Great Expectations (2012)


Ralph Fiennes is ‘Ungry

Director: Mike Newell

Cast: Jeremy Irvine (Pip), Holliday Grainger (Estella), Helena Bonham-Carter (Miss Havisham), Ralph Fiennes (Magwitch), Robbie Coltrane (Jaggers), Jason Flemyng (Joe Gargery), Ewen Bremner (Wemmick), Sally Hawkins (Mrs. Joe), David Walliams (Pumblechook), Tamzin Outhwaite (Molly), Ben Lloyd-Hughes (Bentley Drummle)

There is one major problem with Mike Newell and screenwriter David Nicholl’s faithful adaptation of Great Expectations, one of Charles Dickens’ best loved novels. It’s such a faithful adaptation that it largely fails to say or do anything unique or interesting with the actual source material itself. Thus it basically joins the parade of adaptations of this novel on film, struggling to define itself from the competition.

For those who don’t know the story: young Pip has two defining encounters in his childhood. One is with escaped convict Magwitch (Ralph Fiennes), to whom he provides some help; the other with eccentric, secluded spinster Miss Havisham (Helena Bonham-Carter), who brings him in as a playfellow for her ward, Estella. As a young man, Pip (Jeremy Irvine) finds himself coming into “great expectations” from a mysterious benefactor, and moves to London where he encounters Estella (Holliday Grainger) once more.

Nicholl’s screenplay is a careful ticking off of all the events you would expect to see from either the book or previous versions: “I’m hungry boy”? Check. Mrs Joe? Check. Boxing with young Herbert Pocket? Check. Jaggers and Molly? Check. Wemmick, the Aged P and the cannon? Check. Bentley Drummle? Check. Joe Gargery in London? Check. Fire? Check. And so on, and so on. What’s really missing from the film is any sense of identity, any sense of a story it wishes to tell, or angle it wants to take on the source material. Instead it’s a picture book accompaniment to the novel. A beautifully filmed one, I will say (John Mathieson’s photography is lavishly good, and brilliantly captures the wide-open spaciousness of Kent compared to the dank, claustrophobic confines of London) but still a picture book.

It’s also decently acted throughout, with Jason Flemyng a stand-out as a decent, kind and loveable Joe (a part I think it’s almost impossible to fail in). Robbie Coltrane makes Jaggers a creepy charmer. Helena Bonham-Carter is, as one reviewer said, “almost too perfect casting” as Miss Havisham – her performance is a bit too familiar as a remix of her parts in Tim Burton films and Bellatrix Lastrange – but she is still very good in this role.

The closest the film gets to putting a twist on the novel is to front and centre the love-story angle between Pip and Estella. Even this, though, is not completely successful, largely due to time. Irvine and Grainger are fine performers (Grainger in particular does an awful lot with what can’t be more than 10-15 minutes of screentime), but adult Pip and Estella don’t have a scene together until halfway through the film. The film also is reluctant to lose anything major from the Gargery or Magwitch plotlines, meaning these get equal weighting with the Estella scenes. It’s possibly the only area where this adaptation is weaker than the BBC adaptation of a few years later, which effectively repositioned the story with a focus on father-son relationships, adding greater prominence to the Pip-Gargery-Magwitch relationships.

Mentioning that BBC adaptation makes a key point about the lack of individuality this production has. Casting my mind back to it, I found it very hard to remember or distinguish the differences between the two – both looked very similar, took similar decisions and featured similar casts. In fact, it became very hard to remember who was in what – an internet search for images for this film throws up plenty of images of Douglas Booth from the mini-series. It’s a small point, but I think captures the lack of uniqueness about this film.

I’ve been very hard on this film, which I feel a bit bad about as it is a very watchable and loyal adaptation and a perfect entry point for Dickens. It also has, in Ralph Fiennes, one superb performance. Of all the versions of Magwitch on screen, this surely has to be the best. Fiennes has the physicality and danger the role needs, but he also has an ethereal, almost child-like quality to him. You can believe this is a dangerous man, but also understand how he can be so passive and easily led. Fiennes’ Magwich takes a delight in the seeing the pleasures of others and has a sweet dedication to his own codes of loyalty. It’s a terrific performance – and actually emerges as the one unique and defining thing the film has to offer.

Jackie (2016)


Jackie Kennedy patrols a White House she will soon be forced to leave behind

Director: Pablo Larrain

Cast: Natalie Portman (Jackie Kennedy), Peter Sarsgaard (Bobby Kennedy), Greta Gerwig (Nancy Tuckerman), Billy Crudup (The Journalist), John Hurt (Father Richard McSorley), Max Casella (Jack Valenti), Richard E. Grant (William Walton), John Carroll Lynch (Lyndon B. Johnson), Beth Grant (Ladybird Johnson), Caspar Phillipson (John F. Kennedy)

“Ask ev’ry person if he’s heard the story

And tell it strong and clear if he has not,

That once there was a fleeting wisp of glory

Called Camelot.”

Or so sang King Arthur in Alan Jay Lerner’s musical Camelot. It’s apt as it’s a musical cue Jackie returns to several times in this thought-provoking, if rather stately, film that with one eye looks to sharply critique the legend building of American political history, while with the other staring with adoration at the very legacy at its centre.

The film follows, in a slightly non-linear fashion, the period of time from Kennedy’s assassination through to his state funeral and Jackie Kennedy’s departure from the White House (although other scenes feature Jackie during the presidency, most notably her filming of A Tour of the White House in 1962, a TV special the film lovingly recreates with a mixture of existing and newly-created footage and audio). The framing device is an interview Jackie gives with an unnamed journalist, set after the events of the film, in which she alternates between frank honesty and careful legacy building – all the time stressing she will decide what is, and is not, printed.

The film is a both a careful deconstruction of legacy building and a celebration of it, with Jackie Kennedy portrayed as a contradictory figure – keen to give her husband a place in history and, at times, resentful of the impact of public interest in her life. In a neat scene, Jackie Kennedy asks the driver of her husband’s hearse if he has heard of the last two Presidential victims of assassination, William T. McKinley or James Garfield. He knows neither. When asked if he has heard of the first, Abraham Lincoln, he of course is able to name check victory in the civil war and the abolition of slavery. It’s a sharp reminder of the work she must do for her husband’s legacy, with his achievements ranking nowhere near Lincoln’s.

The films suggests throughout that the planning of the funeral was focused on giving Kennedy (and by extension Jackie and her children) a permanent place in American folk-lore. It’s why the reprise of Camelot works in the film – it’s sums up the attitudes of America an administration that has indeed lived on as a short time of hope, with Kennedy as the lost Golden Boy. The appropriateness of the song is something the film manages to both use and comment upon – and which it also manages to make feel fresh, despite the fact the “Camelot” has been a nickname for the Kennedy White House ever since the 1960s.

Simultaneously, though, it is a film that lingers with wide-eyed wonder on JFK himself, and which presents LBJ as a far more corrupted and overtly political figure compared to the reverence the film feels for his predecessor (his serial womanising is given only a brief mention by Jackie during her conversation with her priest). Kennedy (played by an actor with a remarkable physical and vocal similarity) is always a romantic figure, his motivations or his achievements very rarely questioned. He’s filmed like the very romantic hero, which the film is half encouraging us to question that he was – and I’m not sure this is deliberate.

The film is acute and quietly non-judgemental throughout the scenes covering the assassination, reaction and funeral plans. So much so, that the framing device of the journalist (Billy Crudup in a thankless part, scruffily dressed, alternately arch and adoring) seems like it belongs in another, dumber, movie – as if we needed Jackie to give voice to her feelings, to actually speak words stressing her power and determination in shaping what is printed about her husband, in order to understand it. It’s an obvious, TV-movie framing device that really adds very little.

This is largely because Natalie Portman gives such a sensational performance in the lead role. As to be expected, it is a brilliant capturing both of Kennedy’s vocal and physical mannerisms. But more than that, it is also a sharp performance of deeply confused grief and guilt over her husband’s fate, mixed with a public strength (at times bordering on furious anger) in her determination to plan a funeral she felt befitted her husband’s status. Weak as the journalist scenes are, she dominates them with her skilful portrayal of a woman split between a need for intimate confession and determination to maintain control over the story.

Portman’s performance also provides the emotional anchor to scenes that could otherwise be careful reconstructions. The assassination itself (filmed within the car) has rarely seemed so immediate – and the camera largely sticks with Portman’s stunned, terrified face throughout the long drive to the hospital. Her combination of lost alienation, bewilderment and shock equally dominates the rushed inauguration of Johnson, while scenes of her returning to the White House to finally remove her blood-stained clothing shimmer with emotional intensity. It’s a film that captures the stunned sense of alienation from reality that comes after undergoing any major, life-changing event.

The film has a ghostly, elegiac mood. Larrain uses rather murky photography effectively throughout the film. The slightly grainy focus given to the general world of the film allows sharper primary colours to stand out at key moments. The Oscar-nominated score for me was, however, far too insistent – a series of sharp notes and discordant sounds mixed with mournful refrains. It draws too much attention to itself and makes the same point too many times to be effective. I suspect its a score that might work better in isolation. Far better are the quiet and controlled shots of Jackie walking listlessly through a deserted White House, or the careful mixing of the tragic and the mundane (when selecting a positon in Arlington for her husband, she has to ask a companion to slow down as her shoes keep getting stuck in the mud).

It’s an intelligent, thought-provoking and adult piece of film-making, that carefully avoids passing judgement or making pronouncements. I can’t decide if it’s a film that can’t make up its mind about events, or if it challenges us to make up our mind for ourselves. Either way, Portman gives an extraordinary performance and is well supported by the rest of the cast, in particular John Hurt who gives a charming, witty performance as the Priest who Jackie allows herself (for a moment) to be completely honest with. A dynamic and interesting addition to JFK films, that manages to find a new angle and even some new ideas from well-worn ground.

The Equalizer (2014)

Denzel rests up. In about five seconds of screen time that scolding hot coffee will probably be in someone’s face.

Director: Antoine Fuqua
Cast: Denzel Washington (Robert McCall), Marton Csokas (Nicolai Itchenko) , Chloe Grace Moretz (Alina/Teri), Melissa Leo (Susan Plummer), Bill Pullman (Brian Plummer), David Harbour (Frank Masters), Johnny Skourtis (Ralph)

In the 1980s Edward Woodward had a sudden massive success in the States starring as Robert McCall, akaThe Equalizer, a former agent of a Government Agency, making atonement for past misdeeds by offering his skills free-of-charge to help the innocent and falsely accused. It ran for four seasons and then largely faded from memory. As such, it seems a strange choice for Denzel Washington to bring back to life – until you remember that Washington has a fondness for appearing in trashy action films. Kinda like I have a fondness for watching them.

Because I’ll be honest, this film is more or less exactly what you would expect from a film whose poster is the star male actor holding a gun (and, after watching this on Netflix and seeing my recommendations I am now aware how many films out there have posters of late middle age actors holding guns. Liam Neeson has a lot to answer for. Half of Hollywood’s middle aged men should be paying him some sort of commission.)

Here McCall is reimagined as a quietly retired man, works at a hardware store, is beloved by his colleagues and in mourning for his wife, who of course he promised he would leave his old life behind. There are hints that he has a certain level of OCD, and meticulously times every action he carries out. Concerned at the poor treatment handed out to a teenage prostitute by her Russian Mafia pimp, he attempts to intervene politely but firmly – but of course a blood bath of slaughtered goons ensues, and before we know it the whole Russian mafia is trying to work out who our hero is and what he wants.

It’s a pretty familiar set-up and the film wastes no time in letting us understand it before hurling us into events that will shatter any peace its lead character has. After all we all know that this zen peace isn’t going to last and that Washington will soon be dishing out pain and taking names like nobody’s business. What the film does do quite well though is sketch out the everyday folk in the film so well (with only brief moments on screen of things like baseball games) that you actually do care for them, and you actually do understand why McCall finds this life so enjoyably unstressful.

The violence when it comes is very effectively filmed. It has a great “Bourne-ish” quality to it, as McCall uses a series of everyday items with lethal effect. The final sequence takes place in the very hardware store McCall works at, and there is some imaginative use of the various products contained therein. Similarly, throughout the film McCall uses various hardware items for purposes other than those intended by the manufacturer, and niftily cleans the items to return them for sale (a great way of junking the evidence).

My one issue with the violence in this film is that I felt, at times, it was a little too graphic, a little too delighting in its mayhem. It largely gets away with this as it establishes that the victims of the violence throughout the film are mobsters and killers. The film is also slightly too long – the momentum dries up in places – and the script or direction fails to deliver a single key ‘moment’ to make this stand out from the crowd of films in this genre. It’s entertaining and good fun for fans of the genre, but it never really seems completely original, instead an effective remix of things from other movies.

Denzel Washington is of course the film’s MVP, and he tackles the part extremely well, adding a great deal of depth to McCall’s shame at his past, his discomfort with violence and his need to carefully organise his life into time managed compartments. He has the quiet, cool confidence that the part needs and suitably manages to look normal enough that you can believe he would fade into the background. Of course he could do the part standing on his head, but he still gives it a lot of interest. Marton Csorkas also does a good job as his nemesis, though the part is paper thin.

The ending feels rather tacked on and designed as sequel bait – but there are far worse films out there that will get sequels. Decent fun, nothing special, an effective remix of other films.

The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

Our heroes undergo one hell of a cold snap

Director: Roland Emmerich
Cast: Dennis Quaid (Jack Hall), Jake Gyllenhaal (Sam Hall), Ian Holm (Professor Terry Rapson), Emmy Rossum (Laura Chapman), Sela Ward (Dr. Lucy Hall), Christopher Britton (Vorsteen), Arjay Smith (Brian Parks), Dash Mihok (Jason Evans), Jay O Sanders (Frank Harris), Adrian Lester (Simon), Kenneth Welsh (Vice President Raymond Becker)

I have to confess there are certain genres I have a weakness for. One of these is the big-budget disaster movie. For some reason, nothing helps me relax or unwind more of an evening than watching some of the great landmarks of the world being destroyed or seeing hundreds of people fleeing before a tsunami/pyroclastic flow/asteroid impact/tornado etc. There is clearly something wrong with me.

The Day After Tomorrowfits very comfortably into this trope, offering up some totally predictable and entertaining-enough thrills combined with total ‘scientific’ nonsense. Thanks to man’s foolishness, the climate of the Northern hemisphere is changing, and only Professor Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) knows that it’s happening (although to be fair he does say it will take place across hundreds of years). But gosh darn it doncha know, suddenly those projections are revised to “the next six to eight weeks!” Cue cold snaps of -100°F dealing out death in Scotland, brick sized hail bashing in heads in Tokyo, and a tsunami taking out New York. Of course Hall’s son (a game Jack Gyllenhaal) is trapped in New York so Hall mounts a rescue mission…

The world-destroying scenes are suitably high scale and dramatic, with Roland Emmerich showing his usual efficient martialling of special effects. Emmerich doesn’t get quite the credit he deserves – as a B movie hack director, he’s very good at keeping the viewer fully aware of what’s happening all the time and to whom, and very rarely labours any particularly point. He also has a goofiness about him, when directing this sort of nonsense, that encourages you to disengage critical faculties and join him for the ride. Don’t get me wrong, he’s no Hitchcock – but compared to Michael Bay, he’s David Lean.

The story doles out the expected personal dramas amongst the chaos. Its main issue is that “weather” doesn’t make the most relatable nemesis ever committed to screen. To cover this, some timber wolves are introduced into New York to terrorise Gyllenhaal and his trapped student friends (Emmerich, bless him, carefully stages a scene earlier where befuddled zookeepers stare aghast at an empty wolf pen and comment “The wolves are gone!”). To be honest, though, these animals are a bit dull – what people will really remember are the desperate dashes to get somewhere warm while another “death-on-contact” cold snap speeds towards our heroes. As most of this stuff happens in the first half of the movie, the second half can rather drag – with the Northern hemisphere effectively destroyed early doors, what else is there left to show?

Emmerich does have some fun with politics. One of the joys of the disaster film (I find) is the inevitable crowd of characters who denounce any chance of the disaster occurring. Emmerich goes one better here by having the President and Vice-President vocally and visually imitate then-office-holders Bush and Cheney. The facsimile Bush even defers to his facsimile Cheney. It makes for some heavy-handed digs at their Presidency’s lack of impetus on climate change, and general perceived weakness, but hey at least the film is using blockbusting to make some tongue-in-cheek political points.

The characters are all pulled from the stock. Quaid does his usual decent job as the guy you hire for this sort of film when your first choices are unavailable, but he never lets you down and brings a lot of dignity to the ludicrous concept. Gyllenhaal and Rossum are rather sweet as smart teenagers (gotta like a film where all the young characters are bookish nerds). Smith gives some good comic support. Ian Holm and Adrian Lester manage to keep a straight face and provide a lot of dignity to roles that must have been little more than picking up paycheques.

Disengage brain, settle back and enjoy the carnage. Emmerich is like an eager-to-please student proudly presenting his work on parents’ day. The great thing about him is that you know he is a booky, geeky type (like his heroes here) and he’ll never do anything to offend you.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016)

Sisters doing it for themselves. As I’m sure the film would have said in the dialogue if it had the guts.

Director: Burr Steers
Cast: Lily James (Elizabeth Bennet), Sam Riley (Fitzwilliam Darcy), Jack Huston (Wickham), Bella Heathcote (Jane Bennet), Douglas Booth (Mr. Bingley), Matt Smith (Mr. Collins), Charles Dance (Mr. Bennet), Lena Headey (Lady Catherine de Bourgh), Sally Phillips (Mrs. Bennet), Aisling Loftus (Charlotte Lucas)

Back in the 1990s, Harry Enfield and Chums did a sketch in which The Terminator (played by Martin Clunes) arrives in early 20th-century England, and spends a weekend at a country house searching for his victim. His violent antics are met with po-faced, stiff upper lip responses from the Upper Crust members of the household and uncomplaining reserve from the servants. It’s very funny. It sticks in the mind. It brilliantly mashes up costume drama with sci-fi drama. It’s five minutes long.

This film is effectively the same gag but stretched far beyond any possible welcome to an agonising 104 minutes, in which the same comic beat is repeated over and over again. “Oh look! Those posh girls/blokes in frocks are discussing tea and table arrangements! And now they are slaughtering a herd of zombies! While continuing the conversation! What larks!”

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was the poster child of a mercifully short-lived literary novelty: classic novels rewritten with genre elements. This trend also saw sea monsters inserted into Sense and Sensibility and hard-core sex scenes inserted into Jane Eyre (the worst of all, as the author had the cheek to suggest that Bronte would of course have got those scenes in if she could). It was a best-seller, but only in the sense that it was the ultimate ‘I-don’t-know-what-to-get-you-for-Christmas’ gag gift. But years after the moment had passed, the movie adaptation lumbered towards the big screen.

Morbid curiosity made me watch it (over several nights on Netflix, I hasten to add) and it’s exactly what it appears to be: a student sketch that is worthy of maybe a slight smile for the first few minutes, but then totally collapses the longer it goes on. Now I like Jane Austen films and I like zombie films but still I didn’t like this. Firstly it’s a terrible zombie film – the action moments are poorly shot and hard to follow, the action dull and the “laws” around the zombies in the movie are inconsistent (some zombies are super killers, others are lumbering brainless beasts). Secondly, all that Zombie stuff makes it a pretty bad Austen film. Worst of both worlds.

The Austen bits are (unsurprisingly) by far the best bits. There is a good cast here: Lily James and Matt Smith in particular would be very well cast in a proper adaptation. Anything interesting comes largely from Austen (the characters, the emotions, the bulk of the watchable stuff in the first half) anything dull from the source material (the zombies, the action, the final 30 minutes). The idea of society being fundamentally unchanged by a zombie invasion makes no sense at all (would money still be the driving factor in a world destroyed by the undead?). Much of the fighting involving the female characters has a slightly uncomfortable leering sexuality about it (“Look at those hot chicks pull knives from their undergarments! Phrroooaaahhh!!!!”) as well as being far too over choreographed.

Zombies is a pointless film of a forgotten fad. It’s one of the worst zombie films ever made. It wastes our chance to see some of these actors give decent performances in a proper adaptation. Pleasingly, it bombed catastrophically at the box office, probably because it appeals to no one: the zombie action isn’t anywhere good enough to interest the genre fan, the Austen fan is more likely to bung on their Firth/Ehle DVD than check this mess out. None of them are missing anything. Zombies isn’t the must-see abomination it needed to be to have any shelf life – it’s a blatant attempt to rake some more cash from a horse flogged to death. If you want to get a sense of it, save yourself 135 minutes and watch that Harry Enfield sketch instead. I guarantee you’ll laugh a heck of a lot more.

Mr. Brooks (2007)

Kevin Costner goes for a ride, accompanied only by his imaginary friend. We’ve all done it. Right?

Director: Bruce A. Evans
Cast: Kevin Costner (Earl Brooks), William Hurt (Marshall), Demi Moore (Detective Atwood), Dane Cook (“Mr. Smith”), Marg Helgenberger (Emma Brooks), Danielle Panabaker (Jane Brooks), Ruben Santiago-Hudson (Detective Hawkins)

Apparently when Kevin Costner read the script he thought it was the best script he had read in years. This probably says more about Kevin’s choices since the early 1990s than it does about the script itself but this is still a decent enough thriller with an interesting twist on the psychopath killer story.

Costner’s Mr Brooks is a successful business man and loving family man who also happens by night to be a serial killer. The twist being throughout that he is accompanied in his crimes by his imaginary friend, played with creepy relish by William Hurt. Brooks is consumed by guilt from his “addiction”, visiting AA and constantly claiming he is ready to quit. The film opens with an unexpected curtain being left open during a carefully prepared murder, leaving Brooks open to blackmail from an eye witness with a taste for trying this murdering lark.

The film is performed with such guilty and gleeful relish by Costner and Hurt that it’s incredibly easy to be swept up by its momentum and to forget that out hero is a serial murderer. The film is very careful to give centre stage to the invention and intelligence of its anti-hero which, combined with Costner’s fundamental likeability as a performer, are very attractive traits for any viewer. Only at a few points is the darkness of Brooks explored, most prominently from Costner’s near orgasmic sigh and shoulder roll after committing the first murder of the film. Otherwise the viewer is as seduced by this dark world as Brooks himself has been.

A sub plot about Brooks daughter possibly inheriting her murderous inclinations is much less interesting but does allow Costner to offer an amusing twist on the straight-as-an-arrow American heroes he made his career playing. But it never engages as much as the strange will-he-won’t-he dance Brooks has with his blackmailer  (a fantastic performance of scuzzy bravado hiding cowardice from Dane Cook). Demi Moore also gives a surprisingly effective performance as a hard as nails career copper chasing down the murders.

But it’s the performances of Hurt and Costner that really lift this film up into the higher reaches of the second tier of psychological thriller, along with the neat concept of the childhood imaginary friend gone completely over to the bad. Hurt in particular is terrific, in a performance that is part raging id monster part caring big brother. A dark guilty pleasure I’m not surprised it is slowly gaining cult status.

London Has Fallen (2016)

Rather appropriately Gerard Butler takes aim at us. After all the viewer is just about the only person he doesn’t kill in this film.

Director: Babak Najafi
Cast: Gerard Butler (Mike Banning), Aaron Eckhart (President Benjamin Asher), Morgan Freeman (Vice President Allan Trumbull), Alon Moni Aboutboul (Aamir Barkawi), Angela Bassett (Director Lynne Jacobs), Robert Forster (General Clegg), Melissa Leo (Secretary McMillan), Radha Mitchell (Leah Banning), Charlotte Riley (‘Jax’ Marshall), Jackie Earle Haley (DC Mason), Waleed Zuaiter (Kamran Barkawi), Colin Salmon (Com Kevin Hazard), Patrick Kennedy (John Lancaster)

Devoid of any sense of humour, decency,  charm or emotions at all this is a brainless and tasteless action film crammed to the gizoids with extreme knife based violence,  growled threats and paper thin characters none of whom are remotely interesting or engaging. It’s cast iron certainty, it’s self righteousness and brutality make it a deeply unpleasant, off-putting and unlikeable film.

Basically the UK PM is slain and the G8 assemble like besuited Avengers for the funeral. Unfortunately some terrorists have hatched a plan to wipe them out in revenge for a pre-credits missile strike and sure enough we have a series of assassinations in the opening seconds by villainous shady terrorists. Spreading the stereotypes fairly BTW the French leader is a yacht based dilantte, the Italian a geriatric lothario and the German a sour faced deadly serious Angela Merkel type.

The main problem with this is Gerard Butler. The film sinks completely under the weight of Butler’s self importance and chronic lack of humour . At no point in this film does Butler’s Mike Banning make any mistakes or offer up any form of human reaction such as fear or uncertainty. Compare him instead to John McClane and the moments of terror Willis dips into that role to humanise it. Also remember that Willis is charming and witty in that film. Butler however thinks alpha male certainty and grim faced contempt for everyone he meets (bar his bosses and a Scottish SAS captain) will endear us to his character. Instead it makes him border line terrifying – it would surely only take a wrong word, for Banning to turn his fury on an innocent bystander.

Mike Banning however is a violent psychopath, Butler thinking that brutally murdering a captive with a knife while growling some zenophobic one liner counts as wit. To be honest I’d be scared shitless if I was protected by this psycho who growls brutally from start to finish, all too clearly enjoying the mass killing. There is a vague attempt to humanise him with the introduction of a pregnant wife at home but instead you dread what values Banning is likely to invest the infant with in the future.

In fact the whole film has a horrible jingoism, xenophobia and racism running through its centre. It’s attitude to anything not American (or at a push British) is at best suspicion, at worst outright hatred. Anyone with a beef against America is twisted, evil, riven with jealousy and hatred of freedom and shucks we should cheer as Banning brutally tortures one of them in his final moments. America! Fuck Yeah! It gives patriotism a bad name.

The film passes the time if you enjoy seeing London destroyed (again) on film, and the body count of gruesome kills is high enough to satisfy anyone’s needs for violence, although the killing is so graphic and the film lingers so leeringly on each knifes plunge with the perversity of snuff film. A load of Brits (Colin Salmon, Charlotte Riley and Patrick Kennedy) dial in worried expressions from a control room (needless to say one of them is a traitor) while sportingly Morgan Freeman, Melissa Leo, Robert Forster and Jackie Earl Haley do similar jobs in a bunker in America.

But the film is almost proud of the fact it has nothing new to say at all and seems totally unaware of its fundamental unpleasantness. It’s actually a nasty, bigoted, small minded, cruel film that hates anything different. It thinks it has a Die Hard lightness of touch – but it really, really doesn’t. Butler is charmless and horrible and the film is revolting. Avoid it.

La La Land (2016)

Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling literally dance the night away

Director: Damien Chazelle
Cast: Ryan Gosling (Sebastian Wilder), Emma Stone (Mia Dolan), John Legend (Keith), Rosemarie DeWitt (Laura Wilder), Finn Wittrock (Greg Earnest), JK Simmons (Bill) 

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!

Okay this review will discuss the plot of the film in some detail, including the ending so if you want to avoid hearing more(and I think the film is best enjoyed as an experience if you don’t know what happens at all) don’t read on.

A sweeping camera carries us over a freeway. The drivers honk horns and impatiently stare at the gridlock. Then the camera hones in one woman who starts to sing. Then others join in. The camera never cuts as the singing and dancing spreads around the whole freeway. Through the number, it follows people back into their cars and then settles on a woman reading over her audition piece. It’s a bravura moment, an ambitious piece of cinematic daring. It tells us that we are in for a ride. We get on.

Seb (Ryan Gosling) and Mia (Emma Stone) are early-30-somethings in Los Angeles. She is trying to make it as an actress (and this film really shows the soul-destroying nature of auditions), he dreams of opening a jazz club. Their paths cross a few times, until they meet at a party where he is performing as part of a terrible covers band. They flirt, they fall in love. But can true love survive the ups and downs of life?

Firstly, Chazelle directs wonderfully and Gosling and Stone are radiant in these roles. Emma Stone gives the sort of performance that makes her automatically popular: Mia is warm, funny, kind but also slightly prickly and lacking in confidence about making that big break. Seb is engaging, animated, confident but also slightly distant, standoffish with an intensity behind his eyes. Both actors carry the whole film – this is almost a two hander, as virtually no other actor has more than a few minutes of screen time – and are simply brilliant, capturing that mix of Hollywood magic and real-life tension that the film mixes together throughout its running time.

Very rarely have I seen a film before that I think caught the magic of falling in love as effectively as this one did. The third of the film given to the courtship between Gosling and Stone’s characters is sweet, endearing, heart-warming and rings very true. It has exactly the right sense of tentativeness and uncertainty alongside the natural chemistry between the two leads, that sense of nervousness because you are not sure if the other person is feeling what you are feeling. This portion of the film brilliantly succeeds in getting the viewer to invest in this relationship between the two characters.

Chazelle also fills the frame at this point with some of the best Hollywood old-school musical magic: the song-and-dance routines really work here, giving visual expression to the high flung emotions of our heroes (the sequence at Griffith observatory is the obvious highlight here, but the relationship is handled so well that their first date at the cinema beforehand feels overwhelmingly sweet and real). It’s never cloying and for a film that (certainly during this section) is a real confection, that is quite some achievement.

And that’s the first point in the film where it could stop. But this is a film where Chazelle wants to combine the high concept of cinema with the difficult reality of real life. So what this film is really about is not romance but the sometimes painful truth that relationships, for a number of reasons, don’t always work out. That even the most perfect couple can, for reasons of career, ambition or due to just everyday mistakes, end up drifting apart, even if they still remain deeply emotionally attached to each other. What Chazelle does so well is that seeing these two slowly work towards breaking up isn’t traumatising or unbearably sad – it seems natural and real, something almost inevitable. In fact we can all see the mistakes happening, the ill thought out angry words, the events missed, we can see where it is going, but the underlying affection and love between the two characters is still there, so there remains the hope that they will conquer this “sticky patch” as per hundreds of films before.

Chazelle teases us – and there are several moments again where the film could stop that would leave the audience with optimism that a future reconciliation will occur, or that they will rekindle that initial spark. A possible ending is before the five year time jump that covers the final five minutes: Mia and Seb sit after her last audition. Neither of them are sure what will happen next, but both of them confess they will always love the other.

Many films would end here, and we could interpret what will happen next. Chazelle takes us forward five years for a beautifully moving bittersweet coda (heavily inspired by the end of An American in Paris), where we see both have achieved their ambitions – but not with each other. Mia is married with a young child, Seb seemingly single. Mia finds herself in Seb’s bar on opening night. Their eyes meet across the room and the whole cinema seems to crackle with the emotion – we know in seconds that they still devoted to each other, and regret consumes the room. Seb begins to play their love theme on the piano… Chazelle then gives us a masterful flashback to their first meeting and a wordless, music and dance accompanied replay of the entire film with every mistake corrected, showing them the life they could have had. It’s a beautiful tease – is this a dream? Was the film we watched a dream? Chazelle could leave us at the end of this sequence and allow us to make up our mind. Instead we return to the bar, as Mia leaves. They catch each other’s eyes and smile. It’s a smile that says love, it says happiness for the other but it also carries regret and acknowledgement that they may never see each other again. It’s a beautiful moment, profoundly true and moving and perfectly encapsulates our regret for the road not taken.

Chazelle’s La La Land was a passion project for the director, and his passion for it is clear. It’s beautifully filmed, hugely affecting, and the song and dance moments will put a smile on your face as well as being moving. Your response to it will be affected by how you respond to the mixing of Hollywood glamour with kitchen-sink reality. My wife was jarred by the fact that the film seems to promise the happy ending that old-school musicals so regularly delivered, but then inverts the concept at the end. I, however, found the ending perfect, and the bittersweet sadness of the road not taken in life (a life where other dreams and ambitions are achieved) very moving.

It’s a film that asks us to question our decisions and place values on dreams and ambitions. I’d need to see it again to decide how successfully it does this: in the real world Mia achieves her dreams and is unwilling to sacrifice them to be just a partner to Seb. In the dream sequence, Seb drops his dreams to support Mia, and the film may be suggesting that two ambitious people in a difficult world like this will struggle to be mutually successful. However, it is also clear that one of the things drives Mia away from Seb is his own drift away from immediately pursuing his dream, by signing on for years of touring with a band playing music he hates. What is the message here? Is there a message? Or is the message that life is never clean, never easy, and that having dreams in an adult world will always complicate lives? It’s a question I look forward to addressing when I watch this wonderful film again. It’s too early to say if this is a classic, but it will do until the next classic comes along.

The Lady in the Van (2015)

Maggie Smith and Alex Jennings tearing up the neighbourhood

Director: Nicholas Hytner

Cast: Maggie Smith (Miss Shepherd), Alex Jennings (Alan Bennett), Roger Allam (Rufus), Deborah Findley (Pauline), Jim Broadbent (Underwood), Claire Foy (Lois), Frances de la Tour (Ursula Vaughan Williams)

This screen adaptation of Alan Bennett’s play is entertaining and a feast of good acting, even if not a lot actually really happens in it. Nicholas Hytner directs, as he did with the original National Theatre production, with Maggie Smith also reprising her role as the titular bag lady. Interestingly the theatrical device of two versions of Alan Bennett  (as the narrator) is also carried over from the film, with Alex Jennings playing both Bennett and his “Bennett the Author” persona.

Mary Shepherd (Maggie Smith) is an elderly bag lady who lives out of a broken down van which she insists painting a garish bright yellow. Befriended by ‘neighbour’ Alan Bennett (Alex Jennings) she moves the van onto his drive – and stays for 15 years. The film chronicles their unlikely friendship, as well as Bennett’s conflict with himself over his motives (in this and in everything else) and slowly reveals Mrs. Shepherd’s background.

It’s a witty and entertaining meandering film that oddly feels rather like the biggest budget home movie in the world, a sort of National Theatre party with the action taking place in Alan Bennett’s real home, Hytner himself popping up as an un-named character (as well as appearing on screen at the end with the real Bennett) and its dozens of cameos from British theatre, not least cameo appearances from all the cast of The History Boys (a rather distracting eye-spy game when you notice it). This doesn’t make it not fun – its a delight to see so many great actors at work – it just feels a little odd.

What probably keeps this from being impossibly smug is that it is actually a very acute (and self accusatory) examination of the author himself and the nature of writing. Bennett is not afraid at every point to question his motives and to accuse writers of exploiting those around them for material. Of course this is slightly distanced by the device of the “two” Alan Bennett’s, but this is pretty much essential to dramatise a conversation a man has with himself without using voiceover. Alex Jennings is, by the way, terrific in both roles – a wonderful mimic, but also really understands the psychology of the part and makes the contrasts between the two Bennett’s immediately clear.

Maggie Smith though is the star here and she is a shining one. She brings not only her usual wit and comic timing to the part,but she also is able to demonstrate with a few beats, or a small aside, years of pain and loneliness. She makes a woman who is basically quite unpleasant and difficult, into someone you care deeply about. A late sequence of her playing the piano – music being something she has avoided for years – is deeply moving because of the simplicity and genuine feeling she plays the moment with.

Hytner directs with a smooth unfussiness and a great deal of polish – I’ve always thought he is a natural at film directing, and he resists the temptation for visual flashiness. It goes without saying that he is a superb actors director. The final act of this film however doesn’t quite click into place – the comment on giving Miss Shepherd “the ending she would have wanted” doesn’t quite work and the final conversion with a decreased Miss Shepherd a scene too far. It’s an anecdote rather than a story – and a good anecdote well told – but not something I can imagine wanting or needing to see again.

Touch of Evil (1958)

Orson Welles investigates (though the real mystery is probably Charlton Heston’s Mexican heritage)

Director: Orson Welles
Cast: Charlton Heston (Ramon Miguel Vargas), Janet Leigh (Susan Vargas), Orson Welles (Police Captain Hank Quinlan), Joseph Calleia (Pete Menzies), Akim Tamiroff (Uncle Joe Grandi), Marlene Dietrich (Tanya), Joanna Cook Moore (Marcia Linnekar), Ray Collins (District Attorney Adair), Mort Mills (Al Schwartz), Dennis Weaver (Night Manager)

Has any director ever cast himself in such a physically unflattering role as Welles takes on here? Hank Quinlan is a grotesque, sweaty, grossly obese, lame, mumbling copper with a hinterland of loneliness in his past and a background of missed chances. Yet despite this, it’s Quinlan’s film and despite the terrible things he does in the film (kidnap, two murders, suspect framing) it’s very hard not to feel empathy and sorrow for him. Welles’ immense charisma as a performer is a large part of this, but I think he also recognises the sadness of being the genius who has surrounded himself with mediocrities, the man who knows he could have achieved more in life but for whatever reason never did. If that’s not Welles’ career, what is?

Of course Quinlan isn’t actually the lead. Charlton Heston, curry-coloured but otherwise actually pretty good, plays Vargas, a Mexican law agent (“He don’t look like a Mexican” Quinlan correctly observes) with a new American wife, caught up in an investigation into a bombing of an American citizen in a US-Mexico border-town. Quinlan investigates, finds his culprit quickly and produces evidence – evidence Vargas knows for a fact wasn’t there minutes ago. Accusations of corruption fly and, before you know it, Quinlan (a man flirting with corruption) is forced into alliance with a jumped-up Mexican gang leader to frame Vargas for corruption via implicating his wife in drugs and murder.

The plot, however, largely takes second place to Welles’ virtuoso film-making. The opening sequence of the film – an extended three and a half minute single take that tracks in and out of streets, from close-ups to crane shots – has an astonishing “how did they do that?” quality. But it’s matched by Welles’ brilliance with both actors and camera placement during the equally long continuous takes set in bomb suspect Sanchez’s apartment. He’s adept at jinglingly unsettling imagery, with the murder scene 2/3rd of the way through the film almost queasily twitchy in its fragmented shooting style. The final sequence of the film, as Vargas tracks Quinlan through a filthy oil yard, should be silly but is completely compelling.

Welles of course dominates the film as Quinlan. I love the half smile on his face as his praises are sung by besotted partner Menzies early in the film – the “aw shucks, are you talking about me?” non-modesty – but I also adore the unspoken sadness of his early scene with Dietrich, where he sadly attempts to flirt with this (presumably) lost love (we are never told for certain) only for her to literally not recognise him. Quinlan in many ways is a good copper – he frames the guilty, he doesn’t take bribes, he is reasonably loyal – but he’s also selfish, egotistical and needs the adoration of his position to fill the void in his life. He’s a man who’s corrupt almost without realising it, who sinks into bemused maudlin depression when accused without even recognising that he is in fact guilty.

There are some other equally strong performances in the film. Heston of course looks ridiculous – but look past that and this is one of his best performances, Vargas demonstrating the stand-up, straight-shooting honesty of many of Heston’s roles, combined with arrogant short sightedness and narrow minded determination. Janet Leigh is also absolutely terrific as his wife, despite being saddled with a bizarre subplot of being terrorised in a motel. A note for trivia fans – Leigh actually broke her arm before shooting and it’s in a cast throughout the movie bar one shot (where she doesn’t move her arm) – you can’t spot it until you know.

I was particularly enthralled by a beautiful performance of hero-worship from Joseph Calleia as Menzies, Quinlan’s adoring partner whose entire life has been one of loyal service to Quinlan. In many ways he is the moral centre of the film, and as the film shifts its focus to Quinlan, so it equally explores the changes in how Menzies views his boss. Akim Tamiroff gives a lovely performance of puffed up pomposity as a ridiculous small time gangster with a dodgy wig. Dennis Weaver’s hotel manager is an eccentric collection of manners that is more likely to split opinions, but he doesn’t half go for the oddness. Marlene Dietrich is marvellous in her few brief scenes.

Touch of Evil is one of those films that lingers with you and rewards constant reflection and rewatching. I re-watched large chunks of it again immediately the next morning. As a piece of film making it’s a master class, an immersive, tightly framed, wonderfully shot film that brilliantly uses its filthy, litter strewn locations. The acting is terrific and the final moments strangely moving. Welles was a terrible self-promoter and later he ballooned to the very Quinlan proportions that padding and make-up create here. But when he was on his game, and fully focused, he was terrific. As is the film, which is surely one of the greatest (and last) film noirs ever.

CODA: The coda to this? Of course Welles wasn’t fully focused. He cut the film once, then shot off to Mexico to explore a new film possibility. Studio hands recut the film again. Welles sent a famous 58 page memo suggesting changes. Most of them got ignored for the third cut. Three versions of the film now exist – the two studio recuts and a 1998 recut using the memo (Welles’ original was wiped). I watched the 1998 recut. But it’s always the problem with Welles – a man I always felt who largely lacked the focus to actually finish something. The film bombed on release. Welles never worked in Hollywood again.