OK - Mike Leigh is my favourite director and has been for 40 years (Paul Wiffen said "you'll love Mr Turner - it's pure Mike Leigh, faults and all" - I don't think he has any faults and actually Mr Turner ISN'T the "old" Mike Leigh and, apart from anything else, will win Best Cinematography Oscar for Dick Pope - dead cert, put money on it). But last night's Imagine on him was superb. Illustrates how EVERY great British actor, without exception, cut his teeth on a Leigh film.

Just bought the BBC box set as a self Christmas present!

A delightful doc on BBC Four yesterday on the real Tom Thumb - really worth catching on i-player.

A kind person gave me a DVD of Mr Turner today, so I was keen to watch the movie again. My initial impressions: about 30 minutes overlong, badly edited, badly written, lovely to look at. My second impression: the same, but angrier.

I must say it reinforced my feeling that Leigh gets off incredibly easily from the critics. His improvisational habit: of course the actors queue up, after the fact, to say how great it is, because they love that freedom, but, come on, how many actors are good enough to write good dialogue? Not many. So that's why you leave a Mike Leigh movie not being able to remember any dialogue. Because it wasn't written. Writing is an art. It's no good having actors say they know how their characters felt twenty years after the action took place. It doesn't make their mumbled dialogue any good here and now.

Pacing. Structure. Storytelling. You don't do this as a group. Certainly not as a group composed of individuals flitting in and out over a nine month period. Writing is HARD. You don't 'improve' it by getting a bunch of actors to wander about mumbling things. Think of that next time you stare at a blank piece of paper! The whole movie was a slow, incoherent mess, but because it's Mike Leigh, rather than some poor young sap without a mass of cheerleaders, he gets showered with awards.

Have another look. Do you ever, REALLY, learn anything about Turner? Do you ever actually discover what made him want to paint??

I like Leigh, but he's wildly over-indulged. Do him a favour and LOOK, and LISTEN, at what he does. Imagine what he might achieve if he got a 'normal' critical appraisal. It might make him improve. It might make him realise that writing is quite an art.

Does anyone remember Naked it's one his best ?