Category: Films

In a Galaxy Far, Far Away

I’ve never understood the enduring, almost religious appeal of sci-fi and superhero stuff – the comics, the blockbusters, the video games, the whole alternative universe. Ok, I admit I did enjoy the original Star Wars trilogy and loved the sixties Batman with Adam West as the camp caped crusader in budgie smugglers (I wonder why?). But that was back when I was young and easily aroused. These days, I much prefer a whodunnit – even better if it’s set in a quintessential caramel-coloured English village with a mad vicar with murder in mind.

But we were reminded how big the ‘super-verse’ has become when the circus came to town for Comic Con 2025 at the Excel Centre in London’s Docklands. Our East End digs for my 65th birthday extravaganza were occupied by a battalion of young superhero lookee-likees. A trio of dressed-up Star Wars jedheads joined us in the lift. As the doors began to close, one cried out, ‘Shit, I’ve left my light sabre behind!’ Down in the lobby, we were faced with a speeding bullet of supermen in full caped garb, rushing – though not flying – out the door, with Captain America and Darth Vader bringing up the rear.

Still, I guess it’s all good clean fun for the young and the young at heart. Much healthier than being seduced by the dark side of cybercrime, county lines, street gangs or religious fruitcakes.

Art for Art’s Sake

“Grab your man bag,” Liam said. “We’re off to Sainsbury’s.” It wasn’t a pint of semi-skimmed and a sourdough loaf on his mind but something altogether more highbrow – the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.

The museum was opened in 1978 to show off the art collection donated to the University of East Anglia by Sir Robert and Lady Lisa Sainsbury (of the Sainsbury’s supermarket chain). Robert was made a knight of the realm for his services to the arts, not for the quality of his Jersey royals or his juicy plums.

The impressive Norman Foster-designed building sits within the leafy university grounds and houses an eclectic miscellany of paintings and sculptures spanning 5,000 years, with artefacts from prehistory right through to the late 20th century. As you meander through the exhibits, there seems to be a particular obsession with the human form.

Lady Lisa and Sir Robert Sainsbury

The building itself was put on display in several scenes from the 2015 films Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ant-Man.

And continuing the movie theme, we weren’t expecting to witness a half-baked Lord of the Rings re-enactment as we sank a bottle of plonk in the museum refectory. How times have changed. In my day, students misspent their days getting pissed in the Students’ Union bar, not mucking about in Middle-earth. Or to paraphrase Gandalf: “You shall not pass out.”

Bridget Jones – Like Catching Up With An Old Pal

It’s been nearly a quarter of a century since Renee Zellweger first climbed into her big knickers and staggered across our screens as the hapless, plonk-swigging, accident-prone Bridget Jones looking for love. And I’ve been with her every misstep along the way. By episode three, Bridget finally got her man – spontaneous standing ovation and massive round of applause – only to find him snatched away by this fourth and final instalment, Bridget Jones, Mad About the Boy.

Now a widow and single parent of two, Bridget hides her crippling grief behind a brave face for the sake of the kids and her own sanity. Staring at a future alone, she dips a reluctant toe into the dating pool all over again.

With more pathos and less slapstick this time round, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house – because we all want Bridget to get a second chance at a happy ever after.

As before, Rene, the Oscar-laden, mega-talented Texan, delivers the best home counties accent since Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love. And the excellent supporting cast, many of whom have been by Bridget’s side from the very beginning, is crowned by a fantastic turn by Hugh Grant as the scoundrel Daniel Cleaver. Like a good wine, Hugh Grant just gets better with age.

Here’s the trailer…

Some people are a bit sniffy about Bridget, but as Sarah Carson wrote in the I Paper,

I pity the Philistines who do not adore Bridget Jones. How joyless their lives must be, how poor and lonely, not to find in her diaries solace and wisdom and some of the most shrewd understanding of people and society since Jane Austen.

Ok, a tad harsh, but I see her point.

For me, the joyful reunion with Bridget was like catching up with an old pal over a drink or three.

Flight, Fight or Fancy

On a recent shopping and supping matinee in old Naaridge, we spent the afternoon watching the macabre horror flick The Heretic. Hugh Grant is bone-chilling as the over-courteous villain who menaces with oh-so-typical English charm as he dissects faith with a pair of nervous Mormon missionaries. Struck dumb as we left the cinema, we needed a drink to loosen the tongues and unpick what we’d just witnessed. Despite – or perhaps because of – a round or two of the Devil’s brew, we weren’t able to make too much sense of the religious experience we’d just had.

When we got back to the village, we had a final snifter at our local. A couple of likely lads in football kit were sitting at the bar. They kept looking across. We couldn’t think why at first. Usually this means one of two things – fight or fancy. Had we pulled? Fat chance at our age. Should we flee? We soon realised that what they actually fancied was the signed Norwich City FC shirt hanging on the wall behind us. Well, at least they didn’t want to beat us up.

Beer is All Around

The big screen at Cinema City flickered green – Gremins green. So that was the end of that. No matinee at the flicks for us. What’s a couple of likely lads to do instead on a damp and dismal afternoon in old Norwich town? Find a pub, of course. Down the years, we’ve supped at most city centre watering holes and one of our favourites is the Murderers on Timberhill, a traditional ale house stuffed with old world charm, oak beams and exposed brickwork. The pub has a dark past – hence the name – and it’s usually our last port of call before we stumble onto our bus back to the village.

They serve a very quaffable house wine at the Murderers, at a very good price. And quaff it we do. At the time of our visit, the bar was rammed to the crooked beams with hard-drinking young bearded types. Boisterous but good-humoured, it turns out the hairy merry men had parachuted in from the North Sea gas rigs. And the riggers were hell-bent on spreading the love by offering sambuca shots to everyone from a loaded tray. It would’ve been rude to refuse.

Not to miss a PR trick, the Murderers has stepped into Christmas with a brilliant parody of a famous scene from that perennial festive favourite, Love Actually. So folks, I give you…

Everyone’s a Critic

We’re big fans of Sir Ian McKellen, star of stage, screen and gay bars – or ‘Sirena’ as he’s affectionately known by the brethren. Sirena is at his devilish best when working to a witty and waspish script. And he clearly revelled in the role of Jimmy Erskine in The Critic, our latest movie jolly.

Jimmy, a fearsome and feared 1930s theatre critic, writes for a right-wing ‘family’ national newspaper. Despite the rag’s political leanings, Jimmy’s predilection for ‘the love that dares not speak its name’ is barely concealed. After all, a theatrical gay is hardly front-page news (even back then). But when it gets him into hot water with the boys in blue, the scandal also gets him the sack.

Staring at an impoverished future preaching to an empty house, Jimmy hatches a dark plot to get his job back. He persuades an up-and-coming young actress – played by the marvellous Gemma Arterton – to seduce the newspaper owner. Jimmy has blackmail on his mind. What’s in it for her? Glowing reviews, of course. She craves Jimmy’s affirmation. These days, everyone’s a critic. But before we all got in on the act, a bad newspaper review could make or break a budding star.

McKellen is deliciously wicked as Jimmy and gets all the best catty put-downs. And he’s ably supported by a first-class cast. How does it all end? Well, let’s just say the critic and the critiqued do not make great bedfellows. Here’s the trailer…

Now That’s What I Call Acting, Dear Boy

Dustin Hoffman is a famous devotee of the ‘The Method’, where an actor tries to get right under the skin of a character to deliver the most authentic performance. The story goes that, on the set of Marathon Man, he stayed up for two nights to shoot the scenes where his character hadn’t slept for 72 hours. When his co-star, Laurence Olivier, saw the state Hoffman was in, he allegedly quipped, “My dear boy, why don’t you just try acting? It’s so much easier.” The tale is the stuff of legends – and probably not entirely true.

However an actor arrives at a performance, some at the top of their game can just turn it on. Take Emma Thompson’s crying scene in Love Actually when the penny drops about the cheating husband.

And then there’s the ghostly father and son scene in my favourite film of the decade, All of Us Strangers. Here’s a link to the scene on Facebook. Best grab the Kleenex first.

All of Us Strangers

Now That’s What I Call Acting, Dear Boy.

An Ordinary Hero

Sometimes real heroes are just ordinary people who do extra-ordinary things. One such ordinary hero was Nicholas Winton who, following the 1938 German annexation of the Sudetenland in what was Czechoslovakia, travelled to Prague to help deal with the ensuing refugee crisis that was overwhelming the city. Aided by a small and very brave band of fellow heroes, together they saved 669 – mostly Jewish – children from the Nazis. It was part of the much broader ‘Kindertransport’ programme across Western Europe which, in Britain alone, saved around 10,000 children – once again, mostly Jewish. But it couldn’t last. The rescue missions hit the buffers once war was declared in 1939. Tragically, many of the children who arrived on Britain’s shores were the only members of their families who survived the Holocaust.

A quiet and humble soul, Nicholas Winton’s story remained untold for 50 years until in 1988 it was finally picked up by a national newspaper and the That’s Life TV show on the Beeb. And now the heroic tale is the subject of a remarkable film One Life, with Anthony Hopkins brilliantly playing Winton in his dotage and Helena Bonham Carter as his formidable mother in earlier years, who ran the show at the London end.

Along with others, we sat through the film in stunned silence and didn’t rise from our seats until after the final credits had rolled. Winton was later knighted for services to humanity and died in 2015 at the grand old age of 106.

Here’s the trailer followed by original 1988 footage from That’s Life.

For the recreation of the That’s Life scene, the audience in the film was made up of the descendants of ‘Nicky’s children’.

“Save a life, save the World,” Winton says in the film. As we left the cinema, I couldn’t help thinking that despite his amazing story of hope, history just carries on repeating itself over and over again.

All of Us Strangers – Simply Mesmerising

We’d heard amazing things about All of Us Strangers. It’s caused quite a stir among the critics and film award aficionados, so we decided to see what all the fuss was about with a trip to Norwich’s Cinema City. Originally a wealthy merchant’s gaff, it now houses three screens, a bar and a restaurant under a vaulted stone ceiling. Membership gives us free tickets and discounted drinks so, as is our habit, we had a few sherries in the medieval great hall beforehand.

As for the film, well, it’s the most extraordinary piece of cinema I’ve seen in years. Based on the 1987 novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, it’s a masterpiece and has been lavished with praise and awards since its release. More gongs to come, I’m sure.

So what’s it about? A passionate romance between two loners set to a glorious eighties soundtrack of the Pet Shop Boys, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Alison Moyet? Yes, but it’s so much more than that, so much deeper. The film begins with writer Adam sitting at his desk in his fancy high-rise staring out at the night-time London skyline. What follows is an examination of profound grief where the past is knitted with the present in a hopeful attempt to find forgiveness and resolution. But is this an autobiographical screenplay Adam is struggling to write? Or a series of fantastical dream sequences? Or perhaps it’s a classic ghost story? Go see it and decide for yourself. All I can say is there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. 

Andrew Scott as Adam is mesmerising. And the exquisite Paul Mescal as his sexy squeeze, Harry, hits the bullseye too. Here’s the trailer…

As an aside, Harry reminded me of a sexy squeeze of my own back in the day who introduced me to Kraftwerk’s amazing 1978 album The Man-Machine as we rolled around the floor of a South Kensington mews house. But that’s another story.

A Man Called Otto

A feel-good flick is the surest way to chase away those midwinter blues and they don’t come more feel-good than A Man Called Otto, with an unusually brittle Tom Hanks in the title role as the eponymous grumpy old fart living life on a short fuse. A remake of an earlier Swedish film and adapted from a best-selling novel, check your cynicism at the door before you take your seat.

Newly widowed Otto likes things done right and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Surrounded by idiots and utterly consumed by grief, he sees little to live for. And yet his meticulously planned attempts to re-join his dearly departed are constantly thwarted by do-gooders and doing good, proving that his number isn’t up.

Liam sees a lot of Otto in me. I can’t think why. All I can say is I loved it. But then, who doesn’t like a Tom Hanks film? Here’s the trailer…