THE BRITS (ACCORDING TO THE CELLULORD):

You may have noticed a recent trend in whacking-on about how bally ace it is to be British (despite the over-whelming evidence to the contrary).  Well, whilst some German immigrants are enjoying a nationwide party, kamera.co.uk is discussing British films ... I've posted a comment there, throwing-in my thoughts, but it seems rude not to share the same with you my ardent reader ... So here they is:

Ahh ... The timeless conundrum ... What makes a film 'British'?  

Old blue-eyes is back ... Michael Fass - sorry, Peter O'Toole as Aurens of Moravia.

Are '2001', 'Clockwork Orange' and 'Lawrence of Arabia' British?  Depends on your terms of reference, I suppose.  Although they were made in (and around) Britain ... They were made with American money.  Does that matter?  Debatable.  'Lawrence' is obviously *about* Britain and the British mentality ... And the reality is that Britain alone has never been able to afford to make a film on *such* a grand scale.  It speaks volumes about British colonial ambition in a way that we, ironically, couldn't say without spending American money.  So, yes, I'll happily call that an 'assisted win' for Britain.

Stanley Kubrick: The man with the movie camera ...

Did Kubick count as a British director by the late sixties?  Possibly.  Even if they weren't set here, his films were certainly made here and are shot through with a British sensibility ... Albeit seen from an American perspective.  But what about Terry Gilliam?  When he spent Universal's money to make his swinging satire of 80s Britain - Brazil - Did that stop it being a British film? 

Okay, but what about putting the boot on the other foot ... What about Hitchcock?  Can we claim any of his American films?  The perversity and sarcasm at the heart of many of his films feels British.  Psycho?  Can we have that?  Notorious?  North By North West, even?  They feel very British (or at least European) to me!

Alfred Hitchcock on, seemingly, a tightrope.

Are the Harry Potter films ours?  Thanks to Ms Rowling's insistence, they *feel* British, gave work to a lot of British thesps and technicians and, of course, where shot here ... But every penny of the profits goes back to Warner Brothers' vault in Gringotts.  Does that make them British?

I feel this question has a bit of an Andy Murray feel about it ... If they're hits, we'll claim them; if they're flops, they're all yours (unless, like me, your inherent perversity makes the opposite response more likely).

To my mind - and what I've always taught my students - is that the money *does* matter.  British films are 'Financially British'.  A film can have a British identity, a British feel, it can tell the world about Britishness ... But it is *not* itself British if a significant amount of the production budget didn't originate here and/or the bulk of the profits don't stay here.

So, with that entirely arbitrary rule in place ... Here's my ha'penny worth, in purely chronological order (and I'm happy to be corrected if I'm mistaken in thinking these films qualify as 'financially British') ...

Horribly hand-coloured lobby-card from the wonderfully monochrome 'School for Scoundrels'

School for Scoundrels (1960 – ABPC) How does one choose just one Alistair Sim or Terry-Thomas film?  And why this one above Belles of St. Trinians or I’m Alright, Jack, say?  I don’t know.  I just find this film irresistible; whenever it makes one of its regular Saturday afternoon appearances on TV, that’s me spoken-for for a couple of hours.  The humour is so delightfully cynical and the third act offers the most perfect revenge comedy in all cinema. 

Moodily monochromatic shot from the gloriously colourful ... You get the idea ...

The Wicker Man (1973 - British Lion - although I gather they were bought-up or bailed-out by EMI, I believe that was still a British company at the time).  One of those films which still delights ... The more often you see it, the more you see in it and it's a *great* film to show modern teenage film students because they've never heard of it - So the ending catches them completely off guard.

All together now: "We're just haaangin around ... Haaaangin' arooooound ..."

Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979 – Handmade Films) This has just edged out both Time Bandits and The Long Good Friday, ’cos I don’t want Handmade Films to dominate my list, which they very easily could!   The money famously came from a Beatle mortgaging his house … But the end result is probably the cleverest and most ambitious comedy made since the glory-days of Ealing.  And why haven’t I included any Ealing?  Same reason there’s no Hammer … Cos I only have five films!

Five little fingers ... But which one's Pinky? (Sorry ... I'm getting tired, here)

Pink Floyd:  The Wall (1982 - EMI)  I have long maintained that Alan Parker is tragically overlooked when one considers the history of British film of the 70s and 80s.  He did pretty much everything Ridley Scott did, he often did it sooner, sometimes did it better, and generally set it to music!  Obviously, to tolerate The Wall, one has to be up for 90-odd minutes of Roger Waters’ self-flagellation, which I certainly am.  Back in the 80s, this was the first VHS tape I bought (as opposed to renting), and I watched it time and again, getting a headache every time from frowning as I tried to fathom the meaning of every frame.

You can't just call ANY film British ... This isn't Viet-Nam ... There are rules!

The Big Lebowski (1998 – Working Title)  Yes, I’m being awkward now but this film was co-funded by Working Title (who paid, at least in part, for The Coens’ Fargo and O Brother Where Art Thou) … So it’s British.  Through and through!  Let’s be honest, would anything as uniquely odd-ball have been produced by a mainstream American production company?  I doubt it.  Besides, it really does hold my list together.

So ... Thoughts:

 

BLU-RAY: SUBMARINE

This is a film (based on the novel of the same name) about a teenager called Oliver, awash on a sea of hormones and confusion.  This is not, it’s fair to say, unexplored territory.  From Catcher in the Rye via The Breakfast Club to Juno, you will find many brilliantly observed and painfully true depictions of the terrible teens.

There are so many rites of passage films depicting the shedding of childish things that you’d be forgiven for thinking there was nothing new to say about it but, as with silly love songs, we don’t seem to have had enough.  And I am grateful for that because Submarine is wonderful!

The movie that I was mostly put in mind of is Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl (1981).  And that’s about as fine a complement as I can pay a British teen movie.  Part of the reason for the comparison is that Submarine seems to be set in the eighties.  There’s nothing that overtly tells you this … But the absence of mobile phones and laptops and the presence of video tapes and Paddy Considine’s mullet would seem to suggest that!  Also, it is that point in the eighties when some people still hadn’t quite got over being in the seventies.

Thing is, that’s the time I was trudging through the ignominies of teenage.  So, unlike y’r modern teen who LOLs and LMFAOs their way through life, experiencing everything vicariously through their constantly updating social networks whilst growing a thick skin of cynicism; I remember having to make my mistakes myself and having to figure out how and why I’d made them alone.

We were a sadly solitary lot, the teenage boys of the 1980s.  Similarly, Oliver (Craig Roberts) lives in an isolated world largely of his own imagining.   He agonises about being invisible to girls but, in his mental experiments, he imagines being dead would be a good career move because he would then, in his absence, become the centre of everyone’s attention.

Rather like Adrian Mole (also from the eighties) Oliver is well-read and erudite but has no life experiences to elucidate with his wide vocabulary … So, in the absence of an incident-filled life, he makes things up.

As children will, he tries a bit of everything.  Tired of being bullied, he tries a spot of bullying himself, just to see if it agrees with him and will impress Jordana, the girl on whom he fixates.  He has the ability to rationalise any behaviour to himself – including spying on his parents to the point when he knows, to the day, when they last had sex … Some seven months previously.

So far, the film probably doesn’t sound especially new or unusual … But writer / director Richard Ayoade (who you will, of course, know as Moss in the I.T Crowd) has created a beautifully visualised depiction of mundane alienation.  There is a clever economy of shooting here and Ayoade even allows the editing to carry the gag occasionally.  That shows real maturity but, it’s worth mentioning, whilst this is Ayoade’s first movie, it isn’t his first time in the director’s chair:  His first screen credit, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace was as co-writer and director as well as co-star!

Whilst the whole film is seen from Oliver’s perspective, making him very much the centre of things, he is surrounded by great oddball characters:  His rigid, perpetually-embarrassed middle-class parents (played by Noah Taylor and Sally Hawkins), Graham, the mullet-wearing Ninja neighbour (Paddy Considine) and, of course, the frosty presence of Jordana herself (Yasmin Paige).  All of these characters are layered and complex and portrayed with the lightest of touch by an inspired cast. 

Visually, the film is full of unobtrusive but beautiful tracking shots, with the camera flowing effortlessly through the wintery Welsh wilderness, making it look quite magical; even if this does lead to some rather self-conscious referencing of Francois Truffaut.  Hey it’s nice, for once, for someone to not be referencing Spielberg or Tarantino!

Oliver’s eccentric, experimental relationship with Jordana, conducted almost exclusively out-of-doors in duffle-coats, is made up of perfectly conceived vignettes, often gathered together in delightful little montages.  Like any miniature, the details are absolutely crucial in this small film, the humour is gentle and heartfelt but the themes, they’re universal, and here played out to the accompaniment of Alex (Arctic Monkeys) Turner’s simple, soulful songs.

As the film progresses into its third act, we do begin to lose sympathy with Oliver.  His rationalisations become quite cruel and self-serving, but this is because he is still a child, unfamiliar with and unsure of how to cope with the emotions he feels.  It is quite brave of the film to not gloss over this and not try to idealise Oliver. 

What about that title, then: Submarine?  Well, apart from the submarine Oliver has painted on his bedroom wall, this is mainly a reference to his discovery of sonar.  Using sonar we can detect what is going on inside a hard metal object.  Oliver’s fear is that there is no sonar for people, no way of being able to detect what is going in on in the human heart.  Of course, we do develop that sonar: It’s called empathy.

One has to experience teenage traumas in order to develop that empathy.  That is the point of a coming-of-age story and that is the key difference between a child and an adult.  We can enjoy the humour, understand the human drama and be moved by the emotions precisely because we have been through that rite of passage and can now empathise with those who are still struggling through it.

Fortunately, watching this film is very far from a struggle.  It may just be my film of the year!

THE EXTRAS:

Audio Commentary – This is the best extra by far.  Featuring Ayoade, of course, as well as the original novelist, Joe Dunthorne (I love it when novelists get this involved in a movie adaptation) and Director of Photography, Eric Wilson, who does extraordinary work with the seemingly impossible task of making midwinter Wales seems like a place you actually want to be.  A great excuse to watch the film again straight away!

Through The Prism – 16.00

This is the self-help video that Graham T. Purvis (the Ninja neighbour) flogs at his ‘seminars’ and parts of which we see peppered through the film.  It is essentially Paddy Considine improvising in character.  A bravura performance, to be sure, but the joke does wear thin.

Message From Ben Stiller – 2.00

A heartfelt pep-talk video from Ben Stiller, sitting in sun-kissed LA, sent to the film-crew entrenched in Wales in the rainiest month on record.  He certainly feels their pain.

Interviews – 24.30

EPK (Electronic Press-Kit) interviews with all the main stars.  Feel free to add your own questions then howl with laughter as the cast answer a completely different question.

Deleted Scenes – 9.40

One of the joys of the film is its cracking pace and economy.  These scenes would, almost without exception, have slowed things down.  They do, however, fill-in some of the details about Oliver’s dad who is, to be frank, only sketched-in as a character in the film.

Extended Scenes – 4.50

Ditto

London Comedy Festival Q&A – 10.00

Seemingly shot by an iPhone, this gives an impression of what the Festival screening must have been like, for those people trapped at the back who couldn’t hear.

Glasgow Film Festival Q&A – 11.40

This one is better and more coherent, although Ayoade does seem to be a bit nonplussed at being asked questions about his film.

Camera Test – 3.50

This is a run-through of the key under-the-bridge scene, with different hair and an unattractive mack instead of the duffle-coat.  Those tiny details really do matter!

Piledriver Waltz Video – 3.20

The video for one of Alex Turner’s songs, made up of seemingly unused montage material from the film.  Quite delightful!

MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS

.

.
This film was co-funded by the BBC … so some small part of your licence fee was spent ensuring that George Clooney continues to have a crust to eat and a warm bed to sleep in. Hope that makes you feel good.

I’m sure George was paid far more than Jon Ronson, on whose book and investigative journalistic instincts this film is based.

Ewan MacGregor plays Bob Wilton, a journalist – not even remotely based on Ronson – who decides it’s time to make his journalistic career by heading out to Iraq to see if he can find something interesting going on there. It’s 2003, there’s a war on, shouldn’t be too hard. Now, casting MacGregor, a Scot, to play a frankly unconvincing American journalist (after his celebrated turn as an unconvincing Irish priest in Angels and Demons) seems a tad odd. But then the film-makers’ thinking becomes clear when we begin to encounter a steady stream of persistent Star Wars references. Essentially, MacGregor was cast simply so, when Clooney tells him that the secret military operation he was part of was called Project Jedi, he can ask: “What’s a Jedi?” And that’s it. He was cast simply so they could (repeatedly) employ an inter-textual Star Wars gag.

Okay, so that’s maybe a bit disingenuous, as MacGregor generally comes across as normal and likeable and Bob needs to be both of those things to throw Clooney’s mad-eyed ‘Jedi’ psych-corp soldier into stark relief. Of course, Clooney’s Lyn Cassady comes across as the exemplar of normalcy compared to an all-but unrecognisable Jeff Bridges’ Bill Django, initially only seen in flashback, who believes that the path to creating super-soldiers is to embrace ancient wisdom and new-age practices. These long-haired, chilled out and laid-back soldiers form the core of The New Earth Army.

Django (and his disciple, Lyn) believe that a man finds his ‘optimum trajectory’ (his destiny) where he least expects it. Meeting Lyn was Bob’s trajectory and it ultimately leads him into a chaotic battle between Lyn, Django, the assembled might of the American military machine and Larry Hooper, a jealous ex-New Earth soldier played with typical relish by Kevin (I only had my eyes done so I’d look younger in the flashbacks) Spacey. All of this culminates in the whole army, tripping its collective tits off on LSD, charging around the desert in scenes which reminded me (not accidentally, I suspect) of Bob Rafelson’s Monkee movie Head (1968).

It’s possibly worth reminding the casual reader at this point that the film is a comedy. Not a throwing-my-popcorn-up-in-the-air-I’m-laughing-so-hard-I-can’t-catch-my-breath comedy, but a wry, cynical, whimsical comedy … very much in-keeping with the style of writing in Ronson’s original book. Of course, under all this whimsy, there is a sharp, incisive deconstruction of America in the age of the Star Wars Generation. As Clooney’s frequent forays into political film-making have clearly demonstrated, he is a man who has little sympathy for the gung-ho, wild-west mentality which, until quite recently, yee-hawed it’s way down the corridors of The White House. That was an America that believed in super-heroes, in Jedi Knights, in the undeniable truth of a nation’s manifest destiny. It believed in the magic of the Force and in the simple, easy-to-identify villains on The Dark Side. It believed that Iraq and Afghanistan were mere rebel uprisings that could be quashed with irresistible fire-power. Maybe the film’s constant Star Wars references and similes are a way of getting the afore-mentioned Star Wars Generation to give a damn about politics again.

Looked at against that background, this film is really Kevin Spacey’s chance to play Darth Vader. Bridges gets to be an acid-casualty Obi-Wan, MacGregor becomes Luke and Clooney is Han Solo, able to do the Kessle Run in twelve parsecs, fuelled only by a bottle of beer and a Boston CD.

The film blatantly states that America under Bush is the Empire under The Dark Side. Cowardice, chaos and compromise have led to a condition of madness running unchecked through the land and all those who supposedly represent her. Well, this isn’t exactly news, guys.

As for the performers, they have a uniformly light touch, they’ve all done this sort of thing many times before. Clooney is very comfortable being directed by his ex-writing-partner, Heslov (they wrote Good Night And Good Luck together in 2005). Yet it is still interesting to see him play younger than we’ve ever seen him thanks not to Benjamin Button-style elaborate CGI but through simply wearing a long wig. Bridges, on the other hand, physically transforms himself, several times, as he ages thirty years through the film. For a role which is essentially slapstick, he manages to bring both power and pathos to the table to make it seem totally credible that this man could persuade the most narrow-minded and officious people you can imagine at military high command that he had the key to unleashing super-powers. Why is this film called The Men Who Stare at Goats? Well, I’m glad you asked: Because Django believed that, with sufficient training, a soldier could kill simply with a hard stare … and he used goats to demonstrate his theory.

The real Django must have had the selling skills of a Siberian fridge magnate to persuade the military high command to believe this voodoo nonsense and here, in the fictionalised film version, Bridges makes it all seems so wonderfully, horribly plausible. I’d sign up to his version of the army! Wouldn’t you?

Dir: Grant Heslov
Stars: George Clooney, Ewan MacGregor, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey
Dur: 94 mins
Cert: 15

.

ICE AGE: DAWN OF THE DINOSAURS.

. .
Digital is the way to go. I’ve been saying this ever since I saw Bee Movie and Blade Runner: The Final Cut on the same day at the all-digital Vue Cinema in Hull, in 2008. Odd double-bill you might think, and you’d be right, but they served to show the full range of possibilities made available to us by digital projection. The twenty-five year-old Blade Runner has never been sharper and the CGI Bee Movie had real sting. I’d never seen a clearer, richer, more detailed picture anywhere.

Here in Britain, we rarely get to see pristine prints of films. Even first-run films at big cinemas are often hurriedly mass-produced prints, or re-cycled ones from the States, so it’s rare to see a film at its absolute best, even on the big screen. Not a problem with digital. Every ‘print’ is as good as the original, no scratches, no cigarette-burns, no reel-ends missing. It’s exactly as the film-makers wanted it to be.

The only variables, then, are the quality of the venue you see it in and the aptitude of the person running the projectors. Ah, but there’s the rub. A custom-built system, calibrated and maintained to optimum levels and operated by a technician with experience and a real feel for his art (like at Hull's Vue), is as close to perfect as I ever expect to get in a cinema. However, a converted analogue screen, thrown-together simply to draw down some European funding and operated like some circus side-show by an incompetent orang-utan’s dumber, younger brother is, by contrast, only marginally less unpleasant than being force-fed crusty toe-nails by a grinning, gap-toothed chav with ferocious body-odour and a Mockney accent.

Which brings me back to Ice Age 3 (Or Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs to give it its full, non-sensical title). I didn't see this at a custom-built digital cinema. I saw this in the sadly more-common dodgy conversion.

The digital presentation I saw was flat and fuzzy and pallid in colour. It speaks volumes of the film that I managed to fight through this curtain of exhibitor-incompetence to actually enjoy it!

Our story kick’s off an elephant’s gestation period after the last film, we have Ellie and Manny the mammoths expecting the patter of, frankly, quite large feet, which makes Sid the surprisingly energetic Sloth just plain broody. He stumbles across a clutch of dinosaur eggs (dinosaurs … you know, those things which the first Ace Age (2002) correctly stated had died out millions of years before our mammal protagonists evolved) and, dubbing them Egbert, Shelly and Yoko, decides to adopt them.

Well, of course, the triplets’ real dino-mum arrives (and we all know how much we enjoy a CGI saurian, they were, after-all, CGI’s coming-of-age back in 1993), takes Sid along for the ride and leads the gang to a Pellucidar-type land of the lost where we meet this movie’s star-turn, a buckle-swashing one-eyed weasel called Buck. Voiced exuberantly by Simon Pegg, he is clearly this franchise’s attempt to cash-in on Puss In Boots from Dreamworks' other trilogy franchise: Shrek. He is their guide through the exotic flora and fauna of this subterranean world where pretty-much everything wants to kill you.

As with all of the sensible animations this year, the 3D here is used sparingly and with care, to give depth and detail to the landscape, to help create the magical, fantastical vistas the animators have dreamed up, with only the occasional cheap-thrill sequence designed to be turned into a ride or video-game, such as the spectacular pterodactyl dog-fight.

The slapstick humour is classic Looney Tunes tom-foolery, with the rat-a-tat one-liners reminding me of nothing so much as the Hope and Crosby Road films, while the musical score has all the scope and romance of a Korngold classic. I love the fact that today's animators draw inspiration from source-material so old that, in all likelihood, even the parents of the supposed target-audience kids won’t recognise it. All of which tells me that a good animated film’s roots are growing in soil far deeper and richer than that which spawns your typical, undemanding, lowest-common-dee-dum-dee-dum-dum kid flick. Seeing beyond the short-term demands of this year’s fashion is partly what gave John Lasseter’s Pixar its strength, and Katzenberger's Dreamworks has been wise to follow Lasseter’s lead, therefore it would have been the acme of foolishness if Blue Sky Studios (the makers of the Ice Age films and the backbone of Fox's animation division) had not followed suit.

So, is Ice Age 3 that rarest of things, an artistically successful and enjoyable sequel? Unequivocally yes! The film-makers know that bringing the dinosaurs back is nonsense (one character opines at one point “I preferred you when you were extinct”) but they are cartoon dinosaurs, in a cartoon world. After all, if we are untroubled by the notion that sabre-tooths (sabre-teeth?), woolly-mammoths et al can talk to each-other … in English … then having dinosaurs hidden away in a secret jungle shouldn’t cause us any problems.

If was good enough for Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Willis O’Brien … it’s good enough for me!
.
Directed by: Carlos Saldanha & Mike Thurmeier
Stars: Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary, Simon Pegg
Dur: 94 mins
Cert: U
.
Image © 20 Century Fox

FAQ ABOUT TIME TRAVEL

.

.
After almost twenty years in the having-an-uninformed-opinion-about-movies-because-I-can business, I have learned there is one universal truth about film distribution in this country: Some films are released after months of preparation and anticipation … some films just escape when no-one’s looking. Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel is definitely one of the latter. I’d never heard of it until the day before seeing it.

This zero-budget British sci-fi comedy … sorry, SF comedy … is an underdog even by British film standards. Creeping out of the shadow the rightly-feted Shaun of The Dead (2004) and the wrong-headed Lesbian Vampire Killers (2009), with more than the occasional glance across the water to the works of That Kevin Smith, this film wears its science fiction fan credentials with pride.

Chris O’Dowd (in his second movie in two weeks – after The Boat That Sank) plays Ray, while Marc Wooton (BBC 3’s Shirley Ghostman) is his creatively frustrated friend, Toby and Dean Lennox Kelly is the long-suffering sceptic, Pete, who goes along with their mad ideas just because they’re his mates. In the film’s opening scenes, Ray comes across as the most sympathetic a depiction of a science fiction fan as I’ve ever seen outside of an actual convention hotel. He, like most ‘serious’ SF fans, absolutely hates the term sci-fi, as popularised by Forry Ackerman. He, like many SF fans, is overly intelligent and under-occupied with life. He, like some SF fans, has only male friends and limited experience in conversing with women. Which is why it comes as a pleasant surprise to him when young, American and not significantly un-attractive Cassie (Scary Movie’s Anna Farris) strikes up a conversation with him.

Now, reading that description, many a dedicated SF fan is going to be dusting off their Umbrage in anticipation of taking it with them when they leave, because there is a real sense of pre-emptive antagonism amongst SF fans to the disdain of ‘mundanes’ as some of them still feel compelled to call non-fans. It is assumed, by SF fans, that all references to them in the mass media will be negative ones. Certainly, there is a lot of precedent on which that belief is based. The legendary SF commentator Dave Langford’s monthly newsletter Ansible typically includes a section called ‘As Others See Us’, which invariably contains some gross misrepresentation of the genre perpetrated by those so-called literati who are attracted by the exotic ideas of SF, but are simultaneously repelled by the cultural association. Against such a background it is not surprising, then, that SF fans, who tend to be astute, analytical and very-well-read both within and without the genre, have learned to expect misplaced disdain.

Of course, the reality is that any gathering of SF fans is no more or less inviting to the uninitiated than a gathering or accountants or golfers or fly-fishers. Yes, SF fans are ‘weird’ when seen from the outside, but no weirder than any clique which has its own traditions, habits, jargon and interests. Personally, I find the company of people with imagination, intelligence and the wit to articulate both a hell of a lot more interesting than, say, an afternoon trapped on the terraces with hundreds of aggressive, over-stimulated ignoramii hysterically bellowing insults at the opposition, the ref and each other. But that’s just me.

Meanwhile, back at the plot; Ray and his mates emerge from the cinema, having watched A Boy’s Life (I won’t insult your intelligence by telling you what that’s a reference to) before wandering over to the pub (The White Horse, a subtlyelliptical little nod to the book Tales From The White Hart by the recently-departed granddaddy of British SF, Arthur C Clarke).

Here, the afore-mentioned Cassie confesses she’s a big fan of Ray’s and what an honour it is to meet him. Like the equally star-struck Rufus in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) she’s from the future and her job is to “repair time leaks”. Ah, methought, now that’s a bit like Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981), then Cassie warns Ray about The Editors, who travel through time finding important people and killing them. Surely not Timecop (1994) too? Heaven forbid.

Ray, not unreasonably, assumes that she’s been put-up to saying all this by his mates but very quickly realises that she’s telling the truth when we get the introduction of the time-travelling toilet which projects the three friends into various different alternate futures, both near and far, without ever leaving the pub. Then there’s the inevitable running around trying to avoid bumping into alternate version of themselves (à la Back to the Future Part II, 1989) and, to be fair, quite a lot of incident for a film set almost entirely in one room.

I understand why budget limitations have made the film-makers think, wisely, on a small scale. Small cast, one main location, limited number of special-effect shots, etc. That works well enough on the two-camera TV shows director Carrivick has spent the last decade helming, and it can be done well on film. But there’s no excuse for under-written or poorly-timed dialogue in a comedy. The story is intriguing and there are a few clever lines in there but, ultimately, I came away from the film with a hankering to see these ideas done better.

The dilemma of the film’s latter part is simple and intriguing: is a good idea worth dying for? For an SF fan, that’s a potentially fascinating conundrum. After-all, the foundation of most of the negative criticism of SF is that it tends to prioritise ideas above characters, technology above humanity. Whilst this is true of much bad SF, and even some good SF, it certainly isn’t true of all SF. But it is true of this film.

Despite a sterling attempt by Kelly to make Pete believable, we simply don’t care about what he goes through lost and alone in the time continuum. Which is a shame because, in his appearance as William Shakespeare in Doctor Who (2007), Kelly succeeded in coming across as both complex and charismatic, but there’s nary a trace of that here. Indeed, with the honourable exception of Ray and his mischievous little smirk, none of the characters in this fourth-dimensional tale rise above the level of under-written, one-dimensional clichés.

No matter how large or small the budget of a film, the writing of the script is the cheapest and most important part of the process. Here, the script needed a lot more work, not on working out the logistics of the various alternate futures, but on developing sympathetic, warm characters to escort us through all those narrative complexities. The reason Shaun of the Dead (the film from which FAQ clearly lifted its pub setting) worked is not because Pegg, Frost and Wright are the biggest horror movie fans and could therefore pack their story with loads of deliberate references to other films, nor even because they are exceptionally gifted comic writers (although that clearly didn’t hurt), but because they took the time to develop and write multi-faceted characters with lives and histories and personalities with which we could identify. Simply put, they made us care about their characters before putting them in harm’s way. That makes for good drama and for good comedy.

The irony of Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel is that it’s about history repeating itself in subtly different ways yet, if you’ve ever seen Shaun of the Dead, Doctor Who, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Time Bandits or Back to the Future Part, you’re going to spend this entire movie experiencing that all-too familiar sense of déjà vu.

Or did I mention that already?

Dir: Gareth Carrivick
Stars: Chris O’Dowd, Dean Lennox Kelly, Anna Farris , Marc Wooton
Dur: 83 mins

Cert: 15

.

BLU-RAY: ROCKnROLLA

.
.

The Film:

Not so long ago, if a British film was to have any audience at all, it had to be based on some unread literary classic and feature Helena Bonham-Carter in a bustle. It had to sweat heritage and breathe the foetid air of worthiness. Nowadays, thankfully, such films are consigned to memory and reduced to being watched by the characters in a cheeky little gangster movie. RocknRolla is very definitely not about the way Britain used to be … it’s about the way Britain could (and maybe should) be, right now.

The opening monologue tells us that “London is on the rise” and demonstrates this with shots of the glass sepulchres which have sprung-up around Thatcher’s Isle of Dogs pyramid. This will serve to remind anyone as long in the tooth as myself of The Long Good Friday (1980) with its tale of the underworld’s attempts to break through into the daylight of legitimacy. So, we know from the get-go that we’re in familiar Guy Ritchie territory.

Like the characters he loves and the city in which he houses them, Ritchie’s films are all about flash, shiny exteriors hiding dark, violent interiors, seen from a non-judgemental, humorous perspective and all shot through with a deceptive intelligence.

Whether Tarantino’s coiled-spring breakthrough film, Pulp Fiction (1994) or Danny Boyle’s hallucinogenic, energetic Trainspotting (1996) gave Ritchie the inspiration he needed, or merely the permission, to unleash his first full-length feature, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) on an unsuspecting world, is a moot point. His films still have a vibrant aesthetic, filled with crowds of primary-colour characters whose stories thread in and around each other like coils of live wire. One becomes lost in admiration for the way complexity upon complexity is woven into the fabric of the film through the kind of editing which I have (especially with the much under-valued Revolver, 2005) held up as a master-class in the form. Very few films are as well cut as a Ritchie film.

Visually, everything is shot through with metallic hues, faces shine like chrome, to reflect the grandeur of modern architecture around them, or burnished brass in the more modest flea-pits and dives, turning to verdigris green as the story’s tone turns sour. What a boon to the visionary director digital colour-grading has become, although I suspect it will be the cliché that, in years to come, identifies films as being “early twenty-first century” in the way that mullets and padded-shoulders mark-out films of the eighties.

So, to the story. Lenny (Tom Wilkinson) is the local kingpin with delusions of gentrification. He is a fixer; he can make new business opportunities happen and all he expects is his unfair cut. With this is mind, he is getting involved in a partnership with new Russian money, in the person of property developer, Uri (Karel Roden).

Around Lenny scuttle the small-time thieves, drug-pushers and general low-lives who wash around the shores of London’s East End, rather like the cray-fish swarm around the shores of the great river Thames. One such motley crew is the self-styled ‘Wild Bunch’, made up of characters like One-Two (Gerard Butler) and Handsome Bob (Tom Hardy). If you only know Butler from his loincloth-wearing “We Arr Sparrrr-tarrrrr” days then you’re in for a bit of a treat. Not least because, it turns out, he’s a dab hand at humour.

Throw into the mix the maguffin of a valuable ‘lucky’ painting we never get to see (rather like the contents of Travolta’s briefcase in Pulp Fiction) which Lenny’s crack-head rock-star son, Johnny Quid (Toby Kebbell) steals, a deceptive sub-plot about an informer and Mark Strong’s typically-majestic performance as Lenny’s enforcer, Archie and you have all the ingredients in place for a movie rollercoaster (a RocknRollacoaster, I suppose).

Of course, the story, however labyrinthine, is all-but irrelevant, it's the pretext to get these characters into trouble so we can watch them figure-out how to escape. Ritchie's frantic camera-work is no-less exotic than we have come to expect but, if anything, he has learned to trust his actors enough to not let his camera-play get in the way of their performances. The joy of this film is in the interplay of the characters and in the pleasure of a well-turned line of dialogue. The funniest and most surprising moments are those which were, I suspect, the most fun to act: Between One-Two and his best mate Bob, before the latter is due to go down for five years.

Ritchie’s hyperreal take on the East End is as fully-realised an alternate reality as that which Dickens created back in the 1830s. Unlike Dickens, Ritchie has no ambitions to ennoble his world by lifting it out of the gutter; he likes it just the way it is, his characters are in need of no imposed salvation, they love the grotty, chaotic world in which they choose to live, and they love each other just as much. There is a modern take on old-fashioned bonhomie and an honour among Ritchie’s thieves. In this sense, his films also have vague resonances of golden-age Ealing satires like The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955) or Peter Sellers’ Two-Way Stretch (1960).

The heist and resultant chase they get themselves involved in would not look out of place in any big-budget American action movie, save for the vein of ironic humour which runs through it, because the Americans seem to like their action scenes straight-up. Of course, it’s worth mentioning that Ritchie, despite his tabloid profile, has clearly chosen not to go the lucrative Hollywood-Hack-For-Hire route like, say, Paul Anderson and Danny Cannon before him, but seems determined to stick to his guns. Literally. We’ll see if this remains true for his take on Sherlock Holmes.

Although it probably won’t trouble any awards nights (which is a shame, given the sophistication of the lighting, photography and editing), RocknRolla is one of the brightest, paciest, most erudite and all-round enjoyable films of last year. It’s British and it’s proud.

The Disc:

The extras on the Blu-Ray I watched seem to be the same as on the DVD. We begin with a behind-the-scenes documentary which is, inevitably, more about Ritchie and London than it is about the film. In interview, now that he doesn’t speak Mockney, Ritchie comes across rather like a BBC correspondent, seriously and thoughtfully explaining the present situation in London and articulating its importance to him at this time. I suppose this travelogue will be of interest to the Americans, but for we Brits who are bored of hearing Lahndahnahs congratulating themselves, it isn’t really news.

The really special extra, is the audio commentary. Some commentaries are just people sucking up to the over-paid prima-donnas they are contractually obligated to have endless regard for. Thankfully, this isn’t the case here. Make time to watch the film with the commentary, at least once, you’ll be glad you did.

Written and Directed by: Guy Ritchie
Starring: Gerard Butler, Tom Wilkinson, Mark Strong, Tom Hardy, Toby Kebbell, Karel Roden, Thandie Newton

Dur: 114 mins

Cert: 15

.

image © Warner Home Video

.

MY NAME IS BRUCE

.

Well, this one has certainly rushed to our screens. Originally finished in 2007, the film was shown at various conventions, was then ‘beefed up’ in re-shoots in 2008 and now, finally, hurtles onto our screens in 2009. The plan is for it to be released at the cinema in the UK the same week it escapes onto DVD and Blu-Ray in The States. Panic not though, it’ll be on disc here too in less than a month. This is not dissimilar to the release pattern which Bubba Ho-Tep (my personal favourite Campbell film) received. I had bought several friends copies of the region 1 DVD and had worn my Ho-Tep tee for the best part of a year around the office, before people started to comment on it – because that’s how long it took the film to arrive here in the UK. We’ll see if My Name Is Bruce has the same eventual impact.

As a long-time reader of comics, I was interested to see that this film was made by a spin-off of Dark Horse Comics, and written by long-time Dark Horse scribe Mark Verheiden (he who helped come up with the Alien Versus Predator comics some twenty-odd years ago and, by the way, did it far better then than the films do it now). Although, I suspect, Bruce Campbell had more than a word or two of involvement in the drafting of this film since it is, after all, about him.

If you've so-much-as glanced through his autobiography, If Chins Could Kill (to which this film is a sort-of companion) you'll appreciate his wry, self-deprecating sense of humour. Anyone who has seen the Evil Dead films (new DVD editions of which seem to be released weekly) or his legendary turn in the afore-mentioned Bubba Ho-Tep, will know that he isn’t remotely frightened of making a fool of himself. Therefore, there was never any danger that this film would be a vanity project.

Instead, what it is is a deliberately lame, deeply affectionate throw-back to the truly awful straight-to-video horror films of the 1980s, where Campbell first made his name and paid his rent, before CGI monsters and post-modern irony gave such films some measure of legitimacy. Many of the classic 80s tropes are here: the blue lightning, the child whose name ends in ‘y’ (Skippy, in this case) and the plot which is actually a lift from the 1950s.

To say that BC is the only professional actor here is to over-estimate his co-stars’ abilities. He would appear to be the only actor of any calibre. But that is part of the film’s appeal. Judging from the lighting, the framing, the entire mise-en-scene (look it up) you’d think the last 25 years of film making just hadn’t happened. But that really isn’t a problem. It means the film isn’t a victim to all those jump-cut, flash-fame, out-of-focus fashion accessories which have to adorn horror-films these days. It’s a simpler, more traditional piece of work which will doubtless delight the hoards of Campbellites (Campbellonians? Campbellese?) whilst leaving civilians entirely cold.

What we have here is a ‘what if’ Bruce Campbell; a fake shemp version of the Bruce Campbell we know and love (or are completely indifferent to, I suppose), a Bruce Campbell who doesn’t possess the disarming sense of humour, who doesn’t get lucrative bit-part roles in the Spider-Man movies directed by his best mate, who sports an awful line in Hawaiian shirts and, therefore, doesn’t have the self-respect of a dog. He lives in a beaten-up trailer, he drowns his considerable sorrows in Shemp’s Old Tyme whisky and he rages at the world. This Campbell is, to put none-too-fine a point on it, a real schmuck.

The story, if one can call it that, begins when Campbell’s number one fan, Jeff, arrives at his trailer door. Jeff’s hick-home-town of Goldlick is being terrorised by a resurrected Chinese spirit called Guan-di (oh, that old chestnut) so Jeff, who’s not the brightest button (not that this Campbell is any Nobel laureate either) kidnaps Campbell and takes him home so he can save the town, population 339 and falling … You see, he thinks that his hero is a real hero. Fortunately, the ego-maniac Campbell convinces himself that this is all a big set-up for his birthday, so plays along cheerfully.

Finally, after a leisurely and fairly uninvolving first act, the story gets going with a few comedy death-scenes (most notably the omni-present Ted Raimi’s) and plenty of cracking Campbell put-downs. But, even here, the film never manages to emerge from the shadow of Bubba Ho-Tep, not that I’m convinced it’s really trying to.

Bruce Campbell is always worth the effort, but here his talents as an actor are not brilliantly showcased by his lesser skills as a director. Ultimately, the film is little more than an amusing diversion, which never quite manages to be as charming as it thinks it is, since it is focussed very clearly on appealing only to those who already know and love Campbell’s oeuvre. The film is peppered (though not full-to-over-flowing) with references that the fans will love but, oddly, My Name Is Bruce’s most obvious influence, reflected first in its use of townsfolk-singers as a sort of Greek chorus, is Russ Meyer.

The supreme irony, then, is that this film, which is so clearly designed to go straight-to-video, is getting a theatrical release where it will be unleashed on an unsuspecting and ill-prepared mainstream audience. One could look upon that as professional suicide but, as Campbell himself would say, “It’s only suicide if I die!”

.

You’ll find more info about this movie and its eccentric release pattern at the official website: http://www.mynameisbrucemovie.co.uk/

Directed by: Bruce Campbell.
Written by: Mark Verheiden
Starring: Bruce Campbell, Ted Raimi, Taylor Sharpe, Ted Raimi, Grace Thorsen, Ted Raimi
Cert: 15

Dur: 86 mins

image © Anchor Bay Entertainment