A Haunting In Venice

Venice This
Happening?

A Haunting In Venice
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
US/UK/Italy 2023
20th Century Fox
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Slight, implied spoilers.

Okay, so I put off watching A Haunting In Venice at the cinema back in September because I knew it would make a good Christmas or birthday present for my mum and so I saved it to watch with the family. Glad I did because, although it’s okay, it’s perhaps not as good as Kenneth Branagh’s previous two Poirot movies and I’m glad I only have to watch it the once, to be honest.

Unlike the last couple, this film is not loaded with famous celebrities this time around... at least not ones I’d seen or heard of... other than, of course, the inclusion of the great actress Michelle Yeoh, who does a good job with her, sadly short, role... yeah, I saw that one coming. They do manage to at least give her some bang for her buck, though,  in the scenes she is in... going head to head with Poirot as she plays a medium, whom Poirot has been ‘invited’ to show up as a fake. This is actually something he does quite quickly, although the film seems to take the stance, depending on whose witness testimony you believe, on whether this is just partial fakery to lend credence to real supernatural phenomena... or completely a sham.

And it’s this ‘certain point of view’ strand which runs throughout the course of the film.

Branagh is, of course, excellent as Poirot or, rather, excellent as a detective character (my understanding is that Agatha Christie purists rightly take umbrage with his interpretation of Christie’s popular literary detective) and he, aided by some quite good actors, carries the weight of the film as the script follows that ‘double POV’ style uncertainty by very much trying to both eat and retain the fancy pastry at the same time (or have it’s cake and eat it, as they say).

So, there are some great and spooky jump scares in this as various supernatural manifestations are unleashed at the great detective, while he tries to solve various murders which take place (either at the start of the story or as part of its back story). There are sadly no real surprises in terms of ‘whodunnit’ and why (apart from, perhaps, a tiny bit of unwelcome chicanery from his former friend Ariadne Oliver, played by Tina Fey), you’ll figure out various parts of the underlying solution (including the real identity of a blackmailer) long before they are revealed on screen. The supernatural shenanigans are where a lot of the entertainment value comes from on this one. A constantly underlying subtext which is both explained away as the effect of a specific poison made by the honey of certain bees while simultaneously showing the audience itself that... this may not be all of the story (in other words and, especially following the final character death near the end of the movie... make up your own mind if ghostly spirits leant a helping hand here).

So all this good acting and not a terrible script, coupled with some absolutely sunning sets and some nice visual compositions (and I loved the blues used in the opening set of extended establishing shots which turn out to be part of a dream that Poirot is having) makes for an entertaining film, surprising or not. Unfortunately, Branagh’s regular composer Patrick Doyle was not available to collaborate on this project with him but Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score for A Haunting In Venice does a pretty good job, especially at underlying the spooky, supernatural shenanigans presented in the film. A nice enough addition to Branagh’s Poirot canon and I hope he does another one soon.

Death On The Nile

 

A Gal In
Every Port

Death On The Nile
UK/USA 2022
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Slight spoilers.

Finally catching up now to the 2022 release of Kenneth Branagh’s Death On The Nile... a loose adaptation of Agatha Christie’s novel of the same name and a sequel, in this case, to the director’s Murder On The Orient Express (reveiwed here), in which he reprises the role of Christie’s famous Belgium detective Hercule Poirot.

And there’s lots of things wrong with it, it has to be said. Especially if you’re an Agatha Christie purist and treat her original works as sacred. I don’t and am somewhat fortunate, in regards to this film, that I’m not all that familiar with the story. The first and last time I had any exposure to this particular tale was in my local cinema in 1978, when I saw Peter Ustinov play Poirot in the adaptation of it from that year. It was a much publicised film and I think I found it pleasant enough (which is probably not nearly enough for a ten year old boy watching more sensationalist fair such as Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica) but I absolutely don’t remember anything of it other than Ustinov wore a white hat... I think.

So, luckily for me, I found this new version by Branagh to be utterly entertaining and well directed, with some beautiful, symmetrical cinematography and bright, almost lurid colours signalling stark contrasts in tonal palettes, to indicate key locations (and even time shifts) at various points. There are a load of problems though... so I’ll get to those first.

The character of Poirot is at least 30 years younger than in the books and here is seen, younged up and clean shaven, serving in the Belgium army during the First World War. The scenes serve as an introduction to the film and are rendered in a beautifully crisp black and white which helps serve, along with a later flashback, to give us both an origin of why Poirot grows these enormous moustaches and also helps to humanise Poirot. So I think Christie purists would have bailed by this point of the pre-credits because, yeah, all of this is just made up and not from source.

Then we have the various characters and plot mechanics themselves... many of them amalgamated or replaced to give a smaller ensemble. Perhaps a very smart movie for a film adaptation but not something fans of the novel would easily embrace, I suspect.

Now I’ve said that, though... the cast are all wonderful and there are some real star names on board the paddle steamer, which serves as the ‘murder cruise’ location for the majority of the film. Actors such as Annette Bening, Letitia Wright, Armie Harmer, Sophie Okonedo and, the film even reunites famed comedy duo French and Saunders as ageing lesbian lovers. Joining them is the absolutely brilliant Gal Gadot and, I have to say, I was impressed by her skills as an actress here. I mean, she does brilliantly as Wonder Woman but I was amazed she was able to hold her own with such acting heavyweights on board... more than hold her own actually, she pretty much outshines many of them and I was truly astonished by her presence on screen again in this one.

There were two more big downsides for me though. One is when one of the characters greets Poirot with a parody of a famous line from Casablanca, “Of all the pyramids in all the world...” etc. Alas, the main action of this film takes place in 1937... five years prior to the release of the film this character is paraphrasing. So, yeah, this was quite a glaring error.

The other big problem for me was... knowing it was a mystery. As soon as I heard one of the characters complain that some red paint was missing, I knew that a gunshot wound or some such was obviously going to be restaged to reframe the timing of a murder and I was pretty sure I knew, due to some atmospheric dance hall telegraphing near the start of the movie, exactly who the two culprits would be. Despite their pretences throughout the main body of the movie. So, alas, within the first twenty minutes of the movie, I was pretty sure I knew who would be responsible for various murders and... yes, alas... I was completely right. Always a bad thing, in my book.

However, I will say that, for all it’s many perceived flaws, I thoroughly enjoyed this production and was content to let the beautiful performances and wonderful cinematography, counter pointed by a nice score by the director’s regular collaborator, composer Patrick Doyle, wash over me and give me a nice time. I even enjoyed the romantic spark of humanity stirred up in the movie and bolstered by an epilogue which clearly spells out Poirot’s intent to one of the other characters (a scene which also features a cameo by long standing TV Poirot David Suchet, as it happens). So, yeah, if you’re a strict Agatha Christie fan then you may find this new version of Death On The Nile to be in poor taste, perhaps... but I certainly had a good time with it, despite the ease of the solution to the mystery. Glad I saw this one and I hope Branagh gives us a third sometime soon.

Tenet

 

Welcome To The Palindrome

Tenet
UK/USA 2020
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Warner Brothers

Warning: This one will have big  spoilers so, you know,
if you don’t want to know then please don’t read.

Regular readers of my blog will know I’m not the biggest fan of Christopher Nolan. I’ve seen nine of his feature films now but was generally disappointed by most of them and truly baffled by the bizarre impression that they’re somehow high brow and almost impenetrable in their construction (pedestrian and obvious would have been my thoughts). I’ve been disappointed by hopeful expectations almost every single time and, the only films of his I’ve really thought were worth a ticket purchase, were the second and third installments of his Dark Knight Trilogy (after a fairly shaky, fumbled first installment with Batman Begins). I’m never really wanting to go into his films expecting them to be bad but I’ve almost resigned myself to that now and... now that I’ve finally seen Tenet... yeah, I have to say that, okay, it’s not as bad as Inception but, it’s still a bit drab, in all honesty.

Tenet has a nice central concept but it’s a whopper of a suspension of disbelief in terms of the fantasy element of the movie and, frankly, I’m more likely to be on board with fire breathing dragons and magical swords than I am with what he’s done here, which is to hijack the concept of the flow of time as, crucially to the plot, something of an alternating current that you can ride both ways and, well, ridiculing the science while, to his credit at least, remaining totally poe faced about the whole thing.

It’s somewhat strange and a bit of a dud as far as I’m concerned because... I’ve never really believed in the passage of time. I don’t have Alzheimers yet (as far as I know) but, if I did I think I might well be perceiving the universe as it really exists... as a single playing field which, due to the limitations of my standard ape brain, I can only perceive in a linear fashion, to the point where the whole human race participates in the measuring of this fictional thing known as time and begins to see it as something beyond the huge convenience which that specific measure was invented for... to synch up various actions and events with each other. So the idea that you can run backwards and forwards through time as though it’s something that can be viewed from differing viewpoints kind of misses the point, for me. Also, one of my favourite ideas when I was growing up was the metaphorical use of entropy to describe the chaotic, moral decadence of human nature but, when you get down to it, I’ve either completely misunderstood the concept of what entropy is all my life or... Nolan’s just not using it in a plausible fashion. Entropy isn’t something that can be reversed folks so... yeah... like I said, a fantasy film. And I don’t mind a fantasy film, for sure but... it just felt a bit flat for me.

So the main premise of a secret organisation which literally wears the name of its underlying strategic tactic on its sleeve, so to speak, seems to me to be a little overly silly. Actually there’s a scene in the film which popped me out of the movie because it features two of the central protagonists hatching the details of their upcoming ‘heist’ on a crowded bus and I was like, “Seriously, you’re supposed to be a secret organisation, do you imagine none of your fellow passengers are listening in on your plans?” Now that I contemplate the full extent of their ‘special word’ though, I found myself thinking... well, yeah, what do you expect of such people. They need to recruit some professionals instead.

That being said, Tenet isn’t a bad movie... it’s watchable and holds your interest. The main lead,  John David Washington, holds the attention and he did a really good job in this. Despite the limitations of his script he brought a certain confidence to the role and I’d like to see him in something similar but, perhaps, something less overtly fantastical. Ditto for Robert Pattinson who, frankly, I often have a hard time taking seriously but, I think he does an excellent job here. Elizabeth Debicki and Kenneth Branagh are equally watchable in their roles and, in terms of actors and on screen chemistry, the whole thing works rather well.

The film looks quite good in terms of the 'cleanliness of shot' which I tend to associate with this director. He seems to have a penchant for symmetry and a lack of clutter which, honestly, gives everything a kind of polish and layer of shininess which doesn’t always help the credibility of the milieu but, well, it’s easy on the eye, at least. The music by Ludwig Göransson is also pretty good although, I have to confess, if I hadn’t known he was scoring this picture I would have assumed, on hearing it, that Nolan’s regular composer, Hans Zimmer, was on the job. Honestly, it sounds pretty much the same as what I would expect him to compose for a movie so... yeah, great score and I’ll definitely try and grab a copy on CD before long but, well, I certainly couldn’t pick up Göransson’s personal signature from this one (mind you, it doesn’t help that so few of his scores have actually made it onto CD, instead of a useless electronic download, so I don’t exactly have an opportunity to listen to his stuff properly).

My real disappointment comes, perhaps, from my expectations for the film about half way through. I was sure that Robert Pattinson was going to turn out to be an early version of Kenneth Branagh’s character but, instead, the implication from the final shot of the movie seems to be that he’s Branagh’s son. At least, that’s the obvious conclusion I came to from watching this and, yeah, it might be that I’m wanting to cheer the film on to at least some sense of a twist or slightly more interesting denouement because, frankly, Kenneth Branagh quoting the old chestnut about the world ending with a whimper rather than a bang could well be equally applied to this film itself. It’s just a bit dull and, although the film was apparently made in a very clever and impressive fashion, frankly, I’ve seen film being reversed through a projector since I was a young boy and it failed to impress me then too (doubly so when Superman somehow managed to break established temporal mechanics... such as they are... and reverse the world at the end of Superman The Movie... that made no sense). So, if your trick to attempted spectacle is to have various things in a shot running backwards and forwards at the same time... I’m really not that impressed, to be honest.

All I can conclude, I think, is that Tenet has its moments but is not my idea of a truly great action movie and it just felt a little lacklustre in places. Not unwatchable though, for sure... although I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. As for me, I think I’ll stick to The Dark Knight, thank you very much.

Murder On The Orient Express

Get Christie Love

Murder On The Orient Express
Malta/USA 2017 Directed by Kenneth Branagh
20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone B

So here we go again with another movie version continuing the exploits of famed crime writer Agatha Christie’s “world’s greatest detective”... no, not Batman... Hercule Poirot. I remember seeing the old Albert Finney version of Murder On The Orient Express back in the mid 1970s (possibly on a re-release) and I kinda half liked it at the time. I remember the solution to the mystery being somewhat unexpected (well, I would only have been 6 or 7 years old, maybe) and it interested me enough that I went on to see the Peter Ustinov Poirot movies at my local cinema when they were released.

Kenneth Branagh is here with this new reboot and, honestly, it’s not a terrible film although it’s not quite as 'refreshed' as I was expecting it to be. There are, however, some brave attempts to liven things up throughout the film. To be honest, one of the reasons I didn’t bother with this one at the cinema last year is because I couldn’t imagine it translating that well for the younger generation of movie goers the film needed to set in its sights to guarantee a bankable interest. Especially since, once you know the final solution to the whodunnit at the heart of the story, you probably don’t need to see another version of it.

Branagh puts himself front and centre here as Christie’s much loved (except by her) character and, when I say ‘front and centre’, I really do mean it. It’s a film which seems to be top loaded with medium/long shots except for quite a number of close ups on the directing/acting force of nature who is top lining the film. To be fair, though, he does have quite entrancing blue eyes and it doesn’t seem too out of place to expect that kind of camera attention given to Poirot.

Like the 1974 version, Murder On The Orient Express boasts a star studded cast with the likes of Johnny Depp as the murder victim (who seems to have fallen out of favour with audiences at the moment, for some reason but allow me to still make that Poirots Of The Caribbean pun), Michelle Pfeiffer, Penelope Cruz, Judi Dench, Willem Dafoe, Daisy Ridley and Derek Jacobi. However, as I said, a lot of the film is medium and long shots and though a few characters do get to shine for a few minutes at a time, the ensemble of these people sharing screen time is what’s more important here and Branagh doesn’t let himself be intimidated by the number of famous film stars who have climbed aboard for the journey.

There are a few attempts to liven up the story with a sense of dynamism... the opening ‘end of mission’ scene were Poirot’s perfectly placed walking stick ends up to be the undoing of the villain of the hour, the punch up after Poirot has been shot, the chase outside the train in the snow after it has been derailed by an avalanche... but these things don’t really make much difference to the general scheme of things, it has to be said.

What does make a huge difference to the tone and watchability of the film is the beautiful way in which Branagh, with his director’s head on, composes the shots with his cinematographer and there’s some truly stunning stuff here where he uses the 65mm format film to highlight some great designs (which is now making me regret not seeing this one at the cinema). He expertly uses various chunks of different texture such as the walls of a carriage against the glass windows, for instance, to section his actors off and highlight their place in the screen space. Indeed, he quite often replaces the naturally occurring verticals found in a variety of situations with various actors standing in front of them. So, for instance, the two vertical strips separating train carriage windows would have various characters standing or sitting in front of them with their positions on screen allowing the composition to still work without it jarring.

One of my favourite instances of these kinds of set ups in the film is where he has a shot of Branagh aligned against a vertical wall with the landscape to his right but with him firmly positioned in the vertical block. When the camera cuts to a closer shot of him from a different angle, he is still placed within the same vertical block (presumably he’s moved position slightly to accommodate this flow from one shot to the next) and I was impressed by this.

Another thing the director uses is a lot of those kind of Hitchcockian overhead shots where various characters can be seen from above and where you may, or may not, wish that some of the actors had a larger cleavage. Hitchcock used it maybe only once or twice in a film (if that) but Branagh really likes cutting to these kinds of views at various points in the story.

One other thing which was kind of interesting but possibly just a little distracting was the use of different glass planes next to each other to create a deliberately double image of this or that character. He does this fairly regularly (although I think Poirot himself is only seen as a single image) and I suspect it comes at points when the great detective realises that the particular person (or persons) are lying to him (although I’d have to check it again to see if I’m right). Thus, their duplicity is revealed on a less conscious level in the visual design of certain shots.

Not much more to say about this one, I think. A nice score by Branagh's regular collaborator Patrick Doyle in no way goes the same route as the famous Richard Rodney Bennet music for the 1974 version but it’s a nice one full of interesting orchestration and I might give this one a go as a stand alone listen if it’s available as a proper CD (rather than a stupid download).

Sure, there are some errors in the movie like the section of track where the train is derailed by an avalanche not actually having any mountains on it in real life but, on the whole, I quite enjoyed Branagh’s very self aware revitalisation of the character’s exploits. The end of this one kinda half contradicts Poirot’s original reason for being on the train in the first place, as he is met by someone who needs him to look into a murder on the Nile. So, yeah, the next movie along, if they get the green light to make one, will be Death On The Nile, I guess. I would quite like to see that if Branagh is still on board because I think what he’s done here is take a quite old school story and made it, not exactly relevant but certainly something which has a place in the pantheon of modern cinema. So maybe give Murder On The Orient Express a go if you’re not too precious about the way in which Christie’s famous character is handled.

Dunkirk

Dun-roamin’

Dunkirk
2017 UK/Netherlands/France/USA
Directed by Christopher Nolan
UK cinema release print.

It might be pertinent, perhaps, to mention at the very start of this review that I am not the biggest fan of war films. That being said, there are a few which I think work really well and I’m sure that if I could just bring myself to see a few more of them, I’d probably embrace the genre as much as I do any other. However, I’m also not the best admirer of the work of director Christopher Nolan either, although I did like the second and third films of his Batman Trilogy quite a lot.

So why did I go and see this movie then?

Well, I’ve mellowed a lot to the music of Hans Zimmer over the years (and seen him twice in two incredible concerts, one of which is reviewed here) and I really wanted to see what he’d do with a score set in the Second World War which, I assumed (rightly, as it happened), would eschew the traditional but quite effective, Ron Goodwin style approach to the onscreen antics of its protagonists and instead deliver something much more... um... Zimmer-like. I wanted to see if this kind of scoring would hold up to the subject matter. It does so admirably, as it turns out but, that being said, it’s not a typical war film either. Even so, Zimmer meets it more than halfway. I’ll get back to the music in just a short while but let me tell you a little more about the film itself.

Well, it’s a bit of a visual treat and that’s good because, as I said, it’s not your typical war film and there’s not a lot of dialogue in it... the main chunks of speaking going to Kenneth Branagh as an officer but even his dialogue is minimal compared to most other movies. It’s also not a film which captures, in any way, the epic scale of war... at least not in the same way that most directors would do it. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s more like watching an intense, dramatic thriller than a big patriotic celebration and I think the reason for that is because the film doesn’t focus on big units of men moving around... well it does have that element, obviously but, it doesn’t focus on it...

Instead, it tells a story from the points of view of four main protagonists in different parts of the skirmish. We have a young soldier called Tommy, played really interestingly by a guy called Fionn Whitehead and he is on the beach at Dunkirk. He just wants to get off the beach and onto a boat, somehow, to escape all the killing going on around him. He’s one of those characters who any person would really want to be around because, just like Sandra Bullock in Gravity (reviewed here), wherever his character ends up, that’s where the most trouble and peril is going to hit. Stay away from this guy... he’s incredibly unlucky. We also have Kenneth Branagh as an officer on the same beach, waiting patiently for some kind of help to arrive to get his soldiers off to safety.

Then we have Mark Rylance playing Mr. Dawson... a civilian mobilised to take his boat out on a rescue mission to get the soldiers and who takes his son and another local lad with him plus... we have Tom Hardy as a spitfire pilot who sacrifices his best survival options in order to pitch in when it counts. I thought it was kind of interesting that Tom Hardy played the Batman nemesis Bane in the same director’s The Dark Knight Rises (reviewed here), mostly behind a mask and in this film he also, almost the whole time, plays a character hidden behind the mask of his flying outfit. Interesting that Nolan picked himself an actor who he knew, from previous experience, could deliver a performance with most of his face hidden from the audience. Good call.

As the little storylines unfold, the main dramas leave the Branagh officer part more as an anchor point which is not really going anywhere but which has this important character because you get a sense of ‘establishing info’ from him whenever we cut back to him. So the main dramas are Tommy trying to get away from conflict with every path he chooses seeming to get him closer to it, the noble spitfire pilot who is running out of fuel and needs to figure out when to turn back and we have the drama of Mr. Dawson and his companions after they pick up a shell-shocked soldier filled with the horrors of war, played by Nolan regular Cillian Murphy.

However, what’s really interesting... and I didn’t really realise this was happening straight away, is that the linear track of the film is chopped into little bits and we are crosscutting continually to bits of the action which are happening in a totally different part of the timeline. So, for instance, we can be watching an action or suspense scene cross cut with another scene which was occurring a day or so before but without any warning and, I have to admit, it took a little while for me to realise what was going on until I started noticing things like days scenes cut against night and the different characters looking at other scenes from a different point of view. It’s actually very clever in this regard and, as the film progresses, you get the sense of time zones speeding up to meet each other, somewhat, so that by the time you get to the end, you can place all the characters in roughly the same area at more or less the same time and see how the actions of one person in one place has consequences to another character in a slightly different chronological space.

Nolan also has a way of sometimes ‘hanging back’ in a shot and giving the camera POV a certain voyeuristic kind of feel. For instance, he might follow a character only so far into a shot and then stay put so you can see the character from afar interacting with a new environment... almost like using an establishing shot in reverse. Now I have seen this technique used before, most notably in Isabella, Duchessa Dei Diavoli (aka Ms. Stiletto, reviewed by me here) and Nolan does it really well here. It’s a great way to place your main protagonists into a situation while detaching you and letting you see a slightly bigger picture at the same time.

Now, I have to say that I did find some of the editing, even following this deliberate method of structuring the story, a little clumsy in parts. Things occasionally felt disjointed and popped me out of the narrative at some points but... Nolan is lucky in that he’s got Hans Zimmer suturing up all the little visual discrepancies that some of the audience might feel are there. Which, okay, is a standard role of film music anyway... it brings continuity across the cuts... but Zimmer really earns his keep here.

I was thinking about the relationship between composer and director as I left the cinema on this one because the music is a big factor in the success of this film, I feel. If you think about the huge impact made by the partnering of Alfred Hitchcock and composer Bernard Herrmann you will perhaps remember the latter’s famous score for the former’s Psycho. A score written entirely for strings but which has a vast impact on the way the film was perceived. Even Hitchcock himself, before that score was written, was contemplating cutting Psycho down to an hour and using it as an episode of a TV show before Herrmann told him to hold on until he’d written something. The result was a score which many people regard as injecting pretty much all of the tension and unease you feel in Psycho when watching it. Without Herrmann’s music, the film would not be the powerful classic it is widely regarded as being today.

And I think, without doing Nolan a dis-service because his visuals and scenarios are quite intense in some places... that this is exactly the same thing happening here. I believe Zimmer’s score for this movie is responsible for, maybe, over 90% of the unbelievable ‘edge-of-your-seat’ moments in the narrative. There’s a really strong set of sequences near the start of the film where Tommy and a French soldier grab a wounded soldier on a stretcher and make a very long, fraught and suspense filled run to get him on the one leaving ship... in the hopes that they can get on it themselves. Even from this section, Zimmer’s music is full on tension filled suspense and it’s, wisely, mixed into the foreground of the audio track so that it can do its job as effectively as it does. And it continues to do it throughout, with a score which uses a recording of Christopher Nolan’s pocket watch ticking transcribed into a synthesiser and used, perhaps in a clichéd way, like a metronome’s heartbeat on the soundtrack which synchs with your own biology and ramps up and down with your emotions once you’ve got it in your head. I’m really looking forward to listening to the CD of this one away from the movie, I can tell you.

So yeah, that’s my take on Nolan’s Dunkirk. There’s excellent acting in a truly visual style... it’s the looks, pauses and reactions, not the words, which make for most of the drama. There’s some beautiful cinematography and some well designed sequences (such as a truly suspenseful part where Tommy is on a boat being slowly riddled with bullet holes... I won’t describe the whole scene and spoil it for you here, though) and there’s Hans Zimmer’s truly phenomenal score (which I was surprised to hear commented on by a random audience member as they were leaving the screening... more people are actually listening than I thought, perhaps). So, yeah, this one counts as my third favourite Christopher Nolan film, I think and, as such, gets a strong recommendation from me. War is hell... but it can also look and sound pretty nice with the right people behind and in front of the camera... so maybe give this one a watch.

Mindhorn

Mann Of Action

Mindhorn
UK 2016 Directed by Sean Foley
UK cinema release print.

When I first saw the trailer for Mindhorn some 6 to 8 weeks ago I looked at it and thought, yeah, looks like a film with a really strong comedy premise but the trailer really isn’t all that funny. Then, however, I remembered back to 1988, when I was almost dragged kicking and screaming to a film I didn’t want to go and see, Terry Gilliam’s remake The Adventures Of Baron Munchaussen, because the trailers had been so awful and offensive. That was the year I realised how misleading some trailers can be because Gilliam’s film, despite a much troubled shooting history, was an absolute instant classic. So I thought, yeah, Mindhorn... how bad can it be? After all, I’d sat through the truly terrible Johnny Depp movie Mordecai and lived to tell the tale (which I tell right here) and I was pretty sure that it couldn’t possibly be any worse than that.

In this prediction, at least, I was more or less right. It’s still not as bad as Mordecai.

Mindhorn is written by, and stars, Julian Barratt (who was so good in the absolutely brilliant Aaaaaaaah! which I reviewed here), playing fictional ‘career on the rocks’ actor Richard Thorncroft, who was best known for his cheesy, Isle of Mann based TV show in the 1980s called Mindhorn. In that show he portrayed the eyepatch wearing title character who had an advanced eyeball that could see into the truth of a person’s soul. However, cut to more or less modern times and a psychotic killer also based on the Isle of Mann, known only as The Kestrel and who thinks Mindhorn was a real person, will only negotiate if Mindhorn is brought in and so the police call in Thorncroft, who goes there with a mind to getting himself some much needed publicity for some kind of comeback or deal further along the road. However, all is not what it seems and there are bigger things afoot than the majority of the supporting characters are aware.

That’s pretty much all I’m giving away of the plot but the film takes Thorncroft through a minefield of ex-colleagues and co-workers from the show as he tries to figure out what really lurks behind the unusual request of The Kestrel and uncover something far more sinister lurking in the shadows. And it’s not without it’s entertainment value, to be sure.

The cast who, in addition to Julian Barratt, include the lovely Essie Davis, Jessica Barden (who was so good in Season Three of Penny Dreadful, reviewed here soon), Russell Tovey and even Steve Coogan are all pretty good. In fact, they’re more than good, they’re brilliant, especially when it comes to finding the little quirks and traits to their characters which tell a lot about them in a very short time. With a special heads up to Simon Farnaby as Thorncroft’s former stuntman who has since, in the fictional 'real life', stood in for him in every other way. Farnaby being the one who kind of steals the show with a couple of laughs here and there but, well that’s the problem with this movie right there...

Mindhorn is engaging, filled with some marvellous characters and is extremely clever. The plot sucks you in and I, for one, found myself really wanting to get involved in it more. I’m sure it must have looked really good on paper and I bet the script reads much better than it’s presented here because... and this is a crunch thing for me... it may be a cleverly concocted comedy but it’s just, really, not very funny. And there’s not much worse than a comedy which works on every possible level apart from the one creative element it needs to succeed as a comedy. In this way, Mindhorn reminded me more of last years spectacular but, ultimately, unfunny Ghostbusters reboot (which I reviewed here ). It’s exactly the same problem because Ghostbusters, too, had some great actresses in it with a lot of good chemistry who you really wanted to like... if only they had remembered to write some actual jokes in it.

And, like the aforementioned Ghostbusters reboot, this is pretty much the only thing which doesn’t work about the movie... but it’s such a crucial element that it causes the whole thing to fail. And it’s such a shame because its a very well observed movie which takes aspects of the human condition and kind of holds them up to the audience and says... look how ridiculous we are as a species. And I just loved things like the various Mindhorn merchandise and packaging such as the toxic truth powder and the different action figures. The music by Keefus Ciancia and David Holmes is appropriate to the images and captures the spirit of both Thorncroft as he is now and the kind of music being written for the fictional TV shows that were being spoofed. There’s a brilliant shout out to the varied and notorious drunken interviews given to Oliver Reed on various chat shows of the 1970s and 80s which was quite cool and there are even some memorable cameos from Kenneth Branagh and Simon Callow where they are playing themselves. But, yeah, you know... it’s just not funny.

And that’s about all I can really say about Mindhorn, at the moment. I rolled the dice on whether I should go and see this one and, unfortunately, the numbers didn’t come up lucky for me. If you are looking for a laugh out loud comedy then I think you might be looking in the wrong place when it comes to this one. That being said, if you are interested in some ingenious acting and are studying the way in which you can pull a character together in broad strokes and make things come alive for an audience then, you know, you might want to take a look at this one before it goes. Not my cuppa tea though, to be sure, so I wouldn’t be recommending it to anyone I know... alas.

My Week With Marilyn

Marilyn Haste, Repent At Leisure!

My Week With Marilyn 2011 UK/US

Directed by Simon Curtis

Screening at

UK cinemas.

Funny how a little scrap of knowledge you pick up just before you start writing your review can dispel your main criticism of the subject matter. Doesn’t matter, still going to be a very short review and, in some ways, my enlightenment as to the source of the film I saw means I have even less to say about it than I did have when intending to put pen to paper, or in this case, intending to press fleshy fingertips against the cool, hard plastic keys of my Macbook.

The two brief points I was originally intending to make were that My Week With Marilyn is a pretty good film, well worth a watch and I was also going to go on to say, having read the diary it’s based on some years in the past (The Prince, The Showgirl and Me), that it didn’t quite make my Best Films of 2011 list because it was also a poor adaptation of the source.

However, now I’ve found out that My Week With Marilyn was based on, not one, but two accounts by the same writer (Colin Clark, played in the movie by Eddie Redmayne), I’d have to plead ignorance now as to whether this is a good adaptation or not as I haven’t read the other book.

What I can say, however, is that the movie has a very strong and positively star studded cast, even for the little walk on parts, and that everyone is extremely strong in their roles and this makes for a vastly entertaining movie which is well shot, pacily edited, has a nice jaunty score and doesn’t outstay its welcome in any way shape or form. There’s less emphasis given on the character of famous Sykes actor Richard Wattis than I would have expected from the book I read all those years ago, but ultimately it’s not a problem for me now I know the writers and producers were working from a dual source.

Special mention must go to Michelle Williams who really does successfully capture the flirtiness, confusion, insecurity and general sense of tragedy that was Marilyn Monroe a few years before her death. The performance (and script) are exactly as I have come to think of her from various written accounts through the years and it’s easy to see how she could have accidentally topped herself when she was in this state (if that is indeed what actually happened to her).

This is a really slick production and represents the time period in a bright and nostalgic way (as opposed to going with a more gritty, realistic approach) but the romanticisation of this period didn’t bother me in this one because it’s a quick effective way to bring the period to life and, also, because to someone who is perpetually in the limelight and roaming from interview to film set to camera flash, maybe the reality of the situation did seem somewhat altered by the reflection that a person’s choice of profession engenders.

The idea that Marilyn was a personae projected by Marilyn is very blatantly highlighted in this movie and the realisation of the character becoming lost in her own “legend” while still having very lucid moments of not being that image, really is not a bad thing to call to the attention of the audience of this film. It might even lead some of its viewers to explore the life of the titular character and some of the other famous names that come up... after following in his footsteps for so long as the “new Laurence Olivier”, I bet it was a real blast for Kenneth Brannagh to actually find himself playing the man in question.

I gave this one an honourable mention in my Best Films of 2011 list and would happily suggest that anyone who’s even remotely interested in the people captured in this roaring snapshot of a movie should check this one out... it’s rare that anyone playing Marilyn comes out on top as anything more than a caricature of the bottled screen presence of Norma Jean. This movie does things a little better than most.

Thor

Thor blimey! Norse Code!

Thor US 2011

Directed by Kenneth Branagh

Playing at cinemas now.

I’ve mentioned this in reviews before but it’s relevant to this particular movie so I’ll summarise it again...

Marvel comics were a little harder to read than DC comics when I was a kid. I cut my teeth and taught myself how to read with comics like Superman before quickly honing my reading skills on titles such as Batman, Worlds Finest, Shazam and Casper The Friendly Ghost. Although I absolutely loved Spider-Man too, I found most of the Marvel comics of the time a little harder to get into at the age of two or three because the narratives were just not as straightforward or as linear as their DC counterparts. That’s not a criticism, by the way, and I’m sure there are many (myself included nowadays) who would much rather embrace the narrative complexity of a Marvel comic... which would start off a little way into the story and have some scene of conflict (and for conflict I mean the title character and some super-villain punching the crap out of each other and destroying half of their surrounding neighbourhood in the process) and then flash back to the start of the story to tell you how our friendly neighbourhood “whatever”-slinger came to be in this predicament of a punch-fest in the first place!

Hey, what can I say? I was young and low on concentration span and never in the Marvel brand of comics got as far as about page four to realise that the start of the story was coming. I always just assumed it was the second or third part of a story continuing from a previous issue I’d never seen.

Still, I persevered and was soon reading the Marvels almost as much as my DC, Charlton, Gold Key and Harvey comics like a trooper (before 2000AD came out and blew them all away) but one of the Marvel characters I just couldn’t get into was The Mighty Thor. I had one of those big Treasury large format editions they used to do of that particular title featuring the traditional Jack Kirby artwork but Thor was never really my thing. He always seemed a bit arrogant and he was a Norse God and he “talked funny” even though he lived in a mythical, magical world of Gods and monsters. He would also quite happily “hob nob” with other Marvel characters in supergroups such as The Avengers and I always found this strange because it didn’t sit comfortably with me that such a character would inhabit the same universe as a group of adventurers whose powers and weapons were based on cold, hard, rational science (and in some cases, such as The Hulk, in gi-normous accidents caused by the “stretching” of science to fit in with a fictional destination point). Surely they’d just use their science to prove this guy can’t exist and send him back to the fictional well of ideas from whence he sprang?

But for everyone else on our planet it seems, I have to say, that Thor worked fine in the comics and the mythological background of the character didn’t seem to be terribly off-putting for most people. This helmeted, hammer spinning, gotterdammerung personified has been genuinely accepted and loved by generations of readers since his first appearance in the Marvel Comic Journey Into Mystery at the tail end of 1962. His close working relationship with his collegues in The Avengers started in the first appearance of that superteam a year later, which has a nice symmetry when you realise that the movie incarnation of Thor makes his second big screen appearance in next years movie version of The Avengers.

Marvel’s movie of Thor is yet another of the recent spate of Mighty Marvel Movies that have been developed and produced by Marvel themselves (like the recent Iron Man movies and The Incredible Hulk) which really hit the mark and delivers the goods when it comes to making entertaining films from their characters (unlike some of the films based on their characters produced by other studios such as the hit and miss Spiderman and X-Men franchises). I really shouldn’t be surprised at their track record with these things either, I guess. After all, it’s Marvel adapting big screen versions of characters and situations that they’ve been working well with for almost fifty years now. They understand the basic dynamics of their characters but, what’s more important and is becoming increasingly apparent in their current product, is that they know just where they can push the differences and boundaries of the make-up of their superheroes without straying too far from the spirit in which they were created. And this is important when handling characters who are, by their very definition, far more exaggerated and elaborate than most normal characters would be... they have to be handled “just right” or they lose credibility with the audience. It’s a very fine line and Marvel do seem to have been proving quite deft at working on a larger canvass just recently.

Marvel’s latest smart move with Thor is to select a director who will be confident with the background and idiosyncracies of the speech of such a high-born, nobleman as everyone’s favourite Norse God personified and they’ve landed Kenneth Branagh to helm the movie version, a classic Shakespearian performer and director who should be fairly confident at pitching Thor's particular mythical make-up against a modern setting and running with it and not looking back.

And he doesn’t dissapoint. The magic of “the Gods” and the science as personified by S.H.I.E.L.D fit quite snuggly with each other, slipped past the audience with dialogue that at once highlights their differences and validates these differences by calling attention to their similarities. But, thankfully, Branagh doesn’t let this get in the way of telling an entertaining yarn at a cracking pace and Thor (brilliantly played by Chris Hemsworth who was also good as his brief turn as Captain Kirks ill-fated father in the recent Star Trek movie) and his buddies seem to derive more from Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood in their attitude than any Shakesperian influences... although I have to say that this is probably because I’m almost entirely unfamiliar with the works of the English Bard myself rather than there not actually being any parallels. There’s even a familiar “routine” from Arthurian legend in it in which the God of Marvel Comics himself, Stan Lee, makes a memorable cameo appearance.

Another thing which Branagh does, which hardly any of the Marvel movies have been doing recently, is to take that basic hurl-you-into-the-excitement-first-and-then-flashback-to-the-set-up style of telling stories in “the MIghty Marvel Manner” which I talked about earlier. This movie does start off quite a ways into the plot with Thor’s “arrival” on earth and the introduction of Natalie Portman as the poster girl for science and reason and, of course, our heroes new love interest. It then, however, flashes back to set up the world of Gods from which Thor harkens and we see the beginnings of the insidious, twisted plot of his step-brother Loki and the stripping of Thor’s powers by Odin, played with much fire and brimstone by Anthony Hopkins. Once the storyline has caught up with the opening sequence again, the thing crackles along at a fair old pace and makes good on the post-end credits sequence from Iron Man 2 with Agent Coulson once again representing S.H.I.E.L.D as Thor tries to reclaim his hammer and his power and a mechanical destroyer that seems to be based on Gort from the original film The Day The Earth Stood Still (and probably was, if it derives from the comics) is sent to despatch Thor and his chums who have illegally travelled to earth to rescue him.

So some cracking special effects (which even look half-good in 3D on the cinema release), good plotting and scripting, and some great acting by the likes of the leads bolstered by the always fine acting talents of Stellan Skarsgård (who is a much more respected actor now that everyone’s forgotten his stints in movies such as Anita: The Shocking Account Of A Young Nymphomaniac opposite soft-porn queen Christina Lindberg) and the charismatic presence of a young actress called Kat Dennings. There’s even an un-named cameo appearance by another member of The Avengers, Hawkeye (out of costume)... so I’m assuming he’ll be in the new movie next year?

And, of course, stay around after the final credits have played out to see Stellan Skarsgård and yet another post-credits cameo by Samuel Jackson (as Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D) to lead us in to The Avengers movie. Also, it’s worth staying around for this sequence to see the return of one of the other characters from this movie... I’m not saying which one as naming him will kind of give the game away a little if you’ve not seen Thor yet.

All this and a great score by regular Brannagh composer Partrick Doyle which, if not as Korngoldian as I would have liked considering the attitude of many of the characters in this movie, is certainly not fumbling any balls and gives a good, supporting sound to the proceedings.

All in all then, a good night out at the movies. By Odins beard, see it before it vanishes.