Film

The Walk

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11/09/15

In 1974, tightrope walker Philippe Petit performed a stunt that defied belief. He strung a wire between the twin towers in New York (illegally) and walked backwards and forwards across it eight times while an entranced audience of passers-by watched in stunned amazement. The ‘Coup,’ as Petit called it, has of course already been the subject of a film, James Marsh’s riveting documentary, Man On Wire (2009), but Petit only had a couple of still photographers with him. So this is Robert Zemeckis’s attempt to reconstruct the event.

We open with Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) talking directly to camera. Gordon-Levitt is a charming performer (considerably more charming than Petit himself who was famously unfaithful to his long-suffering girlfriend, Annie, played here by Charlotte Le Bon the night after the Coup, a fact that the film makers choose to ignore). Indeed, the charm offensive may be what skewers the early sections of this, as a young Petit conceives his dream of walking between the towers (in a dentist’s waiting room, as it happens), enlists the help of circus stalwart, Papa Rudy (Ben Kingsley) to teach him the secrets of wire walking – and mawkishly romances Annie, who, when we first meet her is a street performer, bashing out drippy ballads on an acoustic guitar. The tone here is too whimsical for what follows, too self consciously comic for comfort and at times it threatens to derail the film completely. Matters aren’t helped by one of the murkiest 3D prints I’ve ever seen, which sets the first half of the story in deep shadow.

The momentum is happily regained somewhat once Petit and his ramshackle bunch of accomplices actually set about trying to achieve their objective. This section is filmed like a heist movie, with the tension steadily rising as the team try to get everything in place for the walk.

The Coup itself is a hair raising, terrifying, vertigo-inducing nightmare. I sat there, desperately reminding myself that history has already assured us of the outcome of the exercise, but it was to no avail. I’m not particularly good with heights and watching Gordon-Levitt walk back and forth, kneel down and at one point lie down on that narrow steel cable must have taken several years off my life. If the rest of the film had been up to this standard, it would doubtless have been granted five stars much higher score.

As it is, that uncertain first half is hard to forgive, particularly when it’s coming from a director of Zemeckis’s stature. A warning though. If you genuinely suffer from vertigo, this really may not be the film for you.

3.9 stars

Philip Caveney

Macbeth

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08/09/15

Macbeth has been filmed many times with varying degrees of success. Indeed, the story is so familiar there’s no point at all in describing what actually happens, since it is indelibly imprinted upon most people’s consciousness. Yet every single film made thus far has overlooked a really important opportunity. Macbeth and his wife need to be teenagers. Only the overbearing hubris of youth and rampant ambition can ever fully explain their actions. Of course, when you’re in the business of financing a movie, the simple truth is that you need names that will put bums on seats, so the chances are we’ll never get to see such an interpretation on the big screen. Which is a shame.

Here, Michael Fassbender gives us a grimy, muscular Macbeth, while the usually dependable Marion Cotillard struggles somewhat with her Scottish accent as his scheming wife. If you’re going to film this play, you really need to have something different up your sleeve and apart from a few neat flourishes, director Justin Kurzel doesn’t have an awful lot to offer us. He opens with the funeral of the Macbeths’ young son (something alluded to in the text but not, to my knowledge, ever shown before) and then he gives us a big slow motion battle, set against some bleak highland scenery. The witches are nicely restrained (some of their most famous lines summarily dispensed with) and from there, matters proceed at a funereal pace, with Fassbender and Cottilard reciting their lines whilst gazing into the middle distance, like actors in an Ingmar Bergman film.

It isn’t terrible, you understand, but the leaden quality rather neuters this most virile of Shakespeare’s plays, making you long to push on to the next action sequence, rather than relishing those wonderful words. There’s also a terrible misstep when Macbeth appears to discuss the assassination of Banquo (Paddy Considine) as the entire court listens in. It must have been Kurzel’s intention to do it this way, but it looks, frankly, risible.

The closing sections, in which the avenging forces set fire to, rather than transport the woods of Dunsinane, finally allow a touch of awe into the proceedings and the confrontation between Macbeth and Macduff (Sean Harris) is visceral enough to ensure this probably won’t be suitable to show in schools. There’s also a nice twist at the end involving the King’s sword – but by this time, it’s a little too late to salvage proceedings.

Advance reviews for this had led me to expect something extraordinary, but overall this felt like just another version of a tried and tested story. Decent but not a game changer.

3.5 stars

Philip Caveney

Roger Waters: The Wall

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29/09/15

Well, you can’t say the show wasn’t big enough.

Infamous rock-curmudgeon Roger Waters has finally released his long talked-about movie adaptation of The Wall and it is, as you might expect, a mammoth undertaking. Co-directed by Waters and Sean Evans, it’s essentially a documentary, culled from the show’s three year long world tour. The concert footage is intercut with a more personal tale, in which Waters drives across France and Italy to visit the graves of his grandfather and father, both of them the victims of war. It makes for a lengthy cinematic experience, a bum-numbing two hours and fifty minutes in total. The original double album was, in Waters’ own words, ‘the whinging of an over-priviliged rock star.’ But across the years, it has developed into something more worthy, a powerful polemic about the futility of war and a tribute to ‘the fallen.’ There’s no doubting Waters’ absolute sincerity in this, even if the personal footage occasionally feels a tad over-indulgent. I could have done without his drunken ramblings to an Italian barman, but the scenes where he plays a simple trumpet theme in two different graveyards is, it has to be said, touching.

As for the show itself, The Wall is what it has always been – a great big sprawling carnival of sound and light, shot through with occasional flashes of pure brilliance. I always thought that it was a patchy double album that could have been a killer single album. As somebody who has been a Pink Floyd fan since 1967, this was of course, a movie I had to see – and it’s definitely a marked improvement on Alan Parker’s rather shrill attempt to film it in 1982. It’s not all plain sailing though. In this day and age, the scantily-clad female imagery that accompanies Young Lust looks suspiciously like an old rock star having his cake and eating it; and despite Gerald Scarf’s wonderful cartoons to accompany The Trial, I was never convinced that this part of the show actually works. But there are so many other highlights to relish here; the jaw-dropping visuals projected onto the wall as it is built between the band and the audience (such an audacious concept!); the note-perfect guitar work from Snowy White and Dave Kilminster which capture David Gilmour’s sonic stylings perfectly; the hilarious Nuremburg Rally chic of Pink’s paranoia-filled stadium show, and the final spectacle of the wall coming down as a packed crowd bays for its destruction.

The high point? It has to be Comfortably Numb. Close up shots of a transported audience howling the lyrics back at the stage, demonstrate how universally adored this song is – and the moment when Kilminster rises above the parapet to deliver that guitar solo has to be one of the defining moments of rock theatre.

Overheard on the way out, a lady complaining to her husband that what she had just watched was ‘an endless anti-war rant.’ This seems a tad unfair, particularly as said husband had a distinctly beatific smile on his face. You don’t have to be a Pink Floyd fan to enjoy this film, but it certainly helps.

4.2 stars

Philip Caveney

The Martian

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27/09/15

With The Martian, Ridley Scott takes us back into outer space. Given that his previous excursion in that direction was the much anticipated, but decidedly underwhelming Prometheus, there are many out there who didn’t have great hopes for this movie. Happily, their fears are unfounded, because this is the best Ridley Scott movie in a very long time.

Based on Andy Weir’s recent bestseller, it’s the story of Astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon), who, during a manned mission to Mars, is caught up in a violent storm and knocked for six by a flying projectile. After a desperate search for him, his fellow crew members, led by Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain) come to the assumption that he must be dead and make a hasty exit in the direction of earth. But Watney isn’t dead. He wakes up several hours later with a nasty wound to his stomach and the awful realisation that he is totally alone on a planet that is millions of miles away from home. When the people at NASA finally learn of his situation, the decision is taken not to inform the other members of his crew of his plight for fear they will ‘lose concentration’ on their journey home. Watney is, to put it mildly, in a bit of a pickle. It will be four years before a rescue mission can be mounted and he only has enough food for around a month. If he’s to survive, he will have to (to use his own words) ‘Science the shit out of this.’

What follows is a fascinating and captivating couple of hours as Watney works out a complex plan to stay alive, starting with the idea of growing potatoes planted in the packaged human waste from the expedition’s toilet. Meanwhile, there’s an even more serious problem. The only music available to listen to is Lewis’s collection of disco hits circa 1980 – he may go stark raving mad before help arrives.

Damon is always an appealing performer and he’s perfect for the wisecracking, plucky Mark Watney. You’re rooting for him from the word ‘go,’ and, as his position becomes ever more precarious, you feel every setback as keenly as he does. As the story moves on and his crew mates finally learn of his situation, proceedings metamorphose into a complex rescue mission, which results in an absolutely nail biting climax. What’s more, there are all the tropes we’ve come to expect from Ridley Scott – magnificent cinematography (with Wadi Rum in Jordan standing in for Mars), a fabulous soundtrack utilising the delights of Abba and vintage David Bowie, plus the absolute conviction that no matter how far fetched the story becomes, it’s backed up by a wealth of detail, enough to convince you that this really could happen. It’s ironic that I’m reviewing this film on the very day that NASA will announce a ‘major discovery on Mars.’ I appreciate that Scott always puts aside a huge budget for publicity, but that may be going too far!

Scott, by the way, is pressing on with his production of Prometheus Two, so he isn’t quite giving up on outer space just yet. But The Martian is definitely a keeper. Watch it on the big screen and yes, for once, it’s actually worth booking for the 3D showing, because those vast, alien landscapes really are out of this world.

5 stars

Philip Caveney

Solace

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26/09/15

This fast moving pyscho-thriller, directed by Alfonso Poyart and executive-produced by its star, Anthony Hopkins was originally intended as a follow up to Se7en and it certainly treads similar territory, though it has to be said, with rather less spectacular results. A killer is at large in the city of Atlanta, despatching his disparate victims with a single stab wound to the base of the skull and the FBI are frankly, baffled. Agent Joe Merriweather (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) turns to his old colleague, John Clancy, (Hopkins) a psychic who has worked with him on previous cases but who has retired since the death of his young daughter from leukaemia. At first, Clancy is adamant that he doesn’t want to get back in the game but a brief encounter with Joe’s partner, Agent Katherine Cowls (Abbie Cornish) grants him a disturbing vision of her future and persuades him to change his mind. Once on the case, he soon uncovers the fact that all the murder victims are linked by one thing they have in common…

To be fair, the film is slickly directed and well acted by its cast, but it’s fatally skewered by the fact that Clancy’s abilities are so pronounced, he comes across as some kind of psychic superhero, leaving his FBI partners with very little to contribute to the proceedings. One quick touch of the deceased (or one of their possessions … or a flower they recently touched…) unleashes a whole barrage of cinematic images in his head, which act as a kind of conduit for him to anticipate the killer’s every move. Not only does this seem quite ridiculous, it kills any sense of suspense the story might have generated.

In the film’s final third, the killer steps into the spotlight only to reveal that (oh boy) he is psychic too, whereupon all hope of rescuing this movie goes straight out of the nearest window. A shame, because it’s nicely done and entertaining in its own, galumphing way. Those who actually believe in the supernatural may enjoy this more than I did, but honestly, if so-called psychics really were this adept, police forces across the world would have a much easier time of it.

3.2 stars

Philip Caveney

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A Walk Among The Tombstones

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21/09/15

Annoyingly, I missed this one at the cinema and it’s taken me far too long to catch up with it on the small screen. Based on a novel by Lawrence Block, it’s a dour slice of American grunge, featuring Liam Neeson as former detective and alcoholic, Matt Scudder, now plying a precarious trade as a private detective. Given Neeson’s relatively recent incarnation as everyone’s avenging Daddy of choice, it’s good to see him in a role where he actually carries a badge in order to justify his brutality, even if the badge in question is no longer valid. A pre credit sequence which shows him in his former incarnation, involved in a shootout with three bad guys, carries an entirely different accusation – that of crimes against fashion.

Now clean shaven and sans loon pants, Scudder receives a frantic phone call from drug trafficker, Kenny Kristo (Dan Stevens, demonstrating just how far he is able to depart from his Downton image when necessity calls.) Kristo’s wife has been kidnapped and despite him paying a hefty ransom, she’s been murdered anyway. Now he wants revenge and feels that Scudder is just the man for the job. Despite his reservations, Scudder undertakes the job and soon finds himself pitted against a ruthless duo of sociopaths who have enacted the same routine over and over. It’s quickly demonstrated that the bad guys are such scumbags that any retribution rained upon them will be richly deserved. A scene where Ray (David Harbour) espies his latest victim, a young girl dressed in a Little Red Riding Hood style, is the film’s most powerfully repellent set piece. Other scenes depicting the torture of the murderer’s female victims, stray very close to the line between powerful and gratuitous, so this certainly won’t be for everyone.

Written and directed by Scott Frank, AWATT is a powerful crime drama, though its stygian look can be a little dispiriting and its demonstration of the depths to which the human psyche can descend makes for grim viewing.

3.8 stars

Philip Caveney

Bill

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20/09/15

The Horrible Histories TV team, take a fairly convincing step up onto the big screen with this radical retelling of the life of William Shakespeare. When we first meet Bill (Matthew Baynton) he’s playing lute with Stratford On Avon’s hottest band, Mortal Coil. However, his propensity for indulging in tortured solos, soon prompts them to tell him to ‘shuffle off.’ (This will give you some idea of the standard of jokes on offer). However, Bill feels he’s destined for the big time and writes his first play, a knockabout comedy, but when his long-suffering wife Anne (Martha Howe Douglas) is unsupportive, he sets off for ‘that’ London to seek his fortune. He soon falls in with down-on-his-luck playwright, Christopher Marlowe (Jim Howick) and together they write a new play – but little do they know that the dastardly King Philip of Spain (Ben Willbond) is cooking up a fiendish plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth, (a gurning Helen McCrory) for which he needs one vital ingredient: a decent play.

Fans of the TV series should enjoy this as the format hasn’t changed a great deal, with the familiar players taking on multiple roles. There’s plenty of slapstick for the younger viewers, some more intellectual asides to keep the parents happy and if the whole enterprise has the hit-and-miss feel of the average Monty Python film, it doesn’t really matter as the end result is rarely ever less than entertaining.

It’s also very refreshing to encounter a family film that, for once, doesn’t come absolutely coated in saccharine. The crowd this afternoon was proof enough that it’s reaching its target audience. We were probably the only grown ups there who didn’t have a chortling child in tow. (I think we got away with it.)

3.8 stars

Philip Caveney

45 Years

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12/09/15

45 Years is a compelling film, laying bare the emotional complexities that lie beneath the surface of any relationship. Here, Geoff and Kate’s plans to celebrate their forty-fifth wedding anniversary are suddenly derailed by the arrival of a letter, informing Geoff that the body of his former girlfriend has been found in Switzerland. Perfectly preserved in the glacier that killed her, Katya is transformed into an idealised Sleeping Beauty of a woman: an embodiment of youth and the heady rush of first love. As Geoff retreats into the memories of what he has lost, Kate is left bereft, struggling to cope with what she knows is an irrational jealousy – because what’s the point in being jealous of a ghost?

It’s subtly done. Tom Courtenay portrays Geoff as vulnerable and conflicted. His love for Katya is as well-preserved as her body, but he loves Kate too, and doesn’t want to hurt her with this visit from the past. “It feels like it happened to another person,” he tells her, and it’s clearly true. But Kate, played with wonderful nuance by Charlotte Rampling, is thrown by the revelation that Geoff would have married Katya – if she hadn’t died – and this threatens to undermine their whole relationship. “Was she blonde?” she asks, hopefully. “No,” Geoff tells her, “She was dark.” “Like me.” The fear of being second best, of being the consolation prize, erodes Kate’s confidence in everything that they have built.

And it’s heartbreaking. Two people, who have enjoyed and endured so much together, who have shared their lives for almost half a century, whose caring is so ingrained it’s become routine, can still be unsettled and rendered insecure. It’s heartbreaking – and it’s beautiful. The whole film feels somehow very real.

The Norfolk Broads make a convincing backdrop, and the cluttered house is a nice reminder of the baggage the pair have accumulated throughout the time they’ve shared. The photographs Geoff has hidden in the attic have always been there for the finding, but it’s only now that they have come to light.

And it’s an absolute delight to see a film about old people that isn’t about impending death or comic ineptitude. This is a love story – with sex and tears and tenderness. And it’s just as affecting as any young romance.

It’s well worth watching, if you get the chance.

4.6 stars

Susan Singfield

Legend

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11/09/15

Brian Helgeland’s take on the Kray twins is a curate’s egg of a film; good in parts, but not good enough overall to deserve the welter of four star reviews it has received. Mind you, the Guardian’s two star appraisal was probably a bit harsh, though the publicity generated by the film’s publicists, who cunningly made it look like a four star on the poster surely deserves some kind of special award for chutzpah (see image). Unlike the previous attempt at filming this story (famously starring Gary and Martin Kemp) this version begins with the twins at the height of their powers in London’s East End and is narrated by Frances (Emily Browning) the troubled teenager who ends up as Reggie Kray’s long-suffering wife. Right from the beginning, this is a problem because Frances is actually a rather dull character and we really don’t learn enough about her to fully empathise with her plight, even when her misery turns to tragedy.

On the plus side, we get two Tom Hardys for the price of one. He is, of course, an extraordinary actor and he manages to portray the two very different brothers with swaggering conviction – but it has to be said that his characterisation of Ronnie Kray is largely comedic (brilliantly so in a scene where he attempts to dance to Strangers In The Night) but I felt distinctly uneasy to hear an audience laughing out loud at the utterances of an unabashed psychopath. Call me old fashioned, but that just felt wrong.

There’s a reasonable attempt here to recreate the 60s backdrop, replete with a vintage soundtrack, but the script fails to fully explore some important characters in the story. Christopher Eccleston as Nipper Read, the copper pledged with the difficult task of bringing the Krays to justice is (if you’ll forgive the pun) criminally underused and so is Tara Fitzgerald as Frances’s mother, a woman who famously wore black to her daughter’s wedding.

There are some extremely violent set pieces – a gang fight in a pub, where hammers are put to inappropriate use, and the famous murders of George Cornell and Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, but they are filmed with a kind of cartoonish zeal that somehow undermines their severity and inevitably, glamourises the ‘pay up or get duffed up’ world in which the Krays operated. Again, I felt conflicted by this. Surely villains should be scorned, not paraded as role models?

All-in-all then, this feels like a missed opportunity. After viewing the trailer, I’d expected to love this film, but I came away feeling that it should have (and easily could have) been so much better than it actually was.

3.2 stars

Philip Caveney

The Savoy Cinema – Reloaded

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11/09/15

Heaton Moor, Manchester

For many people (me included) it sounds like the proverbial dream job. But for Louis Mundin and his fiancée, Sophie Smith, it’s soon going to be a reality. This likeable young couple will be managing Heaton Moor’s iconic Savoy Cinema when it reopens, fully refurbished, in late October.

The Savoy has been a fixture on ‘the Moor’ since 1923. Its first feature was silent movie, The Virgin Queen, which was accompanied by music from a string quartet. Over the years, the Savoy has endured, surviving a barbaric 70s refit, sporadic attempts to turn it into a ‘fun-pub’ and the dark mutterings of those who predicted that the advent of digital cinema would finally sound its death knell. But, as it turned out, the doom mongers were wrong. The Savoy is currently in the midst of an extensive refurbishment.

When I arrive on a sunny Friday afternoon, the place is a hive of industry and it’s apparent at a glance that this must be a labour of love, although – at the moment -it’s more like hard labour as the Mundin family work around the clock to ensure they meet their launch deadline of October 23rd. Sophie is painting wood stain onto sheets of plywood, while Louis is in conference with a team of builders. Louis’s mum Amanda is there too, overseeing the workforce and, somewhere amidst the thumping of lump hammers and the screeching of electric saws, I catch a fleeting glimpse of Tony, Amanda’s husband. It’s clear that the Mundins are an industrious crew, who rarely stop for a break, but I eventually manage to coax Louis and Sophie to a (relatively) quiet spot where we can chat.

I begin by asking if this is the realisation of a long-held ambition.

Louis: Well, yes. We first got into cinema about eight years ago, when Mum took over the Ritz Cinema in Belper. We worked there part time, helping out behind the bar and so forth. Me and Sophie both love film so when this opportunity came up, we grabbed it with both hands.

I remark that they seem to possess an enviable skill set between them.

Sophie: Well, we recently did up our home, so we used that very much as a training exercise!

The Savoy offers reasonably priced membership deals and the Mundins were initially expecting to sell 500 of them at most. So they must have been absolutely blown away with the response they’ve had.

Louis: It’s amazing. We’ve been absolutely inundated with support from day one. At last count we had 3,400 members, which is completely unheard of.

Indeed, the response was so enthusiastic that initial plans to restore just a proportion of the Savoy’s seating had to be hastily rejigged and now all 180 seats will be brought back into play – and not just any old seats! The standard kind will be augmented by luxury Pullman style seating and, for the more romantically inclined, there’ll even be double sofas so customers can snuggle up while they view.

Sophie: They are incredibly comfortable seats!

But, I ask, with so many members, what happens if everybody turns up on the same night?

Louis: That would actually be a good problem to have!

Sophie: As with our other cinemas (the family also run the Regal in Melton Mowbray), booking will be a key element. Members will receive film listings a few days prior to general release so they’ll have the opportunity to book seats for the films they really want to see.

Louis: And a week before we officially open we’ll be starting our free members’ previews, a whole week’s worth of them, as a thank you to everyone who has put their faith in us. Depending on take up, we’ll probably also offer free Sunday shows that week, so nobody is disappointed.

I ask what their biggest challenge has been and both of them say that restoring the frontage has been a real struggle. The original plan had always been to expose the elegant Doric columns that supported the portico, but once revealed, it soon became apparent that whoever boxed them in back in the 1970s had not treated them with the necessary degree of respect. In short, they’d knocked the living daylights out of them.

Louis: We worked with the conservation officers on that. It was in everyone’s interests to preserve them, but unfortunately they’d been too badly damaged and were no longer safe. In the end, we had to accept that they’d have to come down, but we’re going to replace them with cast stone pillars, that will recreate the original look. They’ll be as close to identical as we can possibly get.

Of course, it’s not just about restoring the original style. The Savoy will boast state-of-the-art digital projection, surround sound, and there’ll even be live link- ups to ballet and opera events. There’ll be intelligent programming, a mixture of art house and commercial films, silver screen shows for pensioners and weekend matinees for the kids.

I can’t resist asking Louis and Sophie to name their favourite films.

Louis: I’d have to go for The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I’m a massive Peter Jackson fan.

Sophie: I like a good psychological thriller, so I’d definitely go for Shutter Island. It’s got Leonardo Di Caprio and it’s got one of those endings that you can’t stop talking about afterwards.

Plans are already afoot for Halloween. Members have been asked to choose from a shortlist of five movies for the big night. (At the moment, Ghostbusters is the frontrunner, closely followed by The Shining, though my personal choice from the list would have to be Rosemary’s Baby.)

I finish up by asking about the couple’s mission statement. What do they hope to achieve by bringing this beautiful old cinema back to its former glory?

Louis: We want it to be an asset to the community. We would like to give something back to the people who have given us so much faith and trust. We want the Savoy to be one of the best cinemas in the country and there’s absolutely no reason why it can’t be exactly that.

Sophie: The Savoy is going to have the best projection, the best sound, there will be no compromise on quality and people will even be able to enjoy a glass of wine while they watch.

Sounds like heaven, I tell them. Lead me to it!

Read more about the cinema’s progress at

http://www.savoycinemaheaton.com/blog.htm