Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

It would have been James Coburn’s 85th birthday today. Accordingly, I’m reposting a lightly edited version of an article that originally appeared on Agitation in 2009 as part of a month-long Sam Peckinpah retrospective.

'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' opens in Las Cruces, New Mexico, 1909 as ageing Sheriff Pat Garrett (James Coburn) is in dispute with landowner John Poe (John Beck) over a lease agreement. Garrett and Beck's association goes back to 1881 when Garrett tracked down his former friend and partner in crime Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson), but they've come to a parting of the ways. With Garrett old and embittered and publically critical of the Santa Fe Ring, Beck and his business partners consider him a liability - an embarrassing throwback to the old days - and are planning to assassinate him. In his last few moments alive, Garrett relives those infamous days and the terrible denouement that made him a sheriff and the Kid a legend.

It’s a simple story in the way that ‘The Wild Bunch’ is simple, ie. narratively (Peckinpah collaborator Gordon Carroll summarised the plot as "a man who doesn't want to run ... pursued by a man who doesn't want to catch him"); thematically, it’s dense and complicated.

There's probably an entire article that can be written about the opening credits sequence. Events in Las Cruces, 1909 (Poe's betrayal of Garrett) and Fort Sumner, 1881 (Garrett's reunion with the Kid a week before he takes the post of sheriff, ie. just prior to his betrayal of Billy) are intercut. When Garrett rides into Fort Sumner, he finds the Kid and his minions amusing themselves shooting the heads off a bunch of chickens buried up to their necks in the dirt. At Las Cruces, Poe's henchman mumbles something about checking a harness, instead pulling a rifle from a saddle roll; another gunman crawls through the sagebrush, ready to take up his position. The shots that follow cut between target practice and cold-blooded murder. Billy's men blast the heads of chickens; Poe's open fire on Garrett. Timeframes overlap. So does the soundtrack. "Damn near perfect," one of Billy's acolytes declares, apropos of a summarily despatched chicken ... but the words echo as Garrett takes a shot and slumps to the ground. Peckinpah's use of editing ramps up the emotional impact of the sequence: a potshot Billy takes at a chicken seems to travel through time and strike Garrett; purposefully aimed coups de grace by Poe's men result in the heads being blasted off helpless fowl.

Peckinpah's signature freeze frames are used as bluntly and brilliant as in 'The Wild Bunch'. As Garrett struggles to rise from the dusty ground only to sink back defeatedly, Peckinpah isolates the moment. He uses this image to accompany the film's title. He arrives at his "directed by" credit in equally iconoclastic fashion. The 1909 prologue documenting Garrett's death throes gives out the 1881 Fort Sumner sequence, and a very much alive - and younger (though still notably middle-aged) Garrett comes riding into town. Billy the gang don't notice him, so busy are they decimating the local feathered populace. Hopping off his horse, he hefts his rifle and, while Billy's still aiming, sights on a chicken and blows its head off. Billy's boys go diving for cover, panic written on their faces. Billy turns round, slowly and wryly, and greets his old friend with a grin. Some spiky banter ensues (it's clear some of the Kid's hangers-on aren't too happy to see Garrett), then the two of them head off to the bar for a couple of shots of whisky and the business at hand:

Garrett: Times are changin', Billy. You want it straight?
Billy: If that's what you're here for.
Garrett: The electorate want you gone. Out of the country.
Billy: Well, are they tellin' me or are they askin' me?.
Garrett: I'm askin' you. But in five days I'm makin' you, when I take over as sheriff of the county.

Peckinpah's directed by credit appears at this point, in a freeze frame that enforces the pause between "I'm makin' you" and "when I take over as sheriff". It might not be as quotable as "if they move, kill 'em" in 'The Wild Bunch', but by God it gives the line some weight!

The dynamic has thus been established: Garrett and the Kid are equally protagonist and antagonist. Neither are exactly heroes, though Peckinpah both empathisizes with the weight of world-weary experience that seems to be etched into every line on Garrett's face, and appreciates the self-aggrandizing behaviour of Billy (particularly in his escape from the Lincoln County jail). Neither are entirely villains, either, even though Billy is a notorious outlaw who refuses to change his ways, and Garrett is a former outlaw who commits the greater sin (certainly in the grand scheme of Peckinpah's aesthetics) of not remaining true to himself and trying to change with the times.

Oh yes, Garrett is the first (and last) of Peckinpah's western protagonists to break with the tradition of Steve Judd, Pike Bishop and co. and Cable Hogue. This is perhaps the most significant element of the dynamic/antagonism between Garrett and Billy - it's summed up during their conversation just after the opening credits:

Billy: Sheriff Pat Garrett. Sold out to the Santa Fe Ring. How does it feel.
Garrett: It feels like times have changed.
Billy: Times maybe, but not me.

Which makes it pretty clear that, since neither Garrett or the Kid are entirely good guy or bad guy, the real villain of the piece is the changing times. Or rather the men who are responsible for changing them. The men responsible for political corruption, financial chicanery, corporate conspiracy and the fencing off of frontier territory, the free and open spaces partitioned, owned, leased and jealously guarded. Men like high-living politico Governor Wallace (Jason Robards), eminence grices Holland and Norris (the power behind Wallace's throne), grasping landowner John Chisum (Barry Sullivan) and toadying parvenu on the make Poe. If 'The Wild Bunch' and 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue'depict technology as the instrument of change, then 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' looks back to 'Ride the High Country' ("the days of the forty-niners are past and the days of the steady businessman have arrived") - only here the steady businessman has been replaced by the rapacious businessman, the dollar-obsessed businessman, the businessman who rapes the land and values human life lower than his profit margin. Corruption and bribery are rife. At an interview with Wallace, the Governor offers Garrett an incentive towards Billy's expedited apprehension:

Wallace: We're offering a reward of one thousand dollars for the Kid's capture. You can have five hundred now.
Garrett: Well, I aim to bring the Kid in. But until I do, you'd better take your five hundred dollars and shove it up your ass and set fire to it.

One of the most curious aspects of 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' - and I'm damned if I can work out whether it's a flaw or a masterstroke - is how determinedly Peckinpah keeps the Chisum/Wallace/Poe conspiracy offscreen. True, all three of them get at least one significant scene (Garrett's encounter with Wallace is thorny; with Chisum, cautious), but they remain backgrounded, shadows that creep around the edges of Garrett's pursuit of Billy. The depiction of Chisum in particular is borderline bland. It's as if Peckinpah is saying "yup, these are the villains, these are the guys hellbent on destroying the old ways, these are guys without souls who answer only to money and power and influence, but by Christ they're nobodies - they ain't really men".

Peckinpah has more time for Deputies Bell (Matt Clark) and Ollinger (R.G. Armstrong), the latter completing the triumvirate of fanatical religious types the actor specialised in (following on from Knudsen in 'Ride the High Country' and Dahlstrom in 'Major Dundee'. Both are in the way when Billy liberates himself from Lincoln Country jail. Kristofferson's characterisation of Billy melds ruefulness and cold determination when he comes up against Bell. It's a different story with Ollinger. The two men have already entered into a spirited disagreement over spiritual matters, Ollinger committed to making sure Billy "gets with god" ("I'll take you for a walk across Hell on a spiderweb") and Billy responding to Ollinger's pious "On your knees" with a pithy "Kiss my ass". Billy's summary dispatching of Ollinger burns with the visceral and iconic intensity that fuelled Peckinpah's reputation as "Bloody Sam".

Peckinpah has more time for Sheriff Baker (Slim Pickens) and Black Harris (L.Q. Jones), whose exchange of fire after Garrett co-opts the former to help in smoking out the latter results in Baker's agonisingly slow passing, stumbling down to the river, gut-shot, and sitting by the slowly flowing waters, the silvery play of light on the surface, as his breathing grows shallower and the life ebbs out of him. At the same time terrible and utterly beautiful, it's one of the greatest scenes Peckinpah ever shot. Likewise the narratively pointless but poetically eloquent scene where Garrett, in a playful throwback to the outshooting-Billy-at-Fort-Sumner scene, accidentally provokes an exchange of fire with a passing raftsman, only for both men to pause, reflect and lower their guns at the critical moment. Both of these scenes are redolent of Peckinpah the humanitarian, Peckinpah the poet, Peckinpah the wounded romantic, desperately aching for a time that's changed and bitterly regretful of the forces that changed it. They give the lie to the cliche of Peckinpah as a purveyor of violence for its own sake.

 

'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' - given its troubled production, its director's tendency to drinking to insensation on set, the disservices done to it in editing, and its rejection of propulsive/exciting/urgent pacing typical of a chase narrative - ought to be a complete mess. And certainly there's a wonky, woozy, slightly off-kilter feel to the film. Watching it is like being punch-drunk. But it's also multi-layered, a film that repays repeated viewings. A film that worms its way under your skin and disseminates its genius slowly and subconsciously.

Lovelace

Walking back to the car after the film, I was viciously attacked by a gang of double entrendres. Now I can’t think of an opening to this review that doesn’t highlight the single biggest flaw of what could have been a decent film:

It’s not deep enough.

By which I mean, the script should have been more penetrating.

This mainly affects the final act when Linda Lovelace (Amanda Seyfried)’s gee-golly-gosh girl-next-door with barely a word to say for herself suddenly morphs into an eloquent proto-feminist. The transition is hard to swallow.

See what I mean?

‘Lovelace’ is a curious film: it wants to be a sincere account of how one woman survived controlling parents, a violent husband and the dubious glamour of the porn business; yet there’s a fnar-fnar prurience bubbling away just beneath the surface. And it’s not difficult to detect, since the film is all surface. Its two-part structure emphasizes the dichotomy: the first half romps through Linda’s seduction into the party lifestyle and marriage to bullying douchebag Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard), and manages to make the filming of ‘Deep Throat’ look like a veritable laugh riot (particularly ludicrous is the avuncular portrayal of the mob boss bankrolling the production); the second has Linda look back at this period of her life during the Q&A of a polygraph test her publishers have insisted on prior to the release of her memoir ‘Ordeal’. 

The polygraph actually happened, although Andy Bellin’s script treats it as no more than a structural device. A brief scene where Linda reports, with some relief, that she passed the test is the only other reference to it. Spend about quarter of an hour reading up on Lovelace and the picture muddies: various contemporaries have questioned her claims about Traynor’s svengali-like treatment; there seems to be no record of similar behaviour during his ten-year marriage to Marilyn Chambers; Lovelace pulled an about-face on her anti-pornography campaigning by reviving her blue movie persona for a photoshoot for fetish magazine Leg Show in the 90s. About this time, she publicly complained that the feminists who supported her after ‘Ordeal’ was published – among them Andrea Dworkin and Gloria Steinem – didn’t offer her any kind of financial assistant. It’s also worth noting that psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman has stated that, symptomatically, ‘Ordeal’ contains much to suggest complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

Clearly, there’s a story to be told about a deeply troubled woman and the motivations behind her various personas. ‘Lovelace’ fails to tell that story. In fact, it doesn’t even try. The script instead gives us parents who don’t show her enough love, and an embittered and controlling husband. Directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman slot together a series of individually watchable scenes that ultimately add up to very little as the end credits roll. The period detail is nice, the soundtrack’s okay, Seyfried turns in some good work (though I found myself wishing the film had proceeded with Lindsay Lohan in the lead as originally planned), and there’s a solid supporting cast including James Franco, Juno Temple, Hank Azaria, Robert Patrick and an almost unrecognisable Sharon Stone. Sad to see Chloe Sevigny wasted in a ten-second cameo, though. Her character is billed simply as “feminist journalist”. Who knows, if there’d been a greater feminist sensibility to the film, or a rigorous investigation into its protagonist, it might have been something special.

Blitz

When I watched ‘Blitz’ on one of the UK freeview channels last night, it was the culmination of a 24-hour period in which I watched ‘Elysium’ on the big screen and was as disappointed by it as I’d been by Blomkamp’s earlier ‘District 9’ (both labour to establish a socio-political reality in the first half only to pussy out on making a genuine political statement in favour of an increasingly pointless and clichéd retinue of tired action scenes and genre tropes), then sat through ‘Insidious’ on DVD (look out for a full review as part of October’s 13 For Halloween fright-fest) and been frustrated at the brilliance of the first two thirds degenerating into near parody during the final stretches.

So I watched ‘Blitz’ and had a couple of beers and what I might ordinarily have dismissed as mindless and derivative actually delivered some solid thrilleramics and raced effortlessly into first place as the best of the bunch. Okay, so that’s not necessarily the most robust of recommendations – in fact, I could probably have watched a third-rate giallo like ‘Amuck’ and had more fun with it.

*stops typing*

*thinks about Rosalba Neri and Barbara Bouchet*

*takes cold shower*

*returns to review*

The first thing to say about ‘Blitz’ is that it’s not only derivative, but it wears its derivations on its sleeve. I’ve not read any of the DS Tom Brant novels by Ken Bruen (the author co-scripted the adaptation with Nathan Parker), but I can only assume he came up with ‘Blitz’ after watching a ‘Sweeney’ marathon followed by Don Siegel’s ‘Dirty Harry’ and thought “Hey, what if it was Jack Reagan who was after the Scorpio killer and he gave him a faakin’ good hiding rather than muck about with a Magnum .45?”

‘Blitz’ is ‘Sweeney’ to the nines, from the pounding foot chases through authentically shitty London locations (apart from a few overhead establishing shots of the London Eye etc that were obviously dropped in for the benefit of the overseas market, it presents the shabbiest vision of London this side of Mike Leigh’s ‘Naked’) to Brant (Jason Statham)’s casual homophobia: “You’re a good copper,” he tells his chalk ‘n’ cheese partner, newly-promoted DI Porter Nash (Paddy Considine) – “for a poofter.”

If Brant is basically a bastard, then he’s at least a bastard among bastards. Cop-killer Weiss (Aiden Gillen, having a field day) couldn’t be more hissable if he was appearing in panto (that wasn’t a spoiler by the way: his identity is revealed very early on); scuzzy journo Dunlop (David Morrissey), who keeps vital information from the cops to preserve his scoop, makes your average News of the World shit-raker look like a pillar of respectability; nark Radnor (Ned Dennehy) is little more than a sewer rat in human form; and Brant’s alcoholic colleague DS Roberts (Mark Rylance) blackmails his way back onto the force by threatening to blow the whistle on their boss Superintendent Brown (Nicky Henson)’s dalliances with an obese stripper.

It’s not a nice collection of individuals that ‘Blitz’ presents for our delectation. It says something that the two most sympathetic characters are Nash and DC Falls (Zawe Ashton), a young officer trying to put her troubled youth behind her … and of these two, Nash admits to rendering a paedophile he didn’t have enough evidence to arrest sexually inactive by repeated application of a baseball bat to the genitals, while Falls shakes down junkies and gets high on their supply.

But what it emphatically boils down to is the mano-a-mano duel between Brant and Weiss – motivated, it turns out, by a previous contretemps between the two men. ‘Blitz’ does nothing new. No insight is offered into any of its characters’ psychology. Director Elliott Lester seems to view the material as a delivery system for fast-paced chases, bone-crunching violence (Brant’s first act in the film is to discourage a group of would-be car thieves by smacking seven shades of shit out of them with a hockey stick), and smartarse authority-snubbing dialogue.

‘Blitz’ is a blunt yet fast-moving thriller; it’s unabashedly honest about what it is; and anyone who strays onto its manor and starts bleating about political correctness will probably find themselves nutted, cuffed, thrown in the back of a van and a nice “accidental” fall down some stairs back at the station.

The Wolverine

After the disappointment of ‘X Men Origins: Wolverine’ – its clunky title the first of its problems – it looked as if atonement was ripe when Darren Aronofsky was announced as director of ‘The Wolverine’ working from a script by Christopher McQuarrie. A marriage made in fan-boy heaven, right?

Not to be. Aronofsky left the production citing unwillingness to be out of the country, due to family commitments, for the length of time the Japan-set shoot would take. The internet rumour mill speculated on a falling out with the producers after Aronofsky demanded the kind of full creative control Christopher Nolan wielded on the Batman trilogy.

Whatever the reason, what we’re left with is ‘The Wolverine’ written by Mark Bomback and Scott Frank (from Chris Claremont and Frank Miller’s savagely minimalist graphic novel) and directed by James Mangold. And while it’s a distinct improvement on ‘X Men Origins: Wolverine’ – and indeed on ‘X Men: The Last Stand’, the events of which provide this film’s uneasy backstory – it remains curiously bland, never quite delivering on the sum of its parts.

Reintroducing Logan/Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) as a vagrant bumming around the Yukon territory and haunted by memories of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), he’s soon approached by Yukio (Rila Fukushima) who summons him to Japan on behalf of dying industrialist Yashida (Hal Yamanouchi). Logan first met Yashida at Nagasaki – the film gives us a mushroom-cloud shadowed prologue that’s as crassly exploitative as the Chernobyl sequence in ‘A Good Day to Die Hard’ – and Yashida feels he has a debt to repay. The ulterior motive is soon revealed: he wants to extract Logan’s recuperative powers and basically become immortal. Logan understandably declines but before he can head back to the States, a power struggle for Yashida’s empire erupts and his granddaughter and heir apparent Mariko (Tao Okamoto) is kidnapped. Logan and Yukio form an instinctive alliance while more double-crossing goes on around them than an average week in British politics. Participants include: Mariko’s fiancé, the corrupt minister for justice Noburo (Brian Tee); her former inamorata, the bodyguard Harada (Will Yun Lee); and her father Shingen (Hiroyuki Sanada). Weaving between them and spinning her own manipulative web is the sexy-but-deadly Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova, vamping it up in fine style).

Mangold takes his time setting up these characters, making for a low-key and action-light first hour. Indeed, big action set-pieces are pretty sparse for a major $125million superhero movie. A kinetic fight on top of a bullet train is mercifully brief, the whole thing over and done with in slambang fashion before it gets too silly, and even the obligatory extended showdown at the end doesn’t drag on as long as seems to be the norm in these kind of movies. Ultimately, Mangold allows Jackman to give us more of the character of Logan than previous outings have allowed, and the actor seizes the opportunity. A subplot wherein his recuperative powers are weakened allows for both an exploration of his vulnerability and a crowd-pleasing return to full-on Wolverine anti-heroics once he realises what’s been done and reverses the process.

But for all the good work, the film gets bogged down with excess baggage. Logan’s weight of guilt over Jean Grey’s demise in ‘Last Stand’ is handled clumsily. There are too many subsidiary characters are written in purely to overcomplicate an essential simplistic narrative. There’s an undertone of racism that is paradoxically more noticeable for the filmmakers’ attempts to disguise it. For all the talk about honour and Japanese history and culture, it’s just so much tommyrot when you stop and think about how the indigenous characters are portrayed.

Mostly, though, what prevents ‘The Wolverine’ from hitting the heights it could have reached is its lack of either a directorial signature or a specific visual aesthetic. Blandness afflicts it in frame after frame. A good 80% of the movie takes place in Japan, a country where the bustling vibrancy of its modern aesthetic exists, and indeed synergizes, with the stoic classicism of ancient tradition. It should be artistically impossible to shoot a movie in Japan and emerge with footage that’s anything less than eyeball-grabbing. Somehow Mangold manages it, and the possibilities of Aronofsky’s take on the material seem an even greater loss.

The Who: The Kids Are Alright

If you wanted to be cynical, you could say that Jeff Stein’s 1979 film is little more than an assemblage of a decade and a half’s worth of concert footage loosely interlinked by snippets of interviews. By cherry-picking from TV slots, behind-the-scenes studio material, live performance and curios such as the comedic proto-music-video for never-produced BBC television show ‘Sound and Picture City’, Stein’s project immediately marks out a territory beyond the standard concert film. But by the same token, his choice of interview clips is so spurious and satirical that even the most elastic definition of documentary snaps out of the reviewer’s fingers and goes flying off into the distance rather than be applied to ‘The Who: The Kids Are Alright’.

It’s neither one thing nor the other. A curate’s egg. A candidate for casual dismissal, except for two things:

1) The interview clips, never mind that they’re uncontextualised and truncated, are jaw-dropping for their admixture of self-importance and self-deprecation;

2) It’s a film about The Who, one of the most electrifying and experimental British bands in the annals of rock ‘n’ roll; a dynamo powered by internal rivalries and self-destructive behaviour; a band whose guitarist and songwriter was an East End Jean-Paul Sartre, whose lead singer was an ex-sheet-metal worker whose voice sounded like in was forged in the selfsame factory; whose bassist registered on the Richter Scale, and whose drummer went out drinking with Oliver motherfucking Reed. A group who, even in a state of nuclear grade meltdown, were impossibly entertaining.

In other words, ‘The Who: The Kids Are Alright’ could just have featured an hour and three quarters of Pete Townsend smashing his guitar into a Marshall amp while Keith Moon kicked seven bells of his drum kit and it would automatically have been one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll films ever made. That it bothers with the talking heads stuff – let alone the iconic Woodstock performance of “See Me, Feel Me” from ‘Tommy’, or an astounding account of “A Quick One While He’s Away” from The Rolling Stones’ ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus’ – just kicks the whole thing up a notch.

Here’s some measure of how good The Who were at their best: the aforementioned ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus’ was intended as a film showcasing The Rolling Stones (with guests) to be followed by a tour. Sets were built and the whole production was shot to emulate a carnival atmosphere. There was only one problem: The Who turned in a performance so vibrant, so theatrical, so together that they showed up The Stones as lethargic and by-the-numbers. The project was hastily shelved and it’s thanks to Stein’s film that The Who’s showstopper finally got its day in the sun.

Other cracking performances: “My Generation” on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour from 1967, where the band’s instrument-smashing tendencies are indulged to the max; a suitably raw account of “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” on Ready, Steady, Go in 1965, with stereotypical 60s zoom-heavy camerawork; and “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, performed live at Shepperton Studios in 1978 especially for the film. Elsewhere, mimed performances for Beat Club are notable for Keith Moon taking the piss and Roger Daltry looking bored. An interview with a po-faced young intellectual for the same show has a clearly zoned-out Townsend answer a rambling and barely coherent question with a cursory “Uh, yeah”.

Other interviews are drawn from BBC’s 2nd House and A Whole Scene Going, and footage shot at band members’ houses, including a straight-faced bit of banter between Moon and fellow percussionist Ringo Starr at Moon’s Malibu pad, and a surreal short piece filmed at John Entwistle’s Gloucestershire mansion house which sees him machine-gunning gold records to the strains of the magnificently hateful “Success Story” from ‘The Who By Numbers’.

And that’s not the only purely bonkers moment Stein unearths: there’s the slapstick promo film “Cobwebs and Strange” wherein The Who pursue a robotic Moon around an abandoned factory (yes, you did read that right. No, I’m not using narcotics); Steve Martin and Moon riffing off each other in an OTT rock-star-trashes-hotel-room skit; and a comedy sketch structured around the definitely non-comedic single “Happy Jack”.

But the jewel in the crown is the extended interview sequence that Stein partitions out through the film. It dates from 1973 and sees the band entire interviewed at the end of a live performance by Russell Harty, one of the most unctuous, prissy and self-regarding chat show hosts of the day. It adds up to 10 minutes or so of mayhem in which Harty struggles to retain his composure as The Who bicker and talk over each other, Moon strips down to his smalls and tears the arm off Townsend’s shirt, Townsend responds in kind, and Moon effortlessly reverses the interview process, subjecting Harty to his own brand of tossed-off verbiage. 

Naturally, given how frequently The Who were at each other’s throats, cracks often appear. “Four more horrible blokes making a horrible noise you couldn’t imagine,” Daltry grunts at one point, only half-joking. “You’re not the same desperate young man you were ten years ago, are you?” some faceless pundit vox pops Townsend. “No, I’m a desperate old fart,” he shoots back, “but not a boring one.” Stein slam cuts to a typically blistering live performance. Point taken.

Jennifer Lawrence

In the time honoured Agitation of the Mind tradition of visual filler during periods of inactivity on the actual reviewing front, let’s take the opportunity to raise a glass and wish the ridiculously glamorous Jennifer Lawrence a happy 23rd.

Christ, I feel old.

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.

The Lone Partridge

These two movies have just opened in the UK, and I'm really looking forward to moseying on down ...

... to Radio Norwich.

The Conjuring

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: it’s the 70s and a hard-working couple with several children move into a rambling old house in the middle of nowhere. They’ve sunk their life savings into the property and are looking forward to a new start. Their pet dog refuses to enter the house. Their youngest child finds an old music box and makes an imaginary friend who might not be so imaginary after all. Another child sleepwalks and sees things. Clocks stop at exactly the same time every night. A boarded-up stairwell is discovered, leading down a cobweb infested basement. Pictures jump off walls. Doors open and close of their own volition. The mother of the family suffers from bruising that doesn’t seem to have any apparent cause. As strange events proliferate, the family prevail upon the help of paranormal investigators who unearth a history of dark secrets and violent events connected to the house.

‘The Conjuring’ does nothing you haven’t seen in several dozen other movies, right down to the period setting which evokes ‘The Amityville Horror’. Its achievement, though, is generally doing these things better than those several dozen other movies. Avoiding their pitfalls. Skirting it, but never quite tipping over into melodrama. Not overly relying on CGI or whiz-bang effects (an exception, involving a bedsheet torn off a washing line in a gale, pays off with such a careworn image that it shouldn’t work … but somehow does). 

Engagingly old-school, ‘The Conjuring’ takes its time in establishing the characters. Let’s meet the family, truck driver Roger Perron (Ron Livingston), wife Carolyn (Lili Taylor) and their daughters Andrea (Shanley Cresswell), Nancy (Hayley McFarland), Christine (Joey King), Cindy (Mackenzie Foy) and April (Kyla Deaver). Okay, Carolyn’s a tad “gee whiz” naïve/optimistic and Andrea’s pretty much got the whole emo sulk routine off to a fine art, but on the whole these are decent people. A regular family. You wouldn’t balk at having them as neighbours. You care what happens to them. That might sound like an obvious thing to say, but you wouldn’t believe how many genre films I’ve sat through whose characters I’ve either not engaged with (‘The Haunting in Connecticut’) or actively disliked (‘Frozen’).

As the ferocity of the paranormal incidents increases, the Perrons engage the services of renowned ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), from whose case files the story is taken. And hence that twinge of familiarity: they were at Amityville, and they investigated the Smurl family haunting, on which ‘The Haunting in Connecticut’ was based. I guess ghosts and malevolent spirits just took to a certain kind of New England real estate and acted in remarkably similar ways whenever the Warrens were around.

The Warrens had their detractors throughout their career, and how closely the film chimes with the actual psychic investigation four decades ago isn’t something I’ve been able define based on some cursory internet research into the couple. Nor does it seem a worthwhile exercise. The film throws out its “based on true events” card from the outset and we all know how spurious that “based on” tag can be, what a multitude of sins it can hide. What’s up for debate here is how well ‘The Conjuring’ works as an example of its genre, as a work of entertainment. Did it give me the creeps? Yes, and then some. Did it make me jump? Twice, both scenes using the same visual motif.

I’ve seen nothing of director James Wan’s work beyond the inaugural entry in the ‘Saw’ franchise, and was underwhelmed to the point that I let the rest of the saga happily pass me by. I’m told that ‘Dead Silence’ was horrible in many ways (if memory serves, Tim Brayton of Antagony & Ecstasy coined the term “fucktrocious” in his review), and ‘Insidious’ reasonably effective if boilerplate. ‘Insidious’ has now been added to the rental list, and the rather pompously titled ‘Insidious Chapter Two’ is definitely on the big screen radar. I’m curious to find out – and it may well be an investigation as freighted by the unknown as any of Ed and Lorraine’s – exactly where James Wan became such an accomplished craftsman.

Only God Forgives

The most immediate and jarring trick Nicolas Winding Refn pulls in ‘Only God Forgives’ is the shatteringly out-of-whack ratio of visual beauty (cinematography) to visceral ugliness (mise en scene). The only way I can describe it is as if ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ had been lensed by Jack Cardiff. Seriously: this is the ‘Black Narcissus’ of venal brutality, the ‘Matter of Life and Death’ of rape/revenge.

Ooops, I’m sorry. Did anyone trip over the Powell & Pressburger references in the above paragraph. Sorry, but they were incorporated deliberately. Of this, more later.

The most guiltily pleasurable and equally jarring trick Refn pulls in ‘Only God Forgives’ is taking the kind of role that you’d normally associate with, say, Shelley Winters in ‘Bloody Mama’ or Irene Dailey in ‘The Grissom Gang’ and handing it to that most elegant, refined and cultured of English roses Kristin Scott Thomas. It’s a performance that’s already being compared to Ben Kingsley in ‘Sexy Beast’.

The plot is pure 70s exploitation: in Bangkok, two American brothers – Billy (Tom Burke) and Julian (Ryan Gosling) – run a boxing club as a front for drug smuggling (the logistics are never really gone into). Julian spends his leisure time tied to a chair and voyeuristically watching bought-and-paid-for escort Mai (Yayaying Rhatha Phongam) bring herself off. Billy, on the other hand, goes out looking for violent sex, the younger his partner the better. One night, having failed to persuade a pimp to pimp out his 14-year-old daughter, Billy assaults the man then beats one of his girls to death. This latter, mercifully, occurs offscreen. Bangkok’s finest arrive on the scene, in the personage of Inspector Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm) and his men. Chang, a vicious man with a zen-like centre of calmness, dispenses his own paperwork-free, let’s-not-bother-the-courts-with-it brand of justice by locking Billy in a room with the girl’s father who does what any grieving father would do if given access to his daughter’s murderer. Exeunt Billy.

(At this point, it’s perhaps a good idea to consider the film’s title as only half of the dialectic. Try ‘Only God Forgives … But Devils Mete Out Infinite Punishment’ for size.)

Chang then braces the father, accusing him of complicity in his daughter’s slide into prostitution. Exhorting him to focus not on his dead child, but his other three daughters who are still alive, Chang hammers the message home by chopping off the guy’s hand. Next up, this poor son of a bitch is quaking in the corner of a dingy room as Julian, flanked by two heavies, draws down on him. Julian, evidently the more philosophical of the siblings, gives him a chance to account for his actions. Subsequently, he lets him go.

With this narrative arc explored over 90 minutes, ‘Only God Forgives’ could have hiked its way up to a small hillock of high ground, declaring itself a morality play. In Refn’s hands, this is just the first 15 minutes and the narrative explodes in any number of horrible directions as vituperative, foul-mouthed matriarch Crystal (Scott Thomas) comes jetting into Bangkok looking for vengeance and less than impressed with Julian’s lack of a proactive approach. Learning of Chang’s part in the proceedings, Crystal instigates a particularly ill-thought-out campaign of violent retribution which only serves to focus Chang’s attention on Julian.

Essentially, the story is: A does something violent to B as a result of which C does something violent, after which D does something violent, and then hey ho whaddaya know, E, F and G are whipping out swords and guns and H, I and J are leaking corpuscles all over the place. To put it another way, imagine Tolstoy’s novella ‘The Forged Coupon’, in which one deceitful act sets in motion a chain of consequences which negatively affects everyone involved, no matter how peripherally, updated to Bangkok and drenched in blood, and that’s where we’re at.

‘Only God Forgives’ has been dividing the critics as sharply as any of Chang’s swordplay. Writers on film who I personally consider my go to guys for recommendations have professed emotional responses bordering on hatred. I’ll admit that I had two strong drinks before I took my seat in the cinema. And it has to be admitted, Refn sails very close to hoisting himself by his own petard. Symbolism isn’t just introduced, it grabs the viewer by their lapels, hauls them up close to the screen and yells in their face whilst slapping them with a wet kipper. Religious overtones roll up their sleeves, point to crucifix tattoos on their bulging biceps and ask you if you faakin’ want some. The soundtrack is probably annotated as Symphony in Self-Importance in A(hole) Major.

And yet, despite the melodrama, the glacial pace (there are pregnant pauses in the dialogue that leave you itching for a gynaecologist to turn up and perform a caesarean) and the sheer unremitting nastiness of the whole thing, Refn wrestles a sense of accomplishment from the material. Partly it's in the incredibly focussed application of cinematography. The first scene is at the boxing club, two fighters squaring off in the ring. One wears blue trunks, the other red. The cloudless sky of the firmament vs the fiery infernos of hell? The opposing PR palette of political parties, both of whom betray their electorate and stand by and watch young men die? Your humble blogger on a pint too far and reading way too much into this? Whichever interpretation you choose, the film’s visual aesthetic is established within seconds. And undeviated from. ‘Only God Forgives’ never, for a second, looks anything less than stunning.

And partly it’s in the way Refn reflects the film’s ugly/beautiful dichotomy back at the audience. I mentioned earlier that the pace is glacial. This is because the characters spend more time moodily watching things than they do participating in them. Chang’s colleagues blankly watch his moribund karaoke performances; Julian watches Mai in solo flagrante; a disabled child watches Chang interrogate a suspect; Crystal watches Julian disastrously square off against Chang when her incessant campaign of needling and provoking him finally yields results. It’s worth noting how many of these watchers are confined to their seats, either by bonds, sharp implements or muscular dystrophy. And those who aren’t, watch out of prurience.

As the sexually liberated ethos of the 60s began to permeate British cinema, Michael Powell proved himself half a decade or so ahead of his time with ‘Peeping Tom’, a film that pretty much destroyed his career and wasn’t hailed as the masterpiece it so evidently is until the late 80s. Penned by former spy Leo Marks, that film was an examination of scoptophilia (i.e. “the morbid desire to watch”). Powell unblinkingly turned the camera on his audience and royally pissed them off in the process. Refn does something unapologetically similar with ‘Only God Forgives’, and if the critical response to the film thus far is anything to go by he’s rubbed a fuckton of salt into the still-open wound that Powell inflicted.

Pacific Rim: some questions

1. So there are these alien beasties coming through a sea-bed fissure in the space-time continuum (or summat) that can’t be bombed because the fissure only opens for the beasties and shuts tight when any human penetration is attempted. Okay, I get that. But the fissure stays in the same place and the beasties always rise up from the sea. So:

(a) why not just mine the entire area around the fissure for, say, a fifty mile radius? Alien beasties come through fissure, alien beasties immediately go bashing into a fuckload of mines, alien beasties get blown to shit. Job done!

(b) in the twelfth fucking year of the war against the beasties, why are people still living in coastal cities and townships? Why haven’t they been evacuated and moved hundreds of miles inland and said cities mined and booby-trapped?

2. So the alien beasties share a hive mind and there are gazillions of them lurking behind the fissure, and their incursions are increasing such that the time between incursions halves with each successive attack, counting down to zero hour when multiple beasties will burst through the fissure and mankind will be well and truly fucked. So: why not just send an army of beasties through at the outset, whup mankind’s collective ass first time round and avoid twelve years of fight back during which more and more big metal robots get built? I mean, c’mon, alien beastie dudes, where’s the strategy?

3. The jaegar pilots who bond deeply based on shared memories are the best suited to “the drift”, therefore maximising their prowess in jointly controlling the big metal robots. So:

(a) how come jaegar pilot tryouts are based on how aggressively they fight each other?

(b) where’s the logic in a scientist instigating a “drift” with an alien beastie’s brain when there can be no possible bond or common memory to facilitate it?

4. Didn’t anyone do a risk assessment on the Wall of Life construction project? Seriously, sliding down a girder with your only your cloth-gloved hands for purchase will not make you look cool. It’ll shred the gloves off your hands then do the same thing to the hands themselves.

5. Why does the jaegar pilot training programme seemingly insist on interminable hand-to-hand combat with the alien beasties during which the jaegers sustain metal-rending damage before any of the neat funky weaponry is deployed? Why not deploy the neat funky weaponry first and blow the alien beastie fuckers to hell?

6. Did nobody involved in the production do a quick Google translate to check whether “kaiju” actually does mean “giant monster”? Because, uh, it doesn’t. You need the suffix “dai” to make that one work.

7. How come a Mark 1 model of anything made later than 1990 is analogue? Let alone a bit of kit so sophisticated its operating system is configured to neural synthesis?

8. Weren’t the filmmakers aware that we’ve already seen ‘Godzilla’, ‘Independence Day’, ‘Transformers’, ‘Iron Man’ and every sci-fi outing where the alien threat is driven by a requirement to asset-strip the earth of its natural resources?

9. What the fuck kind of name is Stacker Pentecost?

10. How can it be possible that the supremely intelligent visual poet who made ‘The Devil’s Backbone’, ‘Hellboy’ and ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ directed this POS?

The World's End

Early on in ‘The World’s End’, the fictitious town of Newton Haven – the kind of depressingly generic English small town that’s not quaint or rural enough to be a village, nor close enough to the urban sprawl to consider itself a district of a city – is identified as being famous for having the first roundabout in Britain. (For the benefit of my non-UK based readers, that’s roundabout as in intersection, not the children’s ride.) It’s a curious thing about English towns that they clamour to boast about obscure or half-forgotten claims to fame, from the almost-interesting (West Auckland, County Durham: home of the first World Cup) to the blandly culinary (Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire: home of the pork pie) to the nobody-really-cares (Romford, Essex: home to the most lottery winners per capita in the UK).

Any English cinema-goer, on a single viewing, could probably name several dozen towns that Newton Haven reminds them of. And probably several hundred pubs evoked by the various watering-holes the five protagonists visit over the course of an increasingly bizarre, violent and hilariously fraught afternoon and evening. Because that’s another thing about being English: we love our pubs. For all that they’re becoming increasingly subsumed by chains (“Starbucking” is how Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s script puts it), or that the old-school spit ‘n’ sawdust working men’s pubs are as generic as the aforementioned chain establishments (a neat visual joke has the quintet blow the first joint as boring and roll up at the second declaring “this is more like it” only for a pull-back to reveal the interiors as identical), the English pub remains a nexus of social activity (good and bad), a retreat (a la the Winchester in ‘Shaun of the Dead’), and a place for youth to conduct an essential rite of passage whereby it pisses against the wall of manhood.

Two things you may have noticed about the above paragraphs: the use of “English”, not “British”; repeated references to masculinity. Because ‘The World’s End’ has two over-arching thematic concerns: what it means to be English; and how men interact/define themselves/fail to leave their youth or their past behind. In other words, take L.P. Hartley’s observation that “the past is a foreign country” and tip it on its head so that it’s the here and now that seems distinctly fucked up, add a couple of shots of Peckinpah’s rigorous and unflinching dissertations on masculinity, throw in some acerbic satire of the Monty Python variety, blend with ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ and ‘They Live’, and serve with a government health warning.

‘The World’s End’ is perhaps the most ruthless and unflinching satirical statement on the nature of Englishness that I’ve ever seen in mainstream cinema, and not just for the reasons mentioned above. The film’s coda – which it would be remiss to discuss just days after the film opened – serves up a commentary on the insular, belligerent, inherently racist, island-race mindset that has characterised the land of my birth throughout its classist, bloody and empirical history. It’s the heaviest-hitting piece of film-making Wright or Pegg have put their name to and it all but kills the laughs (albeit many of them uneasy) of the film’s earlier stretches.

You’ll already know the plot from the trailers: sad bastard Gary (Pegg), forty-something and still acting like the twat he was at eighteen (only at eighteen his mates mistook twathood for cool), convinces said mates – corporate lawyer Andrew (Nick Frost), civil engineer Steven (Paddy Consodine), upmarket car salesman Peter (Eddie Marsan) and estate agent Oliver (Martin Freeman) – to return to Newton Haven with him and complete the epic pub crawl they attempted at eighteen but never finished due to being eighteen and getting shitfaced very quickly. Gary refers to it, ad nauseum, as the best night of his life, but as the film progresses it becomes evident that not completing it has come to define his life inasmuch as it’s a personal failure he’s been unable to move on from.

Two decades and attendance at AA meetings notwithstanding, Gary is exactly the same person he was in his late teens. He dresses the same, talks the same, drives the same car. Everyone else has grown, matured(ish), changed. The first third or so of ‘The World’s End’ mines this dynamic for its humour. Pegg is unafraid to play Gary as essentially unlikeable. Few of his pals, for all that adulthood and responsibility have scrawled their signature, are that likeable either. Perhaps only Andrew and Steven emerge with any real decency. Regarding the latter, Nick Frost turns in the finest acting performance of his career, a nuanced and complex characterisation that allows Andrew to vacillate between poignantly sympathetic and fuckin’ badass when he cuts loose with two barstools and some bone-crunching WWF moves in one of the many hysterically staged and edited fight scenes.

And you’ll already know that things take an abrupt swerve into sci-fi territory. As the pub crawl – nicknamed the Golden Mile and encompassing twelve pubs (The First Post, The Old Familiar, The Famous Cock, The Cross Hands, The Good Companions, The Trusty Servant, The Mermaid, The Beehive, The King’s Head, The Hole in the Wall and The World’s End: there’s a play on each of the names and they all work on different levels, from the poundingly obvious to the sneakily subtle) – progresses, Gary and co. find themselves under threat from an otherworldly collective called The Network, and being too under the influence to drive and thereby make their escape, they’re forced to see the Golden Mile through to the bitter (or lager) end. En route, Gary and Andrew’s fractious friendship is further tested, and Gary and Steven’s teenage rivalry for the affections of Oliver’s sister Sam (Rosamund Pike) is revisited.

Wright and Frost begun their loosely connected “Cornetto trilogy” with the horror comedy ‘Shaun of the Dead’, which grew out of the twenty-something characters and situations of their London-based sitcom ‘Spaced’; ‘Hot Fuzz’ moved the focus to small town life and embraced the buddy movie/action thriller as its genre touchstone. ‘The World’s End’ takes the stoner/loser/smartarse protagonist of ‘Spaced’ and ‘Shaun of the Dead’, strips him of his loveability, transplants him slap into the heart of – and completely at odds with – the provincial outsider-unfriendly mindset of small town life pace ‘Hot Fuzz’, and ups the ante to cosmological stakes. How high? Imagine Iain M. Banks’s the Culture (and I rather think Wright and Frost had this in mind: there’s a very specific nod to Banks’s work in ‘Hot Fuzz’) squaring off against ‘Withnail and I’.

‘The World’s End’ will probably prove divisive. It kicks out ideas at such a rate of knots that audiences may come away bamboozled (I’ll openly admit that I was hesitant writing this review on just one viewing), and its final sequence goes into some pretty cynical (if still funny) territory. Its achievement, though, is an almost perfect synthesis of its predecessors while existing (and belligerently raising two fists to the universe) on its own terms.

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.

Despicable Me

Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud’s out-of-nowhere hit starts with some horribly blocky animation and a handful of brilliant concepts. The horribly blocky animation depicts a vulgar American family on holiday in Egypt, the prototypically overweight scion of which accidentally discovers that the Great Pyramid of Giza is an inflatable replicable. The original has been stolen. The thief, who seems to have got clean away with it, is hailed in the media as a master criminal.

Leaving aside such questions as how the holy hell do you fence a pyramid? and where do you find a warehouse big enough to stow the thing while you puzzle over question one?, Coffin and Renaud (who should more like a firm of undertakers than purveyors of children’s entertainment) whisk us off to the suburbs of Anywhere, USA, and deal out – in quick succession – their handful of brilliant concepts.

We’re quickly introduced to the beak-nosed and European-accented Gru (voiced by Steve Carell), something of a master criminal himself. And boy is he cheesed off that someone else is getting the criminal genius kudos. He quickly hatches a plan – with the assistance of his sidekick, wheelchair bound inventor Dr Nefario (Russell Brand), and a troupe of yellow-skinned, helium-voiced, nonsense-jabbering minions – to steal the moon. This scheme, to be fair, makes a lot more sense than nicking a pyramid since the potentially catastrophic meteorological consequences make the moon an asset worthy of a high ransom demand.

Thus, the movie’s great concepts:

1) Gru, never mind his Bond villain stylee megalomania, has to go the bank like any other poor shmuck to beg for a loan in order to finance the operation.

2) Gru, never mind his indeterminate accent and decidedly un-American attitudes towards, well, everything, lives quietly in rickety old house on a street full of neatly trimmed gardens and picket fences and none of his squeaky clean neighbours even seem to notice that he has a freakin’ rocket powered car parked on the driveway. (Whether intended or not, it sets up an unspoken incongruity that the movie quietly trades on right till the closing credits.)

3) The minions.

I’m over 300 words into this review and I’ve been putting it off till now, but the minions are the reason ‘Despicable Me’ was a stupidly enormous hit, and the minions are the reason that ‘Despicable Me 2’ (of which more in a couple of days) was made at all, let alone ruled the box office since the second it opened and trampled ‘The Lone Ranger’ into the dust. Sorry, Steve Carell – entertaining vocal work, dude, but they could make ‘Despicable Me 3’ without Gru and just have the minions running around laughing at kiddie-friendly double entrendres for an hour and a half and it would net $100million in its opening weekend. Sorry, Gore Verbinski, Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer, but it’s hi-ho yellow as far as ticket sales are concerned.

Swinging back to the plot synopsis, the president of the Bank of Evil (check out the Corinthian columns leading up to the reception desk: a better visual comment on what banks do to people I have yet to see in a movie, animated or otherwise) reviews Gru’s borrowing-to-repayment history and bawls him out. With the scheme predicated upon the use of a “shrink” gun to render the moon transportable, the president gives Gru an ultimatum: acquire said technology, after which the loan request will be reconsidered.

Gru happily steals said item from a Eurasian military installation (I’m guessing North Korea, but this is a kid’s film and Sarcophagus and Renaud wisely keep the politics foggy) only to have it heisted from him by cocky up-and-coming young villain Vector (Jason Segel). Incensed, he plots to steal it back.

So far, so good. If Donald E Westlake’s Dortmunder had hung out with Ernest Stavro Blofeld and they’d watched the moon-in-the-puddle sequence from ‘Hobson’s Choice’ on replay while they dropped so much acid that they ended up hallucinating a room full of giggling yellow shortarses, ‘Despicable Me’ – up to this point – is probably what you’d get. Then Gru observes that the only outsiders Vector allows into his heavily armoured fortress are three orphan girls selling cookies. Gru instructs Nefario to build a group of cookie robots and sets about charming the hard-bitten matron of the orphanage, Miss Hattie (Kirsten Wiig), into allowing him to adopt the trio in question: wise-beyond-her-years Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), hipster-in-waiting Edith (Dana Gaier) and wide-eyed Agnes (Elsie Fisher).

What follows is toe-stubbingly predictable: grumpy Gru gradually bonds with the sisters to the point where he questions his lifestyle and becomes a better person. ‘Despicable Me’ could easily have not just dropped the ball but scored a classic own goal with it. And to be honest, the script never really shakes itself free of where the narrative arc forces itself towards.

Mercifully, Cremation and Renaud retain Gru’s non-paternal persona for longer than most kids’ films would have: the children’s initial living quarters consist of a patch of kitchen floor, three bowls and correspondence signs reading “food”, “water” and “pee pee and poo poo”; and Gru’s first attempts at putting his charges to bed yields my favourite exchange in the movie: “But I can’t sleep without a bedtime story” / “Then it is going to be very long night for you.” Nor does Gru fully abandon his klepto-lunar plans, even if – in the end – it’s Nefario who gives him the push when he hesitates.

Mercifully, too, the kids (with the exception of Agnes, who seems to be modelled on Boo from ‘Monsters, Inc’) avoid the usual pitfalls of cutesiness. Margo’s continual needling against Gru’s patriarchal parade of rules and regulations suggests the girl’s one step away from joining the Occupy movement, while Edith’s face-twisting scowl is something many a parent will recognise.

An effective contrast with Gru’s difficulty in engaging with the girls is the lifelong dismissive behaviour of his mother (Julie Andrews), revealed in a series of flashbacks. So many of cinema’s super-villains are motivated by arrogance, greed, revenge or lust for power. Gru just wants his mum to be proud of him.

Finally, though, ‘Despicable Me’ works because it’s breezily-paced, irreverent and always funny. Sad to say – I remember only a few years ago when a U- or PG-rated animation was virtually a guarantee of imaginative stories, glorious visuals and plenty of laughs – but of late there have been far too many animated films that have either coasted a moderately-fun-but-kind-of-pointless aesthetic (‘Wreck-It Ralph’) or been no fun whatsoever (‘Epic’). ‘Despicable Me’ – and its sequel, up next for review – buck the trend and deliver comedy, charm and entertainment in spades.

THE AGITATION OF THE SMALL SCREEN: Steptoe and Son – Series 1

With the caveat that Dick Clement and Ian la Frenais’s ‘Porridge’ runs a very close second, it’s my humble opinion that Ray Simpson and Alan Galton’s ‘Steptoe and Son’ is the greatest sitcom in the history of British television. And the remarkable thing is that very often it isn’t funny at all. Very often, it’s cruel and embittered and almost painfully sad. Pathos and bathos have seldom been so enmeshed on the small screen.

Simpson and Galton never intended on writing a series, let alone eight seasons, two Christmas specials and two feature films. The vulgar, obstinate, determinedly working class Albert Steptoe (Wilfrid Brambell) and his loquacious, socially aspirant son Harold (Harry H. Corbett) were created for an episode of the BBC’s ‘Comedy Playhouse’ entitled The Offer. They had spent most of the 1950s working with the brilliant but prickly Tony Hancock on ‘Hancock’s Half Hour’ – the snob/pleb banter between Hancock and Sid James is something of a precursor to the Harold/Albert relationship – and weren’t looking to re-immerse themselves into sitcom writing. Tom Sloan, Head of Comedy at the BBC, had other ideas, and commissioned a series. Said series was produced in short order. The Offer was broadcast on British TV on 5 January 1962, with The Bird – the first episode of ‘Steptoe and Son’ series one proper – debuting on 14 June 1962.

The Offer, unlike many pilots which labour to establish character and setting, and whose aesthetics are often deviated from as resultant series find their own dynamic, presents the world of ‘Steptoe and Son’ fully formed. “You’ve held me back”, “you dirty old man”, the grubby expanse of the Steptoes’ yard, the abject poverty, Albert’s phlegmy low-class ruminations, Harold’s wordy wannabe middle class snobbery, the horse Hercules (beloved of Albert and hated by Harold), the antagonism/mutual dependency of the father-son relationship – it’s all there, perfectly encapsulated, in 30 minutes of grainy black and white.

Harold as a man of aspirations juxtaposed with set-in-his-ways Albert informs the five episodes of series one. In The Bird, Harold’s aspirations are romantic. A night on the town and the company of a young woman (the “bird” of the title) are what Harold sees as his reward for another thankless day at the rag ‘n’ bone trade. Albert protests that he’ll be lonely; tries to play the emotional blackmail card to keep his son at home. His maudlin soliloquy takes in his wife’s death and what he feels Harold owes him for the sacrifices made. “I had your education to think about,” he wheedles. “Not for long, though,” Harold shoots back; “I was on the cart at 12. Gawd, on the cart at twelve, in the army at 18 and back on the cart at 22. It’s all I’ve had.” Harold’s 37; a proximity to 40 that he harps on repeatedly. Albert’s eventual sabotage of Harold’s nascent relationship with the barely-seen but obviously middle class Roxanne (Valerie Bell) probably only presupposes what Harold would have achieved by himself in the long run, but it’s a nasty punchline to an episode already dripping in venom.

The Piano trades in slapstick humour more akin to Laurel and Hardy (indeed, the basic set up of a piano which requires removal from a penthouse suite unserviced by an elevator is immediately redolent of many a silent comedy) and is notable for relocating the action away from Oil Drum Lane (the fictional Shepherd’s Bush address of their yard). It also provides an insight into Harold’s contrariness. Hailed by a rich man (Brian Oulton) to remove the aforementioned piano – an unwelcome reminder of his ex-wife – Harold’s first impulse is to offer him the V-sign. Later, enticed up to the plush apartment with the promise of a grand piano that’s his to sell as long as he handles its removal – Harold the snob-in-waiting is revealed as acutely uncomfortable in the presence of the genuine article. Later still, though – returning with Albert to assist in shifting the piano – he becomes the parvenu again and repeatedly berates his father for his lack of culture.

The next two episodes – The Economist and The Diploma – see Harold trying to better himself professionally. A textbook on economics convinces him that bulk buying is a preferable option to the magpie-like acquisition of bits and pieces that characterises the rag ‘n’ bone trade. “Buying what?” Albert demands, contemptuously. “Doesn’t matter,” Harold responds, and therein lies his failure. 4,000 sets of uncollected false teeth come at a knock-down price, but selling them on proves harder than expected. The Economist ends in obvious fashion with Harold resolutely making the same mistake twice, but not before Simpson and Galton throw out some barbed comments about the political/economical climate of the day, particularly in relation to the Common Market. Harold imagines a tunnel beneath the English Channel (this 32 years before the Channel Tunnel actually opened) filled with foreigner rag ‘n’ bone carts. “English junk for the English,” he declares. Although contextualised, the line (with its nationalistic overtones) is one of many reminders of how different attitudes were back in the day.

The Diploma sees Harold studying to become a television engineer, all full of big talk about his capabilities with the new technology but undone in the end by basic incompetence. Simpson and Galton give us a nice parallel, however, with Albert’s return to driving the cart around London touting for business after so many years of forcing Harold to it while he stays inside and drinks tea (or more often gin). For all that Albert criticizes Harold for being “a rotten rag ‘n’ bone man”, he does no better himself. In fact, demonstrably worse. The Diploma isn’t the only ‘Steptoe and Son’ episode that trades on hubris – far from it – but it’s one of the show’s rare outings where the joke is equally on both protagonists.

The series ends with The Holiday, which boasts one extended comic set-piece involving Harold quite literally tearing through a bunch of holiday brochures while trying to decide which foreign resort is the likeliest location to pull birds. He finally settles on St Tropez (which both he and Albert pronounce “Saynt Trow-pezz”) as “they have it all on display there. Lets you see the goods at one glance. I’ve only got a fortnight, after all. Can’t afford to hang about.” Predictably, Albert doesn’t like the idea of Harold going off by himself – and abroad at that – when they could just go to Bognor, the Steptoe holiday destination since time immemorial. The humour flatlines to just plain sadness in the final scenes as Albert resorts to petulant measures to coerce Harold away from his exotic plans. It’s a brutally timed re-encapsulation of something the show, even in its more fanciful late-Sixties to early-Seventies second incarnation, never forget: ‘Steptoe and Son’ was a sitcom that didn’t always consider it necessary to pay lip service to the “com” bit.

In brief: The Bling Ring

About a third of the way into 'The Bling Ring' - maybe less; it's a mercifully short film - a couple of over privileged teens decide to break into Paris Hilton's palatial LA residence. Entry is effected thanks to the cat-walk strutting heiress leaving a key under the door mat. The majority of viewers at the screening I attended groaned or face-palmed. Someone muttered, loudly, "No fucking way." Reading up on the background - yup, we're in "based on a true story" territory - it transpired this actually happened. This pair of designer-clotheshorse douchebags - later joined by various in-crowd buddies - were able repeatedly to break into the house of Hilton and rip off clothes and jewellery worth hundreds of thousands because Paris Hilton left a key under her door mat.

As the film progresses, more lamentable security lapses come to light, notably Audrina Partridge, Orlando Bloom, Rachel Bilson and Lindsay Lohan's inability to simply lock their doors before they leave the premises. Nor, it would seem, does anyone who lives in Hollywood and works in the entertainment business have the slightest idea of how to programme a burglar alarm.

Thus the walk-in-marvel-at-the-designer-goods-walk-out-with-said-goods approach of our happy band of douchebags, all of whom had names and were played by people I'd never heard of before (except for Emma Watson who, to be perfectly honest with you, was the only reason I bothered with the film), but after a very short while I really didn't care and looking the cast up on IMDb hardly seems worth it for a 400 word review.

The big problem with 'The Bling Ring' is that, in depicting the actions of a bunch of vacuous nobodies obsessed with vacuous celebrities, the film becomes equally vacuous. This needn't have been the case, and a more satirical script and a sharper directorial approach could have made for an excoriating study of materialism and the dubious lure of celebrity culture. There are a few moments, particularly towards the end as the gang are unmasked and brought to trial, where writer/director Sofia Coppola comes close to engaging with the material with some degree of focus, but it's a case of too little too late. Whatever interest the last half hour generates, the first hour of 'The Bling Ring', with its desperately trendy soundtrack and oooh-look-at-me visuals, is little more than 'Hipster Douchebag: The Movie'.

(Oh, and to whoever designed the poster: it’s B&Es they’re pulling, not heists. Don’t try to dignify douchebaggery.)