Friday, 4 July 2025

For what it's worth...




UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of June 27-29, 2025):

1 (new) F1 (12A) ***
2 (1) 28 Years Later (15) ****
3 (2) How to Train Your Dragon (PG)
4 (3) Elio (PG)
5 (4Lilo & Stitch (U)
6 (new) M3GAN 2.0 (15) **
8 (new) Sardaar Ji 3 (12A)
9 (6The Long Wet Walk (12A)
10 (7) Sitaare Zameen Par (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:
1. Hearts of Darkness: a Filmmaker's Apocalypse
2. Ran
3. The Piano Teacher

  
DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (2) A Minecraft Movie (PG)
3 (3) 28 Days Later... (15) ****
6 (40) Jurassic World: Dominion (12)
8 (new) Lethal Weapon (15) [above] ****
9 (6Sinners (15) ****
10 (7) The Amateur (12)


My top five: 
1.
 Black Bag
3. Flow


Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. The Wicker Man (Tuesday, BBC Two, 11.50pm)
2. Don't Look Now (Wednesday, BBC Two, 12midnight)
3. King Richard (Saturday, BBC One, 10.20pm)
4. A House Named Shahana (Thursday, Channel 4, 1.55am)
5. The Day After Tomorrow (Saturday, Channel 4, 7.40pm)

Thursday, 3 July 2025

Enshittification: "M3GAN 2.0"


The first M3GAN - written by Akela Cooper and James Wan, directed by Gerard Johnstone - was released in January 2023 as Blumhouse's official alternative to the season's po-faced awards bait. The tale of a sociopathically sassy emotional support android, it didn't strictly have to be any good to stand out, but it achieved one of the 21st century studio movie's aims in becoming memeable, resulting in a global box-office take of $180m. Sequel M3GAN 2.0, written and directed by Johnstone, is opening at the height of movie summer - between the new Jerry Bruckheimer and the latest Jurassic Park reboot - which possibly explains the decision to expand a small, snarkily satirical sci-fi proposition into something approximating a midrange action pic adjacent to the Terminator, X-Men and Mission: Impossible franchises. Now there is a second item of killer kit on the loose: a robot known as Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), who threatens not just one household, but the entire world order, and prompts the authorities to revive the first film's antagonist as a first line of defence. Johnstone clearly sees this as an opportunity to initiate a popcorn-counter debate about tech that goes beyond kids and screens to consider the looming presence of AI in our homes and pockets and whether it's still possible to forge an ethical career in tech, given the money and lunatics now flooding that field. All valid points for a broadsheet editorial, but as a movie, M3GAN 2.0 proves disappointingly dry: for an hour or so, there's barely one laugh to be had with it. Partly that's because Johnstone gives himself a lot more to set up: while humanoid heroine Gemma (Allison Williams) comes to realise she has to reboot the killer doll that terrorised her family, we're introduced to a weirdo tech guru (Jemaine Clement) with a neural link and bolt-on abs. The elevated budget, too, provides a lot more tech to show off, but it's a narrative issue when these gleaming machines seem to exert greater control over the plot than the tagalong humans. M3GAN 2.0 is busy, but it's never as funny as its predecessor: you begin to wonder whether everybody involved has misunderstood what made the original such a hit - and misjudged whether the franchise really needed expanding in this way.

In its second half - with M3GAN (Jenna Davis) fully rebooted - the movie shuffles closer to what one might expect from any M3GAN sequel. Williams deals with the elevated exposition as well as anybody could, and is rewarded for her efforts with a fight sequence of her own; this setpiece kicks loose the sequel's single most promising idea - having Gemma and M3GAN merge personalities, requiring Williams to mimic the robot's speech patterns - and then promptly forgets all about it. A leftfield deployment of Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work" is the one scene that connects to the joshing original, but plays as incongruous in this new, straitlaced context: a bug or glitch. Elsewhere, Johnstone doubles down on the original's limitations: there are too many bland supporting characters played by cutprice performers (one of whom, TV breakout Brian Jordan Alvarez, arrives on the big screen with a blotted copybook, further adding to the sense of an ill-fated production) and it's been shot with an eye to the softest of R ratings - maybe even a PG-13 - which means it keeps having to cut away from the worst of the carnage this set-up anticipates. It's as if the filter Gemma installs to rein in M3GAN's worst excesses of word and deed has equally been fitted to the film itself: the plot may take a note from Terminator 2, retrofitting an erstwhile murderbot with a conscience, but the tone recalls something like the Short Circuit sequel, particularly around the relationship between the first film's now teenage lead (Violet McGraw) and the android who once watched over her. (Again, to a M3GAN movie's detriment, I was reminded of Blumhouse's underseen Upgrade, a properly thumping, often jolting techno-fantasy that was far more vivid in its pulp, and hadn't been childproofed for an assumed audience of excitable TikTokkers.) Were it not for the visibly higher budget, M3GAN 2.0 would seem much like an opportunistic DTV riff on some sizeable studio hit: most of the ideas with which Johnstone fills these two hours have been done to death, right through to a finale that sees our heroes fleeing a lair their tech loon nemesis has equipped with self-destruct software. It is, however, very much reflective of developments in 21st century tech: after a successful first rollout, 2.0 adds a lot more whistles and bells, new toys with new buttons to press, all of which impede it from functioning as effectively as this technology once did.

M3GAN 2.0 is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Monday, 30 June 2025

From the archive: "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time"


Delicate, becalmed and emotionally satisfying, Japanese director Mamoru Hosoda's animation The Girl Who Leapt Through Time forms a welcome antidote to the noisy, smirking banalities of Jumper. After an incident in a chemistry lab, klutzy schoolgirl Makoto (voiced by Riisa Naka) discovers she can stop and reverse the clock by means of a running jump, thus literally leaping through time. Rather than save the world, Makoto applies herself to accomplishing the kind of things an ordinary girl in her late teens might consider cool: landing top marks in her exams, eking out extra minutes in the karaoke lounge, getting the tea she wants, rather than that she's originally served. Yet the main business of the plot is a chain of events caused by her embarrassed rebuffing of a friend who asked her out, from which our heroine learns that direct intervention in the lives of others, leaping in feet first, has as many negative as positive effects. 
It's very sweet that that the film should use a superpower to resolve a series of crushes: actions that might very well mean the world to the parties involved, though which turn out to have further-reaching consequences than first imagined. Visually, Hosoda takes his cue from a painting the girl's aunt is restoring, and which proves crucial to the plot ("the longer you look at it, the more relaxed and comforted you get"); even when Makoto is at her most agitated, this dreamiest of cameras will often drift away to observe a cloud formation or a ladybird making its way across a surface. It's a time-travel movie that allows itself, and its audience, precious moments in which to breathe, think and reflect upon the various ways in which time flies.

(May 2009)

A 4K restoration of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time opens in selected cinemas from Sunday.

Friday, 27 June 2025

For what it's worth...




UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of June 20-22, 2025):

1 (new) 28 Years Later (15) ****
2 (1) How to Train Your Dragon (PG)
3 (new) Elio (PG)
4 (2Lilo & Stitch (U)
6 (4) The Long Wet Walk (12A)
7 (new) Sitaare Zameen Par (12A)
8 (5) Ballerina (15)
9 (6Karate Kid: Legends (12A)
10 (8) The Ballad of Wallis Island (12A) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:
3. F1

  
DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

2 (1) A Minecraft Movie (PG)
3 (8) 28 Days Later... (15) ****
6 (2) Sinners (15) ****
7 (4) The Amateur (12)
8 (35) Nosferatu (15) ***
10 (13) How to Train Your Dragon [2010] (PG) ****


My top five: 
1.
 Black Bag
3. Flow


Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. North by Northwest (Sunday, BBC Two, 1.50pm)
2. Bonnie and Clyde (Sunday, BBC Two, 11.40pm)
3. The 39 Steps (Sunday, BBC Two, 12.25pm)
4. Glory (Saturday, Channel 4, 12.30am)
5. The Addams Family [above] (Saturday, ITV1, 6.50am)

From the archive: "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World"


From the off, these big screen adaptations of Cressida Cowell's children's books were elevated some way over the digimated pack: 2010's first How to Train Your Dragon did something both tangible and touching with the space separating a scaly firebreather, a nervy young man and the latter's gruffly traditional father. (For once, 3D technology added a layer of meaning, rather than merely subtracting pounds from parents' pockets.) Two films down the line, and with the franchise established and the budgets swelling, that space has come under threat. "We have dragons, lots and lots of dragons!," squawks our still-boyish hero Hiccup (again voiced by Jay Baruchel) as he flies into his hometown of Berk early on in How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World. Lots of dragonriders, too (the supporting voice cast has swelled); also lots and lots of the soaring, swooping spectacle that is assumed to sell 21st century matinee tickets, and which often gets between us and a lasting emotional connection with a film's pixels. One promising sign is the streak of self-awareness running through the writing (a Cowellian holdover, or genuine Hollywood invention?). When a wearied Hiccup sighs "It does seem as if the whole world knows about us now," it has the ring of a film talking to itself, of creatives pondering the pitfalls lying in wait as these characters finally set out for the wiggle room of the title. What next? Where now? How can a third film in a series surprise, move and excite us?

Well, Toothless has started skylarking with a ladydragon, one of many subplots set running over a brisk 95 minutes; in a comic highpoint, he will be Cyrano de Bergeracked through courtship rituals by Hiccup, himself under pressure to commit to his beloved. In short, there is a good deal going on in The Hidden World, both in terms of the dragons and their Viking handlers, and the minor miracle of Dean DeBlois' film is that it finds roundly satisfying means of resolving it all. Even among the tumult of plot and audience-pleasing spectacle, DeBlois makes room for moments of quiet beauty: a lovers' reunion on a cliff at sundown, a wordless ballet between Toothless and his dragon sweetheart, the artistry invariably heightened by John Powell's gorgeous symphonic score. The lighting in one confrontation between Hiccup and dragonhunter Grimmel is so dramatic we barely need anyone to speak; it could serve as both a lesson for and rebuke of less committed animation houses. Pixar suffered a (non-terminal, but noticeable) decline in quality control after owners Disney pressured their animators to industrialise what had previously been an artisanal process and double their yearly output. DreamWorks, it strikes me, have gone in the opposite direction: ramping down their production schedule has freed DeBlois's hopefully merry workers to polish these frames (Roger Deakins was brought on board as a visual consultant) and build these characters and relationships, such that when The Hidden World soars, it does so in the best, Spielbergian sense, where narrative and spectacle intertwine. (That the hidden world in question is first accessed unknowingly by two lovers circling one another is a flat-out beautiful story idea, matched here, as elsewhere, by exemplary design.) The affecting picture-book simplicity of the first film may be behind this series - it's top-dollar commercial animation we're looking at nowadays, storyboarded for an ever more competitive market - but The Hidden World has been programmed to last, with genuine flashes of excellence.

(July 2021)

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World is available on DVD through Universal, and available to rent via Prime Video.

Just a girl: "Clueless" at 30


Clueless
 reaches 30, though this is plainly a film that will forever be 1995: so 1995 that one character is caught panicking at losing his Cranberries CD, so 1995 that its celebrity reference points are Cindy Crawford and Marky Mark, so 1995 that the girls go to the mall to catch "the new Christian Slater", so 1995 that it features that "Shake Some Action" song that might conceivably have also been on the soundtrack of Empire Records or Reality Bites. It's not that the studios have stopped chasing the teen dollar in the intervening decades, but American movies were once, much like the general population, optimistic about the future our kids were growing into; our movie executives, meanwhile, were once literate enough to see the pop-cultural value in staging a high-school variation on Jane Austen's Emma, or at least smart enough to get the jokes in Amy Heckerling's well-turned script. Without Heckerling updating the classical idiom to fin-de-siècle Beverly Hills, there would be no Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet and everything that followed from that; Julia Stiles owes a substantial part of her early career (10 Things I Hate About You, Hamlet, O) to this one text. But let's not overlook what Heckerling the director did on these sets with this particular, unlikely combination of players, matched as perfectly one of Cher Horowitz's outfits.

Folks have been given pause to consider why Alicia Silverstone - as Cher - couldn't fully convert this breakthrough role into sustained stardom, but then this is the kind of role actors rarely get twice in a career: the faux-sophisticate who learns her most valuable lessons outside of class. (Silverstone's knowingly slangy narration is at odds with the vulnerability captured in close-ups, but she also knows where every single one of the laughs are.) More perplexing is why Heckerling couldn't - or wasn't allowed to - reach these heights again. (Especially with Fast Times at Ridgemont High already in her back pocket.) A few rough edges here suggest the presence of deleted scenes or alternate cuts: I still think the dastardly Elton (Jeremy Sisto) is introduced as Cher's boyfriend, which isn't the case. (One revelation on this rewatch: how many red flags the boys in this movie send up. Even Paul Rudd's notionally dreamy stepbrother Josh, who responds to Cher's sincere inquiry about how she can improve the world with a sneery "Sterilisation?") But they're surpassed by deft comic touches: Tai (Brittany Murphy) rouses from moshpit-derived unconsciousness only to boop her head on a low-hanging light. One issue was that the American teen movie was heading into choppier postmodern waters: Scream, Final Destination and Mean Girls, where the characters' flaws would be punished rather than forgiven. (Heckerling did, however, direct a run of glorious episodes for the generally wonderful, underrated Amazon series Red Oaks.) It's pure serendipity that Clueless returns to cinemas in the week of F1, with its own Nineties throwback vibes - but lest anyone need further reasons to revisit an earlier era's robust and nourishing pop culture: check the colossal proportions of the Snickers bar Heckerling's camera notes in passing on the two math teachers' table. Everything's funsized nowadays, which is barely any fun at all.

Clueless returns to cinemas nationwide from today.

Thursday, 26 June 2025

Speed: "F1"


For the two or three readers who will want to know: yes, there is a Martin Brundle cameo.
F1 is the producer-director partnership of Jerry Bruckheimer and Joseph Kosinski, giddy from the success of 2022's Top Gun: Maverick, tackling the renewed challenge of turning one of this world's duller sports into satisfying entertainment. More specifically, this is Bruckheimer's second go at selling us a racecar movie after 1990's Days of Thunder, that Tony Scott-directed NASCAR dud in which - lest anyone forget - Tom Cruise played a boy racer with the titter-inducing name of Cole Trickle. Redemption is written into it: Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes (one immediate upgrade), an aging driver-for-hire found puttering from one gig to the next, haunted at every turn by a crash that put paid to his F1 career first time around. He's precisely the ninth choice of former teammate-turned-team owner Javier Bardem, who - in the absence of better ideas to save his struggling Apex GP marque - pairs this cruising cowboy with promising but inexperienced Brit Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris). Naturally, the pair take an instant dislike to one another; naturally, they shunt one another out of their first race together; inevitably, it gets better over the course of the season the film describes. So it's primarily about boys and cars (and brands: full access has been secured to real F1 circuits, drivers, team chiefs, racedays and hospitality tents), but it's also in some way about the movie machine: how to turn a one-off comeback (the Top Gun sequel) into something sustainable, how to recapture former glories. "Someone call the 1990s," Brundle quips as Sonny Hayes starts to pick up the pace again, and that's what Bruckheimer is attempting to engineer here: to rekindle fond memories of a moment when these big summer blockbusters were effectively sport rather than solely commerce, generating a spectacle to match any World Cup or Olympics.

Granted, one key element in this respect remains money: the revenue stream from Top Gun: Maverick must have been so torrential that for perhaps the first time since the 2008 market crash, one of these tentpole-films can put the cash upfront on the screen; neither corners nor purse strings have had to be cut. (One of Apex GP's sponsors is something called Expensify, which looks to have become the film's own watchword.) But to the three big Ms here (men, motors, moolah), we can add a fourth: maturity. Unlike those Marvel movies that clogged up the multiplex in the years since 2008, Bruckheimer isn't exclusively targeting kids, teenagers and manchildren; the film's driving line is that, much like his producer, Sonny Hayes has developed a nous - crowdpleasing instinct, coupled to acute technical and logistical skill - far beyond that of those upstart MBA punks trying to conjure big summer hits out of third-string comic books. F1 is the first blockbuster since 2023's Barbie to have been pre-empted by songs from a tie-in soundtrack album, as so many of Bruckheimer's films have since Flashdance; the aim has apparently been to revert to that more packaged (and perhaps reliable) blockbuster model so in vogue in the Eighties and Nineties heyday of the multiplex popcorn counter, covering a lot of quadrants while offering something for everybody. F1 may have a Ferrari or McLaren engine, not to mention endless cameos from drivers whose faces will mean nothing to those of us who refuse to spend our Sunday afternoons watching men driving in circles, but they've been welded into the chassis of a DeLorean: boxy at two-and-a-half hours, roomy in the space it affords both its occupants and audience, and recognisable as some sort of movie time machine. We're being driven back to the future at speeds well in advance of 88mph.

The steering involved in that struck me as falling somewhere between reactionary and judicious. Bruckheimer is lucky in the respect that Formula 1 presents as a land before DEI, which permits the film to swerve those culture wars that did for several recent Disney/Marvel imaginings: this really is just 26 men, one or two of whom happen to be Black, putting pedal to the metal, so the hope is that nobody need get too riled up. The inclusive spirit comes through elsewhere. Kosinski, like Scott before him, is clearly a hardware nut with some flair for shooting speed: it's not just the cars that catch his eye, but the simulators, gadgets and medical testing equipment, all state of the art and gleaming items of kit. Left to his own devices, he'd likely make something as overdesigned and fundamentally hollow as 2010's Tron: Legacy or 2013's Oblivion. But Bruckheimer is a people person; you figure he possibly has to be to get close to knowing what audiences want. His best productions have showcased Hawksian ensembles, corralling different personalities, energies and viewerships, affording us the pleasure of spotting favourite actors in the mix, often doing fun stuff: it's why Michael Bay's Bruckheimer films (The RockArmageddon) remain pleasures of some kind, and why Bay's post-Bruckheimer work has largely been unendurable. 

Beyond the duelling leads here, there's a veritable old pros' club: Bardem, working small human wonders with a role that mostly requires him to remove his glasses, rub a rueful hand across his face and sigh; Kim Bodnia as the pitlane chief who gets a memorable meltdown amid one tyre change; Kerry Condon, sparky as the wary technical director with whom Sonny locks eyes. (Bruckheimer's Anglophilia, which landed Christopher Eccleston and Ian Hart major studio paycheques in the 1990s, manifests in roles for Samson Kayo as Joshua's business manager, Tobias Menzies as meddling new money, and Simon Kunz as a hack reporter.) Idris, making a step up after the small-screen success of Hulu's Snowfall, more than holds his own in such seasoned company; as for Pitt, well, given everything we now know about his personal life, we may have to concede this is one of those individuals who just work on a movie screen, removed from any of the gravity and responsibility of reality. It helps that he's one of the few sixtysomething performers on Earth who might credibly pass for late thirties, surely the upper age limit for any F1 driver, even for a team whose collective tyre treads are wearing thin. Yet much like Bruckheimer, Pitt has also long since figured out what looks cool on camera: taking a long gulp from a waterbottle while an irate rival rants and rages, tossing a rubber ball around these polished sets in an apparent homage to Steve McQueen, the new movie's patron saint. (The coolness that might prove infuriating to loved ones - the laissez-faire attitude, the odd, shrugging gesture - works perversely well on a screen: it draws us in, despite ourselves.)

Among Bruckheimer's hardy crew of veterans, the one weak link might be screenwriter Ehren Kruger, whose career (Scream 3, three Transformers movies, the Americanisations of The Ring and Ghost in the Shell) has largely involved assembling scrap metal, if not outright junk. F1's tech talk is generally po-faced (one notable miss from blockbusters past: the stellar script doctors who once punched and jollied this stuff up), and its raceday setpieces, which lack the Hot Wheels madness of even the more routine Fast & Furious stunts, lean heavily on patched-in headset chatter to modulate the stakes, which feels something of a cheat. (They're also blighted by persistently unpersuasive commentary: Brundle either needed better material, or better direction.) But Kruger gets enough of the basics right. The combative Sonny-Joshua pairing - two boxers; more sport - sometimes suggests 48HRS. at the Le Mans 24 (or F1 equivalent): the old white guy and the young Black contender, an extension of the Apex team's monochrome branding. And it's rather sweet that this plot gives not a fig for the business of driver points or constructor championships: these characters do it for the love of the sport, for those days when - after pile-up upon pile-up - it all finally comes together in a flying lap. Just on a philosophical level, F1 remains from green light to chequered flag very likable - or more likable than expected, given the copious gas guzzling, the endless product placement, the big finale in Abu Dhabi (capital of sportswashing, capital of capital), the never-lifting fug of dadness the whole project exists under. (It is, ultimately, Barbie for dads.) It may be a retrofitting rather than any radical overhaul: all straight lines and straight men, as self-contained as any race, it goes fast, then lets us go home without worrying what's next. It can't match Top Gun: Maverick for throwback thrills; even Cruise couldn't do that with the final Mission: Impossibles. But it's a clearer and more enjoyable run at this kind of material than Days of Thunder: 35 years on, Cole Trickle's ghost has finally been exorcised.

F1 is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Tuesday, 24 June 2025

In memoriam: Mark Peploe (Guardian 23/06/25)


The life and career of the much-travelled British screenwriter-turned-director Mark Peploe, who has died aged 82, merged with longer-running artistic traditions. His older sister Clare married Bernardo Bertolucci in 1978, and for a spell, Bertolucci employed his brother-in-law as a writing partner, notably on The Last Emperor (1987), for which the pair won a screenplay Oscar, then two similarly ambitious though flawed projects, the Paul Bowles adaptation The Sheltering Sky (1990) and the Tibetan lama drama Little Buddha (1993).

Peploe came highly recommended from an Italian filmmaker of an earlier stripe: Michelangelo Antonioni, who’d enlisted Peploe to write The Passenger (1975), his tale of a jaded journalist (Jack Nicholson) who co-opts a dead arms dealer’s identity. That project had its roots in two earlier Peploe assignments: the short story Fatal Exit, and his screenplay for Technically Sweet, an Amazon-set riff on Italo Calvino’s L'avventura di un fotografo that Antonioni intended to direct before mounting costs got producer Carlo Ponti nervous.

With the film theorist Peter Wollen, Antonioni and Peploe radically reworked the thematic core of these projects, planting one foot firmly in the bloody realities of the Chadian Civil War even as they pushed onwards towards rigorous philosophical investigation. “Who we are is the central issue – and it turns out nobody knows who anyone is,” Peploe told Time Out upon the film’s release. “[Nicholson’s protagonist] David Locke wants to change, wants to care, but he doesn’t even know who he is trying to become.”

Although Antonioni was frustrated by studio cuts, the finished film hooked viewers searching for meaning amid the moral miasma of the Watergate years; critic Andrew Sarris proposed “it may turn out to be the definitive spiritual testament of our times”. Yet after inheriting the rights from MGM upon winning an unrelated legal dispute, Nicholson withheld The Passenger from distribution until the mid-2000s. Upon its 2006 reissue, Peter Bradshaw called it “a classic of a difficult and alienating kind, but one that really does shimmer in the mind like a remembered dream.”

By that point, Peploe was an Oscar winner for The Last Emperor, Bertolucci’s biopic of the Qing emperor Puyi, and a singular story from the off. Crowned in 1908 aged just three, Puyi was exiled after 1924’s Beijing Coup and appointed by Japan as puppet emperor of Manchuria during WW2; he later worked as a gardener in Peking’s Botanical Gardens. The challenges here were twofold: to combine epic sweep with telling interpersonal and psychological detail, and to get the script past the Chinese censors so as to access filming locations within the Forbidden City.

In the press book, producer Jeremy Thomas recalled how Bertolucci and Peploe’s judicious handiwork made negotiating with the Chinese authorities surprisingly easy: “It was less difficult than working with the Western studio system. [The censors] only made minor script notes and references to change some of the names, then the official stamps went on and the door opened, and we came in and set to work.”

The results achieved a rare mix of scale and substance: David Thomson called The Last Emperor “a true epic but with an alertness to feelings as small and humble as a grasshopper”. It won four Golden Globes (including Best Motion Picture – Drama) and three BAFTAs (including Best Film) before scooping nine Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. Collecting his Best Adapted Screenplay gong, Peploe joked: “It’s a great honour and hugely encouraging to anybody else who wants to write impossible movies.”

Mark Peploe was born February 24, 1943 in Nairobi, one of three children to gallerist Willy Peploe, son of the Scottish colourist Samuel Peploe, and his painter wife Clotilde (née Brewster). Relocated first to Florence, later to Belgravia, the siblings’ upbringing was decidedly classical: Clotilde, the daughter of the painter Elisabeth von Hildebrand, insisted on having no art in the house that postdated Proust. Clare Peploe maintained she and her brother gravitated to film because “it was one medium which they [her parents] knew nothing about”.

Mark attended Downside School in Somerset, before accepting a place at Magdalen College to study politics, philosophy and economics. Upon graduation, he joined Allan King Associates as a researcher, working on films for the BBC’s Creative Persons (1968), although he grew frustrated with the documentary form: “I thought that if you wrote the script, you would be able to control the movie more than I did.”

He earned his first writing credit alongside Andrew Birkin on Jacques Demy’s atypically realist adaptation of The Pied Piper (1972), featuring singer Donovan in the title role; he was also a co-writer on the French veteran René Clément’s final film La Babysitter (1975). Neither was a great success, but Peploe soon began directing his own work, earning a BAFTA nomination for his 1985 short Samson and Delilah, adapted (with the poet Frederick Siedel) from D.H. Lawrence.

There were still writing gigs, including penning his sister’s Rhodes-set artworld romp High Season (1987). Yet nothing quite matched The Last Emperor’s impact. Of The Sheltering Sky, Roger Ebert sighed “I was left with the impression of my fingers closing on air.” (Despite cameoing in the film, Bowles dismissed it, saying “the ending is idiotic and the rest is pretty bad”.) The critics were tougher still on Little Buddha, circling around the casting of a kohl-eyed Keanu Reeves, though it fared better commercially.

Peploe’s feature directorial debut was Afraid of the Dark (1991), an offbeam horror item about an eleven-year-old voyeur (Ben Keyworth) peeping out at an adult world beset by a razor-wielding killer; metabolising Hitchcock and Michael Powell, it featured a memorably nasty scene involving a dog and a knitting needle. Yet his textured Joseph Conrad adaptation Victory (1996), starring Willem Dafoe and Irène Jacob, ran into distribution issues, prompting Time Out’s Trevor Johnston to ask: “What’s so terrible about it that it was consigned to three years on the shelf?”

In the new millennium, Peploe served as a script consultant on his sister’s lively Marivaux riff The Triumph of Love (2001) and a mentor for the Guided Light scheme. Certain scripts remained unfilmed, notably Heaven and Hell, a Bertolucci passion project on the murderous composer Carlo Gesualdo, and action-thriller The Crew, from an Antonioni story. Peploe continued to tour the globe, though now as a guest of international film festivals. Asked at the 2008 Estoril event where he sourced his best ideas, Peploe ventured: “In cafes, watching the world go by.”

He is survived by his partner, the art historian Alina Payne, and a daughter, the actress and filmmaker Lola Peploe, from an earlier marriage to the costume designer Louise Stjernsward.

Mark Peploe, screenwriter and director, born February 24, 1943, died June 18, 2025.

Monday, 23 June 2025

Here be monsters: "28 Years Later"


2002's
28 Days Later saw Danny Boyle and Alex Garland reverting to first principles after the sunsoaked torpor of 1999's The Beach, that starry studio project that once again demonstrated how no creative good can follow from flying your cameras out to high-end holiday destinations. Boyle seized upon the lightweight digital tech with which the Dogme crew had given the arthouse cinema a kick up the backside; rather than waiting for sand to be raked and Leo to emerge from his trailer, he was now free to prowl a damp, depopulated Britain, with Garland using the zombie movie's narrative framework to provide a brisk, pointed social commentary. 2007's 28 Weeks Later, a consolidation sequel which Boyle and Garland exec-produced for the emergent Iberian Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, was informed by America's post-9/11 misadventures in the Middle East, and proved more enthralling than the bulk of the Serious Studio Movies being produced on that subject around that moment with an eye to converting foreign policy disaster into Oscar gold. Now Boyle and Garland take back control, post-Brexit, post-Covid, confident that the UK hasn't got any less rageful in the quarter-century since the first movie. Both the third in the series and the first of a planned trilogy, 28 Years Later proposes that having been quarantined from mainland Europe to prevent the zombifying virus spreading further, Britain has reverted to a feudal state, its citizens retraining as archers and farmers while practising tribalism and social Darwinism. Somewhere in the mix is that pseudo-romantic Faragean notion of an elite-shedding return to the soil; early scenes are loaded with cutaways to the Olivier version of Henry V. Yet the St. George's flags we see are tattered and blood-spattered, and surviving this way of life is presented as a grim and grisly business, with monsters lurking at every turn. Thirteen years on from London 2012, Boyle intends to agitate and unsettle; less summer blockbuster than cautionary tale, 28 Years Later warns us to be careful indeed what we wish and vote for.

We're being invited, then, to huddle in the dark to witness a vision of society after deregulation and the collapse of civilisation; a movie that imagines the worst. There are still, granted, jolly Boyleisms: the first image we see is Teletubbyland, a bizarro-Albion gawped at here by youngsters being sheltered from the outside world, and this prologue climaxes with a characteristically Boyleish instruction ("RUN!"). Director of photography Anthony Dod Mantle - veteran of those old Dogme skirmishes - has picked up a state-of-the-art iPhone rig, digital 2.0, on his travels, and returned with better looking images than the original's grainy, blocky pixels. Yet what those images describe is far from a green and pleasant land, and these characters have little time to take in the scenery; the eye scans the frame for predators, not beauty. This Britain is a place of deeply strange ritual - such as pushing twelve-year-old hero Spike (Jake Williams) out into harm's way to make his first kill - and outright feral at its extremes. (One in-your-face development: after 28 years of violent twitching and lurching, the infected have shed their clothes, and now run amok with their arses exposed. Nobody needs to dress their hatred up anymore; it's all out in the open.) This is recognisably the same country that gave the world Penda's Fen and Andrew Tate, but the dream of London 2012 has tipped over into the stuff of nightmares: corpulent crawlers who emerge from the mud like bugs, a chase across a causeway as darkness falls and the tide comes in. The survivors seem drunk on Blitz spirit; even those who haven't been bitten seem to have internalised the madness of it all. Spike's bedbound mother (Jodie Comer) isn't the only figure who appears deeply unwell, and there aren't any of those pirouetting NHS nurses Boyle worked into the Opening Ceremony to oversee a recovery. It's a death cult. Any resemblance to the Britain of 2025 is etc. etc. etc.

The salvation is that Boyle continues to outrun his demons. A kick-bollock-scramble in the best sense, 28 Years Later doesn't ever hang around: lithe and assured in its cutting, positively free-associative in its music cues, it grabs fistfuls of plot and character details on the run, allowing us to catch up at our own speed. Its director has a way of finishing his own sentences with images: one character or another will start on the necessary exposition, and editor Jon Harris will cut to the fire pit or mass burial ground to which all this is apparently leading. Garland's script, closer to Civil War than Warfare, keeps changing shape, introducing familiar faces as trig points while Boyle's antsy camera takes in a near-overgrown Angel of the North and a newly desolate Sycamore Gap. This isn't the laborious worldbuilding we now expect from the first of a planned series; it's more like on-the-fly mapmaking. For a while, I worried that such restlessness would get the better of it, that movement would take precedence over thematic heft, but it ensures this belated sequel never doubles back on old ground the way last year's Alien: Romulus did, and Boyle and Garland eventually reveal that they've grasped the importance of the stories we tell ourselves. For the most part, the new film plays like a children's fable gone horribly wrong: The Hunger Games redirected by Ken Loach, or Boyle's own Millions as ambushed by George Romero. (It is a story that begs wide-eyed credulity, as with all those tales populists tell of American exceptionalism or British greatness.) It settles (a touch) with the third-act arrival of Ralph Fiennes, established post-Conclave as the ballast of Britfilm, as a Colonel Kurtz with a better bedside manner. Now we confront the spectre of mortality and the question of how we want to die: in a warm bed surrounded by loved ones, or torn limb-from-limb on some unfamiliar battlefield? It hardly counts as breezy summer escapism, so keen are Boyle and Garland to dramatise the instincts and impulses that got us here; I also wonder whether it risks what the listings magazines once described as regional variations, destined to be received very differently in the Tyne Tees and Thames areas. But it's the shake-up this lazy, somnolent summer season, coasting on former glories, sorely required: unpredictable, surprising, undeniably and admirably chancy. Through to its closing (and very British) cliffhanger - and no, I can't believe they're going there, either - 28 Years Later is wild indeed.

28 Years Later is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Friday, 20 June 2025

For what it's worth...




UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of June 13-15, 2025):

1 (new) How to Train Your Dragon (PG)
2 (1) Lilo & Stitch (U)
4 (4) The Long Wet Walk (12A)
5 (3) Ballerina (15)
6 (5) Karate Kid: Legends (12A)
8 (11) The Ballad of Wallis Island (12A) ***
9 (7) Peppa Meets The Baby Cinema Experience (U)
10 (8) Clown in a Cornfield (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:
1. Hidden/Caché [above]
3. Darling
4. F1

  
DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) A Minecraft Movie (PG)
2 (3) Sinners (15) ****
4 (new) The Amateur (12)
5 (4) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **
6 (new) Kingdom of Heaven (15)
7 (9) Gladiator II (15) ***
8 (13) 28 Days Later... (15) ****
10 (7Captain America: Brave New World (12)


My top five: 
1. Misericordia

Sunday, 15 June 2025

Scrappers: "Lollipop"


Lollipop
 is the British film industry writing what it knows. Ten years ago, director Daisy-May Hudson made Half Way, a documentary that followed her mother and younger sister as they bounced between various forms of social housing; as I noted at the time, the project was unusually sharp-eyed both about this family's plight and the interpersonal conflict that resulted from it. It's taken a decade - either because those circumstances remain a tough sell, or Hudson was waiting for things at home to settle down - but the core of Half Way has now been repurposed for a dramatic feature that really does feel like a collective effort, something that's had to be nursed onto the screen with care and sensitivity. In the mother role, Hudson subs in a decidedly sinkable Molly Brown (Posy Sterling), released from prison in the opening scene to start from scratch in a world where her two young children have been taken into care and she has to spend her first night of freedom sleeping in a tent in a park. Here from the off is someone who's slipped through the social safety net, and is now obliged to navigate a cruelly labyrinthine system to try and get upright again. For starters: to regain custody of her kids - her top priority - Molly needs ID, but what ID she has is in storage with a mother from whom she in turn is estranged. When we meet Sylvie (TerriAnn Cousins), introduced correcting the pitch of her daughter's singing voice at a wake for her late husband, we instantly understand why; this woman's paranoid ramblings about the outside world are merely a further reason to step back. (The title is Sylvie's pet name for Molly, and decidedly ironic, given the sourness that exists between these two.) With money, Hudson proposes, Molly would be on an easier street, because she'd have something to throw at the problems that pop up before her. Without it, Lollipop demonstrates, life is an obstacle course of non-starting cars, dodgy landlords, stray dogs, endless bureaucracy, and sleepless nights where if the noises outside your tent don't keep you awake, the worries inside your head will.

So it is tough, but Molly's predicament unlocks layers of conflict and jeopardy that recent Britflicks haven't troubled to access; the closest reference point would be Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake with the emphasis shifted onto the Hayley Squires character. Half Way was an unusually raw watch, in part because its focus was a life lived on the hoof, in part because Hudson couldn't have known where that story was headed when she first picked up the camera. BBC-sponsored fiction demands tighter parameters, more overt reassurance, but Lollipop retains some edge of unpredictability: it's a mix of good and very good scenes with the odd performance that hasn't quite been finessed to the requisite level. As a dramatist, Hudson has an eye and ear for confrontations between authentically rough-edged people talking and acting at crosspurposes, and she's emerged from similar circumstances as a pretty good strategist; the action isn't just lived-in, it's been thought through. A more conventional retelling of this story would have Molly butting heads with the same stonyfaced administrators, for reasons of continuity and budget; in Lollipop, she's constantly running up against different bureaucrats, a choice that speaks both to Molly's struggle to gain any kind of foothold - she keeps having to explain herself anew - and how this line of work typically burns everybody out. Every now and again, the pressure is seen to relent: on a camping excursion where living in a tent is the norm and we get some idea of what this family might be were they afforded time and space, a couple of slightly cringy dancing scenes that invoke the spectre of two-step garage and prove you can't make a Britfilm nowadays without some form of knees-up. (These scenes can be spliced into the trailer to make a hard sell appear easier viewing than it is.) Yet the unflinching close-ups, jittery handheld and raised voices keep pushing Lollipop in a different direction: here is the panic such situations foster, the uncertainty of not knowing how things will pan out, as experienced by a homeless mother keen to make every last second of her supervised visits count and a first-time fiction director trying to finish her debut before the funding dries up. It can be a rough ride, but Lollipop's strongest material really is strong; here, Hudson brings us closer to the truth of the poverty line than most.

Lollipop is now showing in selected cinemas.

Friday, 13 June 2025

For what it's worth...




UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of June 6-8, 2025):

1 (1) Lilo & Stitch (U)
3 (new) Ballerina (15)
4 (4) The Long Wet Walk (12A)
5 (3) Karate Kid: Legends (12A)
7 (5) Peppa Meets The Baby Cinema Experience (U)
8 (new) Clown in a Cornfield (15)
9 (7) The Phoenician Scheme (15) **
10 (new) Thug Life (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:
1. Darling
3. 28 Days Later

  
DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) A Minecraft Movie (PG)
3 (new) Sinners (15) ****
4 (9) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **
5 (4) Marching Powder (18)
6 (re) In the Lost Lands (15)
7 (3) Captain America: Brave New World (12)
8 (24) The Monkey (15)
9 (15) Gladiator II (15) ***
10 (17) Nosferatu (15) ***


My top five: 
1. Hard Truths
5. Anora


My top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. Decision to Leave (Saturday, BBC Two, 12.30am)
2. The Magnificent Seven [above] (Saturday, BBC Two, 1.55pm)
3. In Which We Serve (Saturday, BBC Two, 12noon)
4. The Piano (Monday, BBC Two, 11pm)
5. Funny Face (Sunday, BBC Two, 12.35pm)

In memoriam: Taina Elg (Telegraph 12/06/25)


Taina Elg
, who has died aged 95, was a Finnish dancer and actress who briefly attained Hollywood fame upon being scouted by MGM in the early 1950s; she won a Golden Globe for her performance as Angèle Ducros, the French chorine entangled with impresario Gene Kelly in George Cukor’s enduring musical Les Girls (1957).

Pert, pretty and multilingual, Elg graced three of that film’s Cole Porter-composed musical numbers: the title song, plus “Ca c’est l’amour” (in which she serenaded Kelly in a rowboat) and “Ladies in Waiting”, where her leg-kicking in dense period costume belied the fact she’d given birth before shooting. Elg credited Cukor as “the ideal director”; Variety’s critic called her “exceedingly appealing”.

While the film performed well on release, high production costs meant it initially lost money. Yet it lodged in the memory of awards voters, earning three Oscar nods, with Orry-Kelly winning Best Costume Design; at the Golden Globes, it did better yet, winning Best Picture – Comedy or Musical, with Elg and Kendall sharing the Best Actress gong.

It was to be the highpoint of her film career. Elg left MGM two years later, and the movie musical fell into decline over the next decade. Nevertheless, she retained fond memories of these early, starmaking years. “I had a wonderful time at MGM,” she recalled in a 1977 interview. “They had a certain respect for you.”

Taina Elisabeth Elg was born in Helsinki on March 9, 1930 to pianist Åke Elg (born Ludwig) and his Russian wife Elena Dobroumova, a music professor. Perhaps inevitably, the young Taina showed an aptitude for performance: as a child, she made an uncredited screen debut in the film Suominen’s Family (Suomisen perhe, 1941).

Like many, her progress was stalled by war. After the Soviets invaded Finland in 1939, the family fled first to Switzerland, then to Canada. Upon returning, Elg studied at the Finnish National Ballet, where she eventually became a soloist, touring Europe and North America. She later joined Sadler’s Wells and the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas, only for an injury to curtail her dancing career.

By then, however, Elg had caught the eye of Edwin H. Knopf, an American producer working for MGM’s London office. Elg delayed screen-testing to marry the economist (and fellow Finn) Carl-Gustav Björkenheim; yet she finally signed in 1953, making her MGM debut in the Biblical drama The Prodigal (1955) alongside Lana Turner.

Her supporting turn as a ballerina in Gaby (1956) earned her a first Golden Globe for New Foreign Star of the Year – Female, but after Les Girls, she struggled to find roles. The most prominent was that of the schoolteacher assisting Kenneth More’s Richard Hannay in The 39 Steps (1959); a more typical project was the Cinecittà-shot peplum The Bacchantes (Le baccanti, 1960), very loosely based on Euripides.
  
Elg took US citizenship in 1960 and thereafter found steady employment onstage. She made her Broadway debut as Sister Albertine in the 1970 production of Joshua Logan’s Look to the Lilies, won a Tony nomination in the 1974 revival of Frank Loesser’s Where’s Charley? and played the hero’s mother in the original 1982 production of Tommy Tune’s Nine.

Film and TV provided slimmer, albeit diverse pickings: Hercules in New York (1970) alongside the emergent bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger, a two-year shift on the ABC soap One Life to Live as tycoon’s wife Olympia Buchanan, and a guest spot on “A Fashionable Way to Die”, a 1987 episode of Murder, She Wrote set in the world of Parisian haute couture.

Elg cameoed in Mike Figgis’s murder-mystery Liebestraum (1991), Woody Allen’s made-for-television Don’t Drink the Water (1994) and the Barbra Streisand vehicle The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), before understudying in Broadway’s 1998 revival of Cabaret and appearing in the touring production of the musical Titanic (1998-99). She was awarded the Finnish Order of the Lion in 2004; she ended her career back home with the caper comedy Kummelin Jackpot (2006). 

In her rare interviews, she looked back on her opportunities with gratitude: “People always ask me, ‘huh, Taina, what about those Hollywood parties?’ and I can’t tell them any lurid stories, because I was never involved in them. I was under contract, I was married, I was very safe at MGM, and we had these lovely friends.”

Taina Elg married twice. After divorcing Björkenheim in 1960, she wed the Italian-American sociology scholar Rocco Corporale in 1982; he died in 2008. She is survived by a son, the jazz guitarist Raoul Björkenheim.

Taina Elg, born March 9, 1930, died May 15, 2025.