All posts by MostlyFilm

One Man, Two Guvnors

Theatre

Hero Bradley on a pantomime for people who think they don’t like pantomimes.

Luckily, there is still only one James Corden
James Corden (l), James Corden (r)

The National Theatre’s One Man, Two Guvnors begins its previews at the Adelphi Theatre tomorrow. Earlier this year when it opened at the National Theatre, there were quite a few reviews which mentioned a humus sandwich  being offered to James Corden by a member of the audience. Therefore when I finally saw the show the other week on tour and someone in the front row proffered up a sandwich to Corden, I knew full well that this was no surprise to anyone. Despite knowing all this however, my suspension of disbelief in that moment meant that I laughed just as hard as if I’d believed every word.This whole sandwich section was, by the way, played completely straight. There was no wink at the audience like we were in on the joke. We were expected to think that this was the first ever time that James Corden had encountered a humus sandwich during the run of the play, and I’d hazard a guess that the majority of the audience there that night would have been surprised to find out that the sandwich owner was a plant.

In the coming couple of months exactly the same trick will be played on audiences up and down the country as part of the UK’s annual tradition of Christmas pantomimes. Continue reading One Man, Two Guvnors →

Feckinpah, or the Irish Straw Dogs

Television

Paul Duane on how Simon Nye’s How Do You Want Me? Refashioned a vile classic into a poison-pen paean to Englishness.

Twee

To start with, let’s take two things as given: first, that the 2011 remake of Straw Dogs by Rod Lurie is an irrelevance and an embarrassment, and useful only as a peg on which to hang this poorly-thought-out but long in gestation article; and second, the original Straw Dogs is in itself a problematic, troublesome turd in the punchbowl of Sam Peckinpah’s crazed career. (If you disagree with either of these givens, that’s the comments section right over there ——->).

Now then. Back in the late ’90s, the sitcom genre was quite a different beast. The League of Gentlemen were a successful but oddball bunch of sketch comedians just trying out their talents on television, buried on BBC2. The Boosh and the Conchords were not yet born. Situation comedies tended to be a gentle battle of the sexes, or a lightly humourous clash between different varieties of working-class people and homosexuals. And the king of all he surveyed was Simon Nye. His series Men Behaving Badly was a battle between two men, one jug-eared, one not, to remain childish, irresponsible monsters well into adulthood. It was hugely successful.

Continue reading Feckinpah, or the Irish Straw Dogs →

London Film Festival 2011 – The Italian Job

Film Festivals, Italian Cinema, London Film Festival 2011

Concetta Sidoti rounds up our LFF11 coverage with a special report on the Italian films that played at the festival

Terraferma

For a couple of years, the most interesting Italian films in the London film festival have been about outsiders moving in – often ex-communitari (non-EU migrants) and clandestini (illegal migrants) – and the uneasy welcome they receive from a country more used to emigration than immigration. This year’s festival tackles the subject in films as different as Emanuele Crialese’s Terraferma, the De Serio brothers’ Seven Acts of Mercy (Sette opere di misericordia) and Andrea Segre’s Li and the Poet (Io sono Li).

Continue reading London Film Festival 2011 – The Italian Job →

London Film Festival 2011 – Day 16

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The Deep Blue Sea  (Terence Davies, 2011)

Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea is a quiet, delicate end to an odd London Film Festival. Based on a play by Terence Rattigan, it’s a period-set drama of doomed romance, which will evoke memories of Neil Jordan’s End of the Affair and Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven (both LFF highlights of years gone past).

Continue reading London Film Festival 2011 – Day 16 →

London Film Festival 2011 – Day 15

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Target (Alexander Zeldovich, 2011)

Have you ever been cornered at a family gathering by an 8 year old boy, high on Mr Kipling, Coca-Cola and Ben 10, who wants to tell you a great science fiction story he’s just made up? Have you struggled to stop your eyes from glazing over while he introduces a breathless sequence of new ideas, and doesn’t develop or explore any of them, only to drop each for the next? Have you struggled to keep track of who all the characters in this epic story are, as they run around all over the place, doing things that make no sense, for no reason? Congratulations! You are now prepared for the experience of watching Target.

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London Film Festival 2011 – Day 13

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Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman, 2011)

Sandra Hebron’s last choice as LFF surprise film proved hilariously divisive. As the cast, shot in gauzy cheap-looking HD video, deadpanned the first lines of Stillman’s arch, absurdist dialogue over Mark Suozzo and Adam Schlesinger’s preposterously kitsch underscore, I could feel the hostility in the room boiling over almost instantly. And, to be fair, Stillman’s film is deliberately alienating – challenging you to be on its decidedly obscure wavelength with an unpredictable mix of ultra-precious whimsy, deliberately unconvincing characters (most of whom, irony piling upon irony, are ineptly playing false roles within the film’s narrative), hilariously cheap gags and gimpy musical numbers (just to give you a flavour: Adam Brody and Greta Gerwig appear to dance on water in a fountain, to Gershwin’s Things Are Looking Up (from the P.G. Wodehouse-penned Fred Astaire movie, A Damsel in Distress)  but the cheap-looking platform they are actually dancing on is right there in plain view).  Although Stillman’s previous films were somewhat mannered and artificial, they also had one foot in reality, a concept which Damsels in Distress has no particular time for.

So, fair warning: Your Mileage May Vary. But I had a great time.

Continue reading London Film Festival 2011 – Day 13 →

London Film Festival 2011 – Days 10-12

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Wild Bill (Dexter Fletcher, 2011)

A 35-year on-screen veteran of film and TV, Dexter Fletcher makes his writing and directing debut with a warm, funny and tightly-plotted East End drama that adeptly mixes crime and family plot strands. Charlie Creed-Miles plays the Bill of the title (“More like Mild Bill,” as one wag obligatorily but unwisely observes at one point) – coming out of prison on licence after an eight-year stretch for a veritable portfolio of offences accrued while working as a low-level drug dealer, to find that his children, 15 year-old Dean (Will Poulter) and 11 year-old Jimmy (Sammy Williams), are fending for themselves after having being abandoned by their mother, who has run off to Spain with her new man, and don’t really want to know him. Soon, Bill finds himself besieged on all sides: his probation officer (Olivia Williams) and the police want him to steer clear of his old crew; the old crew want him to slot right back into his old life or get the fuck out of Dodge; social services (represented by Jaime Winstone and Jason Flemyng) want him to stick around and take responsibility for his kids. And there are further complications as Jimmy finds himself sucked into the life his father is trying to leave behind.

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London Film Festival 2011 – Day 9

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Lotus Eaters (Alexandra McGuinness, 2010)

An object lesson, in the perils of writing what you know, if what you know is partying with the young, rich, beautiful and boring, Lotus Eaters cares less about its story (apparently beefed up from McGuinness’s almost plotless first draft by co-credited Brendan Grant) and more about hanging out with its characters as they hop from bacchanalian party to Notting Hill café to gallery opening, in the hope that we’ll eventually come to feel their pain.

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London Film Festival 2011 – Day 8

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Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier, 2011)

I adored Joachim Trier’s last film Reprise, a brilliant, understated drama about an academic rivalry between a pair of close friends in Oslo. His follow-up, Oslo, August 31st, is an equally impressive effort, again about some of the difficulties of educated, middle-class living.

Like Reprise, Trier’s new film stars Anders Danielsen Lie. Lie gives an astonishing performance as a recovering heroin addict, who has been in rehab for nearly a year. The film opens with him attempting suicide, before being allowed out into Oslo for a job interview. He takes the opportunity to see friends and family members.

The film is almost unbearably tense: we know he’s in terrible shape, yet his counsellors, friends and family don’t. We know his life is potentially at risk, and that he isn’t free of the demons that led to his addiction. We know that August 31st, in Oslo, is the day that will define his life.

Continue reading London Film Festival 2011 – Day 8 →