DOWNTON ABBEY

DOWNTON ABBEY the movie is exactly what DOWNTON ABBEY the TV show is but glossier and longer - it's sort of akin to a super version of their Christmas specials. I doubt anyone who isn't a fan of the show would watch the film - indeed no concessions are made to those who don't know the backstory of the aristocratic Crawley family. We simply dive in, in media res, with the family preparing for a Royal visit. Some characters are absent - notably Bates, and for much of the film, Mr Talbot.  Some characters are present with essentially nothing to do - notably Lord and Lady Grantham.  The action centres on Mary Talbot (as usual) - wondering whether to keep the show that is grand country living on the road - and Lady Edith missing her old career - in both cases of course we are meant to sympathise with the grand people with their obligations, and look to the loyal servants to sympathise with them, enable them, and provide moral support.  Of the visitors, the action centres of Imelda Staunton as Lady Bagshawe, and a backstairs secret she is holding that also involves Jack Leech's Branson - after all with the Downton family married of, he's the only candidate left for romance!

The resulting film is everything one expects from Downton, fully satisfying to fans of the series, and probably irritating to those who aren't. It is essentially conservative in its views of the value of the aristocracy and a rural way of life, but mildly progressive in its B plot - sympathy for closeted homosexuals; working women who have to give up their careers to be decorative arm-candy.   It looks sumptuous, with lavish costumes and ball room scenes.  And while the plot and dialogue are rather mechanical, one does of course have the joy of Maggie Smith as the dowager Duchess, with her witty one-liners, not to mention a rather emotional and lovely denouement.

DOWNTON ABBEY is rated PG and has a running time of 122 minutes. It was released earlier this year and is now available to rent and own.

BLINDED BY THE LIGHT

Gurinder Chadha (BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM) returns to our screens with what is being marketed as a feel-good movie - BLINDED BY THE LIGHT. It's based on the memoirs of Sarfraz Mahmood, a second gen British-Pakistani growing up in the racially violent and economically distressed Luton of the 1980s.  If there's not enough to deal with outside the safety of his home, inside he has to deal with issues many second gen immigrants face - how to live an assimilated life, fulfilling one's own dreams, while still honouring the values and dreams of the first gen who sacrificed so much for our success. I say "our" because this is a milieu - and indeed a specific time and place - that I know very well. And I can say that the authenticity that Chadha and Mansoor capture in how our families spoke to each other and hoped and dreamed and were thwarted is spot on - and so close to the bone it provoked a really violent reaction in me.  I think that's because it's so rare to see any kind of explicit racial violence on screen that so clearly depicts the British history that we lived through that the film drove a moment of raw catharsis. So it wasn't feel good for me, but that's okay, because it's deep political conscience is really admirable and much needed.

That said, before the raw emotion overcame me, I have to say this really was and is a lovely and feel good film.  Firstly because Chadha and her production designers so beautifully capture small-town English towns of the 80s - including long-gone but much-lived shops like Athena and Our Price - all those fantastic clothes and songs - the ever-present Walkman headphones - and that specific joy of handing over your favourite cassette or VHS tape to a friend.  Because that's what happens in this film. Our protagonist Javed (Viveik Khalra - sympathetic and charismatic) is feeling miserable under the pressures at home and outside until his new friend Roops gives him a tape of the then unfashionable Bruce Springsteen. He wonders what an American rocker can say that's relevant to him until he listens to the lyrics and realises that working class angst is global, and that seeing your father's dreams crushed by economic reality is deeply relatable.  So the music in this film is superb and energetic before Springsteen makes an entrance but reaches another level when he does. The way in which Chadha uses CGI to superimpose the lyrics on scenes, or pivots action around an inspiring lyric is just superb. There's a lot of love and respect and understanding of Springsteen's work in there.

The film is also just straightforwardly funny - helped by some lovely cameos from comedians such as Rob Brydon, Sally Phillips (Char-DON-nay), Marcus Brigstock and Olivia Poulet.  My only criticism is that it could've more fully embraced its genre - at least for a central music scene that's full of joy and energy but could've been truly superb with a little more careful choreography.  But these are all small concerns. Because BLINDED BY THE LIGHT is a truly lovely joyous film that masks a provocative and brutally honest heart about the immigrant experience.  It deserves to be seen as widely as possible. 

BLINDED BY THE LIGHT has a running time of 117 minutes and is rated PG-13. It played Sundance 2019 and will be released in the UK on August 9th and in the USA on August 14th. 

`THE MAN WHO INVENTED CHRISTMAS - Crimbo Binge-watch #8

Director Bharat Nalluri (MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY) returns to our screens with a rather more well researched than had expected fictionalised account of how Charles Dickens wrote the iconic story A Christmas Carol. Adapted by Susan Coyne from a book by Les Standiford, the film paints a very convincing portrait of an author under great financial stress, with a taste for luxury, a large family to support, and an almost pathological fear of the poorhouse. Most fascinating is the portrayal of the relationship between Dickens and his father - a man who fell into debt, as a result of which Charles spent some of his childhood doing menial labour. Accordingly, this isn't a film about saving Scrooge (although it is) but about saving Dickens - allowing him to make some kind of amends with his father and truly celebrate the newly hyped holiday of Christmas which - lets be honest - wasn't so much invented by Dickens as Prince Albert. The second aspect of the script that I really liked was the idea of making the characters in A Christmas Carol come to life and lobby Dickens about what they want to happen to their characters. It lifted a rather conventional if well done costume drama into something more witty and revealing. The cast is also superb - featuring actors of the calibre of Miriam Margolyes and Jonathan Pryce (Dickens' father) and Christopher Plummer (Scrooge). If anything it's the rather banal Dan Stevens who lets down the show in the central role.

THE MAN WHO INVENTED CHRISTMAS has a running time of 104 minutes and is rated PG. It was released in 2017.

THE SECOND BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL

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THE SECOND BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL is the inevitable sequel to the surprisingly popular and lucrative British romantic comedy set in a crumbling Indian hotel filled with English residents.  Some had come for a holiday - some because they could make their pensions stretch further.  But all were on an exploration of what it meant to be in love at an old age - what does it mean when your kids leave home and you realise you have nothing in common with your partner? How does it feel when you find yourself redundant from your children's lives?  Is it possible to have a second chance at love or a second career in your sixties and seventies?

ALAN PARTRIDGE: ALPHA PAPA

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I laughed at almost every line of ALAN PARTRIDGE: ALPHA PAPA. And I don't mean an inward knowing intellectual laugh but proper laugh-out-loud, can't eat my jelly babies laughing.  And so was everyone else in the cinema, which was a bit disconcerting because they had an average age of twenty which means they weren't even born when Steve Coogan's comic creation first hit the small screen.  I felt momentarily old and passed it, and in between cackling with laughter at Patridge lip synching to Roachford's late 80s hit "Cuddly Toy", I thought of LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge"  - all those teenagers "in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties".  There was some irony in seeing these "yoot" get down with Alan Partridge - a movie that is at heart about people who are losing their edge, whose faces don't fit with shiny new brands aimed at the target demographic. People who want to stick two fingers up to the airbrushed over-familiar breakfast DJs who play from carefully manicured set-lists and have about as much to do with real music as IPL has to do with real cricket.

But, anyways, back to the matter at hand!  ALAN PARTRIDGE: ALPHA PAPA is absolutely brilliant, and not just if you're a fan of his TV appearances as talk-show host and then his ignominious descent into local radio. We've got Alan as we love him - his goofy geeky fashion faux pas - his borderline sexism and racism - his sly selfish survival instinct - and most of all, his egomania.   There's something despairing and tragic about Alan, and yet, he always comes out on top, and that's why we love him.  We all have moments of pathetic desperation and Alan speaks to that. 

In his first feature film, Alan is a DJ at North Norfolk Digital - basically a media no-man's land. But he gets, and ceases his chance at fame, when his fellow DJ Pat Farrell is sacked by the station's new greed capitalist owners.  And when I say sacked, I mean shafted by a devious Alan.  Farrell goes FALLING DOWN, and starts shooting up the station, resulting in a hostage crisis that Alan mediates.  What results in a script that is absolutely packed with jokes but which also hangs together in terms of the  emotional motivation of the key characters and feels satisfying and meaty rather than just another shameless cash-in TV adaptation that has some funny scenes but no real substance.  God bless Armando Iannucci.  For giving us Alan and Malcolm Tucker.  That man shouldn't just be an OBE, he should be a bloody Duke, or Lord or something that signifies what a genius he is.  

ALAN PARTRIDGE: ALPHA PAPA has a running time of 90 minutes and is rated 15.  ALPHA PAPA premiered in Norwich on July 24th and was released in the UK on August 7th.  It opens in New Zealand on December 5th.

London Film Fest 2012 - Day 3 - I, ANNA

I, ANNA is a beautifully made, unnerving psychological thriller from writer-director Barnaby Southcombe.  Set in contemporary London, the movie has a style and control and slow-building tension that is utterly breathtaking.  It's one of the best films I've seen at the Festival so far, and an utter surprise!

The movie stars Charlotte Rampling as Anna, an apparently divorced woman living with her single-parent daughter, nervously entering the speed-dating scene.  She has a certain eery quality from the start.  Maybe it's her anachronistic use of phone boxes, or that we see her wandering apparently aimlessly through a  windswept Barbican at odd hours of the morning, moments after a brutal murder has been committed.  Similarly lonely, aimless and eery is Gabriel Byrne's cop. I love that he's not that clichéd hard boiled-lives-for-his-job cop of low-rent TV series.  Rather he has a melancholy, soulful air, and even when he starts stalking Anna there's something almost gentle about him.

I guess it isn't the most original plot device to find that the woman the cop is stalking turns out to be involved in the crime, but the movie deals with that quickly (within the first 30 minutes), rather than teasing us with obvious red herrings.   This is a grown-up film more worried about the psychology of an event and the emotional ramifications of a crisis, than with "whodunnit".  And the screenplay still has enough tricks up its sleeve to genuinely surprise us in the third act and build to an unbearably tense denouement.

The two lead performances are convincing and compelling, particularly Gabriel Byrne in, perhaps, a softer and more ambiguous role than we've seen in some time.  It was also a pleasure to see Eddie Marsan play a straightforward jovial decent cop rather than the rather shifty characters he normally gets landed with.  Behind the camera, particular praise has to go to Ben Smithard whose cinematography beautifully recasts banal urban architecture into unreal, empty backdrops echoing the protagonists interior moods. The smooth, modern, hard-lit surfaces created a feeling of alienation that was perfectly complemented by K.I.D's electronic score. 

Overall, I, ANNA is a sophisticated, compelling modern noir thriller with enough nods to the history of the  genre to satisfy cinephiles and one genuinely superb plot twist to give us something new to be dazzled by.  This has to be a strong contender for the Festival's First Feature prize,  and I hope that it gets the audience it deserves.

I, ANNA played Berlin, Sydney and London 2012.  It was released in Sweden earlier this year and is released in the UK on December 7th. It will be released in Germany on April 18th 2013. The running time is 93 minutes. 

MY WEEK WITH MARILYN - over-hyped

There is a great movie to be made about the conflict between Marilyn Monroe and Sir Lawrence Olivier on the set of THE PRINCE AND THE SHOWGIRL. Unfortunately, MY WEEK WITH MARILYN is not it.  That is because the writer, Adrian Hodges (TOM & VIV) and director, Simon Curtis (TV's CRANFORD)  have made a decision to take the sharp edges off the drama at every turn.  Instead of the caustic wit of Colin (son of Kenneth) Clark's memoir, the movie gives us a protagonist in the classic "ingenue" line - very dull, very sweet, and hardly necessary at all as an entry point to the film's real drama.  He falls for Marilyn, she flirts with him, but it's all very tame indeed, if in fact it really happened.  

What we really want to see is Marilyn versus Larry.  The Sexy Film Star, enmeshed in the Method, desperately trying and failing to be a technically great actress, puffed up and doped up by her self-serving entourage (a particularly menacing portrayal of Paula Strasberg) versus the Great Actor, painfully aware that his time has passed, resentful he cannot set the screen alight, and in fear of hysterical women from his experiences with Vivienne Leigh.  When MY WEEK WITH MARILYN catches afire, it's because we're watching Marilyn and Larry bring out each other's insecurities - in those moments, we get a glimpse into their interior lives.  But all too often, this fascinating material is cut short for drippy dating scenes as Marilyn and young Colin skinny dip, or visit Windsor Castle.  I wanted more of the drama - more of the tension as cinema and theatre acting changed era - more of Marilyn and Arthur Miller - more of Larry and Vivienne.

The resulting film is basically shot and scripted like an afternoon movie on the Hallmark channel. And, unfortunately, it is filled with a fair few anonymous performances - from Dominic Cooper as a suffocating manager to Julia Ormond unbelievably mis-cast as Leigh.  Emma Watson is utterly wasted as Colin's parochial love interest, and Eddie Redmayne has nothing more to do than look charming and naive.  In the minor parts, it's only really Judi Dench who stands out - she oozes class as Dame Sybil Thorndike and deserves a sort of Oscar-double-whammy for her performance here and in J.EDGAR.   As for the leads, Kenneth Branagh is stunning - stunning - as Lawrence Olivier - capturing not just his particular intonation and mannerisms, but giving the towering presence in English theatre real pathos.  

All of which brings us Michelle Willams' much hyped performance as Marilyn, the subject of an Oscar campaign from the Weinsteins. Frankly, I was utterly underwhelmed. Yes she gets the breathy, tremulous voice, and yes she can sing the songs and do the moves. And yes, she appears to have put on a bit, if not enough weight.  But she problem is this - she has not got the sexy star quality that Marilyn had, and you simply can't manufacture that.  (Which is not to say she isn't a terrific actress - just look at BLUE VALENTINE).  Too often in this film we see other characters look at Marilyn and gasp in awe and envy at the way she "lights up the screen" or the "magic" she works or the way she's "full of life".  Sadly, the sign of a bad film is when people tell rather than show.  We shouldn't need this commentary.  Williams' should be doing it herself.  And I don't buy the concept that no-one can light up a screen like Marilyn today.  We have instinctive "film stars" now just as we have "technical actresses".  Sadly, I would put Michelle Williams in the latter camp.

MY WEEK WITH MARILYN played New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and the AFI Fest 2011.  It opens this weekend in the US and UK. It opens on December 29th in Singapore; on December 30th in Finland; on January 5th in Portugal; on January 13th in Norway and Sweden; and on January 19th in Lebanon and the Netherlands.