Mindhorn

High concept goes lo-fi in this British comedy that treads similar territory to 2013’s ‘Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa’. Hell, Steve Coogan’s in both of them. Here Coogan plays Peter Eastman, an actor who’s done rather well in a forensic detective TV drama called ‘Windjammer’, a spin off of 1980s hi-tech cop show ‘Mindhorn’ whose protagonist was played by insufferable egomaniac Richard Thorncroft (Julian Barratt) and which ended after three seasons when an embarrassingly drunk and coked up Thorncroft publically humiliated himself on a talk show, offended everyone associated with the show, dubbed the Isle of Man (the series’ setting) a “shithole”, and announced that he was off to Hollywood.

Twenty five years later, having abjectly failed to make it in Tinseltown, Thorncroft is reduced to making commercials, attending auditions for rubbish parts, and haranguing his long-suffering agent (Harriet Walter). When Paul Melly (Russell Tovey), the chief suspect in a murder case, contacts the Isle of Man Constabulary to say that he will only talk to Mindhorn, Chief Inspector Newsome (David Schofield) and D.C. Baines (Andrea Riseborough) reluctantly contact Thorncroft and ask him to resume his old role. What follows – as you’ll probably guess, given the involvement of both Coogan and ‘Mighty Boosh’ regular Barratt – is a comedy of embarrassments that is, by turns, genuinely funny, dispiritingly predictable and ploddingly laboured. The moments where it really hits its stride are certainly worth the ticket price, but ‘Alpha Papa’ it isn’t.

One of its funniest set pieces is the opening, which sets up the dynamic of the ‘Mindhorn’ TV show. Full of macho posturing, overly-dramatic line deliveries and opening credits delivered in a hideous font, it’s a spot on piece of spoofery. Imagine ‘Mindhorn’ as a cross between ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’ and ‘Bergerac’ with Thorncroft’s performance akin to that of “John Actor” playing Monkfish in the recurring ‘Fast Show’ sketches. (Mindhorn/Monkfish: I’m stating the obvious here, aren’t I?) Indeed, Thorncroft’s casual sexism recalls Monkfish’s “put your knickers on and make me a cup of tea” ethos.

Director Sean Foley, whose first film this is, mines a lot of humour from the cult of 1980s. A running gag about ‘Mindhorn’ merchandise pokes fun at any number of American hit shows of the era, while the ATV logo is sneakily inserted in the ‘Mindhorn’ opening credits. And there are a handful of bitchy jokes about ‘Bergerac’ (the John Nettles starrer that was set on Jersey). Essie Davis’s role as ‘Mindhorn’ co-star and romantic interest Patrica Deville is a thinly veiled nod to Louise Jameson’s nothing role on ‘Bergerac’.

But beyond nostalgic box-ticking for 80s TV fans, what does the movie have to offer? Sad to say that Barratt is probably the least of its attractions: not only does Thorncroft have to be an arrogant price for 90% of the running time to make the concept work, but Barratt seems to enjoy playing the façade a little too much, and when the time comes for the character’s redemption in the final act, it all feels very forced. Fortunately, everyone else is on form – Davis, Riseborough and an hilariously irascible Schofield are a delight to watch, Tovey takes a very trickily written character (Melly’s mental deficiency, while again necessary to the plot, verges on exploitative) and does fine work, and Simon Farnaby nabs the Agitation ‘Man of the Match’ award for his broadly comedic yet oleaginously creepy turn as Clive, Thorncroft’s former stuntman and now romantic rival.

The hour twenty five minute running time is just right. The pace is generally decent, except when Foley takes too long to set up a joke or labours the payoff (some business involving a switched videotape is a case in point). There’s one set-piece – an assassination attempt and a high speed getaway that are assumed to be part of a civic parade, a bored dignitary giving a running commentary on the whole thing – that is inspired in its concept and pitch perfect as an archetype of British humour. Had ‘Mindhorn’ scraped together another three or four moments this good, and Barratt redialled the performance just a tad, it could have been great. But there’s no reason why the same team, with just a slightly sharper approach, can’t deliver a bona fide belter next time round.

Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa

Originally created for BBC Radio 4’s ‘On the Hour’ to satirize a certain media type – the self-important but culturally banal radio presenter – Alan Partridge (in the form of Steve Coogan, and it would take a more cynical critic than yours truly to speculate on where Partridge ends and Coogan begins) has been around for more than two decades. The transition from radio to small screen was seamless and the guy’s even found his way into print. Who’d have thought, though, that Partridge would have made it to the big screen, let alone so successfully?

The point of Alan Partridge is that, to put it mildly, he’s an arse. Pompous, pedantic and socially inept to the point where he can cause tumultuous offence without even realising it, he’s also the personification of a specific strand of parochial Englishness: the kind of guy, in other words, who thinks loft conversions and traffic disruptions make for scintillating cocktail party conversation; the kind of guy whose favourite Bond movies are the Roger Moore years; the kind of guy who still sports a comb-over and wears driving gloves; the kind of guy finds himself embroiled in a siege/hostage situation and the thing he expresses most surprise at is a woman officer in charge of the situation.

Partridge, I reiterate, is an arse. While having an arse as protagonist is not necessarily a hindrance in a sitcom – let’s face it, many of the great sitcom creations, from Harold Steptoe and his pathetic fumbling towards middle class conformity to Basil Fawlty and his jaw-droppingly casual xenophobia, are deeply flawed characters – the longer format of the feature film requires a different set of aesthetics parameters and at the very least a surface-level reason for the audience’s emotional engagement. And at the same time there’s the tricky business of upping a small screen character to the big screen without the whole enterprise seeming inherently absurd. (‘Porridge’ – great TV, lousy movie. ‘Steptoe and Son’ – ditto. ‘On the Buses’ – … er, actually that one was lousy in any incarnation. Forget ‘On the Buses’.)

Fortunately, director Declan Lowney – a stalwart of British TV, with credits including ‘Cold Feet’, ‘Father Ted’ and ‘Little Britain’ – strikes just the right balance; while the script, by Coogan, Peter Baynham, Neil Gibbons, Rob Gibbons and Armando Iannucci, plays Partridge off against fellow-DJ-with-a-grudge Pat Farrell (Colm Meany), corporate shark Jason Tresswell (Nigel Lindsay), and a team of increasingly disgruntled cops.

North Norfolk Digital, the radio station Partridge and Farrell call home, has been taken over, rebranded, flooded with corporate sloganeering and its employees are steeling themselves for downsizing. When Partridge catches sight of a memo suggesting it’s him or Farrell, he doesn’t hesitate in encouraging management to sack Farrell. Not that he doesn’t feel bad about it afterwards; his housekeeper Lynn (Felicity Montagu) offers a salve: “Pat’s Irish, isn’t he? Why don’t you donate fifty pounds to Sinn Fein?” As a clang-dropping line, it’s nothing compared to Sidekick Simon (Tim Key)’s on-air rumination that tensions in the Middle East could be reduced if Judaism and Islam merged: “They could call themselves Jislam”. Even Partridge is shocked enough to reprimand his co-host: “Never make fun of Islam. Only even make fun of Christianity. And the Jews a little bit.”

I digress. At the launch party for the rebranded station, Farrell crashes the party with a shotgun and takes hostages. An armed-response team are soon on the scene. Farrell refuses to talk to anyone except Partridge, blithely unaware that it was he who brokered Farrell’s redundancy. But standard hostage negotiation isn’t enough for Farrell and Partridge finds himself on air with an armed and extremely pissed off ex-colleague. What follows is kind of ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ in Norfolk blended with an AOR version of ‘Good Morning, Vietnam’ where Adrian Cronaeur wears crap cardigans and is nervous around women. It’s as viciously acidic in its portraiture of Englishness as ‘The World’s End’, and as consistently hilarious. Edgar Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy finale has the bigger concept and its execution is more Hollywoodized, but the overall aesthetic of the two films is very similar. ‘Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa’ would make a great opener to a double bill with ‘The World’s End’.

Another potential pitfall that Lowney avoids: the hostage genre is notoriously static; the milieu of a radio station (small booths; microphone; participants sitting and talking) equally so. Yet ‘Alpha Papa’ maintains an almost constant state of movement, whether it’s Partridge accidentally locking himself out of the very siege he’s meant to be negotiating (the scene pays off with a cringingly embarrassing image that also serves as the most bizarre homage to ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ you’re likely to see), or traversing the building’s endless corridors with Angela (Monica Dolan), the mumsy production assistant he’s taken a shine to: “Walking and talking, very ‘West Wing’,” he remarks in almost fourth-wall-breaking acknowledgement. “I don’t watch the show,” Angela responds, blandly cutting him off as he launches into a hammy American accent. (The film delights in having its supporting cast interrupt Partridge mid-flow, wonderfully puncturing his myriad self-aggrandizing moments.)

Partridge bumbles and spews verbiage and exacerbates the crisis, all the while playing up to the media attention which he sees as a ticket to career revivification. The selfishness of the ploy earns him Tresswell’s approbation and Lynn’s disgust. And here we make the true small-to-big-screen leap: where the Alan Partridge of radio and small screen is unchanging in his parochialism, a man who never learns, who remains spectacularly non-cognizant of the offence he’s capable of causing, the Alan Partridge of the big screen develops. He never becomes a hero – perish the thought of him doing something iconic! – but he moves towards some small degree of redemptive behaviour.

The progress of Partridge you might call it, and it kicks off a wonderfully crowd-pleasing (if nigglingly short-lived) sequence where Partridge (minor spoiler only, since the trailer pretty much gives it away) joins forces with Farrell and they take to the road in a canary yellow outside broadcast vehicle in an anti-corporate roadshow. But Alan’s complicity in Farrell’s job loss is lurking in the wings, and the final act lurches abruptly into thrilleramics. This gives the film a ragged if still entertaining denouement. ‘Alpha Papa’ stops just short of being stone-cold brilliant; but when you stop to consider how crass an Alan Partridge film could have been, damned good is something worth broadcasting. Even on North Norfolk Digital.

Despicable Me 2

At some point – probably while it was still playing in cinemas – someone took a look at the returns for ‘Despicable Me’ and gave the sequel the green light. At some point – probably after attending a kids’ party – someone sent out a one-word memo: “minions”. And thus ‘Despicable Me 2’ could easily have been “The Minion Show”. To certain degree, the epithet’s fair: the loony yellow thingies enjoy waaaaaaay more screen time in this outing, and they play a much greater part in the plot, but directors Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud have a couple of aces up their sleeve to ensure that the minions don’t overwhelm.

The first is a beautiful reversal of Gru (Steve Carell)’s character arc from the original. As the film opens, he’s abandoned his crooked ways and has put Dr Nefario (Russell Brand) and the minions to work producing jams and preserves as part of a – shock, horror! – legitimate business plan; Nefario in particular is so incensed by legitimacy that he accepts a job offer elsewhere. Gru’s also being an attentive father to Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier) and Agnes (Elsie Fisher). So far, so honest. Then he’s recruited – much against his will – by Silas Ramsbottom (Steve Coogan) of the Anti-Villain League to unmask a super-villain operating undercover from a mall. The crim-to-nice-guy transition of ‘Despicable Me’ is effectively flipped on its head as Gru has to re-embrace his old ways in order to get the job done.

The second is Kristen Wiig. After memorable work in an essentially nothing role (Miss Hattie) first time round, Coffin and Renaud reward her with the showier and infinitely more flamboyant role of Lucy Wilde, the agent despatched by Ramsbottom to first contact, and then work with, Gru. Lucy is wonderfully demented character and Wiig delivers in fine style.

All sharp suits, lipstick tazers and boundless energy, Lucy gives this film something absent from its predecessor: a romantic subplot. Where ‘Despicable Me’ traded on flashbacks to the dismissive attitude of Gru’s mother, the sequel depicts a playground humiliation that’s left Gru perennially nervous around women. His growing attraction to Lucy is frustrated by his well-meaning but annoying neighbour Jillian (Nasim Pedrad)’s attempts to set him up with her gum-chewing airhead friend Shannon (Kristen Schaal), and paralleled by Margo’s tentative romance with cocky teenager Antonio (Moises Arias), son of Mexican restaurant owner Eduardo (Benjamin Bratt) – one of Ramsbottom and Lucy’s chief suspects.

And on top of all this, someone or something is kidnapping the minions.

Plenty of material from ‘Despicable Me’ is revisited: the gloating villain in whom the heart of a lonely child still beats (the blithely indifferent mother is replaced by the matchmaking neighbour); Gru’s spectacularly non-conformist parenting skills (his attitude to his charges is a little less Dickensian this time around, but some of the entertainments he lays on for Agnes’s birthday party veer towards the don’t-try-this-at-home); Nefario’s frustration at Gru being sidetracked from proper old-fashioned villainy; Gru’s attempts to infiltrate the fortress-like lair of an even more devious villain than himself. But it’s all done so deftly, and woven around the development of all of its protagonists, that it never seems like ‘Despicable Me 2’ is a retread; indeed, it’s demonstrates the kind of organic progression from the first film that far more sequels should aspire to. 

Moreover, it’s funnier, more inventive and boasts far more appealing animation. Lucy’s kidnapping of Gru and her journey to Ramsbottom’s undersea HQ melds ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ and ‘Danger: Diabolik’ in fine, deadpan style. Eduardo’s hacienda recalls Sanchez’s Mexican hideaway in ‘Licence to Kill’, but with tacos instead of cocaine. The humour ranges from surprisingly subtle to utterly off-the-wall, reaching its most demented in a sequence where Gru, equipped with a Geiger counter type belt, prowls a suspect’s boutique, thrusting his crotch ‘Sexy and I Know It’ stylee at every object or surface that might yield a reading.

Pathos balances the humour nicely, as in Gru’s abrupt transition from Mr Positive when he senses he might have a chance with Lucy, to Mr Positively Depressed on thinking he might never see her again. If Margo’s brief but potent crush on Antonio will probably strike a chord with kids of a certain age group, Gru’s rollercoaster of emotions will almost certainly leave their parents nodding in sympathetic recognition. Elsewhere, Gru’s frustration at chickening out on making a phone call culminates in him pulling a flamethrower at the poor old instrument of telephonic communication: a poignant/slightly psychotic reminder that you’re never too old to get the jitters about asking somebody out immediately segues into pratfall heavy comedy as the minion equivalent of the fire brigade turn up to tackle the blaze.

Yup, it all comes back to the minions. They even hijack the end credits. And why not? They’re like a Greek chorus of cuteness, idiocy and abject incompetence wrapped up in one rib-tickling bundle. A yellow bundle.

The Look of Love

There were two criticisms of ‘The Look of Love’ that followed me into the cinema like a couple of Chihuahuas snapping at my ankles. The first was that Steve Coogan’s central performance was little more than Steve Coogan plays Alan Partridge playing Paul Raymond; the second was that the film lacks a moral centre.

Both are accurate. Both are kind of the point.

‘The Look of Love’ – an examination of the life of British porn baron Paul Raymond, from his money-spinning property deals to his notoriety as owner of “revue bars” (i.e. strip clubs) and publisher of top-shelf magazine ‘Men Only’ – is so effective in its evocative of the grim seediness of Soho in the 1970s and 1980s (the principle decades in which the film is set) that the comic baggage Coogan will always be fated to bring to any role is a positive relief. His arch delivery of much of his dialogue sees him firmly in on the act. Having said that, a knowing directorial decision to play on his established persona should not detract from the due acknowledgement: this is Coogan’s best outing as an actor thus far.

The facts of Raymond’s life (as espoused by the film) boil down to a simple series of events: Raymond makes some serious money as a property baron, fancies himself as an impresario, opens a member’s only nightclub featuring exotic dancers, makes a shitload more money, drives his choreographer wife Jean (Anna Friel) away with all his philandering, takes up with soft porn starlet Fiona Richmond (Tamsin Egerton), and invests financially and emotionally in his daughter Debbie (Imogen Poots) as his corporate successor, only for her to go off the rails in spectacularly self-destructive style.

It’s referenced on at least four occasions in Matt Greenhalgh’s screenplay that Paul Raymond was born Jeffrey Quinn. That he reinvented himself on arrival in London as a young man, shedding his Liverpudlian background, is a snippet of backstory that Raymond delivers as well-rehearsed press-conference banter in two scenes set years apart. The inference is that ‘Paul Raymond’ was an elaborate façade that Jeffrey Quinn disappeared into. It’s a reading born out by a despairingly revealing sequence where his son from an early, previously unmentioned marriage, turns up at Raymond’s vulgarly over-designed penthouse and tries to learn something about the father he’s never known. Raymond gives him a slap up meal, breaks open some good champagne, and can’t wait to show him the door.

Coogan’s performance gives us Paul Raymond as, variously, a little-boy-lost charmer who (it would seem) invested his property millions in shows and wank mags purely to meet girls; a raconteur who throws out erudite conversational snippets and self-deprecating one-liners and effortlessly manipulates his associates into doing his bidding; and a man who, for all that he indulges his daughter to the max and dotes on his grandchildren, has a complete moral disconnect even when his lifestyle coils its licentious tentacles around those dearest to him. The two most shocking scenes portray Debbie’s cocaine use. In the first, Raymond catches her using for the first time, and his only admonition is that cheap shit bought on the street is cut and could contain anything – “if you’re going to do this, buy the good stuff”. In the second, Debbie announces, distraught, that she’s been diagnosed with breast cancer. Dad and daughter do a big fat line of commiseratory coke together.

Poots knocks it out of the stadium as Debbie Raymond. Her winningly gauche performance of the eponymous ballad over the end credits gives the film what small claim it has to a human element. She nails the character’s fluctuation between intense vulnerability and fierce competitiveness. In her scenes with Coogan, ‘The Look of Love’ has the focus of a Jacobean tragedy: the misguided patriarch, his personal relationships self-sabotaged, tries to justify his wanton excesses by living vicariously through his daughter, only to broker her destruction because she is unable to survive the very lifestyle that sustains him.

All told, ‘The Look of Love’ is downbeat and then some. Director Michael Winterbottom makes no bones that, for all Raymond’s protestations that he wasn’t a pornographer, ‘Men Only’ was a grubby and unaesthetic delivery system for gynaecologically blunt images of women. Two ‘Men Only’ photoshoots are depicted and, for all the T&A on display, they’re utterly unerotic. Same goes for the handful of sex scenes, bodies stacked up against each other like marble slabs.

In scene after scene, Raymond tries to convince people he’s living the dream. He name-drops; he parades his nubile girlfriends and the gadgets that litter his apartment; he laps it up when someone likens his penthouse to a set from a Bond film. He goes everywhere by Rolls Royce. He employs a chauffeur. And in scene after scene, Winterbottom takes a scalpel to his lifestyle: cuts through the pretence and the egomania and the self-delusion; hacks away at the absurdities – some of them pathetically funny, others just plain sad – of what a man becomes when he lets money define him.

Hence the necessity of Steve Coogan and the Alan Partridge persona. It takes a comedian to make all of this palatable. And it takes a comedian to give us, with just the right degree of pathos, the tears of a clown as the curtain falls.