Baby Driver (2017)

I spent a couple of weeks in Atlanta last month. Aside from the obvious Gone with the Wind links, a bit of Walking Dead action, and a sight of the Millennium Arch in the little-seen Triple 9, it's not particularly big in the movies. So I when I learned that Edgar Wright's new film, Baby Driver (which I had been planning on seeing regardless), was set in Atlanta, it gave me an extra reason to look forward to seeing it.

Atlanta streets get a fair workout in the film - a couple of glimpses of the skyline - but generally when the film is outside, it's either very locally focused, or moving too fast to be able to do much in the way of scenery spotting.

As for the film itself, Baby Driver has a comfortable old-school feel to the story. Wright (who wrote as well as directed) is clearly referencing back to a lot of American crime movies from the late 60s/early 70s. Take away Baby's earbuds (and cut back on the humour) and there's very little that would distinguish it from a movie of that time - save that the female characters are slightly less than useless in this film (which is not to say that there's much evolution in their parts).

Compared with Edgar Wright's other films, there's something almost tempered about this effort. That's not to say it isn't fast, funny and incredibly watchable, but the quirkiness seems a little dialed down compared to previous efforts. It meshes well with its milieu, and perhaps that's the reason why.

My main criticisms of the film probably lie with its climax - which is difficult to discuss without spoiling the film. There are some interesting reversals, but ultimately I didn't feel it played enough to the main character's skills - relying on more of a brute force approach than the skill evidenced elsewhere. It's a small bone to pick though, because I was thoroughly entertained by the film.

British Museum Members' Room

The members' room at the British Museum is located at the far left end of the Great Court, if you come through from the Great Russell Street entrance. The actual entrance to the room is found
by walking up two flights of the staircase found at the far end of the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery.

After having your card checked by the attendant on duty (you won't get in without one), you will presented with two options: walk straight ahead into the cafe area, or go up the stairs on the left to the study/lounge area.

Before you do either, there is often an artifact on display in the entrance that isn't available to non-members, so you may want to take a look at that.

The cafe provides the best views across the Great Court, or rather the western side of the Great Court. Food and drinks can be ordered at the counter and will be brought to your table (assuming any form of preparation is required), so it's best to know where you're sitting before ordering. The cafe can get busy during peak times (weekends), but there are normally seats available. It is also possible to have your order brought up to the lounge area.

The food is okay, although every time I've been, whatever is up on the board behind the counter pays no resemblance to whatever is actually on offer. I would recommend asking what is available from the outset.

Upstairs, the lounge area provides options for sitting and relaxing, or doing some work. On the landing at the top of the stairs there's a small over-spill area for when the main part of the room becomes too full. In the main room, there is a small counter immediately on your left where you can pour yourself a glass of water, and more importantly where the members' room password can be found.

Further in on your left are shelves of history books to be used as either study sources or as a light diversions while you take a pause during your visit.

On the right are the tops of the windows looking across the Great Court. You won't see as much as you can from the cafe below, but you do get a good view of the Court's floor.

Seating is a mixture of sofa and round back swivel chairs. There is also a large table in the room, around which you will undoubtedly find a number of people working on laptops. There are a couple of power sockets in the room. These will probably have already been taken.

Access to the members' room is one of the key benefits of museum membership (starting at £64 for adult membership if you pay by direct debit - although cheaper if you're under 26).

Other perks include free entry into its special exhibitions. The Museum runs a number of exhibitions a year (I've been to four so far during my year of membership (one of them twice)), so the dedicated museum-goer could make a fair amount of their fee back on the special exhibitions alone. You will also be able to use the members' cloakroom (next to the Montague Place entrance), and fast track the queues if you enter via Great Russell Street.

The Graduate (1967)

Until last night, I had never seen The Graduate.

I had previously caught bits and pieces of it - the finale at the church has been shown so many times in isolation that it was hard to escape it, but I had never watched the whole film from start to finish.

Since it is  currently back in cinemas for its fiftieth anniversary, I thought I'd finally get around to correcting that missing piece of my movie education.

The first thing that I always wonder about is whether a film holds up after all those years. What might once have been a classic can with hindsight, turn into an embarrassment of naive craftsmanship and clunky scripting that no one is prepared to call time on. Certainly there should be an understand of the period in which a film was made, but we also have to appreciate that we've moved on from the time when audiences used to flee from the sight of a locomotive being projected on a screen in a circus tent. There are classics and there are historical artifacts - the two are not always found in the same movie.

In the case of The Graduate though, they are. Cinematographically the film holds up well. The pallet is certainly one of the sixties - the use of colour is something that's often lacking from today's films. Desaturated colours have their time and place, but sometimes you want something a bit brighter. The direction of the camera also holds up - with the occasional shot or cut that dates the film poorly - Benjamin's reaction to the naked Mrs Robinson or any of those zoom shots felt more distracting than useful to me.


Music-wise, the Simon and Garfunkle songs are brilliant (although very much of the period) - the lyrics for Mrs Robinson finally coming in as the car emerges from the tunnel was pure cinema - and for some reason I was reminded of the Burt Bacharach music for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (two years after The Graduate, and also featuring Katharine Ross).

The story itself doesn't feel stuck in the sixties. Benjamin's attitudes seem perfectly contemporary, which probably says much about the effect that sixties sexual politics still have today. The treatment of women doesn't seem to have moved on much either.

Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock looked like the part that fifteen years later would have been portrayed by a young Tom Cruise - and frankly I think young Cruise could have pulled it off better. Certainly Hoffman manages the nervous awkwardness well, but he didn't quite convince me enough as the type of young man who would so easily gain the interest of Mrs Robinson and the affections of Elaine Robinson. A bit too much blank-stare acting too for my liking - although it served him well enough in Rain Man.

The portrayal of the female characters in the film is uncomfortable - Bancroft's Mrs Robinson comes across as a sexual predator in early scenes, and then devolves into a scheming psychopath all to ready to cry rape to suit her own purpose, while Ross's Elaine seems to fall for Benjamin's charms a little too easily.

However, switch the genders for Mrs Robinson and Benjamin, and make the accusation of rape a threat of violence, and I probably wouldn't be concerned about the character's portrayal - so perhaps the truth in the situation compensates for my concerns about the prejudicial characterisation. It's something that's unlikely to resolve itself easily for me.

As for Elaine, I think her final expression on the bus redeemed her character. For me, that look of uncertainty justified every other decision her character made in the film.

Transformers: The Last Knight (2017)

About a year ago, while I was wandering around St James's Park, I noticed a large number of film vehicles - including a lot of cars - parked in Horse Guards Road. A quick check of Twitter (always best for figuring out what's happening in the world) told me that they were filming the latest Transformers movie.

Great, I thought. This is what everyone has been crying out for - a sequel to Transformers: Age of Extinction, that cinematic classic-in-the-making that is certain to be in everyone's all-time-list of best films.

 So I wandered up to The Mall (just by Admiralty Arch) where they were filming, snapped a couple of shots (I also have some video if Michael Bay wants it for the Blu Ray extras), and thought that now I'd seen it being filmed, I should probably watch the film when it came out (like I needed an excuse).

And the film has just come out - so I went to see it.

To say that Transformers : The Last Knight descends into extreme silliness does a disservice to the previous episodes of this seemingly unending series. However, watching it is akin to reading a comic book while jacked-up on helium. Like the earlier installments, it's fast, loud, overlong and completely nonsensical. It was also entertaining, but only in a 'watch it once and never see it again' sense.

I liked the first Transformers movie - there was plenty wrong with it, but it did enough right that it's a film I'll watch again. The second managed to produce some interesting action sequences, so it's not completely without merit. Third and fourth though were like trying to watch one of Michael Bay's Transformers transform - you know there's something happening, but with all the fast edits and constant camera moving, you can't be exactly sure what it is, whether it's doing it right, and whether the end result looks right or not.

With that as a benchmark, T:TLK is a step-up from the last couple of films. It provides Laura Haddock, doing her best Lara Croft impersonation, who seemed to be a step up from some of the female characters of previous films. The camera didn't seem to be quite as interested in leering over her, and she delivers a likable performance. We also get Izabella - a girl doing typical girl things, such as repairing robots and having unrealistic adventures (read my novel if you think I'm being facetious), who gets some decent opening scenes, is then forgotten about for half of the film, and then comes back with some fairly random reason for her involvement at the end.

The attempts at humour in the film generally fall flat - the Autobots are as unfunny as ever - but Stanley Tucci's inebriated wizard is surely a cult character in the making. His performance is somewhere between awful and brilliant - in fact I think an entire spin-off film needs to be devoted to this character,

The Other Side of Hope (2017)

A Finnish-German co-production, The Other Side of Hope is a 'comedy' about a Syrian refugee and a Finnish restaurateur.

I'm not sure I should put comedy in quotes because it is a funny film - or at least half of it is. For the most part the side of the film that deals with the restaurateur is a deadpan, absurdist comedy. The side dealing with the refugee is less so, at times it going to fairly dark places with the reaction the refugee experiences from the less-enlightened members of Finnish society.

It's a film that treats its subject matter with the respect that it deserves. It's also hugely entertaining when it really kicks into gear - although it does take a while before it raises more than the occasional chuckle.

The area the film lacked most for me though was that I didn't care enough about the characters. The style of  storytelling created a certain amount of emotional distance - in some cases quite appropriately - but it meant that while I could feel a certain amount of injustice on behalf of the refugee character, ultimately the story didn't quite cross the empathy barrier.

Churchill (2017)

Churchill is a film about aging.

Certainly it's a character study of the man, but the particulars of the story concern themselves with the moment in Churchill's wartime leadership where he is a spent force, fixated on the mistakes in his past and unable to understand that the world is not the same place it used to be.

Brian Cox's portrayal of Churchill is impressive. There are times where he embodies the role so well that you have to squint to see the joins. Unfortunately this distracted me from fully enjoying the film I was constantly having to struggle between my image of the real Churchill and the performance I was seeing on screen, and I wasn't able to invest myself enough in the story to avoid noticing the inflections that were more Brian Cox than Winston Churchill (or perhaps that's less a problem with Cox's performance and more a problem with the film not fully demanding my attention).

However, in terms of the physicality, the way Cox inhabits Churchill's large, aging frame, there's little to fault. His portrayal carries a ring of verisimilitude - at least from my knowledge of Churchill.

The other actors generally do a decent enough job - although I wasn't quite convinced by Julian Wadham's Montgomery (was he really that effete?) and James Purefoy's George VI seemed off. Miranda Richardson and Ella Purnell were really the other standouts, supplying much of the emotional backbone of the film.

The production felt stagy - in fact, it felt as if it was originally a play that had been adapted to the cinema by throwing in a few exterior shots involving a bit of driving. Nothing suggested it needed a big screen experience. Direction was competent, with some visual flair, but overall it felt lacking in the moving picture department.

The script itself had nice touches of wit and did a decent job with the characterisation. From my basic knowledge of the period and the people, there was little that rang untrue from a historical point of view (although I'm sure somewhere there's a Churchill historian standing outside a cinema with a cardboard sign reading 'Down with this sort of thing').

Wonder Woman (2017)

The biggest disappointment about Wonder Woman is that we didn't get the TV theme tune playing throughout it.

I think by now almost everyone in the world has expressed an opinion on the Wonder Woman film, so why should I be any different.

I've been a superhero fan for ... far too long. Superman was my first superhero, Batman my second - and Wonder Woman was there fairly early on, thanks to a run of the comics by Gerry Conway and Paul Levitz in the early eighties, and the Lynda Carter TV version. I've seen various versions of the character over the year - some have been excellent, others have been disappointingly poor.

Thankfully, the new film didn't have that problem. Gal Gadot seems born to play the role. There are a few actors who have been perfectly cast as superheroes - Christopher Reeve and Robert Downey Jr spring to mind - but there aren't many, so Gadot joins a relatively fall group.

The story itself manages well for most of its running time. The Paradise Island sequences at the beginning were well handled, and a welcome breathe of colour after previous drab entries in the DCverse. They might have been missing the Purple Ray and any invisible aircraft, but I can just about forgive them those things.

The London sequences could have been overlong, and admittedly there are a couple of points where the film drags, but largely they succeed thanks to the amusing scripting and the performances of the actors (principally Gadot, Pine and Davis).

The sequence on the Front are really where the film comes into its own. The sequence in the trenches leading to Wonder Woman (sorry, Diana - the Wonder Woman moniker is never uttered) going over the top is a perfect piece of cinema - emotionally manipulative in the way that all the best films are. I would put this sequence among my all time best, just below a couple of tear-jerking scenes from Up, Inside Out and Room.

Unfortunately, the film spoils its perfect score with the final showdown - Pine's Steve Trevor gets all the juicy heroics, while Diana has a decently staged, but ultimately emotionally empty battle with the film's main antagonist. There's some good character stuff mixed in there, but the two aspects of the climax - the showdown and the weapon - should have been more tightly connected. Diana's battle is too abstract - it needed to be grounded further than it was to make the audience really care.

Despite that slight disappointment, I've still gone back to see the film an additional two times, and I'm sure there will be a fourth viewing somewhere in the near future. Definitely somewhere within the top ten superhero films of all time.

My Cousin Rachel (2017)

It's been four days since I watched My Cousin Rachel, and I still haven't been able to make up my mind what I thought about it. I have been thinking about it quite a lot though, which says something about its effect on me.

I'm unfamiliar with the Daphne du Maurier novel that serves as the source material for the film, so aside from the basic concept (man becomes infatuated with woman who may have been responsible for his cousins's death), the story was completely fresh to me - and the turns in characterisation and plot managed to surprise me throughout.

The performances in the film are strong for the most part. Rachel Weisz handles the ambiguity (and often inscrutability) of the eponymous character well, although at times that makes her something of a blank slate; how well can you judge what an actor is conveying when you're not quite sure what that actor should be conveying? Sam Claflin's onscreen disintegration is slightly easier to judge and is handled cleverly, eliciting empathy, irritation, concern and fear.

Where the adaptation perhaps falls down is in the direction. Performances are handled well, and the direction shifts the story along nicely, but there is something pedestrian to the design of the film. The mood of the scene rarely seemed to match the mood of the characters - perhaps it was too subtle for my to pick up, but I left the film with a sense that there should have been more heightened drama. Compared with something like this year's Lady Macbeth, which had an even more restricted setting, the mis-en-scene seemed overly plain.

That could be my four-day-old memory being unfair to an otherwise decently mounted production, but I do have the distinct impression of being slightly underwhelmed in that area.

World Naked Bike Ride - London 2017

No, I didn't join in. However, for the first time since it's been running through London (according to Wikipedia it expanded to the UK in 2010 - so that would suggest this is the eighth time), I was witness to hundred of cyclists in various states of undress making their way across Waterloo Bridge.

As they passed, a few things came to my attention (insert Frankie Howerd exclamation).

First were the reactions from my fellow pedestrians. I didn't hear any cries of disgust, calls for them to "think about the children" (and there were children who were witness to it without any signs of incipient trauma), or any other morally-outraged responses. I did hear "only in London" a few times (which isn't , the bike ride has been held in other cities both in the UK and across the Globe (hence the World in World Naked Bike Ride - we're not the USA with the World Series here)).

 Secondly was how normal it all seemed. Maybe it's me getting older (although I should be getting more conservative as I age), but the sight of hundred of naked or semi-clad people on bikes didn't appear to be particularly unusual. Seeing naked women didn't make me crazed with lust - so I guess all those people who think women need to be clad from head-to-toe to prevent men from raping them might be a little misguided.

 Thirdly was the sheer variety of bodies on display. Old, young, fat, thin, male, female (although the gentlemen greatly outweighed the ladies). There's often this wrinkling the nose in disgust about the bodies some people have to show - it should only be the attractive people who get naked (which is all confused in the nudity is about sex/sexiness argument). I can't say I felt any particular disgust - at least no more so than I'd feel at any of the riders with their clothes on.

 Primarily, I think this drove home the fact with me that the problem with nudity isn't too much nudity - it's too little nudity. Unless the goal is to fetishise it, to reserve it for the strip club, in which case, keep making sure that everyone is covered up and make getting naked a shameful thing that only happens behind closed doors.

The Mummy (2017)

I've seen The Mummy twice now. Both times courtesy of my unlimited Curzon membership, so don't think I thought it was good enough to warrant paying for it twice.

Somewhere in The Mummy is a decent-enough film, but it looks like a film with a classic case of executive interference. Given that this is supposed to be the first film in a shared universe, it's understandable why the studio might be a bit nervous - but that nervousness could potentially lead to their universe being prematurely mummified and then buried somewhere in what used to be Ancient Mesopotamia.

The opening scene is a prime example. Russell Crowe provides what should be an unnecessary narration over events in Ancient Egypt. Most of what he tells the audience is revealed later in the film anyway - and the rest of it could have played out with a couple more minutes worth of ancient Egypt and maybe a bit of subtitled dialogue to give a little more context of what was going on in the scene. Given the experience of the writers attached to the film, I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't how it was originally intended to play.

There are also numerous cases of over-explanation - lines of dialogue that go against the natural rhythm of the speech and which often seem at odds with the quality of the rest of the dialogue in the scenes. What should be snappy banter becomes weighed down with unnecessary lines.

Then there's Jekyll. And here come some (minor) spoilers - so you might want to give this paragraph a wide berth. It shouldn't come to much of a surprise to most people that he has a monstrous alter ego. That's made fairly evident from Cruise's character's first introduction to the good doctor. What is completely unnecessary is the full-on transformation we get later on in the film. The scene serves a small purpose in distracting some of the characters from other events occurring at the same time, but mostly it feels out of place - assuming Crowe's Jekyll lingers on for a few more movies, there has to be a better picture for him to pop his Eddie. But again, this smacks of someone losing their nerve over including Jekyll and not having him turn into Hyde.

Direction and/or editing feel a bit all over the place. Action scenes are competently handled, but there are a few what should have been jump scares that completely fail (there is one that worked, but it was the exception). There are also a number of moments that I'm sure had the writers rubbing their hands with glee as they thought of the dread that the scene would evoke. Except the director bottled it every single time.

There's a lot more that's wrong with the film, but I don't think it's quite the desiccated corpse that some reviewers might think it is. Ultimately though, I think what's most appealing about it are the glimpses beneath the bandages of the film that it could have been rather than the misshapen version that we were ultimately given.