Kneecap: A craicing political movie about Ireland

Saturday evening – and what better than catching up with another film? In this case, writer and director Rich Peppiatt’s 2024 Kneecap, about the real-life rise of Belfast’s Irish-language hip-hop trio of that name and starring them as themselves.

It starts in the late 2010s in Northern Ireland/the north of the island of Ireland, where there’s an ongoing political issue of having the Irish language being accorded the same rights as the Scottish and Welsh languages in their respective parts of the UK.

Post-Good Friday, working-class lads Liam and Naoise are essentially estranged from society and living in a world of drugs and raves. As children, they had learned to speak Irish Gaelic from Naoise’s father Arlo, a Republican who then went on the run to avoid arrest, thereby refusing to accept his own parental responsibility.

Liam has been keeping a diary, in Irish, which amounts to a sort of poetry. When he’s arrested by the NI police, having been at a rave, and refuses to answer any questions in English, Irish speaker and music teacher JJ O Dochartaighn is called to translate.

Ó Dochartaighn realises that Liam has real talent and, as a musician himself, invites the lads to his own improvised studio in a garage, where they record a track.

However, even as the trio gains in popularity, it faces real threats from Republican factions, the Northern Irish police and assorted others.

Perhaps surprisingly, the central trio – Naoise Ó Cairealláin, Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh and JJ Ó Dochartaigh, as themselves, are really excellent, with nice turns from Simone Kirby as Naoise's mother, Dolores, Michael Fassbender as Arlo and Josie Walker as a detective.

Shot in an anarchic fashion, with no shortage of swearing, lots of drug use, plus nudity and sex, it's very good and very funny indeed. Not really my kind of music, but very enjoyable.

If you only see Heretic for Hugh Grant, that's more than good enough

I don’t mind a spot of on-screen horror – just not the slasher variety. Give me the likes of Peter Medak’s 1980 The Changeling, Jonathan Demme’s 1991 Silence of the Lambs, Mike Flanagan’s 2019 Doctor Sleep, Jordan Peele’s 2019 Us or last year’s Parallel from Kourosh Ahari.

To clarify further – I don’t mind a bit of violence on screen, but in-your-face gore and slasher stuff is a no-no for me, whether it’s horror or not. It’s not limited to that genre either. I entirely understand that the likes of Deadwood and The Sopranos are top-notch, serious TV dramas, but I could only ever watch them in small amounts because the violence (both spoken and enacted) was too much for me – and that was before I’d even heard the word ‘triggered’!

The trailer for Heretic, from joint directors and writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, had intrigued me, but I wasn’t sure enough that it wouldn’t descend to a degree of slasher mode, so didn’t catch it at my local cinema, where it only seemed to have a quite limited run.

Last weekend, I decided to give it a go via streaming. I’m very glad I did, because it absolutely fits into what I can enjoy.

Mormon missionaries Sister Barnes – confident in her faith and her evangelisation – and Sister Paxton (rather less so) are following up leads on potential converts and, as a winter storm breaks, visit the home of one Mr Reed, who has expressed an interest.

A middle-aged Brit living in a slightly remote – and very weird house that appears to combine both an Escher reality and a 1940s (or earlier) aesthetic – he assures them that (vital for female Mormons) his wife is baking blueberry pie in the kitchen so they won't be alone with a man, which covers the church’s rules of what company a female is allowed to be in.

When he goes to the kitchen, the women find that the front door is locked and that they have no phone signal.

Reed slowly ensnares them into a discussion of religion in general, within which he becomes increasingly aggressive. He then offers to show them a ‘real resurrection’.

Heretic is good because it takes its subject – religion – reasonably seriously in a philosophical sense. It doesn’t belittle the missionaries or their religion (or religion as a whole) and it allows them to stand up for it. Now I’m not religious, but I appreciate that.

The script allows for some really interesting looks at how you stay true to a belief – days later, I am still analysing the ending.

Sophie Thatcher as Sister Barnes and Sophie East as Sister Paxton are excellently played, nuanced characters, but Hugh Grant is sublime as the demonic, yet-suave, Mr Reed.

Really worth watching this, in my view.

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.

Wicked it might be, but it's also confused

Here is a real oddity: Wicked Little Letters is billed as a black comedy but, while it manages to be that, it also has something of an identity crisis.

Based on the true story of a poison pen scandal in the seaside town of Littlehampton that scandalised England in the 1920s, Thea Sharrock’s film tells the story of neighbours Edith Swan and Rose Gooding.

When the latter moves in, she soon becomes known for her rambunctious behaviour – not least boozing and swearing.

By contrast, Rose is the pious, stay-at-home daughter of Victoria and Edward, a domineering man with very firm ideas about ‘proper’ behaviour – particularly when it comes to women.

When a series of obscene letters being arriving for Edith, suspicion falls on Rose. As the situation escalates, police officer Gladys May decides to investigate, having concluded that the case isn’t quite as straightforward as almost everyone else believes.

There is much that is genuinely comic in Jonny Sweet’s screenplay, but the story has a very dark reality to it. The identity crisis is because of moments where there are instances of the comedy moving into mugging and slapstick. These are not a comfortable fit.

It’s a shame, because there’s much to enjoy here – not least in the performances. There’s delightful support from Joanna Scanlon, Lolly Adefope and Eileen Atkins as local women who help Moss. 

Gemma Jones gives as lovely turn as Victoria and Timothy Spall is excellent as the deeply unpleasant Edward.

Anjana Vasan has some really fine moments as Moss, but she’s one of the cast who has been directed to go over the top in a couple of scenes. Malachi Kirby, as Bill – Rose’s boyfriend – seems to have been faced with a very scant sketch of a character to work with.

But the central duo are a major reason to see this. Jessie Buckley as Rose brings wonderful vivacity and warmth to the role, but real emotion when it’s needed. Olivia Colman as Edith is delicious as the prissy wannabe saint, but every bit as good in the scenes where we discover the lived reality behind this public face.

Wicked Little Letters is good on showing just how women were expected to behave at the time – and how they were judged if they refused to conform (pressures that have notion away a century on). It also acts as a useful reminder that ‘trolling’ existed well before the internet and social media – and the damage that it can do.

Orlando – throughly entertaining queerness

It was time for another spot of film catch-up this evening – and back to an effort at being thematic for LGBT+ History Month – with a first viewing of Sally Potter’s 1992 adaptation of Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel of the same name.

The film opens in 1600, with aristocratic youth Orlando pondering over his loneliness and his desire to write poetry. When his family is visited by Elizabeth I, the aged monarch takes to him, making him her “mascot” and granting him property and money. There’s one condition: “Do not fade. Do not wither. Do not grow old”, she orders.

In the novel, there is no explanation of how Orlando becomes immortal, but Potter added this to the film to suggest how this occurs, feeling that a cinema audience would need at least a hint.\

As part of the wider court of James I, he becomes utterly besotted with Sasha, a beautiful Cossack, who is visiting with her father. But when she dumps him, he’s left to muse on the “treachery” of women.

Time passes and, in the 18^th century, the eternally unchanging Orlando – nobody ever comments on this, ‘because it’s England’ – is appointed ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. There he enjoys a brotherly friendship with the Khan, before participating in a battle.

Shocked at seeing his first violent death, he flees and falls into a deep sleep for seven days. On waking, he discovers that he has become a she. Heading back to England, Orlando is stripped of her home on the basis of being a woman – and thus effectively “legally dead”.

Somehow, she continues living there until the time of Victoria, where she has an accidental meeting with Shelmerdine, an American revolutionary, with whom she enjoys a passionate fling, before he departs for home. She refuses to join him – and muses on the “treachery” of men – before her life takes her into the 20^th century, through the mud of Flanders and beyond, to 1990s London, where she has a young daughter.

It's not a devastating script, but there is wit – not least in the wonderful to-camera shots of Tilda Swinton as Orlando, where Potter has her break the fourth wall.

It is beautifully shot – cinematography was by Alexsei Rodionov – and beyond Swinton’s fabulous performance, which really grounds the film, it has a wonderful ensemble cast.

Billy Zane posts a nice turn as Shelmerdine, but one of the real joys here is Quentin Crisp as Elizabeth I – “the Queen of Queens”, according to Potter – which also adds to the queerness of the whole thing.

Then there’s Jimmy Sommerville, Kathryn Hunter, Simon Russell Beale and Toby Jones among many other familiar faces, while John Wood provides a delightful cameo as a bumptious, elderly archduke who falls for Orlando.

Potter’s direction moves things at a nice pace – easy to expect an epic, given the century-spanning scale of the story – but it’s just 93 minutes. She also wrote the screenplay and the music (the latter, along with David Motion and, for one song, Sommerville).

It’s thoroughly entertaining – and with the added spice of the gender politics, not least in terms of the differing attitudes toward men and women throughout history.

And as Vogue put it in 2020: “Nearly three decades later, Sally Potter's Orlando is more topical than ever”.

The Royal Tenenbaums – an absolute catch-up joy

Playing catch-up again, I started the weekend – and it’s going to be a fairly busy (for me) few days of film watching – with sticking a disc on to watch Wes Anderson’s 2001 The Royal Tenenbaums for the first time.

Tony and my first encounter with Anderson’s utterly individual style was via a disc of Grand Budapest Hotel, on the particularly enthusiastic recommendation of a friend/colleague who is also a part-time film critic (and is taking me to a critics’ screening next week).

We were seriously impressed – so much so that we saw the next three Anderson releases in the cinema.

And as that implies, we continued to like – and increasingly ‘get’ – what we were seeing; not least, in terms of Anderson’s cinematic vernacular.

Early this evening, half an hour after finishing work, after feeding Otti cat and doing a bit of house work, I popped a Blu-ray of Tenenbaums into the slot and sat back with a tumbler of Hotel Chocolat chocolate salted caramel vodka.

It’s brilliant – I mean the film (though the booze is excellent too).

A family with Royal Anderson at the head is full of success and childhood genius, yet falls from that with bickering, betrayal, deceit and also the sheer fear of others knowing the truth.

The style is totally Anderson: colour palettes, mannered dialogue, short scenes as ‘chapters’, dysfunctional relationships, narration, and an incredible ensemble cast.

Gene Hackman, as the titular Royal Anderson, is arguably not an obvious Anderson-type actor, but gives a superb performance in one of the last films before his retirement. Such a great contrast to the likes of Popeye Doyle. Without doubt one of the finest of his career.

Angelica Huston as his wife is also simply wonderful, bringing a contrasting quietness to this central relationship.

I was astonished to learn that Owen Wilson co-wrote the script with Anderson as well as playing a significant role. Until relatively recently, I’d only seen trailers of Wilson in films that looked (to me) like they were a waste of time – until Tony and I saw him in the first season of Loki. And were a tad re-educated. Here – never mind finding his CV credentials being buffed by his writing credit, it’s also a very good performance, and he looks … well … buff’.

Possibly the best I’ve ever seen Gwyneth Paltrow; Bill Murray is lovely, subtle and warm in his role, and Danny Glover adds real dignity, grace and warmth too.

I realise I haven’t mentioned Ben Stiller, who in general, I feel an active dislike for on the basic of what I see as, being in infantile bollocks. I was moving to that view here. Until late on, when he showed the ability to move from the least nuanced character to one experiencing a real revelation.

Luke Wilson too, is less well known than his brother. But really does give a great performance in this as the desperately unhappy tennis genius.

Funny and moving. Absolutely loved it. What a great start to the weekend!

 

All of Us Strangers – a moving meditation on relationships

Adam is a middle-aged screenwriter living on his own in an almost-deserted new tower block in London, from where he can gaze down and across the city, a reflection of his lifelong loneliness.

Struggling with his latest project, he becomes aware of another resident on a lower floor. When Harry turns up at his door, drunk, with a bottle of Japanese whisky, and propositions him, Adam is quick to rebuff.

The next day, he takes a train and visits the home where he lived until he was 12, when his parents died in a car crash. There he finds it completely unchanged – and his parents are living there, frozen at the ages they were when they died.

Between increasingly frequent visits, as his parents get to know their adult son, Adam begins a relationship with Harry, where they share not only sex, but a tentative exploration of their emotions and fears.

Director and screenwriter Andrew Haigh’s feted film is based on the 1987 novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada and is a quiet and very still meditation not only on grief, but also isolation and the fear of rejection within all our relationships.

Inevitably, given that Adam and Harry are gay – as is Haigh himself – the issue of coming out and acceptance (or lack) of being LGBT is a central part of this meditation and the script allows for an exploration of changing attitudes toward sexuality, from the time when Adam’s parents were alive to the present day (including generational differences of using gay’ or ‘queer’ to self-describe).

Weighing in with the look back to the 1980s is the use of pop hits from Adam’s childhood – Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s The Power of Love is an absolute needle drop here – but the likes of Alison Moyet and The Pet Shop Boys are further musical pleasures that also work as a musical counterpoint to the bitterness of an era of Section 28 and the Aids panic.

Jamie D Ramsey’s cinematography adds a sense of unreality to this unconventional ghost story with his use of soft focus in places throughout.

Beautifully paced, this is a four-hander, with Andrew Scott in superb form as Adam, his silences every bit as effective as his words.

Paul Mescal as Harry is in fine form, revealing the character’s vulnerability and tenderness.

Jamie Bell and Claire Foy are wonderful as Adam’s parents, in tricky roles that could have been clunky stereotypes reflecting those ’80s attitudes.

The central pairing raises some interesting questions about current conversations on casting: should only actors who understand the ‘lived reality’ be cast as, say, LGBT, disabled or some ethnic characters?

Here, Scott is gay, but Pascal is not. If you go down that route, would it logically follow that, for example, Dev Patel should not have played David Copperfield? I’ll leave that with you.

In the meantime, All of Us Strangers is a very moving and thought-provoking film that never descends into sentimentality or simplistic tropes. And perfect for LGBT+ History Month.

Lady Day – a delight that avoids all the obvious tropes

Greta Gerwig’s 2017 feature debut, the comedy-drama coming-of-age feature Lady Bird, is a delight.

Catching up on the director/writer’s back catalogue after seeing Barbie just before Christmas, I managed, on the one hand to wonder how I missed it at the time, but also to feel joy that I can have that experience now.

Christine McPherson is in her final year at a Catholic high school in Sacramento, California. Her family is struggling financially  and her relationship with her mother is particularly strained – she refuses to call herself by her given name, but calls herself instead, ‘Lady Bird’ – but she harbours dreams of getting a place at a prestigious East Coast college, where there’s some ‘culture’.

That might sound like a wide open door for tropes and cliches, but Gerwig takes it and makes it into something so much more complex and emotionally satisfying.

It benefits from an excellent supporting cast – not least Timothée Chalomet, Bernie Feldstein, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Lois Smith and Lucas Hedges.

But Saoirse Ronan as the titular character and Laurie Metcalf as her mother, Marion, take it to a new level.

A late scene has the camera hold on Metcalf’s face for an age, as her character comes to an emotional realisation – it is a wonderful scene from actor and director alike and just one example amid many.

Absolutely no wonder that it has garnered so many awards and such praise.

The Holdovers is a bittersweet symphony of life

When curmudgeonly New England classics teacher Paul Hunham makes the ‘mistake’ of honestly marking the work of a bad student at Barton Academy, with the consequence that the boy’s wealthy father backtracks on a donation to the school, he is punished by the headteacher (one of the first pupils he himself taught) by being forced to babysit the ‘holdovers’ – any boys who have to stay at the school over the Christmas holiday in 1970.

The five that do remain include troubled Angus Tully, whose mother and new stepfather have decided they don’t want him around for a delayed festive honeymoon.

Making up the film’s central trio is Mary Lamb, the head of the school’s cafeteria. A single black mother, she took the job so that her son could have an education as a ‘Barton Boy’. But a lack of funds meant he couldn’t go on to college and instead, was conscripted into the military and died in Vietnam earlier that year.

Initially antagonistic, the inevitable happens as relationships between the three slowly thaw. What avoids this all descending into chiché is David Hemingson’s excellent script and Alexander Payne’s excellent direction – both of which allow the audience to slowly come to understand and empathise with the protagonists – and the performances of the leading actors.

It also allows a commentary on racism, class, mental health, and the importance of education; in particular, that of history – both global and personal.

Making his film debut as Angus, Dominic Sessa has already picked up several best newcomer awards and is up for a Bafta later this year as supporting actor. It’s a remarkably assured performance, full of awkwardness and vulnerability, but shot through with a self-destructive anger.

Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mary brings toughness and vulnerability to the role, and she and the film thankfully avoid tropes of a suffering black character. Having already picked up a Golden Globe, she’s nominated in the supporting actress category for both the Baftas and the Oscars.

And so to Paul Giamatti as the central grouch. He absolutely shines in the role of the misanthropic teacher. There are moments of great humour here – not least in terms of his pomposity – but as with the others, it’s a performance that slowly reveals the character’s vulnerabilities.

Giamatti too picked up a Golden Globe and has best actor nominations for both London and LA.

The Holdovers is proving an awards dark horse, threatening the juggernaut that is Oppenheimer. Having seen it, there’s no surprise to this. Indeed, the only shock is that it took until the second half of January for this to be released in the UK, given that it is a quintessential Christmas movie, which is already being lauded as one of the very best of that species.

A real bittersweet joy. Film making on an absolutely human scale, with story and dialogue taking the lead. Do see.

Cult classic Phantom of the Paradise proves camp fun

Thanks to a birthday present from my niece, I’ve just seen Brian de Palma’s 1974 cult classic, Phantom of the Paradise, for the first time – and what a watch.

A rock musical comedy horror, it brings together reworkings of The Phantom of the Opera, Faust and The Picture of Dorian Gray, to tell the story of naïve songwriter Winslow Leach, who allows himself to be conned out of his magnum opus, a rock cantata of the Faust legend, by one of the henchmen of music producer Swan.

By the time he realises, it’s too late – and Swan unscrupulously has him beaten up, framed and jailed. But Leach escapes and heads toward the Paradise Club, which Swan is going to launch with a production of the cantata, to seek revenge – and rescue Phoenix, a talent singer that the producer is exploiting.

De Palma both wrote and directed it, and it goes at a frenetic pace for it’s 91 minutes. His send up of the music business was seen by many at the time as essentially pointless – remember what rock was like in the 1970s? – but the energy and the campness of the whole affair carry it through.

In terms of the campness, it’s interesting to note that it came out a year after The Rocky Horror Show premiered on stage in London, so arguably very much of a piece with that.

William Finlay does a fine job as the naïve songwriter/tortured phantom of the title, while Paul Williams makes a deeply disturbing Swan – looking rather like a short Brian Connolly from '70s glam rockers The Sweet.

He also wrote all the songs – his other musical credits include the score for Alan Parker’s 1976 film, Bugsy Malone).

Gerrit Graham makes a fine, campy turn as Beef, an over-the-top rock singer, while Jessica Harper, in her debut, as appropriately sweet and gutsy as Phoenix.

There’s a huge amount to take in visually. For instance, I loved that the stage set of the opening to Faust the musical, together with the costumes and makeup, recall Robert Weine’s German Expressionist masterpiece, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, while there are scenes – more mocking of the 1970s music business – that are orgiastic in nature, as though like something out of Caligula’s court.

All in all, a most entertaining watch.

The world according to Louis Wain and his cats

In 1881, after the death of his father, Louis Wain becomes the primary breadwinner of his household, where he lives with his mother and five sisters, while working as a part-time illustrator for the Illustrated London News.

Editor Sir William Ingram wants him to go full-time, but despite the family finances being in tough shape, he initially says no, preferring to have some time for interests other than his art – not least attempting to get patents for his varied inventions and trying to compose an opera.

But his eldest sister Caroline, who has taken over running the house from their scatty mother, has hired a governess for the three younger girls, so Louis has to change his mind on the job offer.

Emily Richardson, the governess, is a hit in the household – and the eccentric Louis, who has never experienced romantic or sexual feelings before, finds that changing.

But after Emily causes an accidental scandal, Caroline decides to fire her – forcing Louis’s hand to start a courtship.

And once married, it is his wife who rescues a tiny kitten, who will then inspire Louis to start painting the cat pictures that were to make him famous – and had a major impact on the acceptability of keeping cats as pets in Victorian England.

This 2021 film, directed by Will Sharpe, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Simon Stephenson, is a whimsical biopic of a man who was, in many ways, very childlike and vulnerable.

Benedict Cumberbatch as Wain, and Claire Foy as Emily, are excellent leads, with Olivia Colman narrating and Toby Jones turning in a lovely supporting performance as Sir William.

There are also cameos to watch out from Taika Waititi, Richard Ayoade and Nick Cave – the latter, as HG Wells.

Erik Wilson’s cinematography feels both quirky in places and highly conventional in others, and it’s not certain that such a mix works perfectly. But in general, it’s a charming, sometimes funny and often moving, watch.