Yesterday

Star Gent’s Better Lone Key,
Part Dub, Fanned

Yesterday
UK/Russia/China
2019 Directed Danny Boyle
UK cinema release print

I should have seen this movie a lot sooner than I did, catching it now just on the last week or so of its cinema run. I’ve been listening to songs by The Beatles for most of my life now (well, around three quarters of it) and since their music plays such a huge part in this movie, I really should have got there sooner. Truth be told, I was kinda put off by the idea that this film was a romantic comedy... nothing against them, just not too many modern ones (post 1950s) done right. You get the odd couple per decade or two that are something special and, luckily for me this time around, this one is pretty good. Also, I had a slight accident recently so the day I had scheduled to go and see this was a day when, frankly, I wouldn’t have recovered enough to be able to walk to the cinema anyway.

But I got there in the end and this film was worth the wait. I find Danny Boyle a bit hit and miss as a director so I don’t go and see everything he does but this does have an almost unique premise so it was always going to make my ‘to see’ list at some point.

If you don’t already know the plot, Yesterday tells the story of main protagonist Jack, played by Himesh Patel, who is a struggling song writer/performer who, in spite of his brilliantly optimistic manager Ellie, played so well here by Lily James who kind of steals every scene she’s in, can’t make it big performing his own songs enough to get any interest and give up his job at a local supermarket and nor can he see the thing dangling right in front of his face... that he and Ellie are obviously attracted to each other but that he’s very late to the party in this regard. Then, one night when he has decided to call it quits and is riding home on his bike, the world experiences a phenomenon which causes all of the electricity everywhere to black out for about a minute. Because of this, a double decker bus hits Jack on his bike and he is knocked unconscious, waking in hospital with two big front teeth gone and lots of injuries which eventually heal. Now, the interpretation of what’s just happened here is left to the audience... did something happen to the world or did something just happen to him? Is there a religious intervention happening or did physics just slam the door. Did he even survive the bus? That’s all left up to you but, not long after he’s integrated back into his everyday life, he discovers that things have changed.

And the most prominent change to drive the plot is, nobody has heard of The Beatles or any of their songs. So, after some thinking, Jack starts ‘writing’ the hits of The Beatles and it’s not too long before he is on the road to what promises to be phenomenal world success. However, The Beatles aren’t the only things missing from the world as Jack remembers it and, it turns out, things which were once missing from our world are also now back in place... in a kind of changed way (no, don’t want to elaborate on that because it’s a bit of a spoiler).

And the film is brilliant, with some nice performances in addition to the two leads supplied by such wonderful character actors as Joel Fry, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Kate McKinnon  and some guy I saw in a Bridget Jones’ movie called Ed Sheeran who... well, frankly, I had no idea who he was when I saw that one and I still don’t really know but I’m guessing he’s some kind of modern pop star or some such. I’ve seen his face around somewhere.

Boyle keeps things nicely paced and there are some great comic moments which work in spite of the straight-laced delivery of Patel in the lead... or more than likely, work because of it. There are also some really nice little shout outs to The Beatles and I gave a chuckle when, for instance, one of the ‘post it’ notes with the titles to the songs that Jack is trying to remember, in a blink and you’ll miss it quick shot, is Revolution 9. Anybody who knows The White Album would tell you that this is an impossible track to cover. Not to mention the moment when Jack decides to launch his new album with a rooftop concert. There’s also a nice use of Beatles needle-drop, when the worldwide phenomenon that, effectively and depending on your interpretation, resets the world is just taking place... here the director uses the end build up from the Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band track A Day In The Life to heighten the tension. I just wish Boyle had stuck with it because he really could have done with that sustained piano chord once Jack is hit by the bus.

There’s also a kind of sub plot in the movie when you worry just what is going to happen to Jack’s plan when two sinister looking people start following him around the world with the lurking realisation that... Jack might not be the only one who remembers The Beatles. The pay off to this build up is absolutely brilliant, it has to be said... the film was moving so fast that I actually didn’t see things coming. Which is always a good thing because movies are mostly so predictable these days.

My one minor criticism, if I had to have one, is Jack’s ‘final solution’ to the problem of the guilt he is suffering for finding fame from the back of the songs of The Beatles. It makes no sense whatsoever because nobody in the version of the world he has suddenly found himself in is getting hurt by his deception. On the contrary, people’s lives are richer for having these songs in their life. So, yeah... there’s no real logic to the end of the movie here but, hey, at least it made a heck of a lot more sense than Avengers - Endgame (reviewed here) so there’s that.

The other possible problem, for me, is that the songs that the film makers chose to use from The Beatles’ huge play list are, with the exception of All You Need Is Love, tracks I normally skip. All the truly great Beatles tracks (again, with the exception of the brilliant All You Need Is Love) such as Strawberry Fields Forever (mentioned but not used), Eleanor Rigby (almost used but alas, unremembered in terms of the lyrics by Jack), I Am The Walrus, Tomorrow Never Knows, I’m Only Sleeping, Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite, Magical Mystery Tour etc, from the 1966 - 1967 period where the group were at their absolute best, seem strangely absent.

Still, even so, Yesterday is a really great little movie and, frankly, Himesh Patel plays the role in such an interesting, throw away manor, while Lily James is... just wow... that I really didn’t worry too much that many of my favourites weren’t included. Lily James needs to be in more stuff, methinks. It’s a good little movie about a surreal premise where, as it should in real life (and hopefully always does), love wins the day and makes things right again. I’d grab this one again on Blu Ray, for sure.

Baby Driver

Engine Ears

Baby Driver
2017 UK/USA Directed by Edgar Wright 
UK cinema release print.

When I first heard that one of the more interesting directors of recent times, Edgar Wright, was working on a movie called Baby Driver, my reaction wasn’t exactly the most enthusiastic. I really like the music of Simon and Garfunkel, those middle three albums they released in the 1960s were absolutely perfect but... their song Baby Driver from their fifth album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, has got to be my least favourite of their songs. In fact, in all honesty, that last studio album together has not got that many good songs on it at all... at least ones that work for me. So yeah, taking one of their dud songs as inspiration for a movie was not my favourite idea... Wright uses it in this over the end credits.

And then I saw the trailer for this thing a few months ago... which was well received by everyone except me. It was a movie with gangsters/criminals and I really don’t like those kinds of people. I went through Grammar School as a kid so the kind of hoodlum mentality behaviour you see at these institutions in real life is not what I want to see reflected in my cinema viewing, where said thugs are armed with guns or similar methods of killing people. If I want to see a gangster movie then I’ll go with Bogart and Cagney, thanks very much.

So the film already had two strikes against it but... I do like Edgar Wright as a writer/director and I did want to support him and so, yeah, I went and saw this thing anyway. And I have to say... I really didn’t get a lot out of it, to be honest. Out of all the Edgar Wright movies I’ve seen, this is the one I wouldn’t ever want to see again. Ironically, though, I am glad I saw it because, while it didn’t ring any particular bells for me, there’s a lot to be admired in it and you can certainly tell that the deft hand of an auteur director has touched this picture.

The film tells the story of Baby, a young super-duper getaway driver played by Ansel Elgort, his burgeoning relationship with a young waitress called Debora, played by Lily James (who seems like a young Mädchen Amick as she used to look in the first two seasons of Twin Peaks) and his ‘work’ for his boss Doc, played by Kevin Spacey. Baby was in a car accident as a kid... where he lost his parents... but is the top of his league when it comes to handling cars and is working off a debt for Doc because of something he did in his past. However, the accident left him with tinnitus and so he uses a number of loaded up i-pods to distract from what Spacey refers to as his “hum in the drum” and the music is so ingrained in his nervous system... and in the basic DNA of the movie as a whole, actually... that he times out everything to music and this helps him keep everything ticking over like clockwork and excel at what he does.

And that’s the basic set up but, as you can guess, the various crooks involved in the jobs bring about disaster on themselves... and Baby and Debora... and everything works towards a conclusion which doesn’t necessarily take any of the easier routes to an ending but is certainly enough, I should think, to win the hearts of most audiences (just not me but even I’m happy to admit that the film is made with a heck of amount of skill and that it’s worth giving it a watch).

I said that the various songs in the film are entrenched in the film’s DNA and right from the opening heist, getaway and subsequent ‘walk to get the coffees’ which plays out over the opening credits, it’s clear that Wright is making a very personal movie. He uses the timings of the music to coordinate the way the characters are moving and even the title character lip synchs a lot of the songs so much so that, for a while there, I thought the film was going to go straight into the territory of ‘the musical’. It doesn’t quite get there but the musicality of the film is quite overt and, by the way the opening heist is choreographed, I thought for a moment that all the characters were literally using the timings of the song to carry out their criminal mission.

That subsequent post heist journey Baby makes to get the coffees, which accompanies the opening credits, is all more of the same and his dance/walk is cut in time with the music, with more lip synch and there are even some moments, during this section, where some of the lyrics to the song that’s playing are introduced onto the screen by way of signs or bits of graffiti in the background. And, of course, Wright manages to get them into the shot at the perfect times as they come up on the soundtrack and it’s one of the little things that, whether you like these kinds of movies or not, make this one worth a watch because, in terms of the visual/audio syntax of the movie, it’s pretty unique.

There’s another perfect musical moment in the film where Baby and the 'next crew' are being briefed by Doc and he’s listening to Dave Brubeck’s Unsquare Dance all the way through the scene. You don’t hear the briefing (you do hear some of it in the trailer, strangely enough) and everything on the soundtrack seems to make a comment on the nature of the visuals. That’s something which happens anyway when you synch music up to image sometimes but, of course, Wright pushes the visuals to synch up perfectly in this sequence so that they almost become a commentary on the characters and their attitudes in this scene. The writer/director also uses this to highlight an important point about Baby when one of the thugs, Bats, played by Jamie Foxx, questions Baby’s attention to the plan because it’s clear Baby has been grooving on the music as the briefing plays out. This is where we are shown that Baby, who also looks after a deaf foster parent, can lip read as he then reels back the entire briefing to Bats and the others with almost photographic recall (which is why Spacey’s words are not heard when the brief is actually playing out... who wants to have to listen to it twice). It’s a nice sequence and its moments like this that saved the film from being ‘something to endure’ as I sat through it.

Other than the sure, confident direction and the absolutely brilliant performances from all the cast in this, we have a central character who is, while certainly a criminal, a well meaning person with a good heart and the way he acts towards people and tries to stop 'death' happening (to an extent... there are some deaths by his hand in this too) are things which help him in a scene near the end of the picture... but I really don’t want to give anything away here.

So that’s my take on Baby Driver. I think Edgar Wright is a great writer/director and Hollywood needs to be throwing money at him to make more films. I really didn’t like the film all that much but, having said that, I can certainly see that there’s a lot to admire in it. I wouldn’t want to watch it again but I would certainly recommend it to people who don’t have my kinds of hang ups about films with gangsters in them and I think this will be a well loved piece of cinematic art for many years to come, as new audiences discover it over time. Definitely worth catching on the big screen, I would say, if you’re going to see this one.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Gored On Bennet

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
2015 USA
Directed by Burr Steers
UK cinema release print.

It is a truth perhaps less than universally acknowledged, that a Hollywood made horror parody in possession of a good budget must be in want of a good review. You will, of course, have to read on to find if a review of that passion and temperature is to be found in this humble blog.

Alas, by way of apology, in terms of my qualification to deliver a fair and less 'prejudiced' review of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I must hasten to add that, having read neither Jane Austen’s original tome, Pride and Prejudice, nor the Quirk books bestseller of less than a decade ago - Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith - I am in no way in a position to point out the merits, either good or bad, of the movie in question in terms of its adaptive qualities. The transformation of a work of written literature into a celluloid or, alas, digital medium can, at times, be a transformative process where either the baby or the bathwater can be found to be cast out and not survive the process which brings forth such hybrid creations, Frankenstein-like into this world.

However, in my defence, I will say that this also gives me a stronger viewpoint to judge the creation of the writers, directors and actors who have blessed us with their talents here on the strength of the primary intent of the final result that such a pot pourri of ingredients may bring to light in full view of the public. That is to say, my judgement is unclouded by the long road and legacy of the creation of the final product and, though this may mean I may not pick up on all the subtleties inherent in the narrative by the writers, I can in fact ensure that I am reviewing the film unhindered by the troublesome baggage that comes with a relationship to past variations of the theme, now made flesh on the cinematograph screens of the world.

It is pleasing for me to therefore report that, contrary to my expectations that such a woven concoction could not necessarily provide sufficient entertainment for the current generation of artistically impoverished souls who queue outside the picture houses up and down the country, myself included in this sometimes less than noble group, the artistic creation in question... that being the motion picture called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies... is indeed a thrilling and most entertaining yarn including extremely exciting scenes and visual depictions of romance and action. Both qualities rendered in equal measure upon a backdrop of atrocities of reanimated zombie horror that, despite being the sum of scenes which, essentially, all hang on the status bestowed upon it of being a ‘one-joke-wonder’ or ‘one-trick-pony’, so to speak, is both a cracking good piece of storytelling and also quite creative, at the very least, in the many ways in which the rendition of said, single, jape can be supported in terms of the comically inventive sequences. For example, the prejudice shown between the origins of a young lady’s skill at martial arts training, hinging upon whether one was trained in the Japanese or Chinese fighting styles, provoked smiles and noises of approval from this jaded cinema goer.

The actors in the movie are all very strong and bold and positively sterling in their upright depictions of the characters ‘borrowed’, or should I say ‘plundered’ from Miss. Austen’s original source novel. Lily James, so magnificent in both her beauty and her poise, soulfully renders the character of Miss Elizabeth Bennet animate with a grace and skill which positively brings one up into the narrative along with her. Sam Riley’s Mr. Darcy is as subtle in expression and deed as Ms James and his face is perfectly suited to that darkness and sense of haunted unease which plagues the character and paints him an ogre to the uninformed outsider. Former Doctor Who actor Matt Smith is also astonishing, playing a truly annoying and unsympathetic character, so much so that I was finding it hard to watch him to the point where his consummate skills as a thespian were painfully obvious in my inability to find anything likable about this charmless bore... I’ve always said Mr. Smith is a great actor and I think this film may not do him any favours in some ways because he is just so good and enthusiastic at his flawless portrayal.

All the performers in this are good and the cinematography more than adequate... incorporating long flowing shots and static tableaux which are a constant pleasure to behold and which lead the eye in to the plot with the other senses following obediently and without regret in their wake. I especially enjoyed the director's power to surprise the audience with the sudden bursting apart of a zombie’s head from a musket shell in mid conversation and also his audacity to then repeat this particular surprise joke again at a slightly later stage of the film while still managing to retain the veracity of its grizzly punchline without recourse to boring the audience or, indeed, popping them out of the narrative structure for any great length of time.

Similarly, the spectacle of the film, where the counties of London and Hertfordshire are rendered in their sheer and filthy zombie ridden beauty, is utterly that to which one must withstand a good and abundant smacking to one’s gob in reaction to the charming aesthetic which is followed through, from scene to scene, with a visual fervor which doesn’t stray from the continuity of the style of the opening sequences of the movie. Some directors can sometimes lose themselves with their incapacity to maintain a sense of kindred spirit between scenes as they flit around different ideas which sometimes burst apart the visual paste designed to cement them together into a single whole but Burr Steers shows not one jot of endangering his finely crafted entertainment with distractions to which an audience may find themselves suddenly left to their own devices.

Even the opening credits, with the back story of this twisted alternate history of the realm, is quite clever, employing a Pollock’s toy theatre illustrative style of the period to quickly keep the audience up to the fast pace of a stirring and noble steed in its expedient and entertaining delivery of the information required to maintain the steady course promised by the thoroughly thrilling pre-credits section. And, of course, the whole of the cinematograph sensation is also much sturdily bound with a score composed by the increasingly potent Fernando Velázquez which is pleasing to the ear, heightening the tenacity of the drama on screen without being untruthful or placing one outside of one’s attentions with any inappropriate or redundant musical atrocities. I have sent off to the Amazonians for a cylinder recording of said musical refinement to assail my ears with its lyrical charm and heart poundingly atonal, horrifying effects at the first opportunity.

And that, dear readers, is my summation of the newest entertainment of the screen, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is showing in limited engagements around the country’s capital and many of the provinces local to yourselves. My best advice would be to take the opportunity to see such a merriment of mesmerising and humourous yet bloodthirsty shenanigans when the occasion first arises as it would be a shame for you to miss it at the cinema, although I understand some kind of home viewing apparatus may mean that many of you can enjoy the subtleties and juicy delicacies the film has on offer in another environment in a few months time. I would certainly urge you to do one or the other, or perhaps like myself, both, since this is truly a much better viewing experience than I had expected from the material and should be seen by many people to ensure it reaps the financial reward and encouragement for the producers that it does, in fact, deserve.