I, Daniel Blake

The poster for I, Daniel Blake.

In many ways, Ken Loach is the Jeremy Corbyn of film; they are of a similar age, give or take, similar backgrounds, and similar politics.  Corbyn mentioned I, Daniel Blake at PMQs today (both he and May are absolutely awful at PMQs). Loach and Corbyn have said unpalatable things about Israel; Loach repeatedly attacking film festivals that show films that have received backing from Israel, and Corbyn – when he met Bashar al-Assad, for fuck’s sake – talking of the Israeli tail wagging the US dog. To be fair to Loach, he’s actually been successful, whereas Corbyn hasn’t.

Anyway, I, Daniel Blake is Loach’s film about the struggles with the benefit system the title character has when he is forced to stop working due to a heart attack. Frustrated by the system that appears not to want to help him, and find any excuse to sanction him. Daniel strikes up a friendship with Katie, a young single mom who has moved to Newcastle from London as it is the only place she has been offered a flat.

For me, Katie’s story is much more sympathetic than Daniel’s; the system is obtuse, and needs changing (when I claimed benefits a few years ago I actually got the money AFTER I’d started working again), but Daniel is willfully ignorant and doesn’t want to play the game. He’s rude to his neighbours and comes across as a rather stereotypical northerner with a chip on his shoulder. Scenes that show him carving wood as he listens to Radio 4 paint him as a Noble Savage.

I detected a slight hint of racism in the stereotypes used in the film; Blake’s black neighbour sells knock off trainers, a Chinese character is ridiculed and a ranting drunk is Scottish.

A few years ago Loach and Paul Laverty, his screenwriter, made Route Irish, an Iraq War drama that had a surprisingly good, serious performance from John Bishop in it, but that didn’t quite work.  As with that film, I get the feeling that Loach and Laverty sat down and ticked off all the issues they wanted to cover, irrespective of whether the narrative justified them, rather than making a more subtle and effective film focusing on one or two elements.

I don’t like Loach’s politics, or his films (though his McDonald’s ad from the early 1990s was good), but I was expecting a good film that I disagreed with, but I didn’t even get that.

Ethel & Ernest

The title characters from Ethel and Ernest, with their son (and the author) Raymond.

Ethel & Ernest is an animation, based on Raymond Briggs’s semi-autobiographical book based on the lives of his parents.

In a filmed introduction (featuring Snowman plates and a Fungus the Bogeyman mug) Briggs talks about how he wanted to write a book about his parents, even though nothing major happened to them during their lives.

The film itself opens in 1928 with Ethel and Ernest’s first meeting, as Ernest passes by the house where Ethel works as a housemaid.  It follows them through until 1971, the year both of them passed away.

What is of interest is not what happened to Ethel and Ernest, but what happened around them. The film begins in a world that would not be unfamiliar to the Victorians – Ethel is a servant – and ends in a world that is recognisable to us – the moon landings have happened, they have a car, TV, a phone.

Ethel & Ernest is a lovely, gentle film, moving and funny by turns; Ethel worries if they’ll be able to afford the £825 they pay for their house in Wimbledon over the twenty years of their mortgage, you see the rise of Hitler, the post-war Labour landslide and the creation of the NHS.

Brenda Blethyn and Jim Broadbent play the title characters, and though it’s only a small cast, all the other voices are well known names. It’s the sort of film you’ll flick on during a quiet bank holiday and end up really enjoying; it’s a social history of the mid twentieth century in Britain. There’s a Paul McCartney song over the end credits, apparently because he was a fan of Raymond Briggs, and when they met they got on well; they must be similar ages and of similar backgrounds.

Ethel & Ernest won’t change the world but it will make you laugh, and it might make you cry too.

Their Finest

Gemma Arterton (sigh) and Bill Nighy in Their Finest.

Their Finest tells the story of the trials and tribulations that took place when Tesco were searching for products for their version of Sainsbury’s Taste The Difference range.

That’s a joke, of course, it’s a film set in the world of British propaganda films during the Second World War. It’s based on the novel by Lissa Evans and is directed by Lone Scherfig, who has done good films (Italian For Beginners, An Education) and bad (The Riot Club).  Thankfully, this is firmly in the former category.

Arterton (if you don’t like Gemma Arterton please make yourself known so you can be taken to a re-education camp) plays Catrin Cole, a Welsh woman who has moved to London with her husband as he struggles to find work as an artist. Catrin stumbles into a job with the Ministry of Information, writing dialogue for women in propaganda films.

Propaganda gets a bad name, but the films made by the Crown Film Unit during the Second World War were incredibly important; thirty million people went to the cinema every week during the war (1946 was actually the peak for British cinema going), and short documentaries were shown during lunch breaks in factories to raise morale.

The film also shows the social mobility that happened during the Second World War; the historian AJP Taylor said it was the closest Britain has ever come to being a socialist republic; class mattered less, people moved around more, and women took on traditionally male roles (the Queen was a mechanic, for example).

Anyway, Catrin begins works on a film about Dunkirk with Buckley (played by Sam Claflin), which starts out as apparently based on a true story and gets more and more fictional as more people have their say; a dog and an American lead are added. As she grows apart from her husband, Catrin grows closer to Buckley, especially when the film goes on location, but it’s not that simple and things don’t run smoothly.

The cast is superb; Rachael Stirling (Guy Garvey’s wife – he’s done well for himself) plays a woman from the ministry with lesbian tendencies and some great dialogue. Bill Nighy is an aging actor, Richard E Grant a studio executive and Jeremy Irons a Minister. Eddie Marsan and Helen McCrory pop up too.

The film isn’t perfect; there are moments it drags, but you don’t really care because you enjoy spending time with the characters and in the period. It’s a funny, sweet love letter to a time period and a type of film that has been lost. It’s quite a feminist film too.

A few days before I’d been to see a Royal Television Society talk about The Night Manager, with the director Susanne Bier; like Scherfig she’s a Danish woman. I’m not sure why high quality British work is being made by Danish women but I’d be snapping up every girl in Copenhagen that had ever picked up a camera if I was Working Title or the BBC.

 

 

 

 

 

The Girl With All The Gifts

Paddy Considine in army uniform, but it’s not Dead Man’s Shoes.

The Girl With All The Gifts was originally going to be called She Who Brings Gifts (a phrase used int he film), so it stood out from all the other films with “The Girl” in the title, but then changed it back to the title of the novel it is based on.

The film is based on the book by MR Carey, and when I saw that name I thought Mariah had branched out, but it turns out to be some Scottish comic book writer called Mike. The book, as seems to be the way with these things, was developed at the same time as the film. It’s a post apocalyptic film shot in Birmingham, Cannock and Stoke, probably to save money so they don’t have to build an uninhabitable wasteland and give lots of make up to the zombie extras.  It’s directed by Colm McCarthy, who has a background in high end British TV like Peaky Blinders and Sherlock, and stars Gemma Arterton, wearing her “decent British film” hat, rather than her “rubbish Hollywood film” hat that she’s too often had on in the past. It’s a weird Children of Men/28 Days Later/Never Let Me Go hybrid.

What I liked about the film is that there is very little exposition; we don’t get a title card saying “England, 2025” or whatever, we don’t find out what happened until some time into the film, we don’t see why children are being strapped in wheelchairs and taught, with one of them occasionally disappearing in between their cell and their classroom.

Newcomer Sennia Nanua (who is superb) plays Melanie, the brightest of the children, and Gemma Arterton plays Miss Justineau, the sympathetic teacher. Paddy Considine is a soldier who looks after the base where the children are kept, and Glenn Close plays a sinister doctor who is working on a cure for whatever it is that is turning people into “Hungries” (as is the norm now, the zombies are never referred to as zombies).  Just before Melanie is due to be dissected (and after Miss Justineau has tried to stop it), Hungries attack the base, with only Arterton, Nanua, Considine and Close getting away, plus some others who you know will die.

The film isn’t futuristic; there are no lasers or flying cars; it could happen now, and the fungus that is turning humans into Hungries is a variation of the real fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis (you know the one – you’ve seen pictures of ants with it growing through their heads). The final scenes take place near an M&S Simply Food; it’s a bit too close for comfort, and quite unsettling.  It was made even more unsettling by the fact that during my screening a man was taken ill after having an epileptic fit, and when the film was halted while he received treatment, I realised that Sennia Nanua was sitting not that far away from me.

My girlfriend didn’t like it – there are rats and at one point a cat is eaten, but there are also moments of dark humour; shortly after devouring a cat, Miss Justineau finds Melanie staring at a picture of a cat on a poster.  “Would you like a cat?” She asks. “I’ve already had one.” Melanie replies.  When Melanie scares off a bunch of feral children by killing their leader she tells Considine and Arterton to pretend to be really scared of her. “Pretend?” Considine says.

Nanua deserves a great career (and with Arterton making noises about producing and directing, I wouldn’t be surprised if they work together), and let’s stop referring to Arterton as “former Bond girl Gemma Arterton”; she’s so much more than that.  The Girl With All The Gifts is a believable, unsettling film.

 

Anthropoid

Why they didn’t just say “Tommy Shelby and Christian Grey kill Nazis” I’ll never know.

Anthropoid is the true story of two Czechs who were trained by the Special Operations Executive and then parachuted to just outside Prague by the RAF, tasked with assassinating Reinhard Heydrich, number three (behind Hitler and Himmler) in the Third Reich, and also one of the architects of the Holocaust. Herr Schicklgruber apparently called him “the man with the iron heart”.  When Adolf thinks you’re a bit of a bastard, you’ve got problems.  Heydrich’s role in the Final Solution is brilliantly shown in the TV drama Conspiracy, where he is played by Kenneth Branagh, and which shows the Wannsee Conference, where he got together with Colin Firth, Stanley Tucci, a bloke from Downton Abbey and the guy Claire Underwood has an affair with in House of Cards and decided to exterminate the Jews of Europe.  If you haven’t seen Conspiracy, then you really should (it also features an early role for Tom Hiddleston).

Anyway, Anthropoid starts with Murphy and Dornan dropping into the forest, with Murphy being injured, picked up by people apparently sympathetic to their cause, they have to escape quickly when it appears that they are going to be given up to the Nazis.  They escape into Prague to find that their contact has already been taken away and what remains of the resistance has lost contact with the Czech government in exile in London.

Initially the Czechs are resistant to the plan to assassinate Heydrich, because they know the reprisals that will come, whereas Christian Grey and Tommy Shelby have been out of the country for so long they don’t understand what it is like to live under occupation.

Persuading most of the resistance to help them – they need to prove the Czechs are still resisting the leads also have time for love interests, which doesn’t quite square with the rest of the film, but isn’t too grating.

Like that other middle Europe assassination earlier in the 20th Century, when Franz Ferdinand was killed (Alex Kapranos always was a prick; an art school wanker with an expensive haircut) the assassination doesn’t go to plan, with the Sten gun jamming – Sten guns were notoriously unreliable, so a grenade is thrown, which fatally injures Heydrich, with him dying several days later.

Assassinating a high ranking Nazi in occupied Europe didn’t tend to end well, and one of the plotters decides to betray his colleagues; there’s torture, and several scenes of people taking cyanide pills. I thought one particularly gruesome scene of a 15 year old being shown his mother’s head unless he gave up the whereabouts of the assassins was a bit too much, but then it turns out that it actually happened. The Nazis were right bastards, it seems.  Two villagers were razed to the ground – the destruction of the village of Lidice is recreated, transported to South Wales, in Humphrey Jennings’s superb film The Silent Village (another film well worth watching).

The denouement comes in a violent showdown at a church, in what I assumed was a fiction, but no, it actually happened and this finale contains the only jarring bit of the film – a vision before one of the assassins kills himself rather than be captured.

Sean Ellis – who I have to admit I didn’t know before this film, not only wrote and directed it well, but also worked as cinematographer and camera operator, and does everything ably.  Cillian Murphy’s Czech accent occasionally slips into Tommy Shelby’s Brummie, but the cast are good, and it’s nice to see a British/Czech film about the Second World War that isn’t fictionalised and doesn’t rely on an American to save the day.  A solid film.

 

 

 

Legend

The poster for Legend, brilliantly hiding the 2 star review from The Guardian

Because I’m a member of the metropolitan elite, I got to see Legend last weekend, before its release for ordinary people like you. Disappointingly it’s not a remake of the Ridley Scott fantasy film from 1985.  (actually I’ve never seen that film. Is it any good, or is it one of those forgettable films that Scott makes every so often?).  It’s actually about The Krays.

Directed and written by Brian Helgeland (his excellent BAFTA screenwriters’ lecture from a few years ago is worth watching here), it’s funnier than you think (“a paranoid schizophrenic walks into a bar…”) as well as being very violent (see the scene that follows that line).

Most attention will be paid to Tom Hardy’s double performance as both Reggie and Ronnie Kray.  Sometimes, when they’re both on screen at the same time – or rather, he’s on screen in both roles, you can see the green screen “join”, and there are other times when the film is shot in a way that wouldn’t have been done if it was two actors in the roles, but enough can’t be said about how good Hardy’s performances are.

I don’t think enough will be made of them, however, because people will make incorrect assumptions about how it was shot.  If I hadn’t seen the Q&A with Helgeland that followed by screening (again, metropolitan elite only), I’d have assumed that Hardy had shot all his scenes as Reggie (who is the bigger presence in the film), then they’d shut down production for a couple of weeks while he bulked up to play Ronnie.  Turns out the budget and logistics meant he had to play both brothers every day on set, quite an achievement when you see how different they appear.

It’s worth noting that Helgeland got a credit on Ridley Scott’s pisspoor Robin Hood, which started off as a revisionist take on the legend called Nottingham, and where Russell Crowe was originally going to play both the Sheriff of Nottingham and his nemesis.  Actors playing dual roles must be his thing.  If I wasn’t a lazy fucker I’d write about Nottingham and Gladiator 2 and loads of other films that never got made but should have.

Though Reggie is the focus, Ronnie gives the dark comic relief; in a scene where Reggie’s doomed wife shows herself to be unable to make a cup of tea, Ronnie and the twins’ mother both exclaim “poor Reggie”.  When Reggie beats her up, his paranoid schizophrenic brother tells her it’s not right; that’s not how they were brought up.

The locations look authentic, though The Blind Beggar in the film isn’t the real Blind Beggar; they actually use The Royal Oak on Columbia Road (around which much of the film appears to have been shot, though Vallance Road, where the brothers lived, was filmed near Waterloo).  I once got told off in The Blind Beggar for messing around with the candle on my table.  It’s OK for the Krays to shoot someone there, but I can’t play with fire and wax?  What a joke.

It’s violent and funny and dark and mostly true, and Hardy gives a performance that should win awards (as he did in Locke, which more people should watch). Go and watch it when it’s released for you proles.

 

 

Kajaki

If we’ve learned anything since the beginning of the 21st Century, it’s that overthrowing an authoritarian regime is easy.  I mean piss easy. You send in some special forces to hook up with local rebels, call in some air strikes and the regime is gone in a matter of weeks.  In a bigger country like Iraq, you might need a few cruise missiles and some mechanised battalions, but you’ll still be in control of the country sooner rather than later.

The bit that comes after; turning a country that shouldn’t really exist, is just a mish mash of tribes who have been fighting each other for centuries, into Switzerland, is the hard part. I mean really fucking hard.

I’m as hawkish as anyone – more hawkish than most, I’d say – but every British military intervention of this century has failed.  At least the Americans stuck around in Iraq long enough to get some sort of withdrawal with honour.

Afghanistan was always seen as “the good war” (because removing a genocidal dictator in Iraq was “bad”), but the British deployment to Helmand, beginning in 2006, was a complete and utter failure.

Anyway, you’re not here for my political views, you’re here for a review of a film.

Kajaki has had an interesting production; it was crowdfunded, and then last week the producers got various male celebrities to tweet telling their followers to go and see it.  Oddly, one of the celebrities was Piers Morgan, a man who happened to buy shares in a company just before before the financial column in the newspaper he edited said they would do well, and who lost his job when he printed photos showing British soldiers torturing Iraqi detainees which turned out to be fake (he remains unrepentant about this).  A strange choice of person to promote a film about the British Army.  It’s only being shown at Vue cinemas, which I would think limits their audience somewhat, but it was nice to see staff in olive green when I turned up to watch the film.

I almost put some money into the crowdfunding campaign for Kajaki, but didn’t because at the time I had very little money, the rewards you got for giving money were a bit crap, and some of the money would go to charities like Help For Heroes.  I’m not as bad as one of my friends, who once told me he wanted to set up a rival charity to Help For Heroes called “Help For Cunts Who Couldn’t Get A Proper Job”, but this whole “support our troops” thing that seems to be an import from the US, and only happens when you’re fighting a shitty, unwinnable war (see: Vietnam), never sits well with me.  The armed forces are not automatically heroes. The civilian version of this is those who venerate nurses and teachers as saints, when the truth is that some are awful, some are great, and most are just doing their job the best they can, like the rest of us.

I said this was a film review, right?

Kajaki is a place in Helmand, the site of a reservoir and hydro electric dam.  The film is a the true story of a British patrol who get caught in a minefield, the hangover from the Russian invasion of the country.

There are things I liked about Kajaki, and things I didn’t like.  I’m not sure they needed to tell us, via an onscreen title, that Helmand Province is in Afghanistan.  Is anyone who watches the film not going to know that?  There is a bit of dodgy exposition at the start, and the dialogue as a whole is a bit ropey.  The CGI isn’t great, and it’s obvious a lot of dialogue was dubbed in post production.  Coupled with some sub par acting, this made me I fail to sympathise with the protagonists when it all kicked off.

Not that it does kick off, really.  The soldiers aren’t fighting an enemy; when they enter the minefield, and the inevitable happens (more than once) they aren’t taking out Taliban, they’re just unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  With this, the film ducks the rights and wrongs of the deployment to Helmand.  It’s been described as “the British Hurt Locker”, but a closer comparison is Lone Survivor; a small band of soldiers is up against it in Afghanistan.  Lone Survivor is far, far superior, though.

There is some gallows humour, and some very British jokes (a guessing game they play means a character asks “Am I Fred West?”).  Whoever did the make up for the wounds deserves an award, but though the subtitle is “The True Story”, it doesn’t tell the truth.  You cannot have a film about Western intervention in Afghanistan where the Taliban only make an appearance at long range, at night.  The film doesn’t even tell the truth about Kajaki; two years after the events depicted in the film, an operation took place to install a new turbine in the hydro electric plant in the dam.  It would create jobs, and provide electricity.  The plan failed.

Like the British deployment to Helmand, Kajaki has high ambitions, but was done on the cheap, and is ultimately disappointing.

 

The Imitation Game

This is the second part of the series Watching War Films With My Mate’s Girlfriend. For the first installment, see here.

Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing.

 

Building on work by Polish cryptanalysts, British intelligence managed to decipher German codes sent using Enigma machines during the Second World War at Bletchley Park. It is commonly held that this shortened the war by at least two years.  One of the main people behind this project was Alan Turing, who was given an OBE for his work.  After the war he moved to Manchester and worked on developing computers.  His “Turing test” remains an important part of Artificial Intelligence debates.

In 1952, his house was burgled.  It transpired that the burglar was an acquaintance of the man Turing was in a relationship.  Perhaps naively, Turing told the police this.  The police acted quickly and arrested him.  Turing, that is, for the crime of being a homosexual.  He was convicted, and given a choice of prison or injections of oestrogen to “cure” him of his homosexuality. He took the latter.  In 1954, he died, of cyanide poisoning, the inquest ruled that this was suicide, which is probably correct though some dispute this, believing his death accidental.

In 2009, the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologised for Turing’s treatment, and on Christmas Eve 2013, the Queen signed an official pardon. Both of these should not have been done, but we’ll get to that later.

The story of the breaking of the Enigma codes was kept secret until the 1970s, a surprising thing in our age of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.  Since then, Bletchley and Turing have featured in books, plays and films.  Robert Harris’s Enigma tells a fictionalised version of the story of breaking the ciphers, and was turned into a film, produced by Mick Jagger (who, perhaps bizarrely, owns an original Enigma machine). The play Breaking the Code, telling the story of Turing’s arrest, with flashbacks to his time during the war, was filmed for TV in the 1990s, starring Derek Jacobi as Turing, and Harold Pinter as a mysterious man from the government.  Enigma had been re-released on DVD, probably to cash in on the release of The Imitation Game.

The film fudges some dates and facts, and puts the spy John Cairncross in Turing’s team at Bletchley Park for dramatic effect, it is, nevertheless, probably the best British film of the year.

Told in flashback as Turing – a brilliant performance from Benedict Cumberbatch, who will win a BAFTA for this performance – tells his story to the detective who realises he is hiding something about the burglary that led to his downfall, the film not only tells the story of Turing’s wartime work but of the beginning of his interest in codes and his first love at boarding school, a relationship that ends in tragedy.  That, in short, is the film; triumph bookended by tragedy.

For a film that contains so much tragedy, it is funnier than you expect, with Turing’s borderline autistic view of the world getting several laughs, his initial interview for Bletchley is particularly funny. The comedy of the early scenes just makes the heartbreak you know is coming harder.  The cast is faultless, from Charles Dance as the Naval Commander running Bletchley, to Matthew Goode – who always excels in period roles – as the colleague and rival of Turing who becomes an ally. Special mention must go to  Mark Strong is brilliant as Stewart Menzies, the wartime head of MI6 – seriously, someone give this man a leading role in a film soon – a man who enjoys the games and lies of intelligence during the war, and Keira Knightley as Joan Clarke, the woman Turing proposed marriage to and who worked alongside him at Bletchley, bringing him out of his shell and helping him forge relationships with his team.

I said the film was triumph bookended by tragedy, but a what a triumph that was.  Clarke visits Turing after his arrest and during his hormone treatment.  She spells it out to him what a difference he made; on the way she travelled through a city that would not exist if it wasn’t for him, she bought her train ticket off a man who would be dead if it wasn’t for him. She repeats a line he used about her earlier in the film “Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”  The end titles make his contribution clearer; cracking the Enigma code shortened the war by two years, saving fourteen million lives. They also mention how his work inspired research into Turing machines. Today we call them computers.  When you read that, after being on the verge of tears, you want to punch the air. The scenes of Turing and his team burning their work at the end of the war, the joy on their faces lit by fire, is as poignantly beautiful as any moment you’ll see on the cinema screen this year.

Go and see The Imitation Game, where Cumberbatch more than lives up to the tumblr fan girl hype, and which tells the story of one of the greatest people of the twentieth century.

But here’s why Turing shouldn’t have received an apology from Gordon Brown nor a pardon from the Queen.

The apology only mentioned Turing, not the thousands of other men convicted of the same crime who may not have done the same work as him but nonetheless made a contribution to society, the war, to this country, and a pardon presumes guilt, and Turing really was not guilty of any crime.

Northern Soul

The cast of Northern Soul, or extras from Life on Mars?

According to wikipedia, the term Northern Soul came from football fans from the Midlands and the North West, in London to watch their teams, stopping off at a Soul music shop in Covent Garden to stock up on records.  They wouldn’t like the new stuff that the soft, shandy drinking southerners were into, but more obscure stuff from years before. Eventually, the owner started referring to it as Northern Soul. I’ve told my Dad that story and he says it sounds about right, and he was the sort of bloke who liked both soul music and football. It’s worth noting that these places – the Midlands, the North West, are the places that gave us the Industrial Revolution and League Football (possibly the only good thing about going to see your team play at Wigan is that they play Northern Soul records at halftime, which beats the fucking Super Bowl).

There seems to have been a bit of a Northern Soul revival lately; it featured in the climax of Cemetery Junction, there was a film a few years ago shot in Stoke and starring Alfie Allen called Soulboy about the scene, various music videos have featured Northern Soul style dancing, and the economics journalist Paul Mason presented a Culture Show special about it. I guess this is because those who grew up with the music are now those making films and in good jobs in the media.

The film tells the story of a teenager in a fictional Lancashire town (a mix of Burnley, Blackburn and Bury) in 1974, he struggles to fit in until he discovers Northern Soul, striking up a friendship with someone from the wrong side of the tracks (do they have the wrong side of the tracks in Lancashire? Isn’t everywhere north of Hampstead the wrong side of the tracks?) as they start DJing in their town, planning a trip to the US to find more soul records, there’s a subplot involving a crazy drug dealer who may or may not be on the run from police in London.

I wanted to like Northern Soul more than I actually did.  It has nice moments (schoolkids will love the lead character walking out of his exams, telling his teacher – played by Steve Coogan – to fuck off).  It’s hard to make a bad film featuring Northern Soul – at least some scenes will get your toes tapping. Lisa Stansfield gives a decent performance as the lead’s mother.  Its great to see a recreation of Wigan Casino, but it doesn’t tell us anything new.  I liked it, but it wasn’t great. Too much of it looked like an extended episode of Life on Mars, given its setting and era.  It’s had an interesting release, with cinemas having to increase the number of screenings.  It’s good, not great. It’ll appear on the TV and you’ll sit down and have an enjoyable evening, but it won’t change your life, which is more than could be said for many films.

 

Three war films

Last week was a bit of a war week for me; I went to see three films that all dealt with war in different ways, spent another morning with a couple of military doctors (one of whom was organising the deployment to Sierra Leone to combat ebola: be afraid, be very afraid), and on Saturday I went to a conflict zone: The Den, to watch Millwall Vs Wolves.

The entire cast of War Book

I started the week by seeing War Book, a low budget, high concept British film that uses a handful of locations and a cast of nine. They are civil servants and a government minister acting out a nuclear war scenario. Internal politics, the personal lives of those taking part and the moral questions of the issue all come into play. The film-makers said they didn’t want it to be a polemic, but you could see where they were coming from. There is one subplot that I didn’t feel was fleshed out enough, but it is a worthy, worthwhile film.

War Book is a film that made me feel old. Ben Chaplin, who I first came across as a young twenty something in Game On, plays a 40 something lecherous spin doctor. Really though, it’s as if his Game On character has got over his agoraphobia and become a government advisor. The bloke who played Nathan Barley plays a cartoonish Tory minister – is he old enough, I thought? Then I remembered the likes of Aiden Burley, a cartoonish Tory MP, and realised yes, he is. Who is this middle aged woman who looks like Theresa May? Oh, it’s Kerry Fox. When did she get old? Oh fuck, Shallow Grave is more than twenty years old, isn’t it? When did I get old?

The standout performance is from Sophie Okonedo, channelling Oona King. She gives a great speech about John Winant, a man I had never heard of and who was the US ambassador to Britain after Joseph Kennedy had left in disgrace because of his pro appeasement sympathies. Winant, by all accounts, did a brilliant job, but when Truman became President he returned to America, his marriage ended and, on the day his book about his time in London was published, she killed himself. I hate bullshit “inspirational/motivational” quotes that idiots share on facebook, but Okonedo quotes Winant’s epitaph, which is worth repeating here in full:

“Doing the day’s work day by day, doing a little, adding a little, broadening our bases wanting not only for ourselves but for others also, a fairer chance for all people everywhere. Forever moving forward, always remembering that it is the things of the spirit that in the end prevail. That caring counts and that where there is no vision the people perish. That hope and faith count and that without charity, there can be nothing good. That having dared to live dangerously, and in believing in the inherent goodness of man, we can stride forward into the unknown with growing confidence.”

I disagreed with the film’s politics (I’m far too hawkish for nuclear disarmament), but it was well made, and shows what you can do with a few locations and not much money (I asked the director afterwards how much it cost, and he said he couldn’t tell me, but I guess it was less than £200,000). The setting and the low budget do sometimes make you think it would be the sort of thing Channel Four should make, probably followed by a discussion with a former cabinet minister, a moral philosopher and a retired General. Well worth seeing, though.

 

The Den on Saturday, or Belfast in 1971

Confusion, collusion, pub bombings, bombs going off early, dead kids, summary executions. It must be Northern Ireland. ’71 is the sort of film you take your mate’s girlfriend to see when he’s on a work trip to Hong Kong.

It is, alongside Alan Clarke’s Elephant (which one moment reminded me of) and Steve McQueen’s Hunger, set ten years after ’71, and which also references Elephant, one of the best films about what we euphemistically call “The Troubles”. Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday, made for television, would be up there, too.

A young soldier becomes separated from the rest of his unit while the RUC raid a house in Belfast, he flees across the city, encountering friendly Loyalists, two branches (Official and Provisional) of the IRA, and a shadowy undercover army unit do deals with all sides.

There are some genuinely shocking, bloody moments and it is not an easy watch, but it is a good one. There is no reason why there could not be a sequel – ’81, set during the hunger strikes, the soldiers older, wiser, more cynical, and a third film, ’91, to complete the trilogy, with squaddies fresh from the Gulf War returning to the streets of Northern Ireland. I definitely want to see more from the director Yann Demange, who makes a very impressive debut here after working. Probably one of the best British films of the year.

 

Bella Swan goes to Guantanamo Bay

I liked Kristen Stewart in her small role in Into The Wild, and it’s not her fault that the material of the Twilight films was so bad. In Camp X Ray she plays a guard at Camp X Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There really isn’t much to say about the film, and  apart from an opening sequence of a detainee being rendered that could have been the start of a great Kathryn Bigelow or Paul Greengrass film, of a John Le Carre novel, it isn’t very good.  Instead it becomes a hackneyed film where Stewart builds a friendship with a detainee and her fellow guards are thick headed jocks. Oh look, he’s a detainee at Gitmo but he likes Harry Potter books, aren’t we all the same inside? Give me fucking strength. Give me a fucking film about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or the Battle of Qala-i-Janghi, and showing what the people who ended up in Camp X Ray did to Johnny Micheal Spann. I should have stayed for a fourth gin and tonic with my mate instead of going to see it. There is a great film to be made about “enemy combatants” being detained without trial, but this isn’t it. It’s not even the best film set at Guantanamo Bay. I’m sure Guardian readers will love it.

Great films about the wars of the 21st Century are hard to find. I like The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, United 93 (about war because it shows the first battle of the War on Terror), Syriana, The Kingdom, Lone Survivor and Battle For Haditha. Four of those seven films are made by two directors (Kathryn Bigelow and Peter Berg). As an enthusiast for both war and films, I want to see more thought going into films about the events that history will remember the first decade of the 2st Century for.