Hong Kong Railway Museum

For a little bit of context, I've been fascinated by trains for most of my life. I can't make any claim to being a true fanatic - my knowledge of different engine classes is severely limited - but I do consider it, when done right, to be the most civilised, romantic, and joyful form of transport that exists.

Which of course means that when gifted a free weekend in Hong Kong, my first point of call was to the Hong Kong Railway Museum.

The museum is sited in the Tai Po area of Hong Kong, which is in the New Territories. About equidistant from Tai Po Market Station and Tai Wo Station on the East Rail Line, it's a bit of a trek if coming from central Hong Kong,

The Tai Po area has a distinctly different feel to it than the urban center of Hong Kong. It also has the high-rise apartments common throughout the city, but smaller buildings sit alongside those, and the bustle of the place has the feel of a local community more than the business and tourist centres found closer to the bay.

As a museum, the Hong Kong Railway Museum is a little on the small side. Its hub is the 1913 Tai Po Market Station building. Unlike other stations of the time that were built in a colonial fashion, Tai Po Market was built in a Chinese style.

Entrance to Tai Po Market Station.

Passenger's waiting hall of the station.

Waiting hall looking into former accommodation quarters for the station master, now an exhibition gallery

Ticket office / station master's office

Signal cabin.Levers would be used to control semaphore signals, railroad switches and level crossings

Distant signal semaphore at stop or danger signal

Outside the station building, two separate lines of track hold a diesel-electric locomotive, and separately six coaches. To the side, a narrow gauge locomotive is also preserved. Two other vehicles that can also be found outside the station are a pump trolley and a diesel-driven maintenance car.

Sir Alexander. The first diesel-electric engine in Hong Kong.

1911 Third Class compartment. Built in London.

Pump trolley

motor trolley

Narrow gauge steam locomotive. Originally ran on the Sha Tau Kok Railway

A small miniature railway is also present. Lacking in sophistication, it still seemed to be a hit with one of the small people at the museum who, judging by the wailing, was extremely put out by having his go interrupted by his younger sibling.

Aside from genuine rail enthusiasts, the museum is probably not worth the journey from central Hong Kong alone. However, along with Tai Po's markets and temples, it makes an interesting diversion for about an hour or so.

Atomic Blonde (2017)

I'd slept about four hours (too much to drink the night before) when I went to see Atomic Blonde, so I wasn't sure that I would be able to stay awake for the whole film. Surprisingly though I did manage to avoid dropping off - although based on my experience of the film, I'm not sure that was necessarily a good thing.

The trailers I'd seen for the film left me in two minds about what I was going to get - on the one hand it seemed to be setting up a stylish action-thriller, smart quips, 80s retro feel, but on the other it seemed a little dour in its choice of colour pallet, hearkening back to the cold war thrillers of that time.

What was delivered was a great soundtrack for the 80s aficionados, some really well choreographed fight sequences, a dour style, little in the way of decent quips, and the dullest characters this side of a timber yard.

The film comes across like the child of The Bourne Identity and Kick-Ass - if The Bourne Identity and Kick-Ass were going through a messy divorce and Atomic Blonde couldn't figure out which parent it wanted to live with.

What would have been preferable: more character, a plot where you actually cared about the twisty machinations, and perhaps a little less objectification of women in a film which looks like it's trying to create a female-led spy franchise.

Step (2017)

Step tells a tale that you've seen before a dozen times. It's the story of disadvantaged kids being lifted up by the efforts of the teachers at a high school, while competing for a dance competition - with this being their final chance of winning, having lost every previous attempt.

The main difference here is that it's a documentary - and unlike all those films telling of a similar struggle, there's no writer who can guarantee a happy ending.

Chronicling the senior year of a Baltimore High School for inner-city girls, the story focuses mainly on three of the girls, showing their family lives and academic struggles, as well as the work leading up to their Step competition - although by the end of the film, it's clear that Step is only the backdrop to the real tale and the question of whether the school can live up to its promise of ensuring that every girl is accepted into college.

As a social document, it provides a glimpse into the lives of those who have to fight to achieve. To paraphrase one of the teachers, the girls are doubly-disadvantaged by both race and gender (and you can throw in social demographic for good measure).

As a piece of entertainment, it hits all the right notes. The audience in the cinema where I watched this applauded at the end - that might not be unusual for cinemas in the US - but this is England. We don't applaud films.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

For me, watching Valerian was like going on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland for the very first time. Although there may have been flaws with it, the sheer joy of the experience meant that on leaving the ride I immediately wanted to run around to get on it again.

In the case of the film, immediately meant the next day.

Valerian is very much the spiritual follow-up to The Fifth Element, Luc Besson's earlier foray into completely bonkers, 60s-comic-book-influenced, science fiction. Like Fifth Element it has the type of dialogue that sounds like the English translation of French comic book dialogue (wholly appropriate as Valerian is an English language version of a French comic book). Characters also feel fairly flimsy, again as if they are very literal translations of their two-dimensional counterparts.

The dialogue and characters have come under a fair amount of criticism as a result, but for an apologist for the film, it feels rather more like this is how they should be. By not developing the characters to greater depths, and by having something of a mannered-translation approach to the dialogue, the film feels true to the feel of the source material. To that effect, it seemed to have similarities with the De Laurentiis-produced films of Flash Gordon, and Barbarella.

There are still issues with the story though. The early sequence with the inhabitants of the planet Mul had me wanting to spend all day on the beach with them, and the following sequence in Big Market is a melange of invention that is beautifully handled.

Nothing else in the film quite met the heights of those first twos sequences, but even so it was a film that kept me entertained throughout and, as mentioned, wanting to do it all over again once it had finished.

It's not going to be a film for everyone. But if you liked The Fifth Element before it was fashionable to do so, then you probably stand a fair chance of enjoying this. Whether you'll be quite as much in love with it as I am is another matter altogether.

The Beguiled (2017)

I had heard plenty of claims and counterclaims about whitewashing in The Beguilded before I went to see it, which never helps in trying to get into the right mood for watching a film. Should I have boycotted it out of principle? Am I supporting racial discrimination in Hollywood by showing my support? Was the director correct to get rid of the sole African-American character as it would have been more harmful to retain her? Was avoiding the issue of racism completely better than potentially being offensive by trying to deal with it?

Looking at the film cold, I wouldn't consider it a racist picture - at least it is not positively racist with its depictions (because there are none in any shape or form). The racism only exists by omission. So while it does not contribute to the conversation, it does not harm it per se - unless another director was lined-up to produce a more racially aware version and Sophia Copolla took that away from them - so I don't see that the film quite deserves to be boycotted for that reason alone.

On the question of whether the director should have gotten rid of the character, the answer is an ambiguous no. I can't say the character would have added to the story (I haven't read the book, or seen the earlier film of it, so have no comparison), but it certainly wouldn't have ruined it. It's a film where audience sympathy with the characters is already a shifting landscape, and I don't think the characters' possession of a slave would have altered the characterisation on display. In face it would have had the chance to focus it better - should the part have been written better.

The other accusation of whitewashing is that a mixed-race character was recast as Kirsten Dunst. I hadn't retained that information while I was watching, and the part was fine, but looking back at the film with that knowledge, the character's motivations would have made much more sense in that light.

Score 0 for Sophia.

Leaving aside the controversies, is the film worth seeing? It certainly looks pretty with its sun-filtering-through-the-trees lighting, although the film's colour pallet seems overbearingly white. I assume the heavenly aesthetic is supposed to create juxtaposition with the more carnal events unfolding, or maybe the director really likes white.

Story-wise, it's populated with largely unsympathetic characters - in some cases because that's what the story dictates, and in others because the director doesn't seem to have been able to squeeze a decent enough performance out of the cast (and to be clear, I'm laying the blame at the director's doorstep).

I think Don Siegel (director of the 1971 adaptation) said of his version something along the lines of the tale being about male castration anxiety, and certainly that felt to be the tone here (at least once the story finally picked up). In fact, knowing nothing about the story at the time, when I saw the trailers, that's what I thought we were going to get (which made the actual events feel much tamer than they perhaps were supposed to be). That said, it still left me with a slightly unpleasant taste in my brain.

Ultimately, this is a film I was happy to walk away from in all senses.