I’m putting the blog on ice for a while while I cook a duck for Christmas dinner, finally get round to re-reading Brideshead Revisited after I finish reading Andrew Roberts’ Napoleon & Wellington, and whoop up BBC2 and BBC4’s low-key Hitchcock season.
Talking Movies proper will return in early January with a Top 10 Films of 2014, and previews of 2015′s best and worst films.
And for the night that’s in it revisit Sorkin Christmas: Part One.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Model turned actress Agyness Deyn is a commanding presence as an epileptic woman searching for her missing brother in an intimidating London.
Lily O’Connor (Deyn) works in a low-rent arcade in a North of England seaside town. She manages, just about, with the help of her avuncular cowboy-hat-wearing boss Al (Tom Georgeson) to keep her epilepsy under control. However, her frequent fits and need for a strict regimen of pills keep her socially isolated. When her hated mother dies Lily is visited by her poker professional brother Barry (Paul Anderson), eager to sell the family home and divide the proceeds. But Lily insists that they split the money with their missing brother Mikey (Christian Cooke); her protector against bullies until their forced separation by the authorities. Barry reluctantly gives her details about Mikey’s bitter ex Sylvia (Alice Lowe), and Lily sets off on a risky trip to London to find her beloved Mikey. But her escalating epileptic episodes soon scupper her investigation.
Director Bryn Higgins, best known for TV directing gigs including Garrow’s Law and Black Mirror, makes a fine sophomore feature with his hallucinated gumshoe tale. Higgins doesn’t hold back from inflicting scars on Deyn’s model-pretty face; going further than Scorsese the alleged king of grit would push things with DiCaprio in Gangs of New York. The moment when Lily pitches forward face first onto a dancefloor and breaks her nose with a bloody crack is truly horrifying. Deyn grabs with both hands this defiant character, who chooses to wear short dresses and a nigh fluorescent furry jacket, aware that this draws the eye to her body even as it increases the danger of that body being covered in cuts and bruises from falling during her seizures. Si Bell’s cinematography impressively renders the seizures as first-person spatial dislocations bleeding into electricity.
However, the screenplay by Joe Fisher (The Tichborne Claimant), from Ray Robinson’s novel, can’t hide the fact that there’s more than a touch of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time about Electricity. The mystery of Mikey’s disappearance could probably be solved much quicker if the investigator wasn’t afflicted with a condition that we’re plunged vividly into experiencing at first hand. Even the characters that Lily runs into, like good Samaritan Mel (Lenora Crichlow, Fast Girls), opportunistic Dave (Ben Batt), and spiteful Sylvia (Alice Lowe in surprisingly effective nasty form) have the feel of sketches rather than true characters. Indeed Paul Anderson, doing this movie between seasons of Peaky Blinders, seems to be on some mission to corner the market in one-note dodgy older brothers with thick regional accents. But for a’that these actors pull it off.
Electricity is a good film, and an always interesting one, powered by a strong lead performance; but you root for it to achieve heights greater than what it is capable of reaching.
3/5
In another entry in this occasional series I round up some trailers for some of next year’s most anticipated films.
Jurassic World
Jurassic Park is now a heritage title. This is like launching Jaws: Feeding Frenzy in 1997, with Jaws III in 1983 having been the last instalment. A whole generation has gone without a Jurassic Park release. They have no loving nostalgia for the original (especially its extensive model-work), or partial fondness for its sequel (“Oh yeah. Ooh, aah, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming” and Spielberg’s delirious appropriation of Hitchcock’s 39 Steps scream), or bad memories of the final barely-scripted disaster. Chris Pratt’s hero seems to be combining the personae of Goldblum and Neill, which is an interesting move, and velociraptors running disinterestedly past him in their desire to escape the new hybrid dinosaur recalls a Whedon line about when scary things get scared… But, Bryce Dallas Howard’s career hasn’t lived up to her assured lead debut in The Village, and there’s a tough act to follow in Richard Attenborough’s Richard Hammond as orchestrator of the madness; not least as the swooping shots of the park (which I swear are the same as in The Hunger Games and The Phantom Menace) make plain that the original’s grounding CGI in tactile reality is passé.
The Avengers: Age of Ultron
Well this trailer carries bizarre echoes of The Dark Knight’s teaser at this time of year in 2007… Talk of how a superhero how has changed things, even if he doesn’t want to admit it, and how the supervillain will show him something – even James Spader’s voice slurs into Heath Ledger’s Joker delivery. Just like the original’s trailer, a city-wide apocalypse is some broken windows, flipped cars, and screaming people. A major let-down in The Avengers was its inability to depict an all-out onslaught, but nobody else cared – so here we go again. I found The Avengers pretty damn dull. It wasn’t the laugh-fest it was vaunted as; Guardians of the Galaxy is far funnier; it delivered only moments of memorable action, and balancing all the characters’ screen-time was tragic given that (prior to the Hulk-out) it only took flight when Robert Downey Jr was onscreen. The Person of Interest season 2 finale just aired on RTE 2, and Jonathan Nolan’s parade of awesome comic-book moments there shames not only the pedestrian Agents of Shield but also Marvel’s films which are becoming increasingly joyless as they become ever more obviously formulaic franchise-connecting CGI-laden corporate exercises.
Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens
Andy Serkis narrates some vague mumblings; because this is a teaser trailer; and the internet explodes with the idea that Benedict Cumberbatch has stowed away in the Millenium Falcon. He’s not. The internet is torn into two between the usual illiberal liberal lynch-mobs on Twitter and Star Wars fanatics trying (quite logically) to comprehend how John Boyega can be a Stormtrooper if Temuera Morrison was cloned to be the genetic exemplar for all the Stormtroopers. The prequels are no longer canon (thank God!) perhaps? All that needs to be said about the 60-second trailer is that it looks like more like a Star Wars film than the last three Star Wars films. If Abrams is throwing the prequels into the dustbin alongside every novel since 1983 it’s all to the good – the prequels showed what happens when everyone knows what happens. Indeed his own Star Trek sequel showed how paralysing the fear of total originality can be in this corporate climate. I’m still terrified that one of the big three returning characters is going to be offed as a plot point (par Blake Snyder), but I can live with threat for the pause after “and the light…” and the subsequent John Williams orchestral blast for the Millenium Falcon roaring over Tatooine. Fun has returned.
Talking Movies 