STORAGE 24

Is it me or is there a big hole in this plot?

I don’t like writing negative reviews.  I really don’t.   Getting a film made (especially in Britain) is such a Herculean task that anyone who succeeds should be proclaimed a national hero.  But sometimes films simply aren’t worth the effort.  Sometimes the only rational thought when fleeing from the cinema auditorium is: Well, that’s seven quid I’ll never get back. 

Sometimes, even a critic like me, the most loathsome of parasites infesting the gut of the entertainment industry, will be moved to speak out in the interests of my fellow human animal.  Sometimes I have to issue dire warnings.  I know no one will listen, but still I must do what I can.  If I save just one unwary soul, then my 87 minutes of suffering will not have been in vain.

Storage 24 is just The Old Dark House For Beginners.  ‘The Old Dark House’, in case you don’t recognise the phrase, is a very simple, very familiar film-making formula:  First you gather together a group of individuals in a claustrophobic location from which they can’t escape; Then you kill them off one by one.  It’s the root source of most stalk ’n’ slash films and, as such, you’ve seen it re-worked a thousand times.  The only remaining interest in this over-familiar formula lies in finding new locations, creating sympathetic characters and killing them in crowd-pleasingly gruesome ways.

            After thirty interminable years of watching these films straining against the leash of this tightly-constrained genre, twisting it, playing with it or just capitulating to it … I have lost the ability to find these films even remotely engaging.  The only way a film-maker can engage my interest in this hoary old cliché is by undermining it, as Scream (1996) did (before it too became a worn-out, unwelcome embarrassment of a franchise) or, more recently, Tucker and Dale Vs Evil (2010) and Cabin in the Woods (2012).

            See, I really don’t give a shit what you did last summer.  I spit on your lazy, prurient, right-wing agenda and your real final destination is my arse.

So, if the Token Black Guy is the hero and both the women are Blonde ... I guess that means the Old Wise Guy's gotta die first.  Bugger.

            All of which is by-way of my explaining that I can’t watch Storage 24 the way it’s target audience is expected to watch it.  I’m not part of the 16-24 urban demographic that forms Noel Clarke’s fan-base.  I don’t have the careless amorality of the teenage horror-movie-nut.  (In all honesty, I didn’t when I was one myself, but that’s a different story). Therefore, I can only watch this film with eyes that have seen it all done so many times before, so much better; because I’m not a beginner.

            The film is based on a script written by Clarke, is produced by him and, of course, stars him.  Clarke is something of a one-man film industry.  Blessed by looking a good ten years younger than he actually is (37), he radiates both intelligence and emotion and this has made him stand out among his contemporary young black actors.  But, almost from the beginning, he has not been satisfied with merely performing other writers’ lines.  In 2005 he arrived in the public consciousness in the re-launched Doctor Who TV show, (as Rose’ long-suffering boyfriend, Mickey) whilst, at the same time, writing his first feature film, Kidulthood.  This would be released a year later.  Two years after that, he wrote, directed and starred in its sequel, Adulthood, and was awarded the BAFTA for ‘Rising Star’.

            This year, Storage 24 is just one of three films he has written and acted in.  Clarke is established.  He will never be out of work because he is too versatile and is too much in control of his career.  Also, this movie notwithstanding, he’s too good.  I think I can understand why he may have decided to make a horror film now.  Horrors are cheap to make, enjoy an unwaveringly loyal audience and have long shelf-lives.  When his 16-24s have forgotten all about Kidulthood and 4,3,2,1 (his 2010 all-girl heist movie), they will still be renting Storage 24, or tuning in for it on late-night TV.  So, from a business point of view, it’s a good move, just not a good movie.  If this had been his first film, I fear it would be his last.  

So, if I make to the end of this tunnel ... I stand a good chance of getting out of this movie with my reputation intact?  Worth a try.

            The credits tell us that the story was by Clarke, then three other people have written the script.  I really struggle to see why it took four people to write this … unless they were gathered around a table arguing over which scenes from Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) they were going to steal.  Ultimately they decided:  All of them.

            The location here is not a gothic cathedral-like oil tanker floating through space … It’s a cold, grey storage facility in London.  It’s about as photogenic as a neon-lit corridor with grey, unpainted walls which, by strange coincidence, is exactly what it is.  I would say it is a warren of corridors … But it’s clearly just one corridor shot from several different directions to give the (not terribly convincing) impression of a labyrinth.  As locations go, it is about as bland and unattractive as the people who find themselves trapped within it.

            Clarke plays Charlie who is, frankly, a whinging bitch.  No wonder his girlfriend, Shelley, has given him the elbow.  To his credit, Clarke takes the central role well, making Charlie really unlikeable in the early scenes and a convincing if unwilling leader in the later ones.   He is even responsible for the films scarce flashes of humour.  Why is he in the titular storage warehouse?  Well, Shelley has apparently dumped all of their possessions there, which results in her and Charlie being there at the same time.  Or something.  This contrivance to get them together isn’t dwelt upon, but together they are, sulky Charlie and obnoxious Shelley along with her annoying and eminently killable friends.

            Charlie’s friend, Mark (Colin O'Donoghue) roams through this all with casual ease, reminding me of no-one so much as Michael Fassbender (although that may have been simply his accent).  Based on this evidence, I suspect that Mr. O’Donoghue may enjoy a good career playing roles the now stratospherically-successful Fassbender turns down or is too expensive for!

What's the use of worrying ... We know who's going to die ...

            So anyway, a ‘plane’ has crashed off-screen and a monster from its cargo hold is let loose in the storage facility and the wiring has fused so the doors won’t open and the lights keep going off.  Classic Dark House type stuff, really.  But the location is so visually dull and the characters so irritating (oh look, now that one is going wandering off by themselves … in the dark) that you very quickly find yourself rooting for the monster in the hope that it will simply kill them all and bring the damn film to an early end.

            But even that brings with it problems, because every moment of so-called suspense is undermined by a) lasting far, far, far too long and b) containing endlessly repetitive close-ups of rolling, staring eyeballs and c) being ripped raw and bleeding from Alien or Aliens (with one inevitable moment lifted from Jaws).  Literally every stalk and slash scene in here is about as familiar and as welcome as an opera-singing insurance salesman.  Every plot contrivance is telegraphed ages in advance ("You must be the only person in the world who still uses matches") even by overly-familiar-horribly-derivative-no-mobile-phone-signal horror-movie standards.

            They’ve spent some money on their monster, mind … Mixing CGI with practical effects.  Problem is, when you see it, it looks like two parts alien Prawn to one-part Brundlefly.  As with every other element of this movie, it’s just too bloody familiar.  

I made it ... I'm out!

Sadly, the one or two gooey on-screen deaths it is responsible for will, I suspect, be enough to give this film an eager and enthusiastic audience of horror film newbies.  But, if you’ve ever seen a good stalk ’n’ slash or Old Dark House movie before, you’ve as good as already seen this one, so keep your money in your pocket.

So few films are made in Britain these days that is little shy of a crime when someone successfully gets one made and it adds nothing to the sum total of knowledge or entertainment in the world.

Storage 24 lacks pace, focus, motivation, tension and internal logic but, other than that, it’s predictable, charmless and contrived.   And ugly.   And boring.  

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: THE DEAD

Gimme a kiss, white-boy ...

I’m not a big fan of zombie films, for very much the same reason I don’t really have time for stalk and slash films … Because they’re all the same! I’ve seen Psycho (1960), Halloween (1978) and Scream (1996), that’s all I need.  Similarly, with zombies, I’ve seen all the George Romero films and find no one else’s take on his zombie idea really adds anything. We all die. The end. Seen it; next please.

But I decided to have a stab at the lastest British-made-but-set-in-Africa zombocalypse movie ... The full review is, as you're doubtless becoming wearily accostomed ... here on What Culture!

Blu-Ray: THREE MUSKETEERS / FOUR MUSKETEERS

Yes, in his day, Ollie could light fires with his heat vision!

These are two of my favourite British films of the seventies ... Because they are so oddball.  But then Richard Lester films are always a curate's egg of weird creative decisions.

They draw together the unlikeliest call-sheet imaginable … So you have the truly bizarre spectacle of Charlton Heston ordering the torture of Spike Milligan (a Lester regular) who is married to Raquel Welch.  Indeed, the first film opens with a fight scene between Michael York (playing D’Artagnan) and Joss Ackland (playing his dad) … Yes, you read that  right: Basil Exposition crossing swords with Chuck De Nomolos!

And as for the rest of the cast ... You've got a starring vehicle for Oliver Reed (Athos), who was a formidable force of nature at the time, and is rarely to be seen having more fun on screen. He is supported variously by Richard Chamberlain (as Aramis), Frank Finlay (as Porthos) and a delightful Roy Kinnear in the almost silent role of the put-upon squire, Planchet.  Allied against our heroes are Christopher Lee as the one-eyed Rochefort (who made this film in-between his turns in The Wicker Man and The Man With The Golden Gun) and the scheming, ice-cold Milady DeWinter (played by the then white-hot Faye Dunaway).  Wow.

The full review of these great, under-valued British classics is here on What Culture!

One thing you won't find on the What Culture! site is this - my favourite Spitting Image sketch ... "Just tell 'em you went for a drink with Ollie Reed!"

KICK-ASS

Okay, so, yes, I’ve read the comic.  But it came out so intermittently over the last two years that, reading it an issue every three-or-four months, I don’t feel I fully appreciated it.  I can also barely remember most of it.  Therefore, I approached this film with a keen sense of anticipation and only a vague idea of what I was going to see.

Inevitably, the film heaves with post-modern inter-textual references to other comic-books and comic-book movies, from the Superman pastiche of the opening credits to the strategically-placed Marvel comics in the comic shop and the cinema hoarding advertising The Spirit 3.  But that is not done simply to stroke the egos of geeks; in this case it happens to be a necessity because Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) and his friends Marty and Todd (Clark Duke and Evan Peters) live in the real world, a world where superheroes only exist in comic-books and comic-book movies.

This is why Dave’s opening monologue wryly points out that his origin has no moments of tragic epiphany like that of Spider-Man or Batman.  In fact, it’s not an origin at all.  It’s a life story.  The life-story of a nineteen year-old.

In-keeping with original author Mark Millar’s mission to explore superheroes in real world settings, Dave’s debut as Kick-Ass results in him … getting his ass kicked.  Because, of course, villains in the real world don’t build elaborate machines and have crowds of henchmen aiding them in their bid to take over the world.  They steal innocent people’s cars or deal drugs and, when challenged, stick the knife or boot in.

As Dave is being stretchered off, we are introduced to the film’s other main protagonists, the family of Damon (Nicolas Cage) and Mindy MacReady (Chloe Moretz).  He’s an ex-cop determined to teach his daughter to protect herself, she’s a ten year-old who likes butterfly knives and machine-guns.  In other words, he’s The Punisher mixed with Batman and she’s Robin.  Their world is more violent than Dave’s and less real.  They live in the hyper-reality of a revenge fantasy.  It is not without meaning that script-writer Jane Goldman has made Damon a comic-book artist.  This is the world in which he lives.  It also gives a well-earned opportunity for John Romita Jnr (the comic-book’s co-creator and artist) to get his gorgeous art-work on screen.

When Damon pulls on his costume – which deliberately echoes Batman’s Kevlar armour, he adopts a very mannered, hesitant vocal pattern.  At first this mystified me, I thought it was Cage trying too hard then, suddenly, it dawned on me: He’s doing Adam West.  Cage, of course, has wanted to play a superhero in the worst way for a long time.  He was pencilled-in to play Superman some years ago but, thankfully, that didn’t happen.  The closest he has so-far come to realising his dream was playing the ludicrous Ghost Rider in the pointless film of the same name (2007).  This opportunity, then, must have come as a gift from the Gods for him.

Dave’s full recovery is remarkably swift and the first element of his life that seems unreal but you forgive the film this conceit because, as it proceeds, he gets drawn further and further into Damon’s fantasy and further away from his comic-book reading mates.

The genius of the original comic, carried through even more dramatically in the film, was the idea of Kick-Ass’ heroism being videoed and going viral on the net, making him an instant celebrity.  Kick-Ass, then, is the perfect hero for the on-line generation with their micro-attention-spans.  It’s worth bearing in mind that the comic came out more than a year before Millar’s fellow-Scot Susan Boyle became world-famous literally over-night by the same method.  It didn’t take long for his prediction to come true!

This is a British film (with every frame – apart from some very obvious New York cityscapes – shot right here in Blighty) and a low-budget one.  Some of the locations and special effects betray the lack of money, but such is the joie de mort of the movie, one can forgive it pretty-much-anything.  Besides, keeping the budget down ensured that director Vaughn and writer Millar could get their vision on-screen intact, Katana-wielding foul-mouthed moppet and all!

Mark Strong – British film’s villain du jour – gives his best performance since RocknRolla (2008) as Frank D’Amico, the comic-book villain who Damon has sworn to bring down.  He is the reason Damon’s Big Daddy alter-ego does have an origin with a tragic epiphany.  He is also the father of the wonderfully nerdy Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), whose appearance signals the left-turn into total fantasy for the film, and constitutes the greatest deviation from the source book.

But the star of the show – and a brand-new movie-star in the making - is Aaron Johnson.  I was amazed when I found out that he was English, because he blends-in so perfectly with this American genre with his American friends.  He brings such humour, pathos and out-and-out likeability to Dave that the film’s more outrageous conceits just seem so much more acceptable because he has to deal with them.  If anything, his face is more expressive when he is wearing his mask – possibly because he doesn’t bother with the black eye-liner that has become de rigeur since Michael Keaton’s Batman (1989), which allows his big blue eyes and prehensile eyebrows full reign.

Vaughn has, of course, taken his biggest cue from the source comic book – although the script does stray further and further away from the comic book and, ironically, more and more into fantasy as it proceeds – but he has also taken inspiration from Quentin Tarantino (especially in his excellent use of music), John Woo and Luc Besson in his staging of some phenomenal action sequences.

Like last year’s comic-book masterpiece, Watchmen, this is a film that has found its moment.  The film-going audience is ready to have their super-hero films dissected, just as the comic-reading audience was twenty-years ago.  The film is different to the book, less grounded in gritty reality, but that works.  They are two different and successful interpretations of the same story.  If you’ve enjoyed one, the other will have some pleasant surprises for you!

This film is a gold-plated, pump-action, four-colour crowd-pleaser and it’s loaded for bear!  I can’t wait for the Blu-Ray.

One thing though, one element which just pushes the bounds of possibility too far.  I know scriptwriter Goldman is married to Britain’s richest and most famous comic collector, but the idea that a comic-book geek can have a super-hot girlfriend who also reads comics … nah … That’s just one step too far!

Dir: Matthew Vaughn

Screenwriter: Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn

Stars:  Aaron Johnson, Chloe Moretz, Nicolas Cage, Mark Strong

Dur: 117 mins

Cert: 15

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SEX & DRUGS & ROCK & ROLL

As the shreds of the so-called British Film Industry quivers in the shadow of Hollywood’s big, bullying three-dimensional behemoth … one of the few things we can do that they can’t is create a musical biopic with balls.  Possibly because of the lawyers, possibly because Americans are, reputedly, just so darn polite, their biopics tend to be limp, deferential affairs.  Even when they do admit to their subject’s faults (like, say, in Ray - 2004 - or Walk The Line - 2005) they still manage to eulogise and forgive. 

However, you can always rely on an independent British film to show you the grit and grime behind the glamour of the music business.  From fictional depictions like That’ll Be The Day (1973) and Stardust (1974) through Slade’s Flame (1975) to the ugly truths of Sid And Nancy (1986), Twenty-Four Hour Party People (2002) and Closer (2004) we never seem to tire of demonstrating just what arseholes our musical heroes are. Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll is no exception but, in this case, its subject, Ian Dury, wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Taking the spotlight, centre-stage as Dury, is Andy Serkis who, as has been demonstrated many times in the past, is a very physical performer.  He has shown impressive physical prowess and a mime-like finesse in throwing shapes for his pioneering of the mo-cap technology that nowadays underpins the creation of most cartoons and video games.  He turned a soulless, mechanical process and made it an art.

He brings this same flexibility to the jerky, stumbling, spastic shapes of Ian Dury.  His transformation into Dury is, like Tom Hardy’s transformation into Charles Bronson last year, quite extraordinary.  Shedding weight to give his face the appropriate lined, worn look, and spending months exercising just one side of his body, he manages to ape Dury’s Polio-derived gait with painful accuracy … but the real revelation is the voice.  Those deep, gravely, Estuary tones are reproduced remarkably, especially when he is performing Dury’s trademark numbers, which were all re-recorded with him by all the surviving members of the Blockheads.  It is an extraordinary performance fully deserving of the BAFTA it didn’t win and the Oscar for which it wasn’t even nominated.  The fact that neither this nor Hardy’s performance last year have received major award recognition is a travesty which leaves me almost lost for words.

Almost.

Director Mat Whitehouse has learned a lot from his mentor Michael Winterbottom about shooting in a documentary style.  Consequently, the aesthetic of the film is convincingly in-keeping with the grainy, poorly-lit music-films of the seventies.  It is clumsy and amateurish and aggressive and passionate, much like its subject and very much like the Punk music scene through which he rose.  Like Dury’s lyrics, there is a simple, dirty poetry to this film.  At one point, musing about his disability, Dury comments: “Polio … it’s like love … There’s no cure for it!”

Dury comes across as a git, frankly.  He’s needy but endlessly uncaring as a husband, selfish and manipulative as a boyfriend, mute and mostly useless as a father.  But, as with all artists, he is surrounded and supported by people who tolerate all this because they love him.  They love his passion and his talent, his angry joie de vive and his frequent moments of desperation.

To its credit, the film steadfastly refuses to sentimentalise Dury or even sympathise with him, he is a true grotesque and we see him here, warts and all.  He calls the song Sex And Drugs And Rock And Roll “ … a celebration for The Outsiders … The Uglies!”  He is definitely an outsider but, in-keeping with his merciless refusal to feel sorry for himself, this status energises him.

Ray Winston, by contrast, gives a restrained, dignified performance as Dury’s father, appearing only in dreamy flashbacks.  He represents a vanished, steadfast generation and the greatest lesson he teaches his little boy is about standing up proudly and hiding your pain inside.

By contrast, the other flashback narrative gives us Toby Jones as a cruel, disappointed warder at the Boys’ Home where Dury is deposited by his father.  Here he is brutalised in ways that only young boys can conceive but this, sadly, is Dury Snr’s plan - to have his son beaten so severely and so often that, like metal, it makes him stronger.  There is a mission statement on the wall in the dormitory: Men Made Here!

This is why the adult Dury maintains his steely exterior at inappropriate times with the people to whom he should actually be opening up.

We’re over an hour into the film by the time he first burst onto the stage as a Blockhead, spasming and scary like some brutal Bauhaus clown.  But the unique man and his unique music were created by his unique circumstances.  To appreciate the music (as, presumably, we must already do, since we’ve chosen to watch a film about it) we must experience the emotional swamps from which it arose like marsh-gas and mouldy corpses.

Sadly, once he achieves some modicum of fame, he promptly falls into all the stereotypical drink and drug traps of the untrained pop-stars of the time.  I suppose  this had to be here, since it’s the name of the film, but it does serve to make the whole project feel more familiar and far less unique.

Never-the-less, if you, like me, have always been intrigued and exhilarated by the music and more than a little curious about the man who wrote it, your appreciation of it will grow exponentially with having seen this film.  Furthermore, if you feared that Serkis would be fated to forever play henchmen and heavies in expensive Hollywood productions (his role as Lumpy in King Kong - 2005 – Mr Grin in Stormbreaker – 2006 - and Captain Haddock in the up-coming Tintin movie all spring to mind) then fear not, with Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll he has proven himself to be a formidable leading man. 

Even though BAFTA, this year, elected to go with the dapper charm of Colin Firth instead of Serkis’ scary, sweaty energy … his day will come.  There are unfathomable depths of talent within that man, much more than can be contained within the fragile framework of Britain’s nebulous film-industry.

Dir: Mat Whitecross

Stars: Andy Serkis, Bill Milner, Olivia Williams, Naomie Harris

Dur: 115 mins

Cert: 15

HARRY BROWN

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There is a particularly unpleasant, but nonetheless irresistible thrill to be had from watching a vigilante movie. Possibly because we share the cold, clammy feeling of vulnerable impotence common among all who do not take the law into their own hands, possibly because, however liberal our sensitivities, we wish we had the nerve to throw caution and the rule of law to the wind; whatever base, tribal instinct it is that these films tap into, it’s a powerful one.

This latest rendering of the Death Wish (1974) gestalt takes place on a bleak English housing estate and, although it articulates thirty years’ worth of prejudices we have about such places (since a few of them went up in flames in the early eighties), it is set very much in the today.

It begins with a sequence shot on a mobile phone of the feral children of the estate killing a young mother for committing the cardinal sin of … well, of pushing a pram across their turf when they were bored.

This sets the tone of what is to come. But first, a change of pace. We are introduced to Harry (Sir Michael, of course) a stiff, sanguine old man, making his breakfast in his grotty little flat, very much as his namesake Palmer did in the opening moments of The Ipcress File back in 1965. Now, as then, there is an air of sad loneliness about Harry. Even the pub he frequents has the air of a funeral parlour. When he ventures out through the cold grey streets where the only splash of colour is the ugly, illiterate graffiti, he avoids the ominous darkness of the subway, because of the uncaged animals he can hear in there. The estate is an untamed wilderness where the young run wild and everyone else keeps their heads down and their eyes averted.

The fact that Harry used to be a Marine is rather clumsily introduced into a discussion with his sole surviving friend, Leonard (played by David Bradley) and even the dumbest of the low-brow mouth-breathers Harry fears would note the significance of this revelation.

The kids of the estate all talk like black Jamaicans, as poor white-boys with no identity or positive role-models tend to do. Deprived of any direction or schooling, all they have is their rage. They don’t know what they are raging against, of course, nor why, they just know that they must.

Meanwhile, inevitably, Harry’s own rage is building until, finally, he reaches flashpoint. He does have a target. And a purpose. The drugs industry has destroyed the estate … so that’s where he starts.

Harry is determined to protect himself. To this end he enters the Hellish abode of the utterly loathsome Stretch, played with captivating, spine-tingling menace by the deathly Sean Harris – who recently played a vicious thug cop in the mini-series Red Riding and is best remembered for his mesmerising turn as Ian Brady in the Moors Murders TV movie See No Evil (2006). This sequence is quite extraordinary, and signals the transition from Harry’s normal, mundane world to a far darker, scarier, uncontrollable place ruled by fear and adrenaline. The music drones like wind in pipes, like memories haunting Harry, as Stretch symbolically uses a World War Two Luger as a crack pipe. The explosion of violence that follows is inevitable and horrifyingly satisfying.

And Harry is unleashed. He becomes a predator, stalking the darkness he so-recently feared, striking suddenly and viciously and never looking back. It speaks volumes about the consistent quality of Caine’s career and the sheer range of characters he has brought to the screen, that he so effortlessly makes Harry sympathetic without being maudlin, then allows hi to evolve believably into a stone-cold killer. We see flashes of Harry Palmer, Jack Carter even Mortwell from Mona Lisa (1986). Harry is the sum of everything good that Caine has ever been on screen.

Unfortunately, the film is less convincing than Caine’s performance. It begins to take liberties with logic, the police presence is ridiculously small given the death-toll, and the prints Harry obligingly leaves everywhere would have brought even the few coppers on show to his door very quickly. But the velocity of his rage is so intoxicating you don’t care about logic, you just want him to continue his cull.

Then, as any graduate of a good script-writing course will tell you, there has to be a twist, a reversal, when suddenly the rug is pulled from under the audience. This is handled, I must confess, very cleverly and very satisfyingly. The film turns into a sort of modern urban Wild Bunch (1969) at its climax, but manages to remain convincing throughout.

Dir: Daniel Barber
Stars: Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer, Liam Cunningham, Sean Harris
Dur: 103 mins
Cert: 18
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FAQ ABOUT TIME TRAVEL

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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

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BRONSON

“Never walk backwards into a madman’s nightmare. You never know what you will find.”

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- Caption on one of Bronson’s self-portraits.
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What? Tom Hardy? The skinny, effete Patrick Stewart clone from Star Trek Nemesis (2002)?

Yes, that’s him.

The tiny, slightly camp one from RocknRolla (2008)?

Yep. He’s done a Christian Bale. Does anyone else remember the shock when Bale ripped his shirt off in Reign of Fire (2002) and revealed himself to be rippling with muscles which were patently missing two years earlier when he’d been American Psycho? No? Just me, then. Well, take my word for it: what Hardy has achieved here is even more impressive, apparently packing-on three stone of solid muscle to fill-out his barrel chest and build buttress-like shoulders.

The film begins and ends with Bronson depicted as a black and red painted monster, naked, primal, like some demonic echo of Harvey Keitel’s Bad Lieutenant (1992) but, as the film grows, you realise he is something far more secular; Charlie Bronson is a child … naked before the world within which, for all of his bulk and aggression, he is helplessly lost.

When he begins his direct-to-camera address, he tells us that he had always wanted to be famous – and fixes us with a mesmerising stare which tells us that we are now complicit in this. As is often the case with a biopic, we begin at the end (well, the end here is the end of the nineties … the real Bronson is still inside, some ten years later, but has experienced an epiphany which clearly makes him a better person if a less entertaining cinematic subject) then jump around within the limited space of his life, intercut with these wonderfully-diverting straight-to-camera asides where Charlie acts out his story to the imaginary audience in his head.

He is determined to make his name as the worst prisoner in the entire penal system, after-all “… they don’t give you a star on the walk of fame for ‘not bad’, do they!?” His unpredictable flashes of violence bringing a dozen cosh-wielding guards piling down onto him – the sheer excessiveness of which affords him the hero’s welcome upon his return to the main prison population, along with the towering reputation that he so craves.

When starved of his audience, he is a seething pressure-cooker of rage. In one lengthy scene, the camera pirouettes around him as he stalks savagely around and around his eight-by-ten, yet, by contrast, in other scenes he is calm and amenable and the camera stays static and aloof, allowing the actors to arrange themselves like posed statues within the frame. It is almost as though Charlie were, in these moments, immortalising himself in living freeze-frames.

It is in these calmer, more posed moments that one can fully appreciate the symmetrical framing and cold, stark architecture of the prisons, which reminded one of the later Kubrick (and I realised why when checking the notes revealed that the Director of Photography, Larry Smith, actually worked with Kubrick).

Nicolas Winding Refn (director of the Pusher trilogy) has peppered this film with subtle allusions to other prison movies … but none of it is so heavy-handed as to distract from Hardy’s magnetic performance. You’ll see the slightly-out-of-step-with-reality Britishness of A Clockwork Orange (1971), whilst the Rampton sequence has the air of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (1975) and 12 Monkeys (1995). Inevitably, then, you find yourself sympathising with Bronson in these scenes, his vibrant, violent spark chemically snuffed-out, leaving him drooling and catatonic. Stripped of his energy and boundless charisma, you realise just how empty a human shell he is, how entirely devoid of direction; but he is still sufficiently cogiscent to decide that he doesn’t like the creepy peadophile who befriends him. You even cheer when this relationship reaches its inevitable conclusion. So, bereft of ideas of what else to do with the man, The System decides to certify him sane and unleash him.

Bronson seems strangely smaller out in the world, less animated, held in by a suit which doesn’t quite fit, marching around the streets of mid-seventies Britain like a Dick Emery caricature, face stoically blank. He clearly doesn’t comprehend much of what is going on around him, now he is no longer in the environment he has come to call his own. Inevitably, his infantile emotions get him into trouble and it is not long before he is back home, back in his eight by ten “hotel room”.

Although playing just the one role, Hardy gets the chance to assay a wide range of acting styles – most of them knowingly theatrical - as he explores Bronson’s vivid imagination and complex, contradictory personality. He clearly loves giving this thuggernaut an enthusiastic breath of life, mostly so he can use it to call everyone in earshot a “fackin’ kant”. Given the time of year this film is released, I don’t imagine he’ll be remembered when it comes to Awards Season, as Ben Kingsley was for his similar turn in Sexy Beast (2000), but I feel he should.

The film is a collage of moments from Bronson’s life (both inner and outer) layered and orchestrated like the classical music which wafts through the soundtrack from time to time, creating a symphony out of the individual ingredients of this ugly, unfortunate and overwhelmingly aggressive life.

Violence is often portrayed, in films, as the last release of those who are sexually stifled. Bronson seems to have no understanding of sex at all. His wooing of Irene out in the world is as clumsy as the gropings of the teenager he emotionally is. Inside, there is an oddly anachronistic scene where he has a hostage and starts to strip off. The hostage clearly thinks the worst … but all Bronson wants is someone to help him put on his “war paint”, the grease he uses to make him slippery when fighting with the crowd of cosh-weilding screws he expects at any second.

Art tutor, Phil Danielson, has the greatest affect on Bronson’s life (and is probably the best advert for the benefits of rehabilitation) by unlocking that all-important release for his pent-up energy which he embraces. This has been something of a saving grace for the real Bronson who, now well into his fifties, sells art for charity and writes books about his life (including a book on how to keep fit in a prison cell).

His art has the naïve simplexity of Leo Baxendale’s crowded full-page illustrations I pored over in The Beano of the 1970s. But this makes sense because, of course, Bronson has been in prison pretty much since he was a child, so the only art he will likely have ever been exposed to would be comic art.

As the film reaches its end-game, Charlie is surrounded, did he but know it, by echoes of high art. Bound and gagged and drizzled in his own blood, he looks like something from a mutated Francis Bacon portrait. When he takes yet another hostage, he paints his hostage as some chimera of Dali and Matisse, all to the accompaniment of The Flower Duet, played out on the prison speakers in a cheeky little nod to The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

Throughtout the film, he is trapped in ever-smaller cages until he eventually finds himself, in an image that will be painted indelibly in your mind, in one almost medieval in its construction and intent. But, of course, throughout his life, he has been trapped in his own cage, the cage of his mind, the cage of his body, the cage of his desire for fame which, as his world gets ever smaller, seems to get get ironcally larger.

Bronson’s true art is his violence and thirty years of solitary confinement is his process! When he is encouraged to artistically express “ … the part of you that doesn’t belong here” he finds nothing. Every bit of him belongs there. Charlie Bronson is no John McVicar, he isn’t equipped to learn from his mistakes. For him, that wouldn’t be so much ‘self-improvement’ as evolution. That is Charlie Bronson’s tragedy, it that is what makes Tom Hardy’s performance so mesmerising and it is what makes this movie so … captivating.
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Directed by: Nicolas Winding Refn
Starring: Tom Hardy, Matt King, Kelly Adams, James Lance
Dur 92 mins
Cert: 18

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