CHICKEN RUN: THE DAWN OF THE NUGGET***** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Day 11

CHICKEN RUN: THE DAWN OF THE NUGGET is an absolute delight and a worthy sequel to the beloved first film. It has everything you want from a family adventure comedy - verbal, visual and physical humour; beautifully executed action set-pieces; characters you actually care about; and an uplifting message about caring about your community and female empowerment.

As the film opens, we see our liberated chickens living the good life in a chicken version of The Shire. Our hero and heroine Rocky and Ginger have a lovely baby daughter, Molly, who seems to have a spirit of adventure that her mother at least is eager to suppress.  They are so happy, and the world so unsafe, why leave their idyllic island?  All of this changes when Molly runs away to an apparently bucolic chicken fantasy land only to discover that it's an horrific factory designed to make chickens docile so that they make tastier nuggets. And so, after the escape movie if the original, we now get a heist movie, as Ginger Rocky and their friends have to break IN to the chicken farm to liberate their daughter. 

The resulting film is beautiful, smart, imaginative and endless fun. I wouldn't change a single stop-motion frame. It was wonderful to be back in the company of old friends, if newly (and controversially) voiced.  Bella Ramsay (The Last of Us) is wonderfully courageous and earnest as Molly and I particularly loved her rogueish rat uncles voiced by Romesh Ranganathan and Daniel Mays. But most of all it was wonderful to see the cine-literate team behind this film reference and re-imagine so many heist movie and evil lair tropes - not least British ones! - with just the right amount of mischief and irreverence.  We had a wonderful time, and our lovely youngsters were bouncing with delight all the way through. 

CHICKEN RUN: THE DAWN OF THE NUGGET is rated PG and has a running time of 97 minutes. It opens on limited release in UK cinemas on December 8th and then on Netflix globally on December 15th.

DAD"S ARMY

Feature length versions of successful TV shows, let alone those originally created decades ago, are never entirely necessary.  And many, including a previous film version of the British comedy DAD'S AMRY, are a failure.  However, for those of us with fond memories of watching this gentle wartime comedy, this new film offers a chance to walk down memory lane with a movie of reassuringly gentle humour and pace, and a surprisingly nuanced expansion to feature length.

The concept of the original show was to focus not on the derring-do of our troops fighting Hitler overseas, but on the rather pitiful men left behind. Too old, too young, flat of feet  - these left-behind men formed the part-time Home Guard, who really were part of Britain's home defences.  The joy of the original show was seeing the clash between the earnest good intentions of the men in doing their bit for the war effort, and the reality of their menial and apparently pointless manoeuvres. No less joyous was the clash of personality and class within the corps - from Captain Mainwairing's rather pompous middle class solidity to Wilson's Oxbridge educated charm to Private Pike's juvenile incompetence and Private Jones' panicking.  

I can report with no little relief that this new cast is absolutely up to the challenge of resurrecting those much-beloved characters without pastiching them.  Toby Jones is brilliantly self-important but also heartbreakingly earnest as Mainwairing. Bill Nighy is tragic as Wilson.  THE INBETWEENERS' Blake Harrison is charming as the infantile Pike.  Daniel Mays is suitably oily as the wartime black marketeer, Wilson.  Bill Paterson is suitably grim as Fraser and Tom Courtenay's Jones gets the best comic moments. But perhaps best of all is Michael Gambon as the flappy wittery adorable Private Godfrey.  One might wonder what such a sterling cast is doing in a rather dusty TV remake, but I feel it's testament to the fondness with which this show is remembered that such acting greats were willing to take on small parts in a low budget film.

This isn't a movie with many laugh out loud moments, though it does contain those. Rather it is a bittersweet gentle comedy about ageing men trapped in decisions made long ago, longing for glory but frightened and overlooked.  When Catherine Zeta-Jones glamorous German spy waltzes into town, there isn't much tension around whether the platoon will triumph. But in a handful of small delicate ways we realise why they would be so easily duped.  This delicacy also extends to the introduction of the platoon's wives and girlfriends - referred to but never seen in the TV show.  There are some clever and gentle digs at the misogyny of the times, but this remains a feel-good film in which Britain will triumph through unspoken friendship and common decency.   Director Oliver Parker and screenwriter Hamish McColl also rather cleverly withhold some of the famous lines and the iconic theme tune to the very end, giving us a satisfied warm feeling as we leave the cinema. Delightful!

The movie is on release in the UK, Ireland and USA. It opens in the Netherlands on April 28th and in Brazil on May 5th 2015.

VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN

Director Paul McGuigan (TV's Sherlock & Luke Cage) and screenwriter Max Landis (AMERICAN ULTRA) have attempted to do for the Frankenstein story what Guy Ritchie did for SHERLOCK HOLMES.  The resulting film is a partial success.  A grimy/glamorous Victorian London is beautifully recreated and photogaphed by DP Fabian Wagner (JUSTICE LEAGUE) and the acting from the two leads - James McAvoy and Daniel Radcliffe - gives the rather hokey story some emotional heft.  But the story is obviously hokey and whether you ultimately enjoy the film depends on how far you're willing to be be swept away by the production design and acting and ignore the rather weak attempts to broaden out the backstory of the Frankenstein legend and the fact that neither the script nor the delivery have the crackling wit that enlivened the SHERLOCK HOLMES reboot and winked at its more ludicrous excesses. In Max Landis' take, Frankenstein (McAvoy) is trying to recreate life because of his guilt in causing the death of his brother and to win back the respect of his father (Charles Dance.)  Radcliffe  plays his sidekick Igor. In this version, Igor is a circus clown rescued by Frankenstein - his back drained of pus in one of the movie's more absurd scenes - and given a Victorian extreme makeover.  The relationship is put under strain by Igor's greater moral qualms about resurrecting life and his love affair with Downton Abbey's Jessica Brown Findlay.  All of which has the makings of a proper tragic drama, in the manner of Kenneth Branagh's Frankenstein film, but both director and writer want to make something more kinetic and funny, which mixed success.  

VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN has a running time of 110 minutes and is rated PG-13. The movie is on global release.

WELCOME TO THE PUNCH

WELCOME TO THE PUNCH is a risibly poor attempt at a Michael-Mann style cop thriller from British writer-director Eran Creevy.  Abandoning the social-realist style that gave his first film, SHIFTY, such authenticity and weight, Creevy creates a film that he believes is a hommage, but which reads as cheap pastiche - all slick surfaces, piss-poor Norf London accents, cliche-ridden dialogue and surreal unintentional humour.  The slightly built James McAvoy is woefully miscast as gifted but cynical cop, Max Lewinsky, still suffering from a gunshot wound inflicted by criminal mastermind Jacob Sternwood (Mark Strong).  Years later, Lewinsky is paired with an admiring and ambitious cop called Sarah (Andrea Riseborough) and is once again brought into conflict with Sternwood when his teenage son is shot, and he comes back from hiding in Iceland.  The plot, such as it is, plays as a conspiracy thriller in which politicians and senior policeman are implicated.  The only problem is that for the cine-literate, as soon as you introduce a wily campaign manager (Natasha Little) and any senior character played by David Morrissey, we can figure out the entire plot from minute 15 of the film.  This  kills any potential suspense or engagement with the characters. The fact that they speak in pat dialogue in predictable tab A into slot B scenes doesn't help either.  Still, the slick look and feel of the movie is kind of interesting, and you can just about keep entertained until the movie totally jumps the shark in its final act. There's a scene involving gunmen and  grandmother that had the audience laughing out loud at the surreal combination - laughing at rather than with. No movie can survive that. 

WELCOME TO THE PUNCH will be released in the UK and Ireland on March 15th; in the USA on March 27th; in Portugal on April 4th; in the Netherlands and Russia on April 18th; in Japan on May 8th and in Australia and Belgium on May 9th. 

iPad Round-Up 5 - MADE IN DAGHENHAM

History is written in broad brush-strokes, with the industrial revolution depicted as a battle between capital and workers.  But as an early scene in MADE IN DAGENHAM shows, by the late 1960s - a period we can now see as the dying breath of the British union movement - both capital and workers had settled into cosy set-pieces and horse-trading with white men on either side.   In this film those roles are played by Kenneth Cranham as the Union boss and Rupert Graves as the Ford boss. They are meeting to discuss equal pay for women, and both presume that the women's token representative, played by Sally Hawkins, should simply shut up and let the men decide what's what. That calcified system was ultimately dismantled by a woman - Margaret Thatcher - but she only got the political mandate to do so after the country had been brought to its knees in the mid-70s.  This movie takes place earlier, but still gives us three women bucking the system.  The first - our heroine - is Sally Hawkins' Rita - is a machinist working in Ford's Dagenham factory. She finds empathy from her boss's trophy wife/domestic slave, Lisa (Rosamund Pike) and support from Miranda Richardson's brilliantly spiky Barbara Castle. 

The film is a very easy watch, glorying in its period costumes and kitschy interiors, and rarely showing the true  hardships of a strike. It's all rather day-glo and, worst of all words, "feel-good". Still, insofar as it does make you feel good while teaching you something about the fight for equal pay (a fight still not yet won), that can't really be a bad thing, can it? That said, one might have hoped for a movie painted in less broad strokes and with less of a simplistic moral stance.

MADE IN DAGENHAM played Toronto 2010 and opened in Norway, the UK, Finland, Israel, the USA and Italy last year. It opened earlier this year in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, Singapore, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Mexico, Denmark and Turkey. It is available to rent and own.

Random DVD Round-Up 3 - SHIFTY

SHIFTY is the impressive debut feature from British writer-director, Eran Creevey. It portrays 24 hours in the life of a second generation Pakistani boy nick-named Shifty (Riz Ahmed, THE ROAD TO GUANTANEMO), who has evolved from being a good schoolkid selling a bit of weed on the side into a hard core crack dealer. Shifty is on the edge of a knife - his elder brother Rez (Nitin Ganatra, EASTENDERS) and his best mate Chris (Daniel Mays, ATONEMENT), recently returned from Manchester, are trying to pull Shifty back from a life of crime. But Shifty is being set-up by his dealer Glen (Jason Flemyng).

The movie was shot for under £100,000 in just 18 days and captures the grim reality of suburban drug use in sludge colours and lower middle-class homes. This isn't London as Compton wannabe KIDULTHOOD style. Rather, you see drug use messing with real families. The movie is emotionally tense and builds suspense toward a dramatic conclusion. It feels authentic and while it makes some perceptive points about the cultural ironies of a being a second-gen Muslim immigrant, it wears its social critique lightly. SHIFTY is just superb guerilla film-making.

SHIFTY played London 2008 and opened in the UK in April 2009. It is available on DVD and on iTunes.

RED RIDING - 1974 - Less slippery and subversive than the novel but well put together nonetheless

1974 is the first of three films produced for television by Britain's Channel 4, based on the "Yorkshire noir" novels of David Peace. Each of his four books, 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1983, is about the corruption of policeman, priests, politicians and businessmen who murder and extort for no reason other than that they can. There never seems to be much money or success to be had from it, other than protecting the status quo. These crimes are posited as endemic in a region crippled with obsolete heavy industry and chippy toward outsiders. The greatest tragedy is to think you can remain an outsider - a cool observer - and that you can affect change. West Yorkshire is a law unto itself, and that law is policed by West Yorkshire's Finest, and spun by the compliant journalists of the Yorkshire Post. David Peace's world is one of almost complete corruption and casual evil. There are no heroes, but there are characters through whom we investigate the world and with whom we come to empathise.

In 1974, that character is a cocky young journalist called Eddie Dunford, newly back from a failed stint as a journo in Fleet Street, and desperate to make a name for himself by proving that someone is serially killing little girls despite the obfuscation of the rozzers; competition from senior crime reporter Jack Whitehead; and the powerful forces protecting a successful local property developer, John Dawson.

The movie is directed by Julian Jarrold, whose previous directorial efforts included the painfully superficial and hi-gloss remake of BRIDESHEAD REVISITED. 1974 is a far more successful film. Shot in sepia tones through the perpetual haze of cigarette smoke, the movie feels claustrophobic and sinister - just as it should. There's a superb scene where the camera looks over Dunford's shoulder through the patterned glass to a distorted image of Paula Garland - mother to a murdered girl - and soon to be Dunford's lover. That sums up Dunford: he sees through a glass darkly. And the tragedy of the film is that his eventual knowledge brings no relief. In a pivotal scene, he hands over a bag of documents - the research of his dead colleague Barry Gannon - to the one policeman he thinks is honest. Dunford is relieved - elated - as he drives toward his lover for an escape to the South. What a fool, the film-makers say, to think that he could actually escape the clutches of Yorkshire corruption. What a selfish, naive fool to think he could dump the files and fuck of to the South, where the sun shines.

Andrew Garfield is superb as Dunford - with his performance in THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS - he has become an actor I will go out of my way to watch. Rebecca Hall is moving as his lover, Paula Garland. In John Dawson, Sean Bean finds yet another role that capitalises on his slightly sleazy charisma. But the real strength is the depth and quality of British character actors filling the cast, from John Henshaw as the harsh-but-fair Editor, to Peter Mullan's Reverend Laws.

The resulting film is atmospheric, sometimes like a bad dream, hard to hold on to, unnverving, and very hard to let go of. Tony Grisoni has done a good job in adapting a ferociously complicated novel for a hundred minute runtime, and cleverly compresses characters. What the film looses, however, is the sheer force of its brutality. The novel is hard work, both in terms of language and descriptions of violence and sex. Every time Julian Jarrold cuts away from a blackmail photo or pans away from a scene of torture, David Peace takes you into the mind of the aggressor. And where the worst crime Grisoni's Dunford can be accused of is naivety, and a final loss of temper, Peace's Dunford is a far more ambivalent character. If policemen casually rape whores, then in the novel Dunford treats women as casually and cruelly, though playing, as it were, in the minor leagues.

And, without ruining either, I found the "solution" of 1974 and the closing scenes too neat and twee, where they should've been more slippery and open-ended. Presumably this was the result of the compression of a large conspiracy into a single culprit but the result was that the ending felt rushed and just plain bizarre - the logic behind the killing was almost given as a throw-away line, and significantly undermines the slow build-up.

RED RIDING was shown on UK TV in 2009 and is available on DVD and on the Channel 4 4oD video on demand service.

Mike Leigh retrospective - ALL OR NOTHING

ALL OR NOTHING is the first Mike Leigh film that I truly enjoyed from start to finish, and that's an odd statement, because it's a pretty grim movie about the British underclass. Still, for all that, there's a tremendous sense of compassion and understanding that runs through the film, in sharp contrast to Leigh's earlier, more satirical movies.

Thatcherism is dead. Long Live New Labour. We are in London in 2002 and not much has changed for the socially deprived. They're still living on decrepit council housing estates, neutered by lack of opportunity and lack of ambition, living on a diet of fried food, alcohol and cigarettes. Leigh introduces us to a rare nuclear family. Timothy Spall plays Phil - an optimistic but lazy taxi driver, reduced to cadging change of his kids to pay for his minicab radio in a scene almost too painful to watch. He's married to Penny: Lesley Maville in a role usually described as "long-suffering". They have two obese children - a loving daughter Rachel (Alison Garland) and a brutish, selfish son called Rory (James Corden. Their journey is of self-realisation. Phil has to realise he is unhappy before he can get the will to change. Penny has to discover the courage to speak out about her frustration. Rory has to face the consequences of his sloth. Rachel, one feels, still has her epiphany ahead of her. In some ways, she is the most intriguing character - so passive, and yet she evidently has a great fondness for her dad, and is deeply affected by her parents' rowing.

The secondary characters are a rogues gallery of teenage pregnancy, abusive boyfriends, slappers and stalkers, except that Leigh's characterisations are much more nuanced than my abusive short-hand descriptions. Together they give a rich sense of the untapped potential, frustrated hopes and yes - the community spirit that just about still exists on the estates. And it's this fine quality, combined with the flashes of gallows humour, that keep ALL OR NOTHING from being a dirge - and stops the film from feeling over-long or unrelentingly grim.

ALL OR NOTHING played Cannes and Toronto 2002 and opened that year. It is available on DVD.

THE BANK JOB - brilliant story; workmanlike execution

True story: in 1976 a bunch of loveable idiots tunnelled into a London bank and nicked three million quid in cash and jewels. They also nicked some tasty pornographic photographs incriminating a member of the royal family and more than a few members of the government. This, naturally, caught the attention of the British secret service, policeman both straight and corrupt, not to mention the porn king of Soho. In fairness though, the rozzers were given a bit of a head start when an amateur radio enthusiast picked up the idiot robbers chatting to each other on their walkie-talkies!

It's a great story. The resulting film, however, is worth a watch but probably not the price of a cinema ticket. It's more the kind of film you watch by chance on Freeview on a boring Tuesday night. Roger Donaldson's direction is competent but unimaginative. The cast are all fine but there are no stand-out performances. (Although I have to say that David Suchet did look eerily like Ronnie Barker.) The production design is fine, but I've seen the seventies re-created more thoroughly on screen. The biggest problem is that the heist takes too long to crank up and grind out. The viewer has more fun watching the bunglers wriggle out of the mess they've made. Frankly, we could've lost twenty minutes off the run-time and it would've been a much snappier, much more exciting film.

THE BANK JOB is on release in the UK. It opens in the USA on March 7th; in Russia on April 3rd; in Finland on July 11th; in the Netherlands on July 31st; and in Belgium on August 6th.

MIDDLETOWN - bonkers....

..but not enough to be interesting.

MIDDLETOWN is a low-budget film set in contemporary Northern Ireland. It is monochrome both in terms of colour palette and narrative. Matthew MacFadyen plays an ex-missionary priest who returns to his home town to find his brother gambling and his pregnant sister-in-law serving pints on a Sunday. He's pissed off for around 80 minutes then goes mental in the final ten. Whoops, I just gave away the plot....such as it is. I think the point is that fundamentalist nutters are a menace. Evidently.

MIDDLETOWN went on release in Ireland in November 2006 and in the UK for about a nanosecond in March. It is available on Region 2 DVD.