Based on a children's novel by Deborah Ellis, The Breadwinner is the story of a young girl living in Taliban-run Kabul who disguises herself as a boy so that she can support her family after her father is imprisoned.
The team who have adapted this into an animated movie are responsible for The Secret of the Kells, a film more suitable for a younger audience than The Breadwinner, which was rightly given a 12A certificate (PG-13 in the USA).
It's not a violent film (although there is violence - mostly off camera), but it's subject matter is quite intense dealing with themes of fanaticism, child marriages, abuse of women, death of children.
However, along with its heavy subject matter, it also carries a lightness of spirit amid the oppression. It's a story that understands the need or different shades in the telling, so it isn't the relentless grind that it could have been.
There are parallels to the story of Malala Yousafzaim, as it deals with an educated, literate girl in a world where men forbid women from reading, although there the similarity ends as this is a smaller tale and the lead character's actions are more personal, inspiring in the small struggles, but under a more overtly repressive regime.
It is also at times a beautiful film, particularly with its landscape shots of Kabul, which would be beautiful pieces of art in their own right.
Ultimately it's the type of film that deserves to be supported. It's well crafted, tells an essential story, and there need to be more of its kind in the world.
Tuesday 29 May 2018
Monday 28 May 2018
Solo (2018)
As of it's opening weekend, Solo has been under-performing at the box office. There are a number of reasons being given for this: fan hatred of the last film spilling over into this one, too many Star Wars films in too short a time, too much competition (Infinity Wars and Deadpool 2), the lead actor not being a clone of Harrison Ford (although Donald Glover may well be one of Billy Dee Williams).
I'm guessing that one of the biggest reasons is the feeling that the film was unnecessary. There wasn't a huge cry for a Han Solo origin film in the first place. Did we actually need to see the first meeting of Han and Chewbacca? Did we need to see the Kessel Run? Did we need to see Han winning the Millennium Falcon from Lando?
The easy answer would be no.
My answer, on the other hand: if it leads to a fun, entertaining movie, then why not?
Solo is certainly entertaining. There are decent action set pieces, some gorgeous scenery, laugh-out-loud moments (I'm still smiling about one particular gag), fun characters, nice call-backs (particularly to The Empire Strikes Back), and it offers a broadening of the Star Wars universe that show a little more of what's happening on the ground.
Alden Ehrenreich performs a decent Han Solo, once you get over the fact that he isn't Harrison Ford. The mannerisms are fairly spot on, given that this is a younger, greener version of the character first encountered in the Mos Eisley cantina. Hopefully it won't be his last big screen outing - there's still scope for a few more Solo adventures before Star Wars in Han's life.
Directing by Ron Howard is solid. There's a clarity to his filming that tells the story well without resorting to a lost of fancy cutting and showy shots. He also manages to create a film with a consistent look, despite the behind-the-scenes mess that the film found itself in. Hopefully he'll get the chance to do another film in the series that's all his.
Monday 21 May 2018
Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece (British Museum 26 April - 29 July 2018)
Two things that I happen to like, Rodin and Ancient Greece, are currently being combined in the British Museum's latest exhibition.
His art is fairly represented with bronze casts of The Thinker and the Burghers of Calais and a plaster cast of The Kiss being among the more easily recognisable pieces.
The exhibition also features a number of pieces from Greece to to show Rodin's influences. Given that he visited the British Museum on a number of occasions, the works on display show his direct inspiration.
The information presented around the exhibition at times presents informed, interesting details of his life and works, particularly around 'The Gates of Hell' and its various spin-offs (which include both The Kiss and The Thinker).
At other times, the display cards are less successful offering up "what Rodin must have been thinking", or a critical appraisal of the art, which reports intent and interpretation as if they are facts.
It's an interesting collection, although not as meaty as some of the previous exhibitions at the British Museum, which starts off well, but seems to lose its way about halfway around the room.
His art is fairly represented with bronze casts of The Thinker and the Burghers of Calais and a plaster cast of The Kiss being among the more easily recognisable pieces.
The exhibition also features a number of pieces from Greece to to show Rodin's influences. Given that he visited the British Museum on a number of occasions, the works on display show his direct inspiration.
The information presented around the exhibition at times presents informed, interesting details of his life and works, particularly around 'The Gates of Hell' and its various spin-offs (which include both The Kiss and The Thinker).
At other times, the display cards are less successful offering up "what Rodin must have been thinking", or a critical appraisal of the art, which reports intent and interpretation as if they are facts.
It's an interesting collection, although not as meaty as some of the previous exhibitions at the British Museum, which starts off well, but seems to lose its way about halfway around the room.
Wednesday 16 May 2018
Deadpool 2
Deadpool 2 is the Monty Python of superhero movies. Not the Monty Python's Flying Circus Monty Python, but the Monty Python and ... Monty Python.
It's archaic, it's crude, it's rude, it's an inheritor of the theatre of Grand Guignol, it borders on the surreal, and it's very funny.
It's also a film where the jokes work so much better if you're steeped in comic book lore, have seen every single X-Men film and are familiar with the complaints about superhero films from X-Men Origins: Wolverine to Justice League.
It's bigger, longer and more expensive than the first Deadpool film - and packed with more meta references and fourth-wall shattering. The film is worth watching for one action scene alone, largely thanks to new arrival Domino (Zazie Beets), who deserves a film of her own.
Hint to those who are going to watch it: there are mid-credit scenes that you'll want to stay around for, but there's no end credit scene - which disappointed a lot of people who'd hung around while the credits rolled.
It's archaic, it's crude, it's rude, it's an inheritor of the theatre of Grand Guignol, it borders on the surreal, and it's very funny.
It's also a film where the jokes work so much better if you're steeped in comic book lore, have seen every single X-Men film and are familiar with the complaints about superhero films from X-Men Origins: Wolverine to Justice League.
It's bigger, longer and more expensive than the first Deadpool film - and packed with more meta references and fourth-wall shattering. The film is worth watching for one action scene alone, largely thanks to new arrival Domino (Zazie Beets), who deserves a film of her own.
Hint to those who are going to watch it: there are mid-credit scenes that you'll want to stay around for, but there's no end credit scene - which disappointed a lot of people who'd hung around while the credits rolled.
Tuesday 15 May 2018
Entebbe (2018)
Entebbe
(aka 7 Days in Entebbe) is a film that seems confused about its purpose.
Although
it’s largely shown from the often-sympathetic perspective of one of the
hijackers, Wilfried Böse played by Daniel Brühl, it doesn’t really side with the terrorists. Brühl is shown
as a slightly naïve idealist, which is about as deep as his character goes.
The Israeli side of the film largely consists of Yitzhak
Rabin (Lior Ashkenazi) and Shimon Peres (Eddie Marsan) debating over how best
to secure the release of the hostages. The end title cards suggest that the intent
of this is to indicate the importance of establishing a dialogue between Israel
and Palestine, but there’s nothing persuasive about any of the onscreen
arguments.
There’s also a subplot about the relationship between one of
the Israeli commandos and his dancer girlfriend. The subplot appears to be
completely detached from the rest of the film, and only seems to serve the
purpose of allowing the director to intercut dance sequences into the film’s
main action set-piece.
The hostages exist only as brief sketches of the people
caught up in this situation. Aside from scared expressions and the bloodied
figure of one hostage who is violently interrogated by his captors, there’s
little attempt to spend much time with them. For the most part there’s an emotional
gulf between their experiences and the audience.
Performances are decent enough with Brühl as the standout part,
but overall the film didn’t really work for me.
Anon (2018)
Anon is a film funded by Sky Cinema and currently showing in the UK on limited theatrical release and on Sky's movie channels.
I don't have access to Sky, but I did manage to catch this on the big(gish) screen - which probably helped my dodgy eyesight as it made the letters on screen a lot easier to read.
And there are a lot of letters on screen.
For video game players, there are familiar reference points. While in a game, hovering a cursor over an object or NPC (non-player character) will often bring up information about the object of focus, in Anon focusing on another person will bring up details of that person's history - a sort of instantaneous Linked In/Facebook/Twitter/Instagram search.
Everything the citizens of the world of Anon see is recorded too - recordings which people can chose to share, or which the police can access with people often acting as the witness to their own crimes.
It's a set-up that would probably fit right in with Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror TV series. Only Black Mirror feels more cinematic than Anon ever manages to be.
There's nothing visually persuasive about the world that writer-director Andrew Niccol has created, the film is saturated with typical dystopian-grey; the characters that inhabit said world for the most part might as well have been cut from the same grey-cloth (Clive Owne delivering a typically Clive Owen-performance). It's a watchable enough piece, but when Brooker's series manages to be more visually compelling and more memorable, the film feels as if it's arrived ten-years too late on the scene.
I don't have access to Sky, but I did manage to catch this on the big(gish) screen - which probably helped my dodgy eyesight as it made the letters on screen a lot easier to read.
And there are a lot of letters on screen.
For video game players, there are familiar reference points. While in a game, hovering a cursor over an object or NPC (non-player character) will often bring up information about the object of focus, in Anon focusing on another person will bring up details of that person's history - a sort of instantaneous Linked In/Facebook/Twitter/Instagram search.
Everything the citizens of the world of Anon see is recorded too - recordings which people can chose to share, or which the police can access with people often acting as the witness to their own crimes.
It's a set-up that would probably fit right in with Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror TV series. Only Black Mirror feels more cinematic than Anon ever manages to be.
There's nothing visually persuasive about the world that writer-director Andrew Niccol has created, the film is saturated with typical dystopian-grey; the characters that inhabit said world for the most part might as well have been cut from the same grey-cloth (Clive Owne delivering a typically Clive Owen-performance). It's a watchable enough piece, but when Brooker's series manages to be more visually compelling and more memorable, the film feels as if it's arrived ten-years too late on the scene.
Tuesday 8 May 2018
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018)
Thanks to the magic of cinema, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society was filmed in Devon.
I think that sums up my nagging feeling that there was something slightly manufactured about the film. There are a couple of areas where I was let down - Lily James's interactions with Florence Keen (playing Kit) also felt a bit forced.
Other than those minor quibbles, the film is a charming, if slight look at both post-war Britain and the German occupation of the Channel Islands during the war. It doesn't bring any great depth to either, the main thrust of the tale being the relationships that James's character develops with the members of the eponymous society, but it doesn't completely ignore the ugliness of those times.
As a piece of entertainment, with no claims on cinematic greatness, it worked perfectly fine for me. It's only worth avoiding if the sight of any sentimentality whatsoever is enough to send you into spasms of revulsion as it is very much a film about the feels - although sufficiently understated to appeal to a British audience.
I think that sums up my nagging feeling that there was something slightly manufactured about the film. There are a couple of areas where I was let down - Lily James's interactions with Florence Keen (playing Kit) also felt a bit forced.
Other than those minor quibbles, the film is a charming, if slight look at both post-war Britain and the German occupation of the Channel Islands during the war. It doesn't bring any great depth to either, the main thrust of the tale being the relationships that James's character develops with the members of the eponymous society, but it doesn't completely ignore the ugliness of those times.
As a piece of entertainment, with no claims on cinematic greatness, it worked perfectly fine for me. It's only worth avoiding if the sight of any sentimentality whatsoever is enough to send you into spasms of revulsion as it is very much a film about the feels - although sufficiently understated to appeal to a British audience.
Mary and the Witch's Flower (2017)
Mary
and the Witch's Flower is the latest film from director Hiromasa Yonebayashi, an alumnus of Studio Ghibli, where he
directed Arrietty and When Marnie Was There.
The film’s parentage is pretty self-evident from the start. From its animation style, the choice of protagonist, the heavy use of flying, and like a few of Ghibli’s films (When Marnie Was There, Arietty (based on The Borrowers), Howl’s Moving Castle) being based on a book written by a female British novelist, it looks and feels like something that Ghibli could have produced.
The film literally starts with a bang with the opening action sequence, and although it quickly settles a slightly more relaxed tempo, there’s a constant sense of energy to it. It looks gorgeous, can easily hold its head up with most of Ghibli’s output, and shows a promising future for Studio Ponoc.
More importantly, it shows that the type of films that Hayao Miyazaki made will continue to be created, long after he finally decides to let retirement stick.
The film’s parentage is pretty self-evident from the start. From its animation style, the choice of protagonist, the heavy use of flying, and like a few of Ghibli’s films (When Marnie Was There, Arietty (based on The Borrowers), Howl’s Moving Castle) being based on a book written by a female British novelist, it looks and feels like something that Ghibli could have produced.
The film literally starts with a bang with the opening action sequence, and although it quickly settles a slightly more relaxed tempo, there’s a constant sense of energy to it. It looks gorgeous, can easily hold its head up with most of Ghibli’s output, and shows a promising future for Studio Ponoc.
More importantly, it shows that the type of films that Hayao Miyazaki made will continue to be created, long after he finally decides to let retirement stick.
Tuesday 1 May 2018
Avengers: Infinity War (2018) - No Spoilers Review
Starting with the negatives, Infinity War has two potential flaws.
The first is that it has a huge reliance on what has come before. If you try watching Infinity War without having seen most of the other Marvel movies, then you're not going to know who's who, why they are where they are, dozens of references to events in previous movies, and half of the jokes will probably miss completely.
If you're going to cram before seeing it - which is also advisable if you only have a vague recollection of what's gone on before, this is what you should be watching:
Iron Man (you can probably skip both The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man 2, if you're in a hurry), Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, Avengers, Iron Man 3 (no real requirement for Thor: The Dark World), Captain America: Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron (Ant-Man is non-essential), Captain America: Civil War, Doctor Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther.
So that's over a day's worth of backstory. Take it a movie a day, and you can be sure that Infinity War is still showing in cinemas (although you might find it hard to find Black Panther still playing).
The second flaw - and this is as close as I'm getting to spoilers, so you might want to blink for the rest of this paragraph if you're really sensitive - is the cosmic reset button. You'll get the idea when you see the film - I'm not saying anything more.
On the positive side, by relying on the groundwork laid by the previous films, Infinity War manages to hit the ground running. For the followers of the Marvel Universe, it's a huge pay-off in terms of jumping straight in without messy character introductions. The filmmakers assume you know these characters, assume you understand the relationships between them, and so don't waste any time.
The film is essentially one big love letter to the tradition of the comic book crossover.
For those like me who grew up reading American superhero comic books, the structure of the piece is incredibly familiar. Marvel and DC comic books broadly fell into three categories: on a monthly basis you would have the solo books (Captain America, Iron Man) and the team books (Avengers), and then on a more occasional basis (although these days it happens more and more frequently) you would get the crossover book.
These events would pull together characters from any number of comics (including some who didn't usually get a monthly outing). For DC Comic fans it probably started with the Justice League/Justice Society annual crossovers, reaching its most cosmic with the Crisis on Infinite Worlds story, which brought together DC's entire line. With Marvel you had the likes of Secret Wars and Infinity Gauntlet (from which Infinity War is partially adapted).
In these crossover stories, to deal with the large number of characters, they would split off into smaller teams to deal with a divergent tasks, all of which would eventually play back into the main story - a structure on which Infinity War heavily relies.
The other element to those stories tended to be the scope. Threats were not merely a couple of masked terrorists with a plan for world domination, these crossover events relied on godlike antagonists, threats that affected the whole universe, or the fabric of reality itself.
In that regard, Infinity War delivers. It's the largest scope of any of the Marvel movies so far. The movie looks and feels big (also long at 2 hours 40 minutes). With juggling all of the characters, we don't get enough of some them (for my money Captain America and Black Panther both get short-changed in screen time), but given the amount of people fighting for their cinematic minutes, it's impressive how many are well-served.
Tonally there's also an impressive balancing act. The Guardians of the Galaxy are consistent from their two outings, Thor feels as if he's continuing directly from Ragnarok, Captain America and the earthbound Avenger s might have stepped straight out of Civil War.
For my money, this is the best of the Avengers movies by far. Not my favourite overall in the Marvel Universe, but I can say that I enjoyed pretty much every minute of the long running time.
The first is that it has a huge reliance on what has come before. If you try watching Infinity War without having seen most of the other Marvel movies, then you're not going to know who's who, why they are where they are, dozens of references to events in previous movies, and half of the jokes will probably miss completely.
If you're going to cram before seeing it - which is also advisable if you only have a vague recollection of what's gone on before, this is what you should be watching:
Iron Man (you can probably skip both The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man 2, if you're in a hurry), Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, Avengers, Iron Man 3 (no real requirement for Thor: The Dark World), Captain America: Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron (Ant-Man is non-essential), Captain America: Civil War, Doctor Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther.
So that's over a day's worth of backstory. Take it a movie a day, and you can be sure that Infinity War is still showing in cinemas (although you might find it hard to find Black Panther still playing).
The second flaw - and this is as close as I'm getting to spoilers, so you might want to blink for the rest of this paragraph if you're really sensitive - is the cosmic reset button. You'll get the idea when you see the film - I'm not saying anything more.
On the positive side, by relying on the groundwork laid by the previous films, Infinity War manages to hit the ground running. For the followers of the Marvel Universe, it's a huge pay-off in terms of jumping straight in without messy character introductions. The filmmakers assume you know these characters, assume you understand the relationships between them, and so don't waste any time.
The film is essentially one big love letter to the tradition of the comic book crossover.
For those like me who grew up reading American superhero comic books, the structure of the piece is incredibly familiar. Marvel and DC comic books broadly fell into three categories: on a monthly basis you would have the solo books (Captain America, Iron Man) and the team books (Avengers), and then on a more occasional basis (although these days it happens more and more frequently) you would get the crossover book.
These events would pull together characters from any number of comics (including some who didn't usually get a monthly outing). For DC Comic fans it probably started with the Justice League/Justice Society annual crossovers, reaching its most cosmic with the Crisis on Infinite Worlds story, which brought together DC's entire line. With Marvel you had the likes of Secret Wars and Infinity Gauntlet (from which Infinity War is partially adapted).
In these crossover stories, to deal with the large number of characters, they would split off into smaller teams to deal with a divergent tasks, all of which would eventually play back into the main story - a structure on which Infinity War heavily relies.
The other element to those stories tended to be the scope. Threats were not merely a couple of masked terrorists with a plan for world domination, these crossover events relied on godlike antagonists, threats that affected the whole universe, or the fabric of reality itself.
In that regard, Infinity War delivers. It's the largest scope of any of the Marvel movies so far. The movie looks and feels big (also long at 2 hours 40 minutes). With juggling all of the characters, we don't get enough of some them (for my money Captain America and Black Panther both get short-changed in screen time), but given the amount of people fighting for their cinematic minutes, it's impressive how many are well-served.
Tonally there's also an impressive balancing act. The Guardians of the Galaxy are consistent from their two outings, Thor feels as if he's continuing directly from Ragnarok, Captain America and the earthbound Avenger s might have stepped straight out of Civil War.
For my money, this is the best of the Avengers movies by far. Not my favourite overall in the Marvel Universe, but I can say that I enjoyed pretty much every minute of the long running time.
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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...
