these dear ladies are now in their 70s, but Sukie, the youngest, is still 'hot to trot'. Not many authors write sex as memorably and as whimsically as Updike.

It's not just Darryl's 'avenger' casting a shadow over our heroines' lives; there's a lot of talk about Death. Perhaps Updike sensed that the Grim Reaper was waiting to pounce on the author. He died in 2009, a year after Widows was published.

A bit slow and short on storyline, The Widows of Eastwick is beautifully written: a good book, if not quite a great one. Villages (2004), Updike's third-from-last book, was his last masterpiece - the last of at least a dozen outstanding novels from a truly outstanding chronicler of the morals and mores of 20th-century Middle America.

The Eastwick books are about witchcraft. You read them at the peril of your immortal soul, supping with the Devil! But to read John Updike is to dine at the high table of literature.