From the archive: "X+Y"

The big blue eyes of the actor Asa Butterfield have often been used to simplify complex matters for younger audiences. In both 2008’s The Boy with the Striped Pyjamas and 2011’s Hugo, those peepers became a recurring focal point for the camera, allowing us to see reflected in them first the horrors of the Holocaust, then the wonders of silent cinema. In X+Y, a winning and impressive feature debut from erstwhile documentarist Morgan Matthews, the subject is autism: Butterfield’s playing Nathan, a Sheffield lad headed to Taiwan, site of a maths training camp ahead of the International Maths Olympiad. Among these numbercrunchers – of which The Imitation Game’s Alex Lawther is the most assured, and Jake Davies’ Luke a poignantly stiff standout – Nathan is, as a fellow traveller notes, “neither the weirdest, nor the best mathematician”, but “painfully average”. This once, the outcast fits in. 

In truth, plot is only half the story here; more striking is how Matthews’ camera comes out in absolute sympathy with its protagonist. Staying close to Nathan where possible – maintaining a documentarist’s instincts, perhaps – allows X+Y to suggest how those with autism approach the world, in ways that succeed in being both free from condescension and quietly, appreciably cinematic. Quartered slices of toast and an exam room set up with perfectly aligned desks get us caught up in Nathan’s quest for order, before such easy symmetries start to be tested with the move eastwards into less squarely predictable territory.

At every stage, the actors approach this venture in exactly the right spirit: in meshing, they form the support network the film (and its lead character) needs. Butterfield, in his most impressive screen appearance yet, has clearly done his homework, while Rafe Spall deftly conjures something cherishable – and often hilarious – out of a characterisation with several possible pitfalls: the shambling mentor juggling a brilliant mind with a MS-stricken body. Eddie Marsan does his usual swell job with a handful of scenes as the mathletes’ beardy, chivvying manager, but it’s fellow Mike Leigh graduate Sally Hawkins, as Nathan’s mum, who makes the biggest impression here. Two moments, in particular, stay with you: one at the airport, where she anticipates a farewell hug her haphephobic son can’t think to deliver – Matthews gets knockout effects from his hero’s emotional reticence – and another in the final reel, attempting to explain the concept of love in terms her boy might understand. 

This dream team assembled, Matthews knows he doesn’t have to force anything; instead, he finds ways to move both film and Nathan forward without recourse to the usual lazy, careworn mechanisms. He hones in on formative moments, learning experiences: Nathan’s tentative first steps to the blackboard, say, or his growing friendship with one of his hosts’ daughters (debutant Jo Yang, smashing), one of a number of little arithmetics that add up to a surprisingly potent and affecting whole. Rare is the British feature that champions intelligence in any form; rarer still the crowdpleaser with heart and a brain.

(MovieMail, March 2015)

X+Y screens on BBC2 tonight at 9pm.

Political animal: "Nature of the Beast"

At a time when the British Left has never seemed more fractious and divided - if not over the matter of Corbyn, then on the matter of Brexit - Daniel Draper's documentary Nature of the Beast presents by way of a blessed relief: here is a thoroughly genial portrait of a figure who predates all socialism's current crises, and who continues to stand for more or less the same values now as when he first entered Parliament in 1970. No matter whether you are of the Left or Right, you know where you stand with Dennis Skinner, the so-called "Beast of Bolsover", who emerged from the coal mines of Derbyshire to head up Labour's militant wing. Yet while Draper's film is dotted with examples of this firebrand's most memorable Parliamentary interjections and outbursts, behind-the-scenes footage throws up plentiful surprises. Here we find Skinner the nature boy, wandering the parks of London to marvel at magnolia blossoms (an interest apparently cultivated at a formative age in reaction to spending eight hours a day in the darkness of the pits); here is a committed Republican lending his voice to a word-perfect rendition of "Getting to Know You" from The King and I; we also find out in passing that Skinner once competed as a racewalker, and that he's seen his contemporary Woody Allen's entire works ("Some are not as good as others").

As that last factoid would suggest, Skinner is very much a politician of the old school. One of nine children - the majority of whom brushed off the graphite to pass into county politics - he's practically the last survivor of an age before potential candidates were plucked near-exclusively from the middle-classes and heavily vetted as to their suitability and likability; Draper discovers him entering Parliament at 8 a.m. ("when the Post Office opens") to get a headstart on the day's duties. The biographical backstory unfurls a philosophy tested and forged during the bitter labour disputes of the 1970s and 80s - Draper's commendably detailed coverage of these casting today's divisions in a new light - yet talking heads reveal Skinner's constituents don't regard him as a "left-wing rebel" (a construct of the mainstream media, unable to properly address and process anybody who falls beyond its centrist purview), rather a man who just happens to talk like them, and has more than an inkling of the work they do.

Arguably, there are gaps and omissions. The tallying up of Skinner's victories and defeats leaves scant time to get into his personal relationships, and - mainly shot before 2016, presumably around a crowded Parliamentary schedule - there is little-to-nowt on the debates surrounding Brexit (for which Skinner voted), though we do see Dennis wagging an accusatory finger at David "Dave" Cameron: "This man has done more to divide this nation than anyone." Draper can, however, plug many of these holes with the hard-won wisdom of his subject, who would surely have no time whatsoever for the arcane ideological spats breaking out on Twitter every half-hour: indeed, his final-reel definition of socialism, and his counsel to those who would tar all politicians with the same brush, is so simple as to be deeply affecting. Observed on the stump, Skinner is still sharp, still passionate, as pugnacious as ever: to watch the pride in his eyes as he recalls singlehandedly defeating Enoch Powell's motion to kill off stem-cell research at an early stage is to reengage with politics, and the possibilities it affords for positive change, at some vital level. The list of the prominent MPs and PMs Skinner has outlasted, meanwhile, grows with each passing year: its own advert for holding onto your principles, and showing up to fight for them, day in day out.

Nature of the Beast is now playing in selected cinemas.    

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office 
for the weekend of September 1-3, 2017:

1 (1) American Made (15) ***
2 (2) Dunkirk (12A) ***
3 (3) The Hitman's Bodyguard (15) **
4 (5) The Emoji Movie (U)
5 (4) Logan Lucky (12A) ****
6 (6) Annabelle: Creation (15)
7 (8) Despicable Me 3 (U)
8 (7) Detroit (15) ***
9 (new) The Limehouse Golem (15) ***
10 (9) Girls Trip (15) ***

(source: theguardian.com)

My top five: 
1. Belle de Jour [above]
2. God's Own Country
3. Logan Lucky
4. Hotel Salvation
5. In Bed with Victoria


Top Ten DVD rentals: 

1 (new) Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (12) **
2 (1) John Wick: Chapter 2 (15) ***
3 (2) Beauty and the Beast (PG) ***
4 (7) Fifty Shades Darker (18)
5 (new) Kong: Skull Island (12)
6 (3) Life (15) **
7 (4) Sing (U) ***
8 (5) Their Finest (12) ***
9 (new) Logan (12) ***
10 (6) The Lego Batman Movie (U) ***

(source: lovefilm.com)

My top five: 
1. I Am Not Your Negro
2. David Lynch: The Art Life
3. Suntan
4. Lady Macbeth
5. Williams


Top five films on terrestrial TV:
1. The French Connection (Friday, C4, 1.20am)
2. United 93 (Saturday, ITV1, 10.35pm)
3. X+Y (Saturday, BBC2, 9pm)
4. The Rookie (Saturday, BBC1, 12.25am)
5. Rogue (Friday, BBC1, 12.05am)

"Goon: Last of the Enforcers" (Guardian 08/09/17)

Goon: Last of the Enforcers **

Dir: Jay Baruchel. With: Seann William Scott, Alison Pill, Marc-André Grondin, Liev Schreiber. 101 mins. Cert: 15

Hollywood’s haphazard summer season persists with this sequel to 2011’s knockabout ice-hockey comedy, a film surely ten people tops felt required any follow-up. Writer-turned-director Jay Baruchel has a funny-strange way of compiling it: he pads his vaguely depressive central thrust – Seann William Scott’s dim-bulb brawler Doug Glatt realising he’s now too old to throw down – with reels of boysy inside-hockey business that yield more shrugs than laughs. Enough useful players are on the roster to generate sporadic mild chuckles – MVP Wyatt Russell, as Glatt’s thunderous bad-boy rival, inadvertently nails a major issue (“the world isn’t watching… just Canada, and maybe three or four states”) – but nobody lands the one knockout punchline that would elevate matters above tolerable mediocrity.

Goon: Last of the Enforcers opens in selected cinemas from today. 

"The Vault" (Catholic Herald 06/09/17)

The American writer-director Dan Bush enjoyed cult success ten years ago with The Signal, a clever media studies-age fable about a mysterious transmission that converted suggestible viewers into bloodthirsty killers. It’s just possible he hit upon the idea for his latest while standing in line with that movie’s residual cheques. Why not do a film set entirely in a bank, perennial locus of low-level tension? The result: The Vault (**, 15, 91 mins), a hokey horror-thriller in which tough-talking robbers the Dillon sisters (Taryn Manning and Francesca Eastwood) storm Centurion Trust’s downtown branch, only to set off more than alarm bells.

That this isn’t another Dog Day Afternoon can be gleaned from the clanging hints dropped early on. One employee lets slip the old building spooks wider-eyed colleagues; twitchy assistant manager James Franco seems unlikely to reassure anybody falling behind on their repayments. Bush, clearly, intends to tease us. Franco redirects the gang to the basement vault, thereby cueing fully ten minutes of sweaty Dillon drilling, and even when the reinforced door finally creaks open, an unhelpful power surge plunges everybody into darkness.

In short, as much here tries the patience as frays the nerves. It’s a shame Bush resists the full-on monster movie we anticipate, because the path he does follow carries The Vault into that netherworld between the horror and thriller genres. Neither scary or nasty enough for one, nor smart enough for the other, the whole assumes the look of an idle thought that has no pay-off: the final half-hour proves anticlimactic, with Bush shamelessly splicing one late reveal together from two prominent Nineties hits.

The ragtag players, at least, approximate the mixed crowd trying not to look too overdrawn or otherwise suspicious in the lobby of your high-street HSBC. Franco, thankfully, looks to have reverted to acting from annoying the planet, and this does feel like a breakthrough of sorts for the fierce-ferocious Eastwood, previously best known as a model, reality star and daughter of Clint. Her resemblance to her mother, the actress Frances Fisher, is properly spooky; the yarn rattling away around her like loose change is, regrettably, altogether less haunting.

The Vault opens in selected cinemas today, ahead of its DVD release on October 9.

On demand: "Don't Knock Twice"

The breakthrough success of 2015's The Witch and the renewed volatility of gender politics may mean we're in for an influx of witchcraft in cinemas over the coming months. Don't Knock Twice, the Welsh director Caradog James' follow-up to 2013's promising philosophical sci-fi The Machine, sets out to do something a little more characterful within the bounds of quiet-quiet-loud horror. Its main event is a mother-and-child reunion that would be fraught enough even if sculptor Jess (Katee Sackhoff) and Chloe (Lucy Boynton), the now-teenage offspring Jess abandoned at birth while battling drug dependency issues, hadn't been joined, in the palatial residence mom shares with her flash banker hubby, by the pallid spirit Chloe believes she summoned during her extended stay in care by ginger-knocking on a local crone's front door.

The mind quickly races towards the thematic possibilities this interloper provides; we're led to wonder whether the witch might be an avatar of neglect, insecurity, loneliness or childlessness, the spectres of all of which hang heavy over this particular household. Yet for much of the duration James's interest resides in the tentative pas de deux going on between his leads, two complicated women nervily circling one another, unsure whether they want to embrace or just throttle the other one. Their uncertain dynamic follows on from the Teresa Palmer-Maria Bello subplot in last summer's sleeper hit Lights Out, but benefits from being couched within a British social-realist setting (the foster home, the class tension between boho mother and loadsamoney hubby, a slightly overemphatic Nick Moran as the cop on the case).

The weak spot is the plotting, which doesn't click pleasingly so much as clang discordantly together, overly reliant as it is on such narrative shortcuts as Jess uncovering a Lever Arch file or glancing upon a framed photo to work out who the real demon is here, and at the very last burping up one ending too many. Here lies the kind of contrivance that requires finessing for an audience not to notice how contrived it is. Still, the more often than not analogue VFX are - as in James's previous production - well above average, the imagery (such as Jess and Chloe burning all the doors in their property, ironically to prevent malevolent spirits from crossing their threshold) is generally arresting, and there's one genuine surprise come the final reel. Two films in, and James is shaping up as a capable genre kid: someone should hand him the script and budget that puts directors in the multiplexes, and see what results.

Don't Knock Twice is now streaming on Netflix.

Send in the clowns: "It: Chapter One"

It has been proven, most recently by last month's disastrous The Dark Tower, that there are no shortcuts when it comes to adapting Stephen King's doorstoppers: you go all in or go home. It, memorably, has been filmed once before at length, as a 1990 miniseries with VHS cover art (Tim Curry in full make-up as malevolent clown Pennywise) that loomed large over many teenage sleepovers. It, in its latest, cinematic iteration, arrives on the crest of a wave of breathless 1980s revivalism that has spawned the likes of the soon-to-be-a-major-motion-picture bestseller Ready Player One and the Netflix series Stranger Things (from which it snatches up one of its excellent young leads); it means there is a movie theatre playing Tim Burton's Batman in the background of its odd-numbered scenes, and fake Billy Idol or actual New Kids on the Block (which is more horrifying?) on the soundtrack of its even-numbered scenes. It has evidently been noted that there might be money in nostalgia. It the movie also emerges at a time when the predations of children's entertainers from this period are far more widely known and discussed: a metaphor lurking in the sewers on King's pages and on the small screen is now out in plain sight. It is a shade disappointing how underdeveloped it appears.

Its director is Andy Muschietti, the Argentine who held down a multiplex screen for a week or two with 2013's Mama, here seizing upon a known property and attempting something a little more marketable yet. It is quickly established that the sundappled Everytown of Derry is a cruel world: a place where nerdy, bookish, plain, plump, stuttery or otherwise maladroit kids are subjected to daily terrors both from without (fears about the AIDS epidemic) and within (playground bullies scarcely less vicious than the boogeymen stalking the town's peripheries). It is not so far, this Derry, from the Castle Rock of Rob Reiner's earlier King touchstone Stand by Me, especially when these boys are inspired by flame-haired group crush Beverly (Molly Ringwald-alike Sophia Lillis) to leap off a cliff into the lake below. It is the case that even the elders of this conservative backwater, distant and forbidding, come to be framed and lit like monsters: Beverly returns home from a skin-pricklingly uncomfortable encounter with a middle-aged pharmacist to a single father who possibly spies the Tampax this Carrie-at-large been shopping for and whispers "Tell me you're still my little girl." It may be no coincidence that the miniseries debuted in the final year of Reagan's family values-hawking administration, and the first season of a show called Twin Peaks.

It will, however, be the sorry fate of every audiovisual artefact released in 2017 to be compared - and, in the main, compared unfavourably - to what David Lynch has achieved over the past four months on TV, and setting It against Twin Peaks: The Return, you soon realise there are significant differences between what teenagers find scary and what grown-ups find scary, between a carnival barker like Muschietti and a dreamweaver such as Lynch. It's clown, certainly, is a superficially unsettling presence as embodied by Bill Skarsgard, lurking on riverbanks (a crib from The Innocents, maybe?) and erupting out of slide projections, as Curry once seemed to from Rediffusion television sets; he even seems promisingly toothy upon ripping off a small child's arm during the opening sequence. It eventually becomes apparent, though, that - unlike the monsters in The Return, who look to have emerged from the bowels of the universe in order to tell us something dire about that universe - Muschietti's Pennywise has no greater depth or meaning than that original cover art: he's just a creep who happens to have spent a lot of time in wardrobe and post-production. It's treatment of rape and paedophilia are almost wholly glib; its allusions to The Frog Prince, which a Guillermo del Toro might have flooded with emotion, are finally handled rather jokily, undermining whatever impact they might have had.

It 2017 - forever more 15 than 18, succumbing to and perpetuating that cosy nostalgia the new Peaks spent so long resisting and refuting - is not a movie about the real evils at large in the world and its entertainment industry, but a movie about all the pop culture its makers and audience have consumed over the years, up to and including It the miniseries. It depends on us finding clowns terrifying because TV and the movies have told us clowns are terrifying, whereas it seems to me that clowns are only really about as terrifying as, say, Dermot O'Leary. It can still be enjoyed as a broadly proficient popcorn movie, shuttling us from one setpiece to the next as if that was all King were good for, and - who knows? - if you were thirteen or fourteen, its jolts may help bring you a little closer to the girl or boy you snuck into the Cineworld to see it with. It is, however, just another in a now very long line of latter-day Hollywood funhouses: you go in, get amused or rattled by the ooky sights popping out of the woodwork, and come out barely remembering a damn thing about it, your pockets ten pounds, dollars or Euros lighter. It naturally, as product, leaves the door open for the possibility of a sequel, with a creak not quite loud enough to cover any yawns or sighs.

It: Chapter One opens in cinemas nationwide from Friday.