La La Land

La La Land. It genuinely deserves the accolades.

If you haven’t seen it by now, you’ll probably be pretty cynical about La La Land. It can’t be that good, can it? All those critics just live in a bubble and love films set in Hollywood because they’re familiar with it, don’t they? The answer to the second question is “Yes, they do.” and the answer to the first is “No, it’s not that good, it’s better.”

The film tells the story of Sebastian (played by Ryan Gosling) a jazz musician reduced to playing Christmas songs to uninterested patrons in restaurants, his dream of opening his own jazz club slowly slipping away, and Mia (played by Emma Stone), an actress who the closest she’s got to a role is working in the coffee shop on the Warner Brothers lot and going to audition after audition.

They meet, after a fashion, in the film’s superlative opening; a musical number set on a gridlocked LA freeway, shot to make it look like one continuous shot, but which I presume contains digital stitches (having said that, it’s worth noting that it’s shot on film rather than digital, and in the all but obsolete CinemaScope format) and then meet again as Seb is fired from his job as a restaurant pianist for not sticking to the Christmas playlist. The film follows them for a year, with the seasons, starting with Winter, introduced on title cards, as they meet again at a party where Seb is playing 80s hits on a keytar with a covers band and Mia is with a boorish date talking about how hot his writing is.

Eventually they begin a relationship, move in together and Seb joins a successful jazz band (fronted by John Legend), meaning he spends more time away from Mia, who he has convinced to quit her barista job and put on her own one woman show.

The film is so much more than a joyous pastiche of old Hollywood musicals; it’s about being told you can have it all, moving to the big city to have it, and finding out it’s not that easy. But it’s also about not giving up on your dreams. The presence of iPhones and iPads reminds you it’s set in the present, but really it could be set at any point in the last sixty years. When the Autumn comes the title card says “Fall”, and it’s a signpost that not all is well between Seb and Mia. There’s a brilliant line that he throws at her, accusing her of only liking him when he was down on his ass because it made her feel better about herself. It’s funny, and happy, and sad and true.  Its requisite happy ending comes, but it’s not exactly what you might expect.

The film puts a spring in your step – I wanted to dance out of the cinema, the first thing I did when I got out was buy the soundtrack (produced by Marius de Vries, who has come a long way since working with Massive Attack).  You do need to suspend your disbelief, but the most improbably thing about the movie is that in one scene Seb drinks Stella Artois; surely a character like that would only touch an obscure craft beer from Portland. It goes without saying that Gosling and Stone are perfect in the roles (Miles Teller and Emma Watson were originally lined up for the leads, but it’s impossible to imagine anyone else in the parts).

Damien Chazelle had previously directed Whiplash (the star of which, JK Simmons, also appears here in a small but pivotal role). He’s younger than me, the fucker, but La La Land is one of the films of this or any other year. Go and see it!

Rogue One

Felicity Jones leads the cast in Rogue One.

I was pretty cynical when they announced that there would be “Anthology” films released, telling stories outside the main Skywalker Saga, but Rogue One more than justifies that decision.

It tells the story of the stealing of the plans to the Death Star, ending just before the start of the original Star Wars film.  I would go so far as to say it’s my favourite Star Wars film outside of the original trilogy. There have been stories about reshoots and the studio not being happy, but whatever happened, the final product is superb.

Felicity Jones plays Jyn Erso, the daughter of Galen Erso, a man forced to work on construction of the Death Star by Director Krennic, played by Ben Mendelsohn. After seeing her mother killed and her father taken away, Jyn disappears and falls under the wing of Saw Gerrera, an extremist rebel, only to be abandoned by him later.

This is where Rogue One really excels; before we have seen the Rebel Alliance as united against the Empire, but here is really is shown as a very disparate grouping, with disagreements and differing factions. Gerrera, played by Forest Whitaker, is in fact the nearest thing that the Rebels have to Darth Vader; he has mechanical legs, body armour that appears to be permanent and needs an oxygen mask to breathe. Jedha, where Gerrera is based, is only one letter away from Jeddah, where the bin Laden family moved to from Yemen when they began their ascent into Saudi society, and it has a very Middle Eastern feel to it.  A rebel attack on Imperial Stormtroopers there is obviously influenced by attacks on US troops in Iraq.  The film will make its way into someone PhD thesis on 21st Century conflicts on film.

Fans of high end TV will enjoy seeing Alistair Petrie (from The Night Manager) and Ben Daniels (from House of Cards) as Rebels.  Riz Ahmed, from The Night Of, is in a pivotal role too. It certainly has the best cast of any Star Wars film. Gemma Arterton and Hayley Atwell probably have late night, drunken phone calls where they slag off Felicity Jones for taking all the young, brunette English roles from them.

There are lots of little nods to the other films, too, but without making it seem too heavy handed. It’s great to see more of Yavin IV, the Rebel base, and Doctor Evazan and Ponda Baba, the two guys who hassle Luke in the Mos Eisley Cantina, are seen here bumping into Jyn on Jedha. Blue milk, which Luke is served by his Aunt Beru in the original film, is seen here at Jyn’s home, and when Bail Organa is asked about his friend, a Jedi who served him well during the Clone Wars, you know he’s talking about Obi-Wan Kenobi, and when he he is told he needs someone he’ll trust, he says her knows the right person, and he’d trust her with his life – you know he’s talking about his adopted daughter, Leia.  When a Rebel X Wing pilot has the callsign Red 5 you know he’s not going to last as that’s the callsign Luke uses later.

I was quite pleased at how much Grand Moff Tarkin was used in the film; given that he’s played by Peter Cushing, who is of course long dead. Seamlessly digitally grafting his face on to another actor gives us hope that General Leia Organa will continue to appear in Star Wars films despite Carrie Fisher’s death. (a young Leia also makes a brief appearance).

Given that we know how it is going to end, the film keeps up the suspense, with the final moments particularly thrilling. My only criticism is that James Earl Jones now sounds too old to provide the voice of Darth Vader; a minor one, but given that you can digitally insert people, they could have played with his voice a bit to make him sound younger.

 

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.

 

 

 

Jason Bourne

Matt Damon in the poster for Jason Bourne, in which he says very very little.

After they made The Bourne Ultimatum, Matt Damon said he wouldn’t make another Bourne film, that later changed to “wouldn’t make another Bourne film without Paul Greengrass”; fair enough, the franchise had run its course, the studios moved on to make another film set in the same universe with Jeremy Renner, and all was well. Until Damon and Greengrass decided to come back, that is…

I like Paul Greengrass; at his best – United 93, Captain Phillips – he is superb, telling true stories of small groups of people up against the odds in a documentary style; in many ways he’s a more cerebral Peter Berg. At least I thought that until I saw this film, now I think he’s probably a dumbed down Peter Berg (for the record, I fucking love Peter Berg; watch Friday Night Lights or Lone Survivor and you’ll see what I’m talking about).

So, apart from being totally superfluous, I have many issues with the film, which revolves around the fact that it was Bourne’s father who started the Treadstone programme he was recruited to, but that’s not really important. It’s a chase/spy film where Bourne has something the CIA want.

A Wikileaks-like group of hackers say “Use SQL to corrupt their databases”, which even a relative technophobe like me knows is meaningless, the CIA apparently have all their black ops in a folder marked “Black Operations”, which this is stolen, it is declared “the biggest hack since Snowden, when Edward Snowden wasn’t a hacker – he just leaked stuff he had access too.  Jason Bourne has been missing for years, with the CIA searching for him, but they can’t find him anywhere, and all of a sudden they have amazing facial recognition software that can be used via pretty much any CCTV camera in the world.  It’s ridiculous.

There is a far too much shaky cam and a totally superfluous chase scene in Las Vegas that has no place in a film franchise that once had pretensions of being realistic. It’s not very good, and after Green Zone (which was similarly average), I don’t think I’ll bother seeing another Damon/Greengrass collaboration. I always thought Tom Hooper was the British film director most like David Cameron, but it turns out Paul Greengrass (who actually directed a Labour Party Political Broadcast featuring Ed Miliband last year) is; he was the future once, and now he should go off and spend a long time thinking about what he’s done.

 

Ghostbusters

The female Ghostbusters

The original Ghostbusters is one of those films that, if you’re my age, you grew up with on VHS. That, Top Gun, Big, a John Hughes movie, some shit like Grease or Dirty Dancing if you’re a girl. With that in mind, my expectations for the new reboot/remake weren’t that high.

I was pleasantly surprised; it’s a fun, entertaining film.  Oddly it doesn’t acknowledge the original films at all; the four Ghostbusters here are the first ones to do the job, rather than women taking over an ailing franchise. Most of the original cast – excluding Rick Moranis, all but retired from acting now, and Harold Ramis, who died a few years ago (though a bust of him does appear in one scene).  It must’ve been hard for a wife beater like Bill Murray to accept the offer to appear in a film with strong female characters.

The one difference I noticed between this and the original was how much darker – in look, rather than tone the original was, and how much more appropriate a film about Ghosts in New York was then rather than now. The original was made in 1984 – less than ten years since the city had almost been declared bankrupt, not long after Escape From New York had imagined Manhattan as a prison, before Times Square had been cleaned up.  Now, in a post Giuliani New York, it’s a safe playground. Chris Hemsworth is a little too dumb at times, but that’s a minor complaint.

There’s a pointless, jarring cameo from Ozzy Osbourne, but I feel the plot is actually stronger than in the original – there’s a reason why ghosts are suddenly appearing. The inclusion of the token black Ghostbuster – Ernie Hudson in the original, Leslie Jones here – is actually done better; Hudson’s character was just a hired hand (though originally he was planned to be a military man) where Jones has some input – she’s seen a ghost and is an expert on New York history.

Though Wiig and McCarthy are stars,  few people outside Saturday Night Live watchers will know McKinnon and Jones, but both have a decent career ahead of them, if they can get through the right wing self publicist arseholes abusing them online.

I know the neckbeards were desperate to hate it, and the trailer didn’t look promising, but it’s a fun film that sets itself up nicely for a sequel.

 

Elvis & Nixon

Michael Shannon and Kevin Spacey as Elvis & Nixon

Richard Nixon is fast becoming the American Winston Churchill – I don’t mean in public perception, because despite being wrong about almost everything people still love Churchill, and despite ending the Vietnam War, going to China, declaring war on cancer, starting the Environmental Protection Agency (oh ok, and being a racist and probably a wifebeater) everyone hates Nixon, even though more people were killed at Chappaquiddick than at Watergate.  They’re similar because every actors wants to play them.

Kevin Spacey becomes the latest actor to play Nixon, opposite Michael Shannon as Elvis.  Spacey is just about believable as the former President, but Shannon is stretching it as Elvis.

The whole film is stretching it a little. It’s amusing in parts and as a concept, but the script isn’t good enough to keep it going.  In the end it’s just two out of touch men having a meeting in the 70s.  Women are low on the ground (Priscilla is “away”, and Nixon talks to his daughter on the phone), and the only friends either of them have are their employees, but that is never really dealt with in any meaningful way.

The actual meeting in the Oval Office only takes up a short amount of the film, but you can’t help but wonder if it wouldn’t be better off if the whole film was just that; a Funny or Die short where Spacey and Shannon get to have their fun playing icons and the rest of us are amused for ten minutes.  The actual photo of the meeting between the two is the most requested item in the US National Archives, but that’s no reason to make a film about it; it’s something amusing for people to share on social media rather than a drama.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it, but I’m not sure we’d be worse off without the film existing.