Reviews
No Time to Die (2021)
Craig's Frankenstein Bond draws to its close
Craig's Frankenstein Bond Reaches Its End
An early scene in his debut film, Casino Royale, saw Daniel Craig's Bond in a footchase with a younger, more lithe and athletic man suspected of being a bomb maker. Though Craig's Bond was older, shorter and not much of a runner, he nonetheless managed to close in, recalling how Frankenstein's Monster would somehow pursue his victims despite a lack of physical agility and pace. Heavyweight boxer Mohammad Ali used the Parkinson Show to cruelly mock his rival George Foreman, referencing, okay, not Frankenstein but The Mummy: 'You see that fella run and run, he does six miles in one shot - but in the next scene, there's the Mummy, he's still after him...'
Facial shots of a heavy-lidded Bond seeming to struggle with his identity in life, or the tender scene with Vesper, sitting down fully clothed in the shower, owed something to the Monster, along with the sense that Craig's Bond was an unwitting creation of factors outside his control. The Monster - a patched up assortment of various bodies - might also be a comment on the new Bond franchise - made up as new but soon heavily reliant on past components from previous films.
The 1930s film Frankenstein spawned a sequel - just one problem: the Monster died at the end of the first. To get round this, they had him re-emerge from the ruins of burnt out windmill. Something similar happened with the Jason Bourne films, to which the new Bonds owe a debt. This lapsed spy's memory regain depended on box office returns, and often each new film would undo the happy resolution of the last to ensure more business.
Similarly, Craig's Bond series, hitting a home run with his debut Casino Royale, based on the Ian Fleming novel, soon became a hostage to fortune. Its ill-fated follow-up, Quantum of Solace, being a sequel, while the fourth film, named after Spectre, the organisation that had belatedly landed in the producers laps, claimed that this Bond's past adventures and woes all stemmed from his traditional foes. But these two traditional Fleming ideas - newly available to EON - combined to box Craig's Bond films into a corner.
So this Bond character came with a lot of baggage that would have to be unpacked at the beginning of each film, not least because the main theme became Bond's inner life, rather than external foes. Craig's five film tenure would come with a story arc that would look rather rickety and ragged, not least because the writers and producers seemed to be making it up as they went along. So No Time To Die begins with Bond still mourning his lost love Vesper from over a decade ago despite the fact he seemed to know her at best for a fortnight only. It emerges this scene comes straight after the finale of Spectre, which perhaps explains why he and Madeleine Swann - the woman he went off into the sunset in his Aston Martin DB5 at the end of Spectre - don't seem to know, like or trust each other very much. That she is clearly so much younger than him is another issue that one could gloss over in the previous film.
It's clear that director Corey comes from the same school as Lee Tamahori or Marc Forster. A classy look and some muscular action doesn't distract from the dearth of 'funny bones' - there are some jokes here, but because of the largely humour free vibe, they don't really land. It's all quite heavy going. It allows one to doubt our hero: when he spits, 'How did they know I was here?' following an ambush, one could reply, 'Probably because you go around in a highly distinctive grey Aston Martin DB5 you tool!' We've been here before - the 'serious' Bond film that demands respect and attention - but then all you do is notice the plot holes and daft actions of the lead characters.
The admittedly tense and gripping ambush in the lengthy pre-credits later makes no sense in view of what we later learn about Madeleine Swann - but again it seems they writers had boxed themselves into a corner.
There's much to confirm that the writers had their work cut out rewriting large swathes of the film following the exit of director Danny Boyle, though how this could not have been foreseen I do not know. This sort of thing has happened before, with the exit of the late Roger Mitchell prior to Quantum of Solace. It's to be suspected both had foreseen just how badly things might go.
As script doctor, Phoebe Waller-Bridges brings none of the lightness of touch we saw in Killing Eve. The jokes don't land. As with Connery's rogue outing, there is the persistent sense of something just not right about the film. The tone of various scenes just do not match up. As with Brosnan's last film Die Another Day, I found myself sitting in my seat thinking, what am I watching here actually? It's not fun and I can't believe any of it - so what's the point?
Another gripe is that inevitably Craig's new film occupies a different universe to that of his debut. So it was with Dr No and Connery's fifth, You Only Live Twice. This could be overlooked when each movie is pretty much a standalone - less so when a plot line is meant to thread throughout. Some of the plot is astonishingly prescient given the pandemic. But in a packed cinema, with many not wearing face masks, there's an added and unwanted dimension of fear, plus the suspicion the makers are trolling their audience.
So it is with allegations of 'wokeness' - here the uneasy sense that the producers don't actually like James Bond. Like a vegan running your local fish and chip shop, there's a sense of being a cross purposes.
Past Bonds suggested a businessman on his travels, putting everything on his account, footloose and fancy free. This one suggests a long-married man with debt collectors on his tail on a family day out whose wife would prefer it if he just signed the divorce papers, agreed the alimony and disappeared. Bond seems hemmed in by one virtual family or another - Madeleine, the CIA, MI6, his foster brother, each one more miserable than the last. Virtually no action scene, no matter how impressive, seems to have him end 'the winner'.
Indeed, it's made clear in the script that had James Bond never been born, much of the troubles he's fought in all the films simply would not have happened, because he wouldn't have landed up as the cuckoo in the family of would be arch nemesis Blofeld. It's like It's a Wonderful Life in reverse.
As reverse escapism, I suppose, it can't be beat. You think your life is bad - he's got it worse!
Having squirmed at again seeing Roger Moore's Bond take Soitaire's virginity in Live And Let Die two days before, I can vouchsafe that there is much about the Bond character to disdain. But I don't want that rubbed in my face when watching a Bond movie. For those who see Bond as a guilty pleasure, this film is all guilt and no pleasure. With Barbara Broccoli having taken the reins since GoldenEye, and now with Phoebe Waller-Bridge on board, it does rather seem as if women have done for the character what Blofeld himself never managed to do.
Returning to Frankenstein's Monster, there are hints here that our man is a cooked-up product of an environment that he can never truly understand or be part of, though suspicions that MI6 are some kind of Masonic source of world strife are never really followed through. As with Jason Bourne - another agent the new films owe something to - there is a sense that none of it will end well, and that the character is not destined to enjoy his cottage with the rose garden and picket fence. Post-pandemic (up to a point; deaths continue) this is far from the cinematic pick-me-up some of us would have liked.
Churchill (2017)
An Abomination
By some reckoning the worst film I have seen in a long, long time. Some plus points for the photography, though it's overemphasised to obscure the small budget, from which you'd get change from a box of popcorn and carton of cola from the Odeon kiosk. When Monty addresses his men before sailing for Normandy, they seem to number only 15. Chartwell (Churchill's home) seems to consist of two box rooms, albeit nicely shot.
This is the sort of film that makes one wish the Germans had won the war, it's that bad. Historically I can't say it's accurate that Churchill didn't want to open a second front against the Germans, and so to base an entire film around that seems like madness. On top of this, he is portrayed as a senile, out-of-touch buffoon who is only fit for a nursing home, who turns up three days before D-day with an alternative invasion plan for Eisenhower. Who laments the imminent loss of life - this would be the same Churchill who led (failed) allied attempts in Norway, Crete, Dieppe, yet you'd imagine from this that the Normandy landings was the first military initiative.
Characterisation is broad, dialogue is asinine.
I don't carry a torch for Churchill, like many great men he had flaws, but this is at such variance with the truth it's basically pornography, except unlike pornography I can't imagine how it could appeal to anyone.
The Two Faces of January (2014)
Solid, could be sexier
A thoroughly decent movie that respects the audience. Some great locations, mostly in Athens. It's a three-hander, and in retrospect the chemistry between the three of them could have got under the skin a bit more, rather like in Knife in the Water. As with Patricia Highsmith's other works, a key theme is male one-upmanship but it doesn't play out here quite the way it ought to, especially with the final pay-off, which is nonetheless quite satisfying.
Nothing wrong with any of the performances, and the twists and turns of the plot work well, but if you can't really sympathise too much with the characters, the director ought to have a more mischievous style perhaps, rather like Hitchcock of course. So this is a film that won't wind you up much, but won't ruffle your feathers either.
The Great Gatsby (2013)
You're an Absolute Beginner...
So imagine it's 1967 if you'd missed out on all the hoo-ha over Bond, but you read Ian Fleming's Casino Royale and found you quite enjoyed it... and what's this? There's a big screen version of Casino Royale hitting the cinemas, with David Niven, Orson Welles and Ursula Andress. Better check it out, right? Well this version of Great Gatsby is as close to F Scott Fitzgerald's novel in tone as that psychedelic romp starring Niven, Welles, Peter Sellers and Woody Allen was to Fleming's dour Cold War novel. Or, if you prefer, as close as the mid-1980s Absolute Beginners musical was to the classic novel about Soho coffee houses of the 1950s.
Which is not to say this film jettison's the novel's plot, not at all, if anything it's too faithful. Scenes are shoehorned in because they were in the novel, but for no real reason. When Nick and Jordan meet the old buffer in Gatsby's library, well in the book it means something, but in the film it serves no real purpose I can see.
As with the other two movies I've mentioned, the songs help save it and it does have its moments. The melancholy scenes work better than all the frenzied upbeat stuff, but this film is really about taking a dayglo spray paint to an ornate statue. You know the director has failed when you have Tobey Maguire just talking the whole frickin' time, explaining what people are thinking and doing and their motivations. Don't tell, show, is one lesson Fitzgerald would have been taught when he tried out as a screenwriter in the 1930s. It doesn't help that narrator should be made stronger, not weaker, otherwise what is he doing there? When he's a first person narrative in a book, his raison d'etre is solid, but in a film the lead actor (arguably I know) should have something more to do, otherwise why not just have the director tell the story? I give this 5 out of 10 because the 3D visuals are out of this world and make this a real experience, albeit not always an enjoyable one, but it IS different, probably the same way that the 67 Casino Royale was in its day. It's mad. But the director misses the poetry and poignancy, the subtlety of the book, and probably isn't even aiming for that anyhow.
The Look of Love (2013)
Citizen Porn
Steve Coogan was turned down for the lead in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, losing out to Geoffrey Rush, and I get the feeling this is his attempts to compensate. It is a biopic with a retro look, encompassing the same era and focused on an oft unsympathetic individual who goes on to neglect his wife and kids.
The problem is that Sellers was a man of a hundred faces while Paul Raymond seems to have none, he always came across as a deeply uncharismatic, grey little man so instead Coogan pastes his own TV persona onto him. It's not quite Partridge, but we've seen it before in 24 Hour Party People and in things like Tristram Shandy and The Trip, where Coogan plays an unflattering version of himself - sort of narcissistic, insecure, a bit sarcastic and witty, not without flair.
I didn't mind this in the Tony Wilson biopic, largely because that was played for laughs and also looked outwards to the whole Manchester music scene, but I did mind it here. We really have no clearer idea of Raymond's personality at the end of it - it maybe should have looked at the hangers on a bit more and the world of Soho generally. What's more, the pop music tends to date better than soft porn. For this to be a celebration of the Raymond Revue Bar, you'd have to contrast the buxom babes with the dour, pinched women of the era, starchy Margot Ledbetters and Margaret Thatchers, with hornrimmed spectacles and never a day in the gym. (Not saying the blokes looked much better back then to be fair. A quick look on Google Images reveals that the real Raymond was severely balding even by the mid 1960s, so must have sported a heavy hairpiece for his lothario years.)
Imogen Poots is poignant as his daughter, and they try to make out she's the same fit as newspaper proprietor Kane's wife, with similar ill-advised showbiz ambitions. Poots gets to sing the title track rather affectingly, the other song on a loop is Anyone Who Had a Heart, so maybe they were going to go with that title for the film at one point. But it's all very broadly written, and too much improvised it seems. Chris Addison impresses as one of the hangers- on, but I couldn't help thinking (due to his look in this) that we'd be better watching a history of Radio 1, with Addison as DLT and Coogan as the odious Jimmy Savile.
As for other stars, Stephen Fry plays a judge and is in this for less than a minute, David Walliams has a recurring cameo as a lecherous vicar, the sort of role that Terry Scott would have played, but is given no backstory or context to speak of, while Matt Lucas plays a stage character for all of 30 seconds. So don't be fooled by scrolling down the cast list, it's fairly slim pickings and at times it resembles those awful No Sex Please We're British movies of the day. You do get a fair bit of sex, with coke snorting atop many a bare breast, so it's not one to watch with the folks, but I can't say it's quite as erotic as I'd like, maybe because tastes have moved on since then.
Django Unchained (2012)
Last 20 minutes is a 5
It's always a joy for me to see a new Tarantino on screen, it's the dialogue stupid. But it's also the direction, there's a sense of ease and familiarity, a feeling that he's going to take you on an exhilarating trip.
So it is here, and I'd happily see this movie again, but there are problems along the way. I can't quite believe that Waltz could get himself into so many scrapes and talk his way out of it, it belongs in a more outrageous, funnier film. In a way, I think Quentin is too influenced by those slightly silly 1970s films where anything goes, and it doesn't really fit here. He is mixing his genres, though when it turns slapstick with the Ku Klux Klan, well, that could be out of Blazing Saddles. I don't mind, it's funny enough, but it's a thin line.
I'm not sure Foxx as Django is quite charismatic enough, so Waltz is carrying the movie a lot, a bit of a problem. DiCaprio puts in the best acting performance I've seen as the plantation owner, but he doesn't quite have the stature or prescence to pull off what would have been a plum role for Larry Hagman or Orson Welles in their younger days.
The final 20 minutes goes off the rails and becomes pure fantasy, much like the ending of Inglorious... It's like Tarantino can't follow through, or maybe it's deliberate, as if to say, yeah, this what we'd like to happen, but I won't kid you that it ever actually did.
Skyfall (2012)
Only in a Bond film
These have been patriotic times for the UK. The Diamond Jubilee. The Olympic Games. I went along with it, you'd have to be a curmudgeon not to. Or Morrissey.
But Heaven Knows, the new film Skyfall has me getting how our miserable pop star feels. I just can't buy into it. The applause given to this series' longevity seems a bit, well, Trigger's Broom. If you recall the gormless road sweeper from Only Fools and Horses, 'Thirty years I've used this broom! I've changed its head three times, and its handle four times...' Which means, of course, that it's hardly the same broom, is it? To me, these films don't stir the same feelings they did when I was a kid. Why should they, just because they feature a character with the same name in it? The first two Jason Bournes, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill Volume 1 - these get me going the way the old Bond films used to.
The phrase 'Only in a Bond film' once referred to the quirky, the classy, the bizarre, traits that lifted the series above other films.
But now the phrase means something very different.
Only in a Bond film would the 'hero' leave a fellow agent to his death to obey orders from his superior, and it's like we're meant to admire him! Craig's Bond disobeys his boss whenever it takes his fancy, but not in this case. We have a name for a bloke like this in England - jobsworth. Maybe that could be the name of the next Bond film, sung by Adele:
Jobsworth! / Get the T-shirt / From the foyer / That'll be another 15 pounds please...
Okay, we soon forget this as we're in a chase and there's some good banter going on, but only in a Bond film do I find it just a bit hard to hear the dialogue, as it's been since Die Another Day, it's just a bit muffled. Is to put the audience on the edge of its seat? Only in a Bond film does the hero slam into another car so it goes crashing into a bunch of 'natives', oh it's okay, he's British and they're not, who cares? Contrast later when you see just how polite and solicitous he is with Brit commuters on the Tube.
Only in a Bond film will the hero smash the bike he's riding into bridge hoping to somehow get thrown onto the train, rather than just pulling up to the bridge like you or I would.
Only in a Bond film will the lead actor move like a crab and no one really cares - it's cool! If you ever watched Octopussy and thought what the film needed was General Orlov in a fight on the speeding train in West Berlin, you're in luck, cos that's just how Craig looks in this scene.
Only in a Bond film would we get all this tripe about what a wonderful song Adele has come up with. It's not a good tune really, you wouldn't look at it twice if it weren't a Bond song. It's lushly produced, just as the film looks good, and some are fooled by window dressing.
Just as Sam Mendes' The Road to Perdition looked great, had ambition but just didn't move along, so it is here. These directors shouldn't be let near a Bond film. As with Marc Forster, who did the last one, I sense a slumming it vibe, as if to say, well, if this doesn't make sense who cares - it's only a Bond film.
This is the Craig and Dench show. Both their characters are talked down - with total justification! They both seem to be idiots. Craig is said to be old and past it - only two films back they were trying to make out he was the young kid on the block! He's only been on two missions, or only two we've seen. This is one way the film tries to tap in to Bond's iconography at the expense of him as a real person.
I think the nadir is when he cockily says he can save the trapped girl in Shanghai. Righty-ho! Sneaks on her ship, easily done. Walks naked into her shower before saying hello. He thinks he can just show up on his own to meet the villain. It starts to feel like The Man with the Golden Gun at this point, in terms of general believability.
CGI buildings on the island, like The Expendables 2.
When the helicopters show up to rescue Bond there's this daft jubilant bit of brass! Like, hey ho, he's safe! No matter the girl he went out to save is, er, dead! Only in a Bond film would the actress get so much publicity for screen time that amounts to what, about 10 minutes? The problem here is a subtext. The writer seems to be saying, hey, M is Bond's Mummy substitute! By taking her back to his own family home, her death allows him to grieve for the first time his parents' death. Seen in that way it's sort of clever, it's only as a straight narrative it's drivel.
Of course, the fans have plenty of reasons to explain away these plot holes (and there are too many to list); though you feel like you're arguing with the Tea Party. Or they say just go with it, there have been plot holes in plenty of Bond films. Well, up to a point, but those movies were fun comedy thrillers. Craig's Bond pitches itself as grim, realistic. I don't want to fess up to being a Bond fan when it means applauding the kind of rubbish we've been fed for the last decade or more. They say patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, it's also the last refuge of the rubbish filmmaker.
Magical Mystery Tour (1967)
A David Lynch film, starring The Beatles
Context is everything, and I cannot think of a worse way of watching this film than how it was first presented; on Christmas Day evening, with a disapproving dad and bewildered uncles and aunties, on a small black and white telly. While much of Sgt Pepper raised a glass to the older generation, and was both out there and inclusive, Magical Mystery Tour takes the brakes off to deliver a total freak-out, and it really should end up like the finale of The Italian Job, with the coach dangling off a cliff. 'Hang on lads,' Macca might shout. 'I've got an idea!' A recent showing on BBC2 may have helped with the documentary preceding it, with both Ringo and Macca on good form, along with lowered expectations, but I really enjoyed this film. It's not too long - only about an hour - with some fine Beatle songs in it. Much of it isn't really dreamlike, but more an odd nightmare, but it did put me in mind of a David Lynch film, in particular Mulholland Drive. It's true there isn't much 'magic' in it, it seems to seek to alienate, or disturb. I'm thinking of the dream sequence where a grinning Lennon - at his most Michael Caine-like - heaps spaghetti onto a fat woman's plate.
I am the Walrus looks rubbish on youtube, but in the context of this film looks quite quirky and polished, the Beatles' animal outfits anticipating the Soft Bulletin and Coldplay. Same with Fool on the Hill, a bit rubbish on youtube but in the film seems to be inspired from the Bergman classic The Seventh Seal.
A lot of the humour seems less out there since Python and Vic and Bob came along.
I know this isn't meant to be the best Beatle film, but honestly I've had worse times watching the others. I can't always get away from the fact that a lot of A Hard Day's Night is aimed at young teenage girls, or that the fabs are stoned throughout Help!, which has a goofy, lethargic, let's spoof Bond plot. Yellow Sub can be a protracted bore and of course Let it Be is no one's idea of fun. In some ways Magical Mystery Tour is the less dated of the lot, but it's also a bit of a time capsule. I'm glad it exists, and while Paul may have instigated it, it's the last time John Lennon looked truly happy to be a Beatle.
Everything or Nothing (2012)
Fantastic bit of editing, catch it if you can
Fantastic documentary and very pacily directed. Actually more involving and entertaining than many recent Bond films for this fan, a real narrative arc to it all, and emotional involvement. Superb use of Barry music throughout to accompany the narrative, and clips from the films to illustrate events.
Bond creator Ian Fleming gets his deserved share of acclaim in it. Connery's non-involvement lends him a posthumous air, but it allows him to be cast as the villain of the piece, an attitude which seems more justified in retrospect as the series has gone from strength to strength without him. They linger on shots of Connery looking quite obese in the Diamonds are Forever era, as if to make a point, and the clips from his rogue Bond film Never Say Never Again mainly show him at his worst. They don't mention, however, that EON actively worked to mess up Never Say Never Again by hauling them to the courts on a weekly basis to throw up roadblocks over their intended storyline.
Alternative Bond producer and huckster Kevin McClory is the other villain of the piece, though no one would realistically stick up for him. That said, I'm not sure that the whole Spectre thing wasn't his idea and lord knows EON milked that in the 60s, using them for films where they hadn't even featured in the books.
A shock to see Roger Moore look so overweight, he's turning into Cubby now, while I thought Dalton looked better than he's been in decades, quite rugged and windswept. But his interpretation of Bond is wholly damned here, with no one speaking up in support of it, and he even seems to damn it in his own words: 'I worried that half the people would love Connery and the other half love Moore and they'd gang up to hate me...' implying that's what happened, though in the interview from which that quote was taken, a few years after LTK, he swiftly added 'Which didn't happen I'm glad to say', now edited out. Brosnan is in good form, but still surprisingly cut up about getting the push, surprisingly because, let's face it, his films were mostly below par through no fault of his own. I think his response was the grief or regret that comes from knowing he'd never get a chance to get it right, and now time had moved on.
One-time Bond George Lazenby is perhaps the best entertainment value for anecdotes, he's in good form and amusingly self-deprecating. Oh, there's a moving scene regarding a phone call from Connery to Cubby, related by Barbara Broccoli. Connery's comments are occasionally heard, but they're from past interviews and used very fleetingly, over other clips.
What I found surprising was that I found the clips of Casino Royale with Daniel Craig at the end far more moving than in the actual film, because the music played over it - not David Arnold, it seems - was more affecting. Craig's performance looked shockingly impressive this time round simply because of this.
Some clips from Skyfall at the end, though not too many if you haven't seen it yet. The trailer is almost directly before the film, so arrive at the last minute if you want to miss that. Catch this in cinemas if you can, as you get to see some clips of the films on the big screen for once, even if some of the hi-def remasters seem to have just something very slightly wrong about them sometimes.
The Expendables 2 (2012)
Pro-Celebrity Golf for the Modern Age
Some of us of a certain age may remember the days of pro-celebrity golf, where past-it stars would invite members of the public to pay to see them knock a few golf balls around paired with actual golf pros; Bob Hope with Seve Ballesteros, Sean Connery with Gary Player, that sort of thing, Bruce Forsythe, Ronnie Corbett, a kind of Stella Street scenario.
The Expendables 2 is a bit like that, you get to see Sly and Arnie back again, but young guns like Jason Stratham lend a bit of credibility in the action stakes. Also this film reminded me of Sinatra's Ocean's 11, with really was rather turgid for the most part, lots of tired banter and the sense it's made to give them all something to do.
It has a bravaura opening scene, and it's easy to overlook that some of the background shots seem painted in. It's let down by the awful, clunky banter, delivered with no sense of timing or expertise. Is it meant to be bad? Is it ironic? Who knows. It maybe comes from Sly's enablers and hangers-on laughing at his jokes for the last two decades, making him think he's funny, a bit like McCartney making Give My Regards to Broad Street all those years ago, imagining his day to day life is really interesting.
But this does seem interesting, it works on different parts of your brain. It's for folk who think the Lethal Weapon films were too Ivy League, too clever, too witty, too Waspish maybe. Maybe that kind of wit and cerebral activity creates a kind of mental malaise, who knows. It reminds me of the Tea Party kind of thinking, if you can call it thinking. Reject the rational, reject discernment, it only makes your head hurt. Or maybe this is like WWF, and I'm missing the point, in that with those wrestling bouts, it's actually meant to be fixed, it's not for real. It's a real different mindset - but this film is for those who rated Tango & Cash over Riggs and Murtagh.
L'Atalante (1934)
Cats on the lash
A group of barge cats are disgruntled to find their floating abode taken over by a film crew making a movie in which nothing much happens for the first hour. So they decide to take off, to see the sights of Paris. Meanwhile, the director is distraught when mice begin to take over the vessel, and one of the crew is dispatched to search for them.
In this clear precursor to Disney's The Aristocats, the fleeing felines hole up with a jazz quartet in the Montmatre district and... okay, okay, that's not the film at all, but in fairness there are times when you might wish it was. In a 90 minute movie, it's an hour before the central event, the newlywed bride, heads off to Paris on her own. Until then, it's something of nothing, rather humdrum life on a barge and it doesn't help if you're at the cinema, cos they never crank the sound up on these old flicks, it never feels too cinematic. The couple are not that charming together, their fellow bargees the wrong side of eccentric and only the cats keep it together. That said, I reckon Hitchcock might have used a couple of things for The 39 Steps the following year; the blonde's Madeleine Carroll taking off her stockings, and the idea of a young bride smitten with talk of the city sights.
The ending did move me, but in a way because it's almost the only meaningful thing that occurs in the movie.
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)
Three or four episodes of Hustle pasted together
This movie is a bit like the UK series Hustle, only with a big budget, international locations and quite a few episodes and climaxes strung together. I didn't really gel with the characters, they seemed out of my league in a way that other action heroes don't, and I didn't quite believe in what they were up to either.
It's the Cruise brand, it's like an empty battery that gets recharged with new characters around him. I prefer this team to the last unmemorable lot, but for all that you just think, well, there'll be another lot next time. The opener in a Serbian gaol seems to be Cruise auditioning for the Jack Rancher role, all bulked up and knocking out prisoners and guards and so on - convincingly it must be said. Simon Pegg is the boffin but a lot of the humour seems a bit inappropriate because the director doesn't know how to set up the expectation of humour, if feels a bit lame. Also, you can't help thinking that the team are chosen to not be taller than Cruise, at which they succeed.
To be fair, it is exciting and my palms were sweaty, yet it was also a hollow experience, not moving really.
The cinematography isn't too great or lovely to look at, and the Imax experience I can't really get the hang of, the screen goes deep when there's some big vista but it seems a bit tacky to me, plus it destroys the suspension of disbelief. Cruise doesn't have many layers as an actor and the crucial thing is you don't really quite believe any of it and I'm not sure you're supposed to but it's all mighty earnest. At times it's as if this is a Scientology movie: here is another seemingly insurmountable challenge that our hero can surely master before moving on to the next level of enlightenment.
Midnight in Paris (2011)
Should have shown the script to Hemingway
I picked this DVD up in a backstreet, but when I got it home Paris Hilton was nowhere to be seen! Swindlers, I tell you! Okay, okay, this is Woody Allen's latest and again, another 'return to form'. My sister said it was delightful, but she had no expectations. Any UK guy might recall a BBC comedy called Goodnight Sweetheart from the 1980s in which a young man steps into a pub and finds himself back in the 1940s, where he meets and falls in love with a belle from back then, committing a kind of time-travellers adultery. This has a similar theme only it's an American Owen Wilson (who looks not wholly unlike Nicholas Lyndhurst) who gets in a Rolls and finds himself back in Paris in the 1920s, his ideal time.
It's a decent premise. I didn't take to the film however. It has lovely opening shots of Paris, but the cinematography is very plain and grainy and Woody's style is very point and shoot throughout. Don't expect much depth here. Wilson falls into the trap of just imitating Woody, like most his leading men do, and it's a distraction. Actually, I thought Johnny Galecki from The Big Bang Theory would have been excellent in the role, as he has real comic chops and I'm not sure Wilson does really.
Michael Sheen (Blair) turns up as a pompous bore, the sort you see in Allen's films sometimes, and gets plaudits for being wholly unlike his Blair persona. Initially you find yourself thinking that talk of him being a Bond villain is really not wide of the mark at all. Until, that is, you realise that he's doing another of his impersonations - it's a young Anthony Hopkins. Again, Sheen is not bad, but doesn't really nail the humour of the situation, though it gets indulgent audience titters.
The scenes where our hero finds himself in 1920s Paris lack authenticity and is all too broadly drawn for my taste, with Hemingway seeming a real bore and the whole thing might as well be set in a 1920s themed speakeasy bar in Shoreditch. All these literary legends of the time take to Wilson, though he seems to bring nothing to the party at all, has nothing of interest to say to them. And you never get much sense of why he might feel disillusionment for the time: wouldn't a neurotic like Allen realise that they never washed their hands after using the john back then? What about the casual racism of the time? The smoke, the dirt in the air? It's all rather superficially done. As Hemingway says at one point, it doesn't matter what the story is, so long as it's told well, and I don't think this was told very well.
Carla Brunei puts in a good cameo, she's actually quite good.
Friends with Benefits (2011)
Slender premise
The main angle here, as with No Strings Attached, is that of the booty call - sex available on request from a 'friend' who you fancy but don't wish to date. Problem is, it's a slender premise for a comedy in this case, because the two leads hang out together, chat, as well as have sex. So really, from the viewers' perspective, it's just your average romantic comedy. There's never any clash of tension, such as one of the leads bringing back a new beau and receiving an inappropriate or untimely 'booty call', or either of them facing disapproval from a friend or relative over their cynical arrangement. In many ways, this is like When Harry Met Sally, only condensed into two months rather than 20 years or so, and the sex out the way from the start. Even then not as funny, because here the two leads pretty much agree on stuff from the get go.
Otherwise, this does take off and becomes more likable as it goes on, but the two leads aren't too great to watch with their kit off and none of it seems too sexy or even kookily sexy to me. It has to be padded out with other themed stuff - the LA/New York divide and their respective parents. It becomes quite watchable and passes the time, but it's never that sexy or that romantic.
The Guard (2011)
Not really like In Bruges at all
In Bruges is the film this has been associated with, it stars Brendan Gleason and is directed by the brother of the guy who did In Bruges. Oh, and I also had to strain to hear the dialogue a bit when I saw it, the only difference being that I didn't feel it was worth the effort in this case.
It's broadly drawn, and just not funny enough. No real wit, most of the humour comes from the Irish cop's inappropriate racist or unPC remarks, which of course could be funny given the right context, but here... We see Gleason's cop finger a dead man's crotch while his nerdy green companion looks on with distaste. Well, is that funny? I know, I sound like Margot Ledbetter in The Good Life, wrinkling her nose. "Tell me why it's funny, please!" Later our man implies to the new black FBI man in town that surely all drug dealers are black. Could be funny, I suppose, but not here. And when one dim bulb asks the FBI man whether to 'liquidate' someone meant kill them by turning them into liquid, well, it's like the film is implying all the Irish are basically thick, though again, were the joke to be stellar I could forgive all.
There's a bit of heart when he visits his ailing mother in a hospice, but it's not that original to have her wonder what it's like to take cocaine, ooh who'd have thought it! It's as if we're not meant to know whether our man is clever or dumb, but I found Gleason just not charismatic enough for this role - Robbie Coltrane would have been fine, were he Irish not Scottish.
Mark Strong was the only actor who really acquitted himself here I felt.
Submarine (2010)
Lacks a third act
I got the feeling the director enjoyed the set-up of the film but then didn't know how to finish it off, nor why we should care about the two protagonists, who at times played it like Hindley And Brady: The Early Years, in terms of their 'quirky' lack of compassion. Some plot confusion early on: I couldn't quite figure out why loads of Polaroid photos of the two kissing would lead the the guy being branded 'gay' by his homophobic classmates, nor why the girl would want to expose him to that... all very odd. Still, it had its moments and a good few surprises, but it did seems like a composite of other films: The Graduate, Harold and Maude, Rushmore... only set in Wales.
Les aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec (2010)
Charming, different
Possibly it's best to come to this film with low expectations, but I loved it. I loved the look of belle epoque Paris, loved the total lack of Americanism, and yeah, kind of fell in love with the leading lady, who has charisma and sex appeal of a kind you just don't see with American actresses who have had it stripped out of them.
I suppose some of the humour doesn't really click, it's trying to be like Richard Lester or Blake Edward comedies of the 1960s, but you get the feeling the director doesn't quite have funny bones. He's better with the tragic aspects of the film, which concern Adele's sister in a coma. This is helped by Eric Serra's wonderful score.
The King's Speech (2010)
"The N-N-N-azis are C-C-Coming!"
This film had me in its pocket for the first half hour or so. It depicts 1930s London in a grimly authentic way and Helena Bonham Carter is a rather fetching Queen Mother. Firth holds the screen and the two kids - one of them from Outnumbered, the other looking like a young Lily Allen - are charming. I enjoyed the relationship between the excellent Geoffrey Rush and Firth, even if it's a reversal of My Fair Lady, the commoner advising the posho on speech.
Then Michael Gambdon's King George V is wheeled out to deliver the most awful leaden-footed exposition, all about how Germany is in enthral to the Nazis and how Bertie's feckless brother is involved with this Wallis woman. Oh, it's going to be one of those films is it, I thought, and I was right. Though Firth and Rush continue to be very good, every so often there's this cack-handed exposition, a character popping up to deliver a Ladybird book version of history, to remind us why it's important that the second in line gets his elocution right. It's not really too accurate as this takes place in the mid-1930s, when Hitler really wasn't seen as that much of a threat, especially by the Royal family. Certainly Baldwin, the Prime Minister, had no particular opinion on him as yet, so they're truncating events big time. Okay, Churchill is wheeled out to say the same thing, (Timothy Spall in a role that could be out of Comic Strip) but Churchill was seen as a dog barking at the moon back then.
Exposition is like a hairpiece, if you notice it it's not doing its job right.
We're artlessly spoonfed information as to why Wallis Simpson is A Bad Person, just mean to accept it like some gullible courtier. With a line thrown in for American audiences: "It's not that she's American..." It's all too broadly written.
Otherwise just as Rush was too old to be Peter Sellers in his biopic, Firth is surely way too old to be the Bertie and looks a lot older than Guy Pearce, who is meant to be his older brother. Anthony Andrews pops up as Baldwin and is unreconisable from his Bridehead days. Actually there's the sense that this script has been on the backburner for so long, Andrews might have been considered for the role of King Edward 20 years ago, and Pride and Prejudice's Jennifer Ehle, who is Logie's wife in this, would have made a decent fist of Wallis Simpson's bony carnality. And Firth would have been the right age.
By this time I was recasting the film in my mind, and came up with Brit comic David Mitchell as Bertie (the same voice as Firth) and his Peep Show compadre Robert Webb as the rakish, carefree Edward, that would have worked rather well. The whole thing at times had the feel of Churchill: The Movie.
The Ghost of St. Michael's (1941)
You can never go back
I'm giving this seven out of ten, back as a kid it would have been a ten but this time round, well, I suppose you know you're getting old when you find yourself sympathising with Will Hay's incompetent teacher, and rather hoping the obnoxious, snotty school kids get a slap; Charles Hawtrey's smart alec schoolboy in particular seems a nasty piece of work. Otherwise the absence of Moffatt and Marriott are keenly felt, because they allowed Hay to be both blustery incompetence but also sarcastic - here he doesn't get anyone to be sarcastic or superior to, so it's a relatively one-note performance. In his earlier roles you never knew if he'd be the fool or the sarcy one at any given time, it kept you on your toes.
Huntley and Laurie would appear in the war movie The Way Ahead of course. Personally I'm not sure the plot machinations of St Michael's stand up. Was it Huntley's ink on the forged suicide note? What gives? Still, the ending has a few surprises and some genuinely sinister moments.
Follow That Camel (1967)
Die, infidels!
Not sure you could get away with screening this on BBC1 early evening these days, though its strangely reassuring to find that the old Middle Eastern Muslim antipathy goes back 100 years and is hardly anything new. Bernard Bresslaw is a revelation as the swarthy anti-imperialist and I must say I prefer him in this to his similar role in Carry On Up The Kyber, which others prefer.
Many Carry Ons basically take one movie and spoof if, be it The Scarlet Pimpernel, Cleopatra, Hammer horror, James Bond. This one does The Four Feathers, as young posh boy Jim Dale leaves Blighty brokenhearted to join the Foreign Legion, with his trusty manservant in tow.
Production values are high, which makes this a joy to watch on DVD. The desert may be Camber Sands, but as this was filmed in the summer of 1967, you get some lovely shots of blazing blue skies, unlike other Carry Ons which are meant to be balmy summer but in fact were filmed in February.
Kenneth Williams mentions his tensions with interloper Phil Silvers in his diaries, though it's clear he may have been jealous of someone other than him monopolising the conversation. You don't get any sense of this with the first half of the film, where Silvers is on comic form and I personally soon forgot about Sid James, seeing as Silvers offered something different. The pace and interest does slacken towards the end, as there don't seem to be so many Carry On regulars on screen, it lacks that ensemble feel and with the Road films you did get a song or two chucked in to lighten the load.
Within three months, Kenneth Williams and the team were back on filming Carry On Doctor that early autumn. That's a heck of a work ethic.
Carry On... Up the Khyber (1968)
Seems I'm in the minority on this...
I like the Carry Ons, but I have to say that this doesn't hit the mark for me. I'd watched Follow That Camel a few days earlier and that really did make me laugh, but though this in theory should be funnier, and the jokes are all there, it just didn't tickle my funny bone.
For one thing, the pretext is a bit infantile. Yeah, I know this is Carry On, but the idea that the British regiment have underwear under their kilts that arouses Afghan scorn just seems too silly to me. I guess if you knew a bit about the conflict this probably has some spoof on reality, as does the final dinner in which cannon balls drop around the fancy residence, but do you know what, I couldn't raise a chuckle. Again, Sid James working his way through a harem of willing women ought to be funny enough, but nah. And there's nothing wrong with Peter Butterworth leering and letching over a woman's breasts - this is Carry On after all - but in this movie it just seems rather horrible. It doesn't help that Roy Castle is standing in for Jim Dale. Castle is one of those Carry On additions who for me just don't work for some undiscernable reason, whereas the likes of Terry Scott were more than welcome. Comparing Castle to Dale is like comparing George Lazenby's Bond to Sean Connery's.
The incidental music isn't as funny or jolly either. A lot of the time it mimics the chords of the James Bond theme, but not to much purpose.
Carry On Up The Kyber is popular and it seems it appeals to those of a highbrow persuasion, rather like Carry On Cleo which I found sort of dragged, despite its high production values. It's as if we're meant to be laughing at the Brits, in an ironic kind of way, rather than mucking in.
The theme might have been topical at the time, what with Sgt Pepper being released only the year before. Anyway, 'the British are used to cuts!' is one line that remains topical, under Cameron's coalition government.
Macbeth (1983)
Workmanlike, uninspired
This was my first viewing of Macbeth. I didn't really rate it. Williamson's delivery is always a bit Leonard Rossiter, which adds some welcome and not inappropriate humour to his Hamlet, but really doesn't work for this character. Sometimes his hysterical throes with Lady Macbeth put me in mind of Rigsby and Miss Jones.
The two leads don't have much chemistry or sexual chemistry. Shakespeare cuts to the chase in this play; no sooner have the witches voiced his destiny, he's licking his lips and plotting, no sooner has Lady Macbeth been informed of this via letter, she's turning murderous! It may be that the surviving play is abridged, some say. But for this to be convincing we have to see something unpleasant or visceral in the two leads just waiting to be untapped by fate, and I didn't see it here. Like, Cherie Blair would be a good Lady Macbeth, and the ambitious Gordon Brown her husband (okay, that's an unlikely alliance!) Here, you don't get the sense that their personal chemistry is the catalyst for murder and downfall. You just think, 'Are they crazy? What are they playing at?'
Against All Flags (1952)
Flynn Sinks It
Latter day Errol Flynn pirate adventure, filmed in sumptuous colour and with Anthony Quinn and Maureen O'Hara providing fine support as the villainy and love interest respectively (of course!). O'Hara was in the not dissimilar Black Swan but I much prefer her in this, as a feisty pirate captain called Spitfire. She wears Lincoln green a lot, perhaps as a nod to Flynn's Robin Hood many years earlier.
Sadly, I found Flynn to be the weakest link here. People say he's aged a lot in this, but no more than many of us do in over a decade, certainly no more than Bond stars Connery and Moore did in the same amount of time. I don't mind the 19th-hole, fetch-me-a-double-whiskey-and-Xerox-it pallour, rather that Flynn seems to be a man with the fight completely knocked out of him. There's none of the animus or spirit of his earlier performances - and Flynn without spirit is like Connery without his dangerous edge - or, as Connery appeared in Never Say Never Again. In fact, this vehicle has the feel of a belated comeback picture like NSNA or Indy and the Crystal Skulls, there's the sense that something is not quite right with the leading man. There's a defeated, shifty look in Flynn's eyes that's very uncharismatic.
It doesn't help that the script seems written for Flynn in his younger glory years, a lady killer who can turn Spitfire's head without preamble. It's a scene that anticipates Connery and Karin Dor in YOLT, but at least Connery had a bit more of the youthful, indolent way about him still then.
I didn't care either for the plot, a Donnie Brasco-type thing where Flynn is a naval officer posing as a deserter to infiltrate the pirate colony, but that's just my taste. Like Lazenby in OHMSS going undercover as Sir Hilary Bray, it works against the leading man's natural brio and bravado. It would have helped to show some dastardly, nasty pirate behaviour early on to justify his undercover actions, because often Flynn plays the outraged insubordinate rather than an establishment figure. Still, the look of the film carried me through and I wish Captain Blood had been filmed in that sort of colour.
The BBC Television Shakespeare: King Richard the Second (1978)
Starts to drag
This is great to watch with the subtitles, and it's generally quite comprehensible, whereas reading the Aarden Shakespeare meant I had to consult the notes to figure out what the characters meant.
That said, there's more than a touch of camp about Derek Jacobi's titular king, to the point where I wondered if he had a bit of the Edward II about him. Jacobi's effete manner reminded me of another, even earlier king, King John, as played by Claude Rains in The Adventures of Robin Hood. All very good up to a point, but it began to lack a certain range for me. As his self-pitying histrionics rose to a pitch near the end, I began to think of Richard Dreyfus in the 1990s sitcom Gimme Gimme Gimme, and how he might expostulate over some handsome hunk he'd had within his grasp, only to let slip through his fingers like slimy spaghetti in cold water - while an unimpressed, gum-chewing Kathy Burke watches on.
It's 2 hrs 40 minutes, btw. Look out for a great supporting cast including Clive Swift (Keeping Up Appearances, Excalibur) among the more obvious names.
Il Decameron (1971)
The Black Death is more fun
Plenty of positive reviews on this site. The Decameron is great - the 14th-century book I mean. What I've read of it anyway, the writing is a mix of Saki and Tales of the Unexpected and holds up very well, in particular the tale about the Christian who hopes to convert his Jewish friend, who decides to go to Rome to observe the clergy to see what all the fuss is about, with unexpected results.
The film can't cover something like 100 tales in the book, but the director seems to handpick the bawdy ones for our (or his) delight. But the bawdiness is unerotic, as if to highlight how comical and debasing such lusty antics. And the 'punchline' - so excellent in the story I mentioned above (which doesn't feature) - is often so weak as to be unnoticeable. You wait for something more to happen, only to find, oh, it's a new story. Okay, that was it was it? What's more, there isn't the comic touch to milk some of the set-ups properly. Frankly, some of the Carry On films do this stuff far better. It's a shame they never set a Carry On film in the medieval era actually. On the plus side, the wonderful scenery stays with you, and it is good to see women who aren't the usual Hollywood example, it does change the mindset regarding the opposite sex a bit.
This is a rare example where the book (in particular the Penguin translation) is easier to dip into.