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

  
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.

Tuesday, 10 June 2025

In memoriam: Marcel Ophuls (Telegraph 09/06/25)


Marcel Ophuls
, who has died aged 97, was a German-born documentarist who fled his homeland in the 1930s and spent much of his career interrogating the various legacies of World War II; his international breakthrough, the landmark The Sorrow and the Pity (Le Chagrin et la Pitié, 1969), revealed the extent to which his adopted France had collaborated with the Nazis.

The son of the German-Jewish director Max Ophuls – known for such elaborate melodramas as La ronde (1950) – Marcel began his career in fiction, but achieved greater traction with complex, rigorous, meticulously edited non-fiction. In such films as The Memory of Justice (1976) and Hôtel Terminus (1988), the filmmaker set multiple testimonies side-by-side, sometimes corroborating, often contradicting, always inviting the spectator to shake any passivity and judge for themselves.

In The Sorrow and the Pity, Ophuls spent four-and-a-half hours of screen time – and many more hours of shooting – staking out the town of Clermont Ferrand with the aim “to analyse four years of collective destiny”. Patiently hearing out residents from all walks of life, the film picked insistently away at the Gaullist myth of a country united against an occupier, instead revealing two Frances at odds with one another – one resisting, the other collaborating.

Inevitably, the project sparked controversy; in France, Sorrow was denounced by conservative politicians as “a prosecutorial film” and initially rejected for both theatrical and television distribution. After much legal wrangling, it finally opened in 1971, earning an Oscar nomination the following year, but didn’t air on French TV until 1981; a station director said the film had “destroyed myths the French people still needed”.

Ophuls subsequently made films on Vietnam (The Harvest of My Lai, 1970) and the Irish Troubles (A Sense of Loss, 1972), though the latter was rejected by the BBC. His personal favourite, The Memory of Justice, revisited the Nuremberg trials in the context of more recent conflicts in Algeria and Vietnam, though the project was again beset by lengthy (and expensive) legal challenges; Ophuls filed for bankruptcy shortly thereafter and spent a decade on the lecture circuit.

He made a triumphant return, however, with the Oscar-winning Hôtel Terminus, on the life of the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie. As free-roaming as its subject, unearthing material both disturbing and absurd, the film ends in one of documentary cinema’s most extraordinary sequences, as Ophuls witnesses a chance encounter between a woman who, as a child, had seen her father carted away by the Gestapo and an elderly neighbour who’d turned a blind eye to the same events.

Though the film sparked violent arguments at Cannes, the critic Roger Ebert admired its tenacity, calling it “the film of a man who continues the conversation after others would like to move on to more polite subjects”. Yet as a characteristically combative Ophuls countered in 2004: “I’m not obsessed. I just happen to think that the Holocaust was the worst thing that happened in the 20th century. Think I’m wrong?”

Ophuls was born Hans Marcel Oppenheimer in Frankfurt on November 1, 1927, the son of Max Ophuls and his actress wife Hildegard Wall. The family fled Germany for France in 1933, taking French citizenship in 1938, whereupon Max dropped the umlaut in his stage name; after the Occupation, they fled anew to Los Angeles, where Max began an unhappy spell as a studio filmmaker and Marcel attended Hollywood High and Occidental College.

Ophuls completed military service in Japan before studying at UC Berkeley, taking US citizenship in 1950. Upon graduation, he moved to Paris, briefly studying philosophy at the Sorbonne before dropping out and working as an assistant director (initially under the pseudonym Marcel Wall, to dodge nepotism accusations) on John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (1952) and his father’s sweeping Lola Montès (1955).

He made his directorial debut with a German TV adaptation of John Mortimer’s The Dock Brief (Das Pflichtmandat, 1958) before being tapped by François Truffaut to contribute to the portmanteau film Love at Twenty (L'amour à vingt ans, 1962). By now, he was part of the New Wave set: Jeanne Moreau funded his detective comedy Banana Skin (Peau de Banane, 1963), but his fiction career came to a halt after the flop thriller Place Your Bets, Ladies (Faites vos jeux, mesdames, 1965).

Ophuls moved into documentary, taking a job with French broadcaster ORTF, where he railed against the prevailing state censorship; he was eventually fired in May 1968 after making a film deemed sympathetic to the student rioters, though by then he was well into post-production on The Sorrow and the Pity.

After Hôtel Terminus, Ophuls suffered mixed fortunes. November Days (1990), on the subject of German reunification, played as part of the BBC’s Inside Story strand, but The Troubles We’ve Seen (Veillées d'armes, 1994), on wartime journalism and the Bosnian conflict, failed to reach an audience, despite a César nomination in France.

He worked more sparingly in the new millennium, completing Max par Marcel (2009) on his father’s legacy and the career overview Ain’t Misbehavin’ (Un voyageur, 2013), his final completed film; a later project on anti-Semitism and the Middle East, Des vérités désagréables (Unpleasant Truths), ran into financial and legal troubles, and remained unfinished at the time of his death.

During a visit to Israel in 2007, Ophuls attempted to define his life’s work: “I’m not a preacher, a judge or an adviser. I’m just a filmmaker trying now and then to make sense of crises... Life made me, unwillingly, an expert on 20th-century crises. I would’ve preferred to direct musicals.”

He is survived by his wife Regine (née Ackermann) and three daughters.

Marcel Ophuls, born November 1, 1927, died May 24, 2025.

Friday, 6 June 2025

For what it's worth...




UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of May 30-June 1, 2025):

1 (1) Lilo & Stitch (U)
3 (new) Karate Kid: Legends (12A)
4 (new) The Long Wet Walk (12A)
5 (new) Peppa Meets The Baby Cinema Experience (U)
7 (4) The Phoenician Scheme (15) **
8 (new) Doctor Who: The Two-Episode Finale (uncertificated)
9 (5Thunderbolts* (12A)
10 (6Sinners (15) ****

(source: BFI)

My top five:
1. The Piano Teacher [above]
3. Darling

  
DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) A Minecraft Movie (PG)
3 (3) Captain America: Brave New World (12)
4 (24) Marching Powder (18)
5 (12) Mickey 17 (15) **
6 (4) Warfare (15) **
7 (9) The Wild Robot (U) **
8 (6) Disney's Snow White (PG)
9 (7) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **
10 (8) Dog Man (U)


My top five: 
1. Hard Truths
3. Anora


My top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. Four Weddings & A Funeral (Sunday, BBC One, 10.30pm)
2. The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Friday, BBC Two, 11pm)
3. BlacKkKlansman (Saturday, BBC One, 12.10am)
4. Road to Perdition (Saturday, ITV1, 11.20pm and Tuesday, ITV1, 10.50pm)
5. Jumanji (Sunday, ITV1, 1.40pm)