The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

And so the rather absurdly stretched-out film versions of The Hobbit come to an end. It’s probably a little sad that what will be remembered, rather than the huge amount of work that went into making this film spectacular and beautiful, will be the superficial things: the padding and the original characters – including the elf-dwarf love story. The protracted battles with orc leaders. The armoured war-pigs. Actually, I’m not sad about that part. Armoured war-pigs are awesome.

It’s been a very long time since I read The Hobbit, and I must say that the events of this film are what I remember least about the original. I remember very well the trolls turning to stone and the dwarves in barrels and Gollum and Smaug...but really very little about the Battle of the Five Armies. Talking with friends and family and checking summaries, though, it seems that largely, what happens is brief: the ‘nice guy’ armies make their demands, the nasty orcs and goblins show up, Bilbo gets knocked out, and when he wakes up he finds that Thorin is in a bad way and, basically, that Beorn the Bear has sorted everything out.

I can understand the desire to take that and spin it into a much larger battle. Especially in the Peter Jackson universe of huge clashes between armies. I mean, there are five of them! Hard to resist, really. And things are done with clarity: the set-up to dispatch Smaug has all been done and Bard does it with little fuss – yet the town is destroyed. Thorin is changed by reclaiming the mountain, becoming like a dragon: proud and selfish, unwilling to pay his debts. Desolate, now, the people of Lake Town march to the mountain to seek refuge and provisions as promised to them by Thorin, but are met and given provisions by the beautiful elves of the Lake. The elves are there because some of their most valuable treasures were taken by the dragon and they wish to reclaim them. Thorin holes himself and his company up in the mountain, preparing for a siege and offering absolutely nothing, and thus the stage is set for battle.

When it looks like the combined forces of men and elves are just going to storm the handful of dwarves, Thorin’s cousin Dain Ironfoot shows up with a heavily-armed company. The third army! Dain is hot-headed, played with aplomb by Billy Connollly, which was a joy. Before they can clash, though, the orcs under Azog appear through tunnels that come courtesy of some sandworms borrowed from Dune, so huge you would think they would have been better off coming up under the armies and causing some damage rather than just making transportation easier.

Anyway, because the orcs decided to appear just then rather than waiting for the other armies to destroy one another as would have been sensible, everyone turns on them. The orcs decide that rather than concentrating all their forces on the armed threat, they’ll draw the men and elves thin by going after the women and children sheltering in the abandoned city of Dale. Thorin finally comes to himself and joins the battle, rallying the ailing dwarves, and then goes after Azog.

Of course, this is all a trap and another orc army is on the way to mop up the remnants. Also, taking out Azog is apparently not that effective anyway, because the armies carry on perfectly normally without him giving commands as he gets distracted by one-on-one fights. As for Beorn? Well, he may not play quite such a role and only gets about 4 seconds of screen time, but effectively he and the eagles are still instrumental. Does this last part seem a bit contrived? Well, yes, but it also makes sense of Azog and co not exactly employing the best strategies.

Ultimately, though, this film is about the joy of all-out action and spectacle. If shouldn’t be treated as intelligent, even by the scale of the main LOTR trilogy. It is straightforward, joyful fun. And I got something of a thrill from watching Christopher Lee kicking some butt and Galadriel getting some pretty excessive powers – but which came with the kind of spectacle I was hoping we’d get with Gandalf vs Saruman in the first film, instead of old man dance-off.

The Hobbit was never enough material for three substantial films, but I can’t say I haven’t enjoyed the ponderous, rather insubstantial ones we got. And Bilbo remains rather more likeable than Frodo ever was...

Rembrandt: The Late Works at the National Gallery

I enjoyed the Rembrandt exhibition quite a lot more than I expected to. I like Rembrandt quite a lot as a technician, and admire his phenomenal technique and subtlety, and the only reason I don’t count him as amongst my favourite painters is that I don’t tend to connect emotionally with his subject matter. He had a very painful life, losing his wife and son before his own death and struggling badly towards the end with money and falling out of fashion, and his major themes are the aging of the patriarch, the contemplation of death and inner turmoil. Very seldom does he engage with youth, though one of the highlights of this exhibition was the juxtaposition of a sweet daydreaming picture of his son with a rather stunning painting of an older woman in a hood with a book.  

And in fact, this exhibition really tied his work together better than I’d seen it before. In conjunction with the newly-reopened Rijksmuseum, which lent some major pictures, as well as pieces from the States, from Sweden, from the Louvre and numerous etchings and sketches from the Ashmolean and the Fitzwilliam. Thus it was possible to arrange the gallery into strong themes: the famous self-portraits first and foremost, but then interesting thematic groups like experimenting with light, pushing softly against boundaries and dealing with his personal demons. The arrangement did very well at framing the narrative of his life, using less significant pieces to inform the more impressive ones nearby, and there were some stunning pieces beyond those self-portraits, including the National’s prized portrait of a husband and wife where the wife is clearly the empowered one, a fascinating depiction of Alexander the Great and a large equestrian portrait – though while the figure in it was excellent, it must be said that Rembrandt probably avoided equestrian portraits for a reason, and his horse was not very convincing. Similarly, for such a consummate master of faces and poses, I do think he has an odd problem with making forearms look very short – for which foreshortening does not adequately compensate. And his depiction of Joseph accused by Potiphar’s wife was bizarrely dreadful in terms of conveying emotion and drama compared with his other far more subtle and believable paintings. In fact, it seems there’s another version by ‘an assistant’ in Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art with Joseph looking penitent rather than like a drama queen.

But that aside, the gallery was well-designed, informative, clever in terms of its flow and really highlighted Rembrandt’s genius. I like artists who work within the boundaries of the prevailing fashions yet push things in small, subtle but innovative ways, which Rembrandt certainly did. And very few artists can match his ability to evoke textures and the play of light in clever, sparing brushstrokes. It is a real joy when his brushstrokes seem so disassociated and oddly-chosen up close when viewed from a distance perfectly represent the back of an old man’s hand or the gleam on a suit of armour. That shows the genuine genius of an old master, and I have nothing but admiration for his skills. 

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1

I didn’t care for the previous Hunger Games films – or, indeed, the novels. I didn’t like Katniss or Peeta, and disliked how the first film took all the easiest options and never explored the genuinely interesting dilemmas it hinted at. The second film very much annoyed me for almost completely repeating the first film, only with less emotionally interesting things in it. The contents of the first film could essentially have been a prologue, and this film was where it could have quickly gone.

And I have to say, this was a much better film than its predecessors. It had big problems, mostly down to following the trend of splitting final films in big female-fandom franchises into two and thus having pacing and narrative issues, but it was much more interesting in general. No more stupid game. No more pretence that this ridiculously evil dictatorship could actually suppress the proletariat. 

This is classic good vs evil as the rebels in the militarised District 13 – thought to have been destroyed - have Katniss. But the Capitol have Peeta. First the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character has to convince Katniss to take part in his propaganda – and it takes indirectly causing the deaths of dozens to spur her into action – but she is soon firing up the masses. This leads to impressive scenes of terrorist attacks on the government – but it’s all good because we know the government is evil so this time terrorism is what we support. The action is kept nice and fast, there are some genuinely funny moments and the angle that Peeta is being used against Katniss – while she is convinced he’s being tortured – provides some interesting depth. The love triangle with Gale is also interesting, though it’s very, very obvious he’s going to have to be killed off because Collins always solves her dilemmas the easy way.

The problem is that the last act is very slow. There’s a protracted attack on the underground bunker, which is meant to be tense but is just boring. Then all power in the Capitol goes down because one dam is destroyed by a random force of rebels, and instead of using the chance to invade, break down the borders or neutralising as many enemy military targets as possible, the rebels use this time to extract Peeta. It leads to the big cliffhanger, and does make sense in narrative terms even if also attacking other targets seems like common sense, but it’s done too slowly, and attempts to seem grown-up by hinting that Snow pimps out his Hunger Games winners (ooh the decadence) ring hollow.

But there are none of the huge glaring problems I had with the previous films, and it’s settled into a much more interesting classic battle against an evil dictatorship. Katniss will never be likeable...but the next film may still be interesting. 

The Imitation Game

Alan Turing is now established as one of the great heroes of the Twentieth Century, as well as a beacon of our progressiveness. Formally pardoned of his gross indecency crimes by the Queen – symbolic of how the vast majority of such convicts should be pardoned – and with an apology from Gordon Brown for how he was treated, he is now recognized for having given perhaps the single greatest individual contribution to the war, for his contributions to cryptography, the development of computers and to the philosophy of artificial intelligence. That he could have been arrested for having a sexual relationship with another man and sentenced to be chemically castrated is a hugely significant example of how barbaric this supposedly enlightened society can have been just a few short decades ago over something like being gay.

Thus, we have this biopic. And I actually loved it – but more for its artistry as a screenplay than for its central messages. This is the fictionalization of a subject done in a remarkable and rather odd way. This is actual human life, just on the edge of living memory, made into melodrama. It came over as very artistic and allowed for a wonderfully heavyweight and varied performance from the media’s current absolute favourite Benedict Cumberbatch, but ultimately it was Hollywood cheese about a worthy subject. Everything was framed in the simplest, most easily-recognised terms: Turing is essentially written as Sheldon Cooper, unable to understand others, convinced of his own genius and quite open to taking jokes literally, at one point going over everyone’s heads with a letter to Churchill. All his drive and motivation derives from his first love at boarding school. His commanding officer is the cliché of an authoritarian. The whole thing is neatly framed not only as an account in a police investigation, but as a Turing test. Enigma is cracked not thanks to the work of prior Polish teams or in a variety of complex ways, but with a Eureka moment over three words always found in morning messages. When it is cracked, there is an intriguingly grey-area dilemma about using that information, made mawkish by the possibility of a team member’s personal loss. It is in large part sentimental drivel, but in fact it works well to move, entertain and hold the interest. These have become the clichés of modern film-writing for good reasons.

And in a strange way, the film made me glad to have lived my life. In many ways the 1940s were the end of the old Britain, but I feel like the 1980s were the last wonderful time to be a British child. I am happy I grew up in a sleepy village, and experienced both simple state schools and a daft opulent private boarding school before Cambridge. There’s a faded romance to that – and I did not live in a time of such absurd persecution of gay people. Though it probably ought to be noted that in keeping with Hollywood schmaltz, the real during didn’t lose his mind and develop some kind of pseudo-Parkinson’s from oestrogen. He got flabby and developed man-boobs. But that doesn’t send such a clear message, does it?

Film Impressions: Effie Grey

The latest fictional account of the doomed relationship between John Ruskin and Effie Gray comes from the pen of no less a respected writer than Emma Thompson. While it tries to be much more sincere and genuine than the last notable attempt – 2009’s extremely fun Desperate Romantics – having just written so much about myths in collective memory, I feel compelled to point out that it is very far from accurate. 

Thompson wants to tell the story of an imprisoned, trapped, innocent young woman oppressed and tortured by her probably paedophilic husband and his overbearing parents. She is effectively imprisoned with nobody to talk to, deprived sexual contact, nearly raped by the only one she opens up to while in Venice, and finally manages to stand up for herself by getting an annulment having seen a better path with Millais. To do this, Thompson excises all the records of Gray being a popular socialite who far from being isolated had numerous people to speak with. She apparently invents the rapey fellow in Venice, and to have a more interesting dynamic in the trip to Scotland with Millais, removes his brother from the narrative altogether. The biggest irony, though, is that in a film marketed as feminist, Thompson reduces Effie from a spirited, powerfully opinionated woman who frequently argued with her husband to a meek, submissive damsel in distress who can do nothing until she goes to find a man to help her.

I also found it a little baffling that for such an interesting life, Thompson’s desire to make a claustrophobic film meant we had two hours building up to the point of Effie’s life where it really gets interesting.

Overall, I rather preferred the version in Desperate Housewives, where Ruskin was buffoonish, Millais was rather wet (and didn’t look more like a dashing Rossetti) and Effie was a little cleverer than them both.

Which isn’t to say there wasn’t much to admire here. The scenery is utterly gorgeous. The cast is brilliant, with Fanning doing a good job as the winsome, heartbroken young Effie, perfectly-pitched controlling-parent performances from Julie Walters and David Suchet, and perfectly-judged cameos from Derek Jacobi, Robbie Coltrane and Emma Thompson herself.

But this was a story that took a historical premise well into a fictional context. Which is fine, but I’m baffled as to why, if that was the intention, the fictional direction chosen wasn’t more entertaining.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

I never liked the Turtles much as a kid, though I watched the show. I couldn’t stand their catchphrases and annoying cocky attitudes. But then, teenagers were a lot older than I was – pretty much adults – and I didn’t see that they were meant to be goofy. I just saw them as overconfident and irritating.

The first live-action films were also pretty bad, but that’s mostly to do with the fact that they were just outright poorly-made, poorly-written and poorly-acted. So what about this one? With the big ugly new designs and attempts to make the concept a little more serious and gritty for the Dark Knight generation?

Well, actually, it works. Of course, it’s a stupid, stupid film, but then, it’s a stupid, stupid concept and that’s part of the charm of it. It’s the story of four pizza-loving ninja turtles living in a sewer with a giant rat fighting a weird samurai guy in New York. It’s inherently stupid. But this film actually does something quite impressive, which is to embrace that stupidity, include lots of pop-culture references and comedy and dumbness, and yet deliver it seriously and sincerely. Thus, while of course it remains a stupid, brainless popcorn action flick, it’s a likeable and enjoyable one.

The film tells the story in a slightly new way, tying things up in a way that goes a little beyond coincidence. When New York is terrorised by the Foot Gang, headed by Shredder, puff-piece news reporter April O’Neil discovers that some vigilantes have been fighting back. Investigating them further, she discovers that they are the Ninja Turtles, and after a little more investigation, realises that by sheer coincidence, they are the very turtles her own father had created before he died in suspicious circumstances. She goes to her father’s old lab partner to confirm her suspicions, now a rich and powerful man, but of course he is not to be trusted. Though it has taken some ridiculous coincidences to get this far, the rest unfolds quite neatly, with April’s revelation having set the rest of the film’s action into motion, and after Shredder’s attack on the turtles’ lair establishes the ticking bomb, the Turtles have to spring to action to rescue the city, with the help of April and her creepy but somewhat amusing cameraman. It kinda works, though the bad guy’s motive to get more rich stumbles over itself in an attempt to have a clever, modern false flag twist, which doesn’t work because...well, the guy’s already super-rich.

The turtles are not detestable. Perhaps they never were. They are actually effectively characterized as a bunch of kids, quite out-of-keeping with their hulking forms. Michelangelo has always been goofy, but here has enough self-effacing and idiotic humour for things to work, Donatello is a bit more of a geek but also a bit more of a rounded character, Raphael is the powerhouse of the team but has a weak, vulnerable side, and Leonardo is the boring leader as usual. Shredder is actually formidable this time – though it was a mistake to cast an American-born Japanese actor instead of an actual Japanese one, because his accent speaking Japanese is really bad. I know that their being huge and scary-looking has put a lot of people off, and maybe gets in the way of them coming over as teenagers, but the writing is actually pretty good.

Overall, bad film, but fun, and better than expected. If someone can explain why Splinter has an accent, I’d like to know!

Dracula Untold

The original plan was to see the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film, but since one of our party couldn’t make it we decided to leave that for next time and see something else. There were no convenient showings of The Maze Runner, so we opted for this. Went in expecting cheesy dreck, and that’s what we got, so no complaints here.

Dracula Untold is basically taking the now-familiar premise of Wicked and Maleficent and applying it to a gothic horror character rather than a fairy tale bad guy. We see Dracula’s origin story, and why he’s not such a bad sort after all. The main problems with this is that in going back to Stoker’s origin for his name, the film goes for the rather more problematic option of attempting to rehabilitate Vlad the Impaler, and disappointingly totally ignores the Victorian setting of the novel.

So we get a story set in the time of Vlad Tepes, mid 15^th-century Wallachia. Historical accuracy is dispensed with: Vlad’s brother disappears, as do all the warlords’ various allies and armies, so that essentially Romania is one fortified city and a monastery. The nasty bullying Turks of the Ottoman Empire hold uncontested dominion over the region, but when Vlad was a child, his father gave him up to be trained into a mindless killing machine, a fanciful version of the political hostage situation of history. Vlad became a nasty killer, murdering a whole village, but has now settled down to become a likeable family man – but here is the first big problem of the film. It wants us to just shrug off Vlad brutally killing a whole village of innocents because he thinks it probably saved ten times the number he killed thanks to making him fearsome. And we’re supposed to accept that and like him because we don’t really get any human perspective on his mass murder. Huh.

Well, the nasty Sultan comes to take more of the kingdom’s boys, including Vlad’s son, so he starts a war he can’t win. Unless, of course, he goes into the mysterious cave on the mountain where a cursed being lives and sells his soul...

The rest is pretty predictable. Lots of battles and the chance for Vlad to save his soul, which he gives up for his loved ones. There’s a lot of bad writing...we’re supposed to accept that he has incredible powers of observation, able to hear the spiders on their webs over the rush of the river, but he fails to notice the Sultan hiding or that his wife is about to fall from a cliff. Silver is presented as a kind of kyrptonite for vampires, but Vlad chooses to have a fight surrounded by it instead of, y’know, exiting the tent and using his ‘strength of ten men’ and super-hearing to just spear his opponent.

The casting is also amusing, coming across like a strange Game of Thrones alternate universe fanfiction. The original vampire is Charles Dance, having fun hamming things up with a mouthful of false teeth, while the son is Rickon Stark and Thoros of Myr shows up as a monk. Meanwhile, the Sultan Mehmed is amusingly played by Dominic Cooper exactly as he played Uday Hussein. Vlad himself has been in the Hobbit films, making for an amusing mish-mash of familiar faces.

But ultimately I don’t want to be too harsh on Dracula Untold, because I never expected it to be any better than it was, because the costumes are gorgeous and because the actors are actually being very sincere. 

Gone Girl (spoilers)

Politically, Gone Girl is a little curious. I was a little taken about how it was MRA Horror Stories the Movie – that is, the kind of thing Men’s Rights Activists love to highlight as the evil things women do and why men are the real victims of inequality. Which of course isn’t exactly a popular, mainstream view, and feminist groups online often get into mud-slinging matches with them. Where these men congregate, they very frequently disseminate (true) stories of women playing the system, usually with false rape claims. Well, there are false rape claims in this story, but the film is primarily about taking that and writing it larger – to a false murder claim.

Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike play the central couple here, Nick and Amy. They had a fairytale romance when they both managed to convince one another they were better than everyone around them, but after they lost their jobs and moved out of the Big City, things stagnated and they grew to resent one another. We don’t know it at the start, but Nick is cheating on Amy, and Amy has very severe issues from her childhood that lead to her hatching a plot to stage her own murder, then slip away, trying her best to get her husband wrongly convicted for her murder with various tip-offs and plotting to kill herself to seal the deal if it doesn’t get to that point without her needing to. The most satisfying part about this set-up is that the main characters are presented at first as though we’re supposed to like them, even though they’re intensely irritating. But that is all intentional – they’re not perfect, not even close, and nor was their relationship even at the start. On the other hand, what that means is that we end up with a film with no characters we like, except maybe Nick’s sis.

When things start to go wrong for her - incidentally just as it starts to look likely that Nick can win any case against him – she goes even further into psycho bitch territory, looking up an old lover who still holds a flame for her, making him think he’s the really creepy bastard, only for her to trump him, then go home, manipulate Nick with pregnancy, and win the day. The evil woman wins! The MRA were right! Call Wizardchan!

Fortunately, politics aside, and forgetting how the only thing I knew about this film going into it was that Ben Affleck’s penis made an appearance (the merest flash, less than you see of Neil Patrick Harris’...yay?), the fact is that it’s successful because it’s actually an enjoyable film. The twists keep the pace going and the various elements of cat and mouse are very compelling. Fincher’s trademark dark yet clinical style makes things uncomfortable in just the right way, and where the plot is very cartoonish, the matter-of-fact style carries it through.

In many ways, this is lazy execution, story-wise. There’s really no satisfying ending, and the way things progress feel a bit half-baked. The main central plot never seems like it would really stand up in court: cryptic final letter, diary that ends on such a convenient line and didn’t actually get burnt, the idea that Nick would try to burn the murder weapon in his house and just leave it there slightly scorched – it wasn’t a perfect plan. And then the fact that there’s no investigation into her killing her stalker guy despite getting hold of a box cutter because dem useless Feds took over the case (and are of course useless at investigating things). It all works out a little too conveniently, especially for the ending it goes for.

Perhaps there’ll be a sequel where the sister sorts everything out with a cleverer plan. But that would just be overkill, really. The film decided it didn’t want to tie up its loose ends for a creepier ending. Personally, it left me feeling a little hollow. 

Lucy

Lucy is a standard superhero origin film, only with the impression it’s something much cleverer and more sophisticated. It’s sadly wrong and really rather charmless, but there’s at least some fun wish-fulfilment one-person-takes-on-the-mafia-and-wins action sequences.

Based on the old and daft urban myth that we only use 10% of our brains, it follows an unwitting young woman named Lucy who while in Taiwan whose boyfriend sends her into a hotel to act as a drug mule for the Korean mafia. She ends up with a large quantity of an experimental drug sewn into her abdomen, and when a rapey criminal kicks her in the stomach, the drug leaks out. It’s a super stem cell-like magic chemical that in an origin story that would fit in beside any of Stan Lee’s most absurd efforts, it gives her superpowers.

Scarlett Johansson’s performance here is praised, but essentially after the opening scenes she can stop acting and become robotic. She gains absurd knowledge and telekinetic powers, flies to Paris to get the rest of the drug from the other drug mules, defeats the evil mob boss and his cronies and ascends to a higher plane. However, she leaves behind a USB drive that sparkles mysteriously so that Morgan Freeman – the scientist who predicted what would happen when the brain exceeds its ‘usual’ 10% - may receive her godly knowledge and enrich mankind.

The film is rather pretentious, and Luc Besson makes it rather pretentiously – especially with his annoying interpolations of archive footage, mostly of nature documentaries. For someone whose big hit Leon was about humanising a figure difficult to see as having humanity, I’m surprised he’d see the merits of a story that effectively takes a human character and systematically removes that humanity. 

Sin City 2: A Dame to Kill For

Though it was intentionally lowbrow, the original Sin City made an impact. It had two things this film did not: firstly, the surprising novelty of a film intentionally made to look like a noir comic, Frank Miller style. Secondly, variety. It goes the same way as the 300 sequel – it lacks the same impact in stylistic terms, being a sequel, and suffers from much duller writing and far less engaging characters. I’m with the multitude of critics who have expressed surprise that this film, with all its ultraviolence and nudity and explosions is so very dull. It simply isn’t as fun as the first film. Not even close.

This film largely revolves around how evil Sin City’s senator is, and the various people who hate him. Joseph Gordon Levett has an abortive storyline made just to push home how nasty he is, where the only surprise is that his story goes in the most obvious way possible, rather than him revealing some greater plan. Otherwise, Bruce Willis’ ghost looms over his wife, who wants revenge for her husband being driven to suicide, and goes from stripper to badass with the help of the film’s real hero, tough-as-nails righteous psycho Marv, who we’re supposed to cheer for as he brutally kills four nasty rich kids who were themselves reprehensible murderers. Marv is also the muscle-for-hire in the film’s other main story, in which a tortured photographer is manipulated by his ex into killing her new husband, despite her incredibly strong manservant. Perhaps the most interesting thing to come out of the film is the potential debate over whether Eva Green’s character in her classic femme fatale exploitation role is a sexualised, abused product of the Hollywood system playing a hackneyed, un-PC character type and getting naked for the purposes of the male gaze, or whether in being the real manipulator who uses her body as she wishes and is in fact the rapist of the piece, is a powerful symbol of empowered womanhood.

Otherwise, it doesn’t look as startling as before, and the token Asian girl with the katana’s violent parts just lack any kind of visceral impact. It seems like the first film showed all the best tricks, and nothing is really left here, so they’re going through the motions with the stylised look. Nothing seems daring or innovative, which is a real problem here. Disappointing.

Flight Films #7: The Other Woman

This isn’t really my sort of film, but I thought I’d watch it for something light and easy and because Jun and I considered going to see it purely because it had Nicki Minaj in it – and she after all gave us the holiday’s theme song.

A silly film about a licentious conman who cheats on his wife with numerous women – until they find out about it and decide first to screw with him and then to bust him. Quite apart from coming from that bizarre and alien world of American dating – where it seems everyone is expected to have a few dozen short-term relationships a year – this is a definite chick-flick. Its humour primarily comes from having a shrill, ditzy woman as the wife doing silly things, and occasional poop and body part jokes – though there are some great little off-beat natural moments.

Can’t say I found it very interesting at all or rooted for any of the characters very much – though they all acted as well as they could under the circumstances – but I was lightly amused. And Minaj’s small role was done perfectly.  

Flight Films #5: Divergent

There was nothing very original on offer with Divergent, but what it did, it did well – and certainly made for a more satisfying film than the similar The Hunger Games.

Reminding me of The Wind Singer but very like every other sci-fi about a caste system and main characters who do not conform, it followed a young, spirited girl who like everyone else in her enclosed society, takes a test in her teens to determine the entire course of the rest of her life. She has been brought up in the worthy Abnegation faction, who essentially do charity work and live ascetic lives, and because of this nobility are the entire society’s governors.

Though a film that lends itself to an awesome trailer, with a focus on dream imagery, it was actually very straightforward and ordinary. After Beatrice chooses to join the Dauntless, the peacekeepers, the film segues into the obvious boot-camp film where Beatrice struggles to make the cut against more physically able students but shows her super-special-ness in the natural talent when facing fears category. In a classic American anti-intellectual twist, not only is the kid who was brought up in the bookish ‘Erudite’ faction the real arsehole amongst Trice’s classmates, but the Erudites as a whole have launched a dumb plan to mind-control the Dauntless and slaughter the Abnegations so that they can take over. Because, presumably, the smart ones are not actually very smart and prefer incredibly obvious power-grabs.

Of course, the ones to stop them are the Divergents. The lawyer faction, Candour, apparently never look into the matter, while the last faction are just Earth Ponies, and nobody cares about them. Unsurprisingly, Trice finds an ally in a smoulderingly hot young man who is also divergent, graduated top of his class at Dauntless, and steps in to save her whenever she’s a damsel in distress, which is rather often for a film feminists are very keen on.  

The plot is obvious, the characters thin and the overarching plot unlikely, but the film is fun to watch and easy. Solid. 

Flight films #3: Saving Mr Banks

Another I regretted missing in the cinemas, but had another chance to see! And also quite my favourite of the films I saw on the flight. I’m not sure how true the story is – presumably at least the story of her being prickly giving the rights away and making extraordinary demands was based on reality, especially given the real tapes played at the end, but I think much of the backstory was likely embellished. It’s very popular to claim that an author’s best-known work must be entirely based on real, harrowing elements of their life, so I’m sceptical that was genuinely the case.

On the other hand, this is a marvellous story, essentially with three parts – Pamela’s life growing up in Australia with an alcoholic father, which is done sensitively; the story of Walt Disney trying to get an insight into this difficult woman’s hangups; and the story of the creative team, including the Sherman Brothers, trying to understand the writer’s bizarre requests. The implication is that Marry Poppins is really about the attempt to save a self-destructive, alcoholic bank manager father, which I don’t really buy – but which works very well as a film. Peripherally, there is also the rather nice relationship between Pamela and her driver, probably my favourite of the roles that Paul Giamatti has ever done.

This film is both much heavier than I expected and much more artistic. The different eras and locations are expertly evoked through subtle filmmaking techniques and the performances are top-notch. Emma Thompson is perfect for the role and Tom Hanks has the slightly oily charisma of Walt Disney beautifully. I was engaged throughout and there wasn’t a character I didn’t find interesting. Very enjoyable!

Flight films - #2: Transcendence

To follow The Railway Man, I wanted something stupid that still took itself seriously. From the trailers, Transcendence looked like it would be just that. Johnny Depp uploads his consciousness to a computer and becomes something greater than humanity. Unfortunately, there was rather too much of the serious and not enough of the stupid. Yes, they end up attacking a transcendent being with a bunch of guns and mortars, but the entertainment value here is extremely low.

The concept neatly skirts the interesting question of what would happen if someone uploaded their consciousness but also still had their original mind by having it happen when Depp’s character is dying. The cause? A terrorist group who think the technology he is developing is dangerous. Which of course it is, and provides antagonists/saviours later on.

There are so many things that are stupid. With this sort of nanotechnology why doesn’t Depp immediately build a body? Why isn’t he making self-contained units so that the system can persist no matter what? Why create a huge conspicuous headquarters when the technology could be incredibly discreet? And why on earth start enhancing and controlling humans against their will when it’s obvious where that would lead. Of course, taking this where something with transcendental intelligence would actually take it would mean no story, but in all honesty there was next to no story anyway.

I wasn’t expecting much, but this was a disappointment anyway. Which is pretty damning!

Flight films - #1: The Railway Man

I was a little sorry to have missed Prisoner of War film The Railway Man when it came along a few months back, and while it was a somewhat odd film to watch as an Englishman en route to Japan on a plane full of Japanese people, I was pleased to be able to watch it. Though at times ponderous and worthy, with a very flabby middle arc, this was a touching and enjoyable film.

The opening part introduces Colin Firth’s Lomax character, who is somewhat fixated on trains, knowing all the routes and being highly enthusiastic about things like gauges and timetables. He meets a woman on the train, played by Nicole Kidman with a very good English accent, and there’s a spark between them. He slightly creepily stalks her, but she likes it and they’re soon married. However, he has mental walls up, and the second part is devoted to the wife probing her husband’s friends to find out the truth – that as a POW in Singapore, her husband worked on the infamous Death Railway as an engineer. While one of the lucky ones not put to work as a labourer, he puts together a radio receiver, which when found results in brutal torture. In later life, he finds out his old torturer is still alive and goes to Japan to confront him.

The confrontation is of course the highlight of the film, though of course mostly this film is about talking, finding peace and whether or not a man has the capacity to forgive. Honestly, I think I would have found the book more touching, or even a documentary, with the most affecting part certainly being pictures of the real people involved in this story. But the performances were strong and the subject interesting, so I’m glad I watched. 

The Purge 2: Anarchy

Amazingly, the debacle that was last year’s The Purge managed to get a sequel.

To be fair, one of the things that I thought when watching the original was that so much more could have been done with the premise – so here we have more being done with it. But none of it is the right stuff, and critically none of it is filtered through the stories of characters anybody should actually care about.

The last film had a Panic Room-style claustrophobia to it, with a family trapped in their house with nutcases trying to get in. This one goes the other way, taking its characters out into the wider world of violence and destruction.

Of course, the exploration of ‘all crime is legal’ remains extremely limited. Stronger explosives are explicitly banned, cybercrime and fraud aren’t mentioned, rape is hinted at being permissible but this kind of film is never going to mention child abuse, and it seems a little remiss that the decadent parties glimpsed here don’t feature any drug use whatsoever. Still, if I wondered before why people don’t go around in huge armoured vehicles with heavy arms, the answer is that they do – even if it’s only the evil gubmint. Yes, a rather silly anti-authority theme pervades here, because not only do we see that the government managed to bring in this ridiculous law, they feel there aren’t enough deaths so send out killing squads to kill off the more vulnerable and undesirable parts of society – ie targetting poorer black communities. Sounds like it would inevitably lead to revolution? Yeah, that’s a given. Though apparently we should believe that the government here couldn’t possibly have thought that would happen.

Our story follows one badass ex-cop who is in completely the wrong sort of film and makes attempts at real social comment seem absurd – but who at least you can get behind. He goes about this anarchic world kicking the butts of trained SWAT-style units and ‘purging’ lunatics from all walks of life single-handedly, all on a quest for revenge. He’s fun but doesn’t belong in a film that ought to be trying to get its audience to feel the would be helpless and vulnerable in this situation. He’s joined by four others brought together by a dramatic episode involving the nasty gubmint. Two are random white people who are incredibly annoying, snapping at each other over their ailing relationship and making stupid noises when they need to be quiet. The others are a black mother and daughter – the mother is probably the most sympathetic and believable character, and I can see why she would lie to protect her daughter, but I couldn’t believe she just got upset about her husband at the very start of her story until there’s some action, whereupon she forgot all about him. The daughter, though – oh, she annoyed me so much. She was supposed to get under the badass guy’s skin by being winsome and innocent and yet having a child’s instinctive knowledge of what is right. But she was just incredibly cocky, irritating and stubborn. There were many times in the film I thought ‘They would just kneecap the other person at this point, to keep them talking but utterly subdued’. But with her, I actually wished they would.

The plot is a total mess. They set up so much that goes nowhere. The gubmint plot? Left for the sequel. The revolution? Left for the sequel. The woman with the loudspeaker and automatic up on the roof? Disappears. The guys in masks (including a painted fencing mask, woo!) who turn out to be not killers but facilitators? Peripheral. After the black characters are forced out of their apartment on the flimsiest of excuses (the SWAT team could have killed them, but no, some grizzly guy wants to mow them down personally), our main characters unite. Rather than take the armoured truck, they set off on foot. We’re told nowhere is safe, yet the banking district is utterly deserted. They go to an apartment where of course violence erupts, get everyone in the building killed by drawing the gubmint there, escape and then get caught and sold to elites who purge in relative safety. They haven’t met Mr. Badass, though – who takes care of this momentary dip into the territory of The Running Man – or, y’know, The Hunger Games. They are in an enemy stronghold, though, but luckily the revolution happens just then and they can escape.

Badass man is given the chance to show mercy. Will he? Well, if he does I’m sure some hackneyed, highly coincidental event will show him that mercy is the best course of action, even though of course mercy could just has easily have meant the opposite. Hypothetically, of course, because spoilers are bad. In that sort of scenario, though, I’m sure the ER of a city hospital would be totally empty after a night of murders and attempted murders, and you’d be able to drive right up to its door.

This film broached several more interesting avenues of thought connected to its ridiculous premise...but didn’t do a good job on any of it, made that premise more ridiculous still, and did it with incredibly annoying characters. Very bad. 

Guardians of the Galaxy

I may start to sound fickle, but I think that Days of Future Past’s primacy in my affections may have been short-lived, and I may have a new favourite superhero film. Guardians of the Galaxy was always the underdog in the Marvel cinematic universe, but its monstrous success is testament to just how good it is.

I’m not overly familiar with the characters, brought together like this only in 2008. I saw the in a couple of random Avengers comics, and of course Rocket Raccoon makes an impact just for being such a striking idea – and for appearing in on of the Marvel vs Capcom iterations. But I honestly didn’t expect to be quite as impressed as I was. The best thing about Guardians of the Galaxy was that it mixed action, glib humour and emotional gravitas perfectly – considerably better than The Avengers did, and that film did it extremely well. If this sort of humour is Whedon’s lasting legacy, I have to grudgingly admit that’s a very good thing – when done right, as it was here, and not patting itself on the back for it.

The plot is a solid, simple one with a MacGuffin at its centre and lots of interesting parties vying for it. As has been teased in previous films, infinity gems are on offer in the Marvel universe, and they make excellent MacGuffins. One falls into the hand of Han Solo type Peter Quill, who likes to call himself Starlord and is affiliated with the roguish Ravagers. Trying to sell it, he gets in a fight with one of Thanos’ adopted daughters, Gamora, who is in league with Ronan the Accuser – and also draws the attention of bounty hunters Rocket Raccoon and Groot. They all end up arrested and have to bust out of jail with the help of Drax the Destroyer. And with that, a new and brilliant team is assembled. They try to sell the gem to the Collector, but things go wrong and Ronan seizes it – planning to use it to destroy the planet Xandar, before going for Thanos. The rest of the multiverse’s heroes aren’t around, clearly, so it falls to the Guardians of the Galaxy to save the day.

The film is just so goddamn good-looking. Ronan the Accuser in particular they’ve made to look amazing. The CG used for Rocket and Groot is superb, good enough that I could forget they were CG creations – and Rocket turns out to be one of the most emotionally convincing characters in the piece, in a film full of characters damaged by their pasts. I really like how they did Quill’s mask, and the makeup on Gamora, Drax and Karen Gillen’s awesome-looking Nebula character is Oscar-worthy. I had no idea she could look so amazingly stylish from her largely goofy Doctor Who role. While it was slightly bizarre seeing the Millennium Bridge on the lovely peaceful world run by Glenn Close (not Meryl Streep: dammit they can be hard to tell apart) and John C. Reilly, it and all the spacecrafts associated with it are beautifully-rendered. They even made Thanos look awesome and not goofy – which, as with his DC inspiration Darkseid, is something pretty hard to pull off.

The acting is also just right, helped by the fact that not only do all these comic characters have enough backstory to have a little depth – for this sort of action film – they all also have their comic sides. Quill is obviously far goofier than he’d like to be, Gamora is kinda naive, Drax is wonderfully literal – undercutting several of his scenes yet not his own personal gravitas – Groot’s comic timing, delivered by Vin Diesel in Iron Giant mode, is impeccable and of course Rocket Raccoon is an inherently funny mix of cuteness, street smarts and grizzly sarcasm. Benicio Del Toro has more to do as the Collector here, though I confess I didn’t spot any Easter Eggs behind him (I hear some might be references to the Guardians who didn’t make it into the film), but there were a couple of foregrounded things in the collection. One I won’t mention – but the other, the cosmonaut dog, was pretty hilarious.

The soundtrack, of course, was exquisite – a narrative point was made of that – and I can’t complain about the cinematography or snappy directing. I would’ve preferred an exciting mid-credits scene, but that’s extremely minor. Can’t wait for a sequel – and hopefully these guys getting involved in the larger Cinematic Universe!

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Leaving aside Tom Felton not managing to kick-start a proper post-Potter film career, the first Apes film was a pleasant surprise. It dealt sensitively with Alzheimer’s and pretty cleverly got me engaged with ape characters.

But the sequel was certainly better. It did exactly what a sequel should do – take advantage of the first film having set the scene and go for something altogether grander in scale, more emotionally involved and more intelligent.

Ten years on, the lab-developed virus that became simian flu has wiped out most of the world’s population. Thus we can have this film set in the currently-fashionable gritty post-apocalyptic world familiar from many zombie properties. Indeed, the main thrust of the story reminded me of one section of The Last of Us – a fairly small human colony can get power from a hydroelectric dam, but getting the power back on is not without difficulties.

The dam, of course, is in ape territory. Caesar and co have set up a self-sustaining little colony, where not only do the apes hunt on horseback and craft tools, but they even learn the rudiments of English – written and, on occasion, spoken. Caesar has a wife and two sons, now, one the somewhat difficult adolescent Blue Eyes and one an adorable newborn. After over two years without any human sightings, he begins to feel that they have died out. However, a human expedition and one idiot with an itchy trigger finger soon shows they have not. When our leading man, played by Jason Clarke – who I don’t think I’ve seen in anything before this – reaches out a hand of friendship, Caesar gives him a chance, allowing him, his medically-trained wife, his weedy son and a dam engineer access to the dam. But the engineer is the one who shot the first ape he met, and likely isn’t to be trusted. If Caesar doesn’t start a conflict with the humans, maybe his more aggressive second-in-command Koba will. Maybe he’ll even be prepared to do so with a false flag attack.

Gary Oldman pitches his weak-leader figure just right, though his grand final gesture is almost ridiculously pointless, and the main cast of humans fill their rolls well, but once again this is really much more about the apes than the human beings. The main lesson to learn here is not to judge entire groups, because any group might have the bad apple who ruins it for everybody – and any group might have the guys willing to work for a better world, too.

Let’s not fool ourselves that this isn’t classic, tried-and-tested cinema, only with apes for the savage tribe / mysterious aliens / noble natives. But that’s okay, because it’s done well, and spectacularly. Some of the action sequences get a bit absurd, especially when there’s an ape on horseback leaping through flames with a fully automatic in each hand, or when a tank is commandeered to ram some doors – though the latter is in a remarkably beautiful and well-done action shot. I also found the whole ‘apes follow the strongest’ line slightly dubious when there are goddamn gorillas in the pack – surely they’re the strongest, and surely they sometimes come into conflict with the leaders?

Planet of the Apes continues to provide good surprises – I’ve not particularly wanted to see either of the films, but when I’ve gone to see them, I’ve ended up enjoying them. And what’s more – respecting them. 

Transformers: Age of Extinction

So, then...what did I like about the newest Transformers film? Well, hearing Peter Cullen’s voice work is always good, especially since his performance here came over as very genuine. Having him opposite Frank Welker again was a joy. There were some stunning location shots, especially out in the American desert and in Hong Kong – plus a nice Giger-esque spaceship interior. The cars chosen looked rather awesome, even if I’m no gearhead, and the 3D was some of the best-executed I’ve yet seen. Hound as a grizzled, overweight Autobot with a plentiful supply of guns and John Goodman’s voice was a good decision. There was some iffy CG, especially when the ‘transformium’ was being demonstrated, but towards the end when it was great boats being dropped onto the heads of giant robots, it was extremely well-done. Sometimes the humour worked well, like when three silly old Chinese ladies got in the way. The Dinobots were cool when they finally showed up. Oh, and I enjoyed the fact that there was no Shia LeBoeuf to be seen, as like most people, I am fed up of him.

That’s quite a list of positives. But they really don’t redeem this tedious, badly-made, vastly over-long blockbuster. It’s been critically panned, and that’s no surprise. It’s thrown together sloppily, too much goes on at once, and there’s very little sense of resolution.

There’s a hint at an attempt at a reboot here. There’s a hint at those pseudo-gritty superhero films where the hero is in hiding and has grown a scruffy beard – which we saw in Wolverine and Superman films lately. Instead of the beard, Optimus Prime has gone into hiding as a beaten-up, filthy truck, barely functional now after narrowly escaping bounty hunter Lockdown, who is in cahoots with the CIA to hunt down transformers. Why? Well, the now-ubiquitous Stanley Tucci plays a tech guru and inventor who is fairly obviously meant to be Steve Jobs. He is harvesting ‘transformium’ (right up there with ‘Gundanium’ and ‘Unobtainium’ for the cringe factor) to make Transformers that humans control – but of course using Megatron’s semi-active mind for this is a terrible idea. Lockdown, meanwhile, is in league with the transformers’ original creators – presumably the Quintessons – and wants to bring Prime back to them. He has made a deal with Kelsey Grammar’s CIA operative – and the old ham is having a marvellous time here – to be able to take Prime back in exchange for a ‘seed’, which will create a large amount of Transformium in what is essentially a terraforming nuke, and Megatron plots to set it off in a populated city.

And all of that complexity? Yeah, it’s all subplots. The main plot follows Marky Mark, who still looks a bit too young to be the father of a 17-year-old model, as he gets caught up with the Transformers. He has an incredibly cliched background – he is a strugging single father who can’t quite make ends meet, because he is following his passion for invention. His daughter, meanwhile, has started a relationship with a dishy Irish racing driver – and admittedly, the trite old comedy dynamic of young couple and disapproving father actually works pretty well, especially given that the human characters are otherwise so completely cardboard. There is also a comedy sidekick, but his dorky sub-Buffy dialogue is atrocious and he soon gets offed anyway.

It’s all too much, especially as none of it is very interesting, and it all becomes so clumsy at the end. Giving the humans something to actually do towards the end is incredibly awkward, and we have to buy that Megatron – now Galvatron – just stands about watching the final Prime/Lockdown confrontation without swooping in to take victory. The issue of Galvatron and that of the creators get left for yet another sequel, and there’s very little sense at the end of just how many lives have been lost. The women in this film are even flimsier than the men, and it’s a shame the dinobots get no dialogue at all.

This is also the worst example of product placing I have ever, ever seen. So much of it is so graceless that it effectively made me hostile to the products shown. Though one cameo from another Hasbro property did raise a chuckle...

Monty Python Live (Mostly): One Down, Five to Go

I had a marvellous time watching Monty Python, though probably predictably, that enjoyment was coupled with an understanding that this was a long way from seeing Python in their prime. Undoubtedly, there was a heavy dose of the joy of being able to say I saw them perform, rather than pure, simple, objective pleasure. I’m a lifelong Python fan, and I was amongst thousands of others like me, though most where a few decades older than me, and whiter too!

The mixed reviews this show got are reflective of this situation: the show was ropey and its performers very advanced in years now. One of them, of course, has passed away and way represented only via projections that typically had a reverent set-up and then undercut it. Others looked like they genuinely might pass away on the stage where they stood. There was a lot of padding, including underwhelming dance routines, playback of classic sketches and a decidedly overlong interval. And it was a little sad to me that it took about half the show for the selection of classic sketches to start focusing on the clever and the absurd rather than the cheeky and scatological, perhaps the area of Python humour that has aged least well, and is not enhanced by penis canons and extra verses of the Penis song that were about vaginas and bottoms. The intent to make a musical extravaganza of the show – Idle’s distinctive stamp, after the success of Spamalot – also provides some clunkers: ‘I Like Chinese’ just isn’t funny or clever enough, and ‘Sit On My Face’ deserves to be short and silly. That’s why Gilliam doing ‘I’ve Got Two Legs’ works wonderfully. You need something on the scale of ‘The Universe Song’ to really work here, and it does, marvellously – especially with a silly filmed cameo from Professors Cox and Hawking afterwards.

But for all that the show could have been better, it was still incredibly good fun – and frequently moving. I will never regret having had seen Python on likely their last-ever outing together, under that name. And there’s a degree of thrill to seeing these men as they have become – two film directors, one of them legendary; perhaps the most respected and grumpiest living comedian; an endlessly likeable travel documentary maker; and an aging darling of broadway who crops up in a remarkable number of animated films. Carol Cleveland herself is there, too, in the flesh – and remarkably sprightly. Strangely, it’s the least visible Python from their original incarnation – Terry Gilliam – who it’s most strange and thrilling to see doing such silly things now. He’s a highly respected and brilliant film director – and there he is in horrible corsets and suspenders! There he is rather awkwardly having to fit an overlong and unnecessary fart gag into the brilliant Crunchy Frog sketch! There he is taking over Michael Palin’s role in ‘Gumby Flower Arranging’. How strange and hilarious!

This was a greatest hits show – nobody should really have been expecting anything different. There’s not really anything new here, only slight expansions and the extended songs – plus an original, catchy but not very comedic song about money being the root of evil. Otherwise, the sketches are all classics from the series – dead parrots, spam, inquisitions, paid-for arguments, penguins on TVs, albatrosses, lumberjacks, Bruces and Yorkshiremen are all present and correct. Up on the screen, we get not only classic animations (some of which I think should’ve been the And Now for Something Completely Different versions, especially the killer pram) but some great sketches – philosophers’ football, fish-slapping and the silly olympics raise laughs, and not just because the laugh track was intact. 

These are well-loved sketches and seeing them performed by their writers is something special. Cleese is wheezing throughout and poor Terry Jones can’t quite remember his lines – which he gets ribbed for by Cleese in ‘Crunchy Frog’ and Idle in ‘Nudge Nudge’ – but they are still very silly and very funny. Nobody should have been expecting new material – but there are little flourishes that are draped onto the sketches that make it all seem more personal. Palin seems determined to get the audience to notice that he’s doing a tribute to Morecambe and Wise’s skip dance every time he exits. Cleese still corpses a lot, forgetting his lines (or pretending to) during ‘Crunchy Frog’ and snatching Jones’ cue card: he also throws Palin during ‘Dead Parrot’ by coming out with a random account of Isaac Newton inventing the cat flap (urban legend). Idle is a little less likeable these days, the put-on smarm becoming a bit too believable, but his voice is actually superb. All the cracks, that on the surface are very unprofessional, actually fall within the remit of the allowances we as an audience seemed prepared to make. They were charming and made it seem like we were seeing something genuine.

If ever there were really awkward moments, it was when the Pythons brought someone else into the fold. People donated to charity to be allowed to join the Pythons onstage in the Bruce sketch, but it was mostly awkward. There seem to have been a variety of celeb guests for the ‘blackmail’ portion, coming on and admitting something embarrassing, and ours was Simon Pegg – but his introduction brought the already sub-par sketch grinding to a halt (though there was a funny moment with a still of Top Gear to modernise it).

Overall, though, this was precisely what I hoped for – and with a much better view than I had thought I’d get! If I could have added anything more, it would have been Mr. Creosote, and maybe more nods to Grail than God and mooses.  

The Hooligan Factory

While this was no masterpiece, and teetered at all times between half-decent and a-bit-crap, The Hooligan Factory was actually considerably better than I expected. This isn’t my kind of film, I’ve never even seen anything with Danny Dyer here (who gets an irreverent cameo here), and if we’re honest, there’s no way I would have been to see it if not for one of my band’s tracks being featured on the soundtrack. On that note, I have to say that it’s a rare and special thrill to hear the drums you played pounding out of big cinema speakers while your singer goes into one of his frenzies over a scene where someone attacks someone else with a chainsaw. Marvellous!

But vested interest aside, I had expected little of this film and got rather more than that. It may not have a great plot or quite know if it wants to be a gentle spoof or out-and-out surreal weirdness, but a lot of the jokes work really well, and the decision to make a surrogate father/surrogate son plot the heart of the piece made for parts that were genuinely sweet and warm-hearted – while taking the piss out of the very idea, of course.

Though for months I’ve not quite known if this film was going to be straight-to-DVD or get a proper release through Universal, and am still not entirely clear on the matter, last night it had a big premiere in Leicester Square like, y’know, proper films, and the enjoyable gimmick of having the events before the screening streamed to cinemas around the country. Sitting in Stratford with the director’s football friends – quite a fun little situation – we were first treated to a very awkward attempt to be funny by a compere called ‘Dapper Laughs’ whose repertoire consisted of ‘I take cocaine hurrr’ and ‘I like sex hurrr’. Then there was a gently funny shy comedian called Joel Dommett and, fortunately, Russell Kane, who actually knew what he was doing and managed to warm out the crowd with a genuinely funny routine about English repression, both in the working class and the upper middle class.

Suitably warmed up, we watched the film proper. The central plot follows Danny, played by Jason Maza, who is just about scrawny and doe-eyed enough to make us root for him despite him being a pretty uninteresting thug largely defined by thinking his horrifically violent, quickly incarcerated father was a ‘legend’. When his uncle moves to Australia, he is left homeless, but a chance encounter with former hooligan gang leader Dex, played by director Nick Nevern, introduces him to ‘The Hooligan Factory’, who in the 80s were a legendary ‘firm’. Dex has just got out of the slammer and is out for revenge on rival hooligan firm leader Baron, who pushed Dex’s young son off a bridge at their last fight, resulting in him drowning.

Dex, having been locked up in solitary confinement for his lengthy term, is stuck in the 80s heyday of hooliganism, all tracksuits and stupid moustaches. However, with the help of his gang of colourful characters, he is soon leading his gang out of decline and back to the top of the list of most formidable gangs. Football pretty much doesn’t factor into it at all, which is probably appropriate for these firms, who have pretty close ties with organised crime – presumably the only way otherwise extinct football hooliganism can have persisted.

The humour is bald and often gruesome. Opening scene about an awkward case of mistaken identity and a shotgun is a bit tacked-on but brings some laughs, and the gross-out humour sometimes works, but much better are the time-worn gags about people not noticing something ridiculously obvious, like the most obvious undercover policeman ever, and Dex failing to realise who his baby’s real dad is. There’s a bit of an over-reliance on paedo and gay and gay paedo jokes, which unfortunately also makes a gross-out gay kiss seem like the joke is that it’s gay and gay is disgusting, rather than the joke being that it’s two ridiculous, unsightly macho guys loved up because of some pills that is amusing in a subtly less homophobic sort of way – ie it could have been a gross-out heterosexual kiss with some slightly altered writing.

I also liked the way that no character in the whole film was past ridiculing. Dex in particular is set up as though he’s going to be played as awesome at all times, but is constantly undercut and made the butt of jokes. Even Bullet, played by one of the guys from The Musketeers, who is seen as the film’s real psycho and danger for Danny, is particularly stupid when it comes to realising that ol’ Bill is, well, the Old Bill.

This certainly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea – including mine. But despite that, it actually manages to be funny at times and even borders on being touching at others. As I said, it teeters between half-decent and a-bit-crap, but falls ultimately, but a hair’s breadth, into half-decent. 

Maleficent

Though the idea is more or less lifted from Wicked, I very much liked the idea of Maleficent. Just as ‘Wicked’ looks again at The Wizard of Oz and says ‘Hold on – this woman just saw her sister crushed to death by a stranger from another world, the same world as the outsider who is currently in a rather questionable ruling position...maybe we should look again at why she goes after Dorothy’, this film looks at that evil fairy from Disney’s version of Sleeping Beauty and asks ‘Why does the king reject her at the Christening? Why has she become evil?’

While indeed, it shares much with Wicked, it is where it departs dramatically from that conceptualisation of an evil being from a fairy tale that Maleficent both triumphs and, later, trips up. Where Wicked – at least in book form – concentrates on a political situation, Maleficent explores the relationship between this evil being and the child she has cursed in the years before she falls asleep. It may be less ambitious, but it works superbly, and addresses subtly what the blessing that Aurora will be loved by all means to Maleficent herself. It allows for a sympathetic portrayal and works quite brilliantly. What spoils the film for me, and holds it back from being the kind of classic I’d like to see played at Christmastime year on year is that where Wicked manages to weave around the original Oz story right up until the end, Maleficent can only work as a sympathetic reimagining by utterly departing from the source and giving an ending quite unlike what happens in the original. This, to me, is a major failing, made even worse by the fact that the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ doesn’t even sleep long enough to get in a full night’s kip, meaning she deserves neither legend nor moniker.

It is a real shame, because other than this decision, I loved the film almost unreservedly. The opening portrayal of Maleficent’s childhood and relationship with King Stephan is obvious but works and is beautifully-realised right up to its bittersweet climax. I’d have liked a bit more detail about the events leading up to the Christening scene – what happened to all those other candidates to be king? Did they not seek to depose Stephan when it became clear that he hadn’t actually performed the deed with which he won the throne? – but I could accept the omissions for the sake of brevity.

The middle section of the film is where its heart is. It is a stroke of genius that the three good fairies are inept (and genuinely funny comic relief), which necessitates Maleficent herself stepping in to act as the child Aurora’s guardian from the shadows. Humanising Maleficent not only with this relationship but with her manservant and foil Diaval the crow (who presumably becomes ‘Diablo’ at some point), played with just the right balance of respect and irreverence by Sam Riley, from Brighton Rock. Big draw Angelina Jolie was a fantastic choice, not just for how well she suits enhanced cheekbones – she has the regal, frosty atmosphere around her quite naturally, which means that when she crumbles and looks vulnerable it seems so very genuine. It’s not always easy to get the audience on her side, but here it works, not least because the story revolves around getting the audience on the side of a traditional, well-established villain.

Elle Fanning is also an excellent choice for Aurora, as pretty as she was in Super 8 while now a young adult, the role that could be so flat and cardboard is fleshed out and made likeable by the most subtle delivery of lines and small gestures. Again, the three fairies who could have been annoying in their frivolity are genuinely funny and likeable, and even bland Prince Philip is made likeable by irreverent treatment and adolescent awkwardness. It’s perhaps unfortunate that one of the key twists is almost exactly the one in Frozen, but that’s coincidental and much less central here than it was there.

Visually, the film is a beaut. Some of the fantastical creatures in the opening may date fast, but overall the film ought to stand the test of time for a while, and there are some stunning shots – like winged Maleficent silhouetted on a sunset sky. The music, including Lana Del Ray cover, is suitably haunting throughout and the costuming/makeup ought to win some awards. In all technical regards, I was impressed, and the film held my attention absolutely throughout.

All of which makes me sadder that I was let down at the end. It all felt like a cop-out, like a cheat, to eventually fall back on ‘the story you heard was wrong – not only in the details but in the entire climactic narrative arc’.

Even with this drawback, though, the film is a very strong one and well worth the time to check out. 

X-Men: Days of Future Past

I loved the new X-Men film, bringing together the casts of the smash-hit film series with the prequel cast of First Class, as hinted in the post-credits scene of The Wolverine. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it was my all-time favourite superhero film, certainly surpassing The Avengers, the Iron Man series and all the previous X-Men films.

Though taking inspiration from the classic, very short Days of Future Past series, this is very much a follow-up to First Class, which is why it works. Yes, it’s a slight shame that Kitty Pride is not the one to go back to seek help, instead being the source of the power to send a person’s consciousness back in time – also quite cleverly used as a contingency plan in the dismal future to escape the Nimrod-style Sentinels – if not because I’m a Shadowcat fan, then because it would be nice to have a female-centric superhero flick. But Wolverine is the big box office draw and plot-wise it makes sense: he was both physically the same in the past and able to heal through ill effects of a consciousness transfer, a condition that ensures the plot isn’t very quickly concluded by Professor X going back instead.

It’s the fact that this is a near-future X-Men going back to the 70s rather than a further-off future X-Man coming back to the present that I feel works very nicely, though, and allows for an excellent sequel. After the schism at the end of First Class, Magneto and Xavier have gone their separate ways – Magneto to a militant defence of mutants, culminating in an involvement in the JFK assassination that has seen him incarcerated under the Pentagon itself, and Xavier into depression, alcoholism and addiction to a drug that allows him to walk despite spinal damage, but suppresses his powers. A lot of the big players of the first film are gone, including Emma Frost – so portentously freed at the end of First Class – but can largely be seen as casualties of Magneto causing a stir ... and shady experiments. Into this reality comes the Wolverine of a future that, of course, has Bishop in it, one of extremely powerful adaptive sentinels wiping out mutantkind. Sending Wolverine back is a last-ditch effort to stay alive in a devastated world, where the sentinels are not only killing mutants, but any human they determine likely to produce mutant descendants – no matter how many generations down the line.

Wolverine’s task is not easy. First, he has to rescue the Professor from his depression, with only Hank to help. Then he has to bust Magneto out of his very tricky cell, which is done with the help of a wonderfully cocky Quicksilver – whose parentage is dealt with in just the right way – in scenes that show how a Flash film could work brilliantly, and make me curious about the character also appearing in the Avengers films, which is a very odd crossover point given the rights issues. Then, in a pleasant echo of the original story, they have to stop Mystique from performing an assassination – not of a senator, but of Sentinel creator Boliver Trask (it’s become odd hearing Peter Dinklage using an American accent), which makes him a martyr and leads to the dystopian future. But this Mystique is of course the Raven of First Class, and has become hardened to the world since we last saw her. That the film pivots on her humanity is one of its triumphs.

Though there’s a lot of annoying paradoxes with this kind of time travel, one of its advantages is that it allows for the worst-case scenario to be fully played-out. The far-future storyline is essentially one long action scene in which the likes of Storm, Colossus and Sunspot are overcome in brutal ways, which is oddly affecting. There’s also the brilliant use of Blink, very Portal in presentation, and the awesomeness that is Bishop – though he dies the same way Bishop always, always dies. I have to say, I would have had a real bit of pleasure if instead of just keeling over, Xavier had put up a fight, preferably joining with Magneto to bring out Onslaught (now there’s a good place for a possible Fantastic Four crossover to go, given the Franklin element), but these allowed a second layer of ‘big climax’ to the film.

Though the main storyline had its own, remarkably independent of Wolverine, who is actually not of much use here. Magneto shows the full extent of his power, and it’s immensely satisfying to watch, even if ole Erik is a fool not to simply play the hero and make the world love rather than fear him – which would have been very easy to set up. Far more so than the Hellfire Club and the hammy posturing of Kevin Bacon, this feels like a mature film with serious dilemmas and enemies, for the first time with the X-Men.

The ending is also intriguing, essentially resetting what happened in the original films while preserving their cast and a basic continuity – with lots of feel-good cameos to back it all up. There are intriguing changes possibly meant for more Wolverine films, not least Stryker’s true identity now, and the possibility of seeing Jean and Scott again.

But best of all was who showed up post-credits. The best villain, without a doubt. The films better do him justice!

Godzilla

This is actually probably a good time for a Godzilla film – more so than the forgettable 1998 attempt at Americanisation, which I remember primarily for its soundtrack. We are at a time when it’s fashionable to revere the source material rather than reinvent it – largely thanks to rabid fans of book series – and the kaiju film is in with American audiences, though really there’s just Pacific Rim to base that on.

And this version has gone down well. Respectful to the ideas of the original, keenly aware of the original’s connection with ideas about The Bomb and incorporating the new nuclear anxiety of Fukushima, and featuring top-of-the-range special effects, it does a whole lot right. Gojira himself in all his glory is magnificent – ridiculously huge and ridiculously powerful and far beyond what military power can stand against, the decision to pit Godzilla not against man but against other kaiju was a wise one. It’s unarguable that the climactic battle scenes are what the film is all about, and it’s all a lot of absurd fun with buildings falling over and bridges being torn apart and no less than three immense monsters brawling. Perfect popcorn entertainment.

If, that is, the rest of the film has deftly built up to it. And if there has been a plot with characters we really care about, this could be a very strong action film indeed. Sadly, this is where Godzilla falls short – and indeed, the attempt is what really shoots everything else in the foot. If a bombastic action film is hard to stay awake through, something is very wrong.

But sadly, that was decidedly the case here. I didn’t mind the way the film teased and teased Godzilla himself – it was quite a good idea to have him largely just spines under the water until finally he is revealed with that signature roar. But for that to work, you need something else that’s interesting to take its place.

What Godzilla tried to interest us in was some of the flattest, least likeable human characters I’ve ever seen. They make the cast of World War Z seem as endearing as that of Friends. First we follow Hal from Malcolm in the Middle, now a very serious actor thanks to Breaking Bad, mangling Japanese as a nuclear plant worker with a young son, who faces terrible tragedy as his co-worker wife is lost in a disaster resulting from an unexplained seismic event. Years later, he is convinced that the seismic event was more than, y’know, Japan being Japan, and keeps getting caught going into the quarantine zone and meeting with conspiracy theorists. His estranged son, now in the army, has to come to bail him out. The two return to the quarantine zone at just the right time to witness the newest monster release the same seismic signals – to vindicate his being a crackpot – and a strange giant insect ten times scarier than Mothra emerges to wreak havoc. Hal doesn’t make it, but his son, John Lennon from Nowhere Boy (who I probably met at Jackie Palmer, come to think of it) trying way, way too hard to be Joseph Gordon-Levitt and having none of the boyish charm, takes up the baton to put a stop to the destructive monsters. Which of course, is the job for another mysterious force, Godzilla, who awakens and fights to ‘restore balance’ when similarly enormous monsters make an appearance.

The film is full of coincidence. Hal and John Lennon happen to be at the scene just when the monster awakens – and though this has a little to do with seismic activity, it’s not as though the seismic activity led to an awakening the last time. Lennon then manages to be in the same place as the monster by coincidence over and over and over again. The premise of the three monsters triangulating and Godzilla knowing where they’re going to clash, rather than, y’know, a hunter moving behind one of the beasts it’s hunting, is ridiculous. The film’s use of character shields is far too much, and Godzilla’s weird playing possum at the end just doesn’t get signposted adequately and seems tacked-on for a bit of fake emotion.

But the bigger problem is simply the unlikeable nature of these characters. The sub-Spielberg absent father line never works, Ken Watanabe just looks faintly embarrassed, the mother and young son characters are basically non-existence and nobody gains the audience’s sympathy in any way.

This was a near-miss, admittedly, and I am curious to know what Japanese audiences make of it and its Western leads. The monster part was done right. It’s just time to treat the human part as just as important.