Tolkien Cert: 12A / 112 mins / Dir. Dome Karukoski / Trailer
IT'S THE STORY THAT TOLKIEN'S FAMILY DON'T WANT YOU TO SEE! imply the headlines following a cursory Google search into the contractual furore surrounding Dome Karukosi's biopic of the celebrated author. Having watched the film without being already familiar with John Ronald Reuel's life, there doesn't seem to be anything particularly controversial in there. That said, there doesn't seem to be anything particularly interesting, either.
SOMME We meet Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult) as a bedraggled officer in the Somme. A particularly gruelling morning in the trenches leads to our protagonist staring glumly into the middle distance, a recurring pose that acts as a framing device for a series of flashbacks which pan from his adolescence in Birmingham through to university days in Oxford, up to the First World War. The earlier part of this (with Harry Gilby as younger-Tolkien and Guillermo Bedward as his brother Hilary*1) is belted through at a rate which barely escapes the pacing of a montage, each beat so mercilessly on-the-nose that the film hardly has the time to pat itself on the back after winking at the audience. Although it manages this anyway.
In this first-act zipping back and forth, the audience's suspension of disbelief is challenged by a casting director who was unable to find an actor who looked like a young Nicholas Hoult. If only there was some sort of accessible reference material. Mid-way through a scene in Barrow Stores' tea room, we leap forward five years or so to find Tolkien and his three compatriots played by different actors. Let's just say that time has evidently not been kind to these kids. We plod along through Uni-life at an unremarkable pace until Sir Derek Jacobi™ arrives for his two scenes, chewing his way through the scenery as an Oxford professor and stopping one board short of going Full Widow Twanky.
(Still, it makes a nice change to see a group of young, privileged, entitled white males bemoaning their struggle to make professional inroads into the arts, rather than government. Although the fact that they're not being immediately shepherded down the pit is another sign of their position in life. As war breaks out*2, they may be sent to the front lines, but they do so as officer-class, after all).
DANNGER Hoult is basically fine as the lead, but he's not right for the part. He does abrasive and rebellious well enough, but struggles with the sadness and… well, the struggle that his character has to show, giving nothing more than the surface-contents of the script and never getting underneath the page. Which, when you remember the context of his role, is criminal. Lily Collins does well as JRR's muse Edith, but she's definitely treated as The Girl One in a film more preoccupied with The Lads. This could be a sign of the times of course, but whether it's a sign of those times or these is less clear.
While it may not be the fault of the film explicitly, a big part of the push for this telling is that it's what inspired Tolkien's fantasy writings. What we see here is a young man having a close bond with some friends, hardly an unusual occurrence at all. And while that's certainly an aspect of Lord Of The Rings, the journey through the midst of war to find purpose and light is what's going on around Tolkien while he's laying in the mud thinking about his salad days. The film doesn't outright ignore this (how many other Sunday night dramas do you see shoehorning in a CGI dragon?), but the actual horrifying inspiration for his works' darker scenes is treated as something of an afterthought.
MINNNIE Because ultimately, the main thrust of Tolkien is 'man lost some friends in the war'*3. Yeah, a lot of people did mate. A lot. With the best will in the world, there's nothing unique about JRR's experience as shown here, only what came out of it. And the film doesn't have the insight to reflect that properly.
Moving on from JRR's mustard gas induced reverie*4, we get a muted finale in which Tolkien is still struggling to write his magnum opus, the tale closing on an unearned moment of iconic triumph as pen hits paper in trademark (and trademarked) calligraphy. Tolkien's work may have a timeless quality, the background to it is rather more mundane.
Marketed as a behind-the-scenes precursor to Lord of The Rings, Tolkien is bloated and self satisfied, with remarkably few strings to its bow. You might expect the formative years of one of literature's most notable authors to be more interesting, frankly. Because if it's not, is it really a story worth telling..?
Watch alongside War Horse, for similarly romanticised levels of existential futility.
With the best will in the world, not really.
Yeah, if you like.
It is not.
We will.
There isn't, and given the trench-scene here that's unforgivable. Although there is a moment with a dude running around completely on fire, which is the next best thing.
*1 A pivotal part of JRR's young life whom the film manages to forget about completely, and so won't be mentioned again here either. [ BACK ]
*2 Loving that moment from the trailer (intact in the film) where a rep from Oxford University's town-crier society helpfully strides across the quad bellowing to let everyone know "WAR! WAR! ENGLAND'S AT WAR!". I like to think that all the colleges had one of these (and still do) for just such an occasion. Or indeed, lesser points of note on a daily basis.
- "DRIZZLE! DRIZZLE! IT'S LOOKING A BIT GREY, BETTER TAKE YOUR MAC OUT WITH YOU!" - Get off the bloody grass, Jenkins! -"BUT RAIN, PROFESSOR!"[ BACK ]
*3 One of the closing caption-cards tells us that JRR named his third child Christopher, implying that this was a nod to Christopher Wiseman, one of his close friends he lost during the war. My initial thoughts were a) Is there any citation for this which you haven't mentioned, though? Christopher is hardly an unusual name. Because b) I notice the tribute was so important to Tolkien that he waited until his third child to implement it. Then I thought 'now be fair, his first two may have been daughters and this was the first opportunity he got to honour his friend'. Nope, John and Michael arrived before Christopher did. How lovely. I'm knocking off a point for that, and it's not even the fault of the movie. [ BACK ]
*4 A slow fade to black gives us a caption card reading "Oxford: years later". What, it's "years" later because Tolkien looks absolutely no older but his hair's a bit different? We skipped forward about five years earlier and you changed the fucking ACTOR. Why does this film hate putting the date on the screen? If it wasn't for the outbreak of the First World War, there'd be no timestamp on this until the closing caption cards (which kindly explain that Tolkien went on to write Lord Of The Rings, for any audience members who weren't sure what they'd stumbled in to watch). A bittersweet coda also gives us a brief flashback to the tea room scene from earlier, the very moment that Tolkien tells the audience that this is the same tea room from earlier. You know, in case you'd forgotten the film you were still watching. It's the little things which annoy, dear reader. The little things. [ BACK ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Okay first off, if you haven't seen any version of Murder On The Orient Express before, Kenneth Branagh's new presentation will be ideal for you. Seriously. The performances, sets, costumes, lighting, sound-design and soundtrack are all exquisite, and the photography will tick the boxes for all those whose first reaction to a sunset is to fire up Instagram. While the production certainly never strays far from the precedent set by previous outings, lensmaster Haris Zambarloukos's approach is inherently cinematic.
The rest of us, however, spend the best part of two hours asking why another retelling of Agatha Christie's most famous story is necessary; a question which the film fails to convincingly answer.
In a bid add a fresh lick of paint to an old carriage, this iteration borrows rather heavy-handedly from other icons of intrigue. The style of the opening sequence, which sees Hercule Poirot wrapping up his previous case, is a clear nod to the James Bond / Indiana Jones in medias res approach, while our hero's on-the-spot deductions in the first act owe more to Baker Street's most famous resident than even Agatha herself would care to admit. There's the feeling with these inserts that the Belgian sleuth is perhaps being pushed toward a more active cinematic presence, and a couple of sequences later in the film shore up this suspicion, despite feeling uncomfortably out of place themselves.
Speaking of incongruities, I'm happy to report than Mr Branagh's moustache and accent combination-set are thankfully nowhere as... awkward as they were in the reveal-trailer*1. Both take some time to get used to, but at least they're not too problematic. Branagh is a fine actor of course, and an even better director. But he's slightly lacklustre as Poirot, somehow.
Back at the coalface however, Orient Express itself is the very essence of character-driven storytelling, an approach which is borderline impossible when this many familiar faces are in the room. Harking back to the golden age of ensemble-dramas, the all-star cast is impressive but frankly too big. It's relatively easy to hide one guest star in a movie like this, but here you'll never forget that you're watching Johnny Depp*2 and Kenneth Branagh and Michelle Pfeiffer and Judi Dench and Derek Jacobi and Willem Dafoe and Josh Gad and Daisy Ridley. Despite the tried and tested structure of the oft-adapted tale, the film sags in the middle and never quite regains its pace, even with a thoroughly sincere denouement.
But all-in-all, Branagh's Murder on The orient Express is a perfectly acceptable re-telling of the story. If a largely unnecessary one. I certainly can't resent the creative team for trying to put their own stamp on a classic, but this will always be Dame Agatha's, first and foremost…
If we get nothing else from this, we can be at least take comfort from new audiences being introduced to Poirot's (Christie's) serene wisdom:
"Every day we meet people the world could do without, yet we do not kill them. We must be better than the beasts..."
Oh, and this loses a point for the Death On The Nile setup-line in the final moments. It's cheap, it's cack-handed and it's canonically illiterate*3.
Other screen versions of this same story, I shouldn't wonder, or Agatha Christie adaptations in general.
Well, it's a testament to the enduring legacy of Christie that a Wednesday evening screening in the second week of its run was over two thirds full (and with a story which, once you know 'whodunnit', you tend not to forget). The film's also scheduled to run next week, too, so it's clearly pulling in the punters across the board. Smashing work, folks.
Well, ish. The film achieves enough to justify its existence (as a one-off entry, at any rate), but in the grand scheme of things, perhaps the interpretative net should have been thrown wider?.
With a cast of this pedigree? Of course not.
Nope.
There isn't.
Level 1: Rey's in this, also there's a 'stepping in poo in a sun-bleached environment' joke three minutes into the film which I'm taking to be a clear homage to The Phantom Menace.
*1 Upon viewing the first trailer in the cinema (I'd avoided it at home), it appeared that Poirot's 'new' moustache and windswept hair made him look like he'd been sleeping in a doorway, while the snippets of the accent we heard made it seem like that doorway was somewhere in Gateshead. Mrs Blackout was appalled to the point where she (an ardent fan of Agatha Christie) didn't come to see the film.
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*3 It's no spoiler to say that in the closing scene of the film, Poirot meets a representative form the British Consulate who informs him that there's been a murder in Egypt ("and only on the Nile!") . The reason Death On The Nile works from a plot-mechanics perspective is that all the characters are established and introduced to Poirot before the murder takes place - while Poirot is also on the boat - so the murderer has to be present in his company and known to him. If the Karnak is going to shore up to let the detective onboard then there's nothing stopping the murderer escaping, before or during his arrival. There's also no reason for the British Consulate to be involved at that point, unless 20th Century Fox are planning to completely retool the story from the ground-up. It's that sort of haphazard reinvention which threatens to derail The Orient Express on more than one occasion...
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DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Now. This was not a hate-watch. My star-rating sits above these words so the cat is already partially out of the bag at least, but I feel the need to emphasise at this early juncture that my inclusion of Stratton on a day's viewing in London was not undertaken with the intention of gleefully ripping it a new one. Okay, Simon West's film does not have a particularly wide release, but neither did A Ghost Story which I watched less than a month earlier in the self-same cinema*1. It's got Connie Nielsen from out of Wonder Woman in it, Gemma Chan from Humans and Derek Jacobi from I, Claudius. Y'know, actual actors. And sure it stars Dominic Cooper from Mamma Mia, but he's also Iron Man's dad, remember. No, when I sat down at West India Quay in the heart of London's regenerated Docklands area (part of which features in an Act III boat-chase, no less) on Saturday evening, my expectations were by no means high, but I genuinely wanted to find the good in this movie and enjoy it on a throwaway, surface level at least.
I did not bring negativity into Screen 2. The film director Simon West did that...
Stratton raises the spectre of a European criminal mastermind with a new type of bio-weapon, to be dispersed via a drone which is to be launched from the top deck of a red London bus, hurtling through Hyde Park*2. Only one man is up to the job of stopping the threat, Special Boat Service agent John Stratton, a gritty maverick who will complete a mission any damned way he sees fit just to get the result needed, before drinking whiskey alone on his houseboat and having occasional flashbacks to the fallen (and slightly less rugged) comrade he didn't manage to save*3.
I hear yer da's gone into the screenwriting business.
From the opening titles which feature animated text-kerning for no reason, to the cardboard-cutout characters and over-produced laptop readout screens, this movie has Supermarket Father's Day Gift Ideas Promo Display written all over it. In fact, at one point the villain (I'm not going to bother with character names, okay?) helpfully narrates the note which has been sent to his mole inside the SBS. We can see that the letter closes '…the penalty is death', but the accompanying monologue doesn't end with those words since the script has been tweaked in post-production. The makers have assumed their audience will be watching on a screen or resolution small enough for this to go unnoticed. Stratton is a £3 DVD on a portable TV, it can't even aspire to being a £5 Blu-ray in the living room.
Not quite sophisticated enough to be labelled mechanical, Duncan Falconer and Warren Davis' screenplay spends its 94 clock-punching minutes lumbering from one tedious set-piece to the next, the cast reading what appears to be placeholder dialogue, drafted in until plot details can be thought of. Nobody actually watches a film like this, they're just waiting for it to end. Dominic Cooper has neither the charm, gravitas nor grit to carry off the title-role, and by the time Derek Jacobi was wheeled back on to give our hero's childhood sob-story in the second act, I'd given up trying gain anything useful or entertaining.
Of course, when you're sitting trying to process Stratton, it's easy to think "the cast are better than this though, surely?". No. Connie Nielsen was in 3 Days To Kill, Gemma Chan lent her voice to the latest Transformers flick, Derek Jacobi sold his soul to Sony whilst pissing into the grave of Charles Dickens and, as I mentioned above, Dominic Cooper is at least partly to blame for the cinematic atrocity which is Mamma Mia!. No, everyone in Stratton knows exactly what they're doing, and they fully deserve to have it on their CV to remind people.
Much like Overdrive, you just know that Statham got the call for this. John Stratton isn't old enough to be pulling 'one last job' or coming out of self-exiled retirement, so Neeson is down at the first hurdle. There are probably more gunshots in this screenplay than words. That said, there are still far too many words. Over-directed to fuck like the action-thriller equivalent of an am-dram Gilbert & Sullivan production, Nielsen sounds constantly surprised at the low quality of her own dialogue.
But it's a 'Saturday night' thriller, right? Hmm. There wasn't a person under 40 or XX chromosome in the entire auditorium at West India Quay, and most of the occupants were alone*4. And even then, the target demographic for Stratton fucking hatesStratton. One guy in the same row as me ate popcorn for the first 25 minutes of the feature then walked out as soon as he'd finished. Another chap nearer the front left less than a minute after the final explosion, not even pretending to have the courtesy to see out the faux-reflective denouement tacked on to the back-end before the credits.
Typical dialogue exchange:
STRATTON: The charges are set. Why is there no-one here? AGGY: This doesn't make any sense… STRATTON: The intel on this mission is now officially bullshit!
Well I suppose it matches everything else, John...
Things that used to be on Bravo in the 00s, I imagine.
Hahahahahahahahaha.
It's based on a novel.
That means this shit has actually been written TWICE, now.
Well, when Tom Felton isn't the worst thing in a movie, he's probably found his niche..
Try me.
Not that I heard Although it could have been drowned out by the voice in my head repeatedly asking "why are you still in this room?".
Level 2: I have neither the time nor patience to IMDB the cast of Stratton on an individual basis looking for lucky bit-part actors, so let's go for Dominic Cooper playing Iron Man's dad in The First Avenger alongside stars Sam 'Windu' Jackson and Richard 'Naboo Fighter Pilot' Armitage.
*1 Although on that self-same day, I'd watched The Emoji Movie, again at that same cinema, and that was a hate-watch…
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*2 In the most lacklustre cinematic climax you have ever seen. in. your. fucking. life. [ BACK ]
*3 Question, though: if Stratton is to be believed, why do so many Special Boat Service / Navy Seal operatives have beards? Yeah I know, "rough manly character" and that, but in a job where you routinely get wet (and with river/sea water, which will be filthy), how practical is facial hair going to be? I wish that was the only illogical thing about this movie… [ BACK ]
*4 I also fall into all of those brackets of course, I'm not pretending I'm any better. I'd chosen to watch Stratton, remember...
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DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Effie Gray Cert: 12A / 108 mins / Dir. Richard Laxton
It's happened again. The sales attendant looked me square in the eye and asked "…are you sure?". "Oh, of course," I replied, "I've brought my ladyfriend - at her request, no less - to see the British-made Victorian costume drama Effie Gray. I like 'films' as well as movies, why would this be a problem?". The young man looked at me, one eyebrow slowly raising in gentle accusation. "You do remember Jane Eyre, don't you, sir? We all do…". "Yeah, yeah, Jane Eyre was an anomaly, though. No-one could be expected to like that, even fans of Jane Eyre. And remember Great Expectations? I enjoyed that, didn't I?". I had won. "I was only pointing out that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is on in Screen 1, that's all.". "Yeah, well enough of your cheek, sonny, take my money and give me my tickets. Besides which, I've seen TMNT and have no desire to repeat the process."
So anyway, Effie Gray follows the story of its titular heroine's troubled marriage to Victorian art critic John Ruskin, resulting in Effie procuring a marital annulment and creating a massive scandal at the time. Actually, the film doesn't cover the scandal, just the events leading up to it. And it doesn't cover the courtship, whereby an intelligent, attractive young woman somehow becomes infatuated with a sociopath harbouring mummy-issues who is, at best, 'a bit odd'. So really, the film just covers the turbulent bit in the middle. Except it's not really that turbulent. Not so much stormy, more of a persistent drizzle.
I have it on very good authority (Mrs Blackout's, no less), that the relationship between the two central characters was a lot more strained than Emma Thompson's screenplay would have its audience believe. The psychological abuse that Gray suffered at the hands of her tormentor seems to be mostly reduced to a few crossed words and funny looks, plus a scattering of huffy silences once Pre-Raphaelite painter John Millais arrives on the scene to woo Effie with his beard and wide array of facial expressions. Like many costume dramas set in the Victorian era, the film restrains itself from placing 21st century attitudes onto its characters. Sadly, this seems to rob them of their bond with a 21st century audience. I didn't dislike the film, but I wanted to engage with it more.
Mrs Blackout was less impressed than I.
A strangely muted affair, played with conviction but unwilling or unable to portray the drive and passion of its characters, or of the Pre-Raphaelite era they were ushering in. Viewers familiar with the art history of the period will raise an eyebrow at how delicately the themes are handled; viewers without that grounding will wonder when the story's really going to kick in.
A midnight storm painted in pastel watercolours, Effie Gray holds the attention, but it's no masterpiece.
Yes and no. The trailer left me none the wiser, but to be fair the film largely did that as well.
Afraid not.
I have it on good authority that it doesn't.
You'll be lucky to catch this at the flicks, but it's perfect Sunday night viewing on DVD.
Not at all.
Not very likely, if I'm being honest.
.
Is it a coincidence that Emma Thompson has written herself the part of the only person in the film who isn't at least a partial fuck-up?
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Like one of those abstract perfume ads you get on TV around Christmas-time, but stretched out to 100 agonising minutes, and without the concerted effort of at least trying to sell you something at the end. Nicole Kidman does a fantastic job of neither looking nor sounding like Grace Kelly, and although I didn't know the woman personally, I'd also put a few quid on the princess of Monaco not regularly ghosting around her Mediterranean palace, rambling on with glassy eyes and an accent stuck on shop demonstration mode.
Oliver Dahan's Grace Of Monaco is a tale of commitment and regret, set against a backdrop of diplomacy and political intrigue, told by someone who can't seem to convey the first two and isn't particularly interested in the latter. The sets look convincing enough, but it's not always easy to appreciate them, what with some of the most baffling camerawork I've ever witnessed choosing instead to fill the entire frame with the top-half of Kidman's face for minutes on end. ("Look, that's acting that! You can see it in her eyes! Well, you can't really see anything except her eyes, but I'm sure it'll have the same effect.")
Directionless to the point of incoherence, Grace Of Monaco isn't even hammy enough to be enjoyed on an ironic level; it's just boring. I would suggest that someone from YRF Entertainment gets on the blower to Google as soon as possible, to make enquiries about exercising the film's right to be forgotten.
I wish I could forget it that easily.
Go away.
No, seriously.
Why are you asking me this?
What do you want from me?
I can't get over it, all the time you won't let it go.
Seriously considering electroconvulsive therapy in a bid to shift this.
No. No there isn't. Now drop it.
…I got nothin'.
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
