Inside Out 2 is another joy

A bit of a film-watchy day to mark the end of the year, and the opportunity to catch up on Inside Out 2. I’d only seen the first film in August, but it resonated, so I was always going to watch the sequel.

Riley is now 13 and guess what – puberty! So new emotions – led by anxiety and including embarrassment – step in to try to take over her new teenage life.

 

Really sweet, but also full of things that even I, as a 62-year-old can recognise. Th cringe was huge.

 

Is Joy right … or is Anxiety right?

 

A great screenplay from Pete Doctor, Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley, with Doctor also at the director’s helm, this is a really good sequel (there may be a third film), which illustrates the mental and emotional difficulties facing young people.

Beautifully realised and with a great voice cast, it’s well worth watching.

The Miracle Club – flawed, but worth a view

It’s 1967 in a working-class area of Dublin. Lily and Eileen join up with the much younger Dolly to appear in a Catholic church talent contest as singing trio The Miracles, with the hope of winning a trip to Lourdes.

Eileen has a lump on her breast, Dolly’s young son is non-verbal (we don’t know why), and Lily has simply always wanted to visit.

When they win, all the trio’s husbands try to stop them going, with Dolly’s even saying she needn’t come back if she does go.

The contest takes place after the death of their friend Maureen, and Lily and Eileen are shocked when Chrissy – Maureen’s estranged daughter, who has been in the US for 40 years – actually arrives for the funeral. Tension and bitterness are clear from the outset, and that increases when Chrissy decides to make the pilgrimage with them.

Released last year, The Miracle Club features the last performance from Maggie Smith, who plays Lily.

The script by Jimmy Smallhorne, Timothy Prager and Joshua D Maurer is pretty slender, with plenty of clichés – not least the general uselessness of the husbands around the house and their expectations of what their wives should do.

It is also sketchy in terms of character building – particularly of Chrissy. We learn almost nothing of what her life in Boston over four decades has entailed, yet she seems reasonably well off and clearly has an element of medical knowledge/training.

There are themes of friendship, guilt, grief, reconciliation (a miracle?), together with attitudes toward women and their bodies – including from women themselves.

Thankfully, at a tight 90 minutes, director Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s film doesn’t outstay its welcome – and is an enjoyable watch, thanks largely to the performances, which mean it never descends into mawkish sentimentality (arguably indeed, there is a quiet anger to be found), benefits from some dry humour and is genuinely moving in a number of places.

Alongside the magnificent Smith, Eileen is played with relish by fellow Oscar-winner Kathy Bates, while Golden Globe and Emmy winner (and Oscar and Tony Award nominee) Laura Linney makes the very best job possible of the thin material she had for Chrissy.

As said, the script is not particularly kind to her. She has to do an awful lot of ‘eye acting’, but she does it very, very well indeed.

Agnes O’Casey holds her own as Dolly alongside such legendary talents and a mention for Mark O’Halloran as Father Byrne.

The Miracle Club manages to be sweet and tart at the same time, even with its limitations. It’s currently streaming in the UK on Amazon Prime and is worth 90 minutes of your time.

It's a cracking film, Gromit

Today was time to catch up with Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, the new stop motion adventure of the inventor and his faithful (if frequently exasperated) hound from Aardman Animations, directed by the legend that is Nick Park, together this time with Merlin Crossingham.

A sequel to the duo’s second outing – the Oscar-winning The Wrong Trousers in 1993 – it sees the return of penguin arch villain Feathers McGraw, who (spoiler alert) has not been rehabilitated by his time inside the local zoo/prison.

In the meantime, Wallace has come up with an AI garden gnome, Norbot – initially with the intention of it helping Gromit in his beloved garden. But as with all of Wallace’s inventions, what starts out with the best intentions has a tendency to go awry.

And as Wallace becomes ever more enamoured of his new creation, Gromit’s nose is pushed out of joint – reminiscent of The Wrong Trousers – when the perpetually broke inventor unwittingly accepted Feathers as a lodger.

With a screenplay by Mark Burton, Vengeance Most Fowl is a 79-minute delight, jam-packed with gags – watch out for a brilliant visual reference to an iconic Bond villain, but there are many, many more.

It also gently points out the problems that modern technology can create – so apt that the film itself is hand-made animation and not CGI.

The northernness of it all is a joy – there’s even a local newspaper article on the Lancashire references in it.

Ben Whitehead proves wonderful as the ‘new’ voice of Wallace. He’s voiced Wallace in games and stuff before, but this was his first major time in the role for a film since the original voice of the inventor Peter Sallis retired in 2010.

Reece Shearsmith is suitably creepy as Norbot, while Peter Kaye reprises his voice role as over-promoted but not very bright copper Albert Mackintosh, who first appeared in Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Lauren Patel is very good as PC Mukherjee, who – even new out of training – seems to have a much better idea of proper coppering.

All in all, this is an absolute delight. No wonder it’s already picking up award nominations. And personally, I’ll be watching again, because there is no way I can have seen and registered all the gags! I suggest you get started now.

PS: A special mention for the mainstream critic who notes (in an otherwise very positive review) that: "only a pedant would complain that penguins aren’t "fowl" as such" ... well no. But Feathers uses a red rubber glove on his head to disguise himself as a chicken. And guess what ... chickens are fowl.

Conclave is top-class, grown-up entertainment

Conclave, adapted from Robert Harris’s 2016 novel, is possibly not the sort of film I would usually think of watching – though I enjoyed The Two Popes when I streamed it in February. I might not have any faith left myself, but given my heavily religious background (very evangelical Methodist) I can still understand and appreciate Biblical debate, and almost inevitably find myself retaining an interest in religion in general.

I only really became aware of this film when seeing the trailer last week and, finding some of the rave reviews it’s been getting (including from the likes of Mark Kermode), decided to give it a go.

It opens with Cardinal-Dean Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) hurrying toward the Vatican to oversee arrangements after the pope has died. Aside from mourning his religiously progressive leader, it means that Lawrence will now have to organise and oversee the conclave of the world’s Catholic cardinals that elects the next pope.

The cardinals have been readying themselves for this – positioning themselves for possible election and campaigning among the rest of their number. The primary contenders are Aldo Cardinal Bellini, an American liberal (Stanley Tucci); Joseph Cardinal Tremblay, a Canadian moderate (John Lithgow); Goffredo Cardinal Tedesco, a right-wing Italian who wants the Mass to be said in Latin again (Sergio Castellitto); and Joshua Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), a popular Nigerian candidate with conservative social views.

But on the eve of the conclave, one Vincent Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz) arrives in the Vatican – a Mexican archbishop apparently appointed by the late pope without anyone else knowing – and working as the cardinal of Kabul in Afghanistan. Suspicions are raised.

There were already whispers about the pope’s last hours and final meeting, and Benitez’s presence only adds to the suggestions of conspiracy and dodgy doings.

The scheming between the candidates and their supporters is barely hidden – though it involves noir whispered talks in quiet corners and comments that only a cardinal that didn't want to be pope would be a suitable one. But who doesn't, at some level, harbour the ambition?

In terms of the performances, it is a wonderful ensemble cast – and that absolutely includes not only all the actors named above, but also Isabella Rossellini as senior nun Sister Agnes, who gets to deliver a truth bomb that is magnificent – and conclude it with a gesture that has seen audiences laughing at screenings (not just the one I attended).

Edward Berger’s film is pretty much perfect as a piece of grown-up entertainment. It’s intelligent. It’s quite easy to see that the world of the Catholic church presented here could also be the corporate or political worlds, so this is not ‘about’ religion. It’s about ambition, power and the gaining and use of that by human beings who, even at their best, are not perfect.

I’ve tended to avoid films of much over 90 minutes in the last year: this comes in at two hours, but Berger’s direction means this doesn’t feel close to that. The pacing is spot on for the tension. Peter Straughan’s screenplay from Harris’s novel is superb: dryly witty, never condescending. It feels so timely, given what the world is seeing today in terms of regressive politics.

Similarly, Volker Bertelmann’s soundtrack is spot on. Stéphane Fontaine’s cinematography is a joy. The mostly muted colours – creamy marble, greys and whites – set against cardinal red – are stark. Some scenes have a feeling of having been choregraphed to almost Busby Berkley levels – cardinals in the rain with their uniform white umbrellas, shot from above, is just one, while the ceremonial aspects and rituals are superb, treated with complete seriousness and respect, yet also revealing the performance and theatre at the centre of church life.

A little personal note here for context (well, I did start this post with one!).

Until I stopped attending church altogether in my mid-twenties, I had drifted away from evangelical Methodism and toward high Anglicanism. I appreciated the theatricality, performance and ritual of services. And I continue to very much appreciate religious music – not the Gospel songs of Billy Graham-style crusade rallies, which haunt me unpleasantly, but works such as the requiems of Mozart, Fauré and Britten.

But let's get back to the review.

If I have any slight complaint, it's that the character of Tedesco is perhaps made to be overly obviously awful. He stands in the refectory vaping, yet refuses to stand for prayers in the Sistine Chapel – just two shows of contempt for most of his brother cardinals, despite he himself being the one that wants 'tradition' brought back. But perhaps that's being over sensitive when we live in a world full of real pantomime villains who are actually very dangerous.

As Lawrence, Fiennes is outstanding. For all the very carefully played camp of the film in general (it's a balancing act Berger gets spot on), his is a stunningly subtle performance. Acting with the eyes, as it were, is an absolute art and he is as good at it as Anthony Hopkins. His own inner struggle so often needs no words to be crystal clear. If he isn’t in the Oscar noms next spring, there’ll be something wrong with the film world.

And the ending – true to the book – is done with real class, even though it may not be quite what some would expect, given its extraordinary topicality.

I cannot recommend it highly enough. Seriously superior entertainment, with an actual ethical heart and message.