Netflix And Chill: Cargo (2017)

Based on a superb short film from 2013, Cargo is a zombie horror with a bit of a difference. It shows the lengths a parent will go to in order to keep a child safe, and reach somewhere they can have a chance at life, with or without them.

Martin Freeman is Andy, a man we see at the start of this movie with his partner, Kay. The two have a young daughter, Rosie, and they are trying to survive a world in which zombies are a wandering threat. Things change greatly when Kay is bitten, leaving the family unit as just father and daughter, so Andy plans a journey that he hopes will take them both to a better place.

Written by Yolanda Ramke, who also-co-directed with Ben Howling (the same positions they inhabited for their short film), Cargo is one of many films that come along to remind you of how many wonderful variations we can have within the zombie movie subgenre. The focus is on survival, as it so often is, but there's a lack of self-interest here. All that Andy wants to do is to give his daughter a chance to have some kind of life, and his every decision is informed by this, whether the people he meets are good or not.

Freeman is a great choice for the lead role, he always brings a quality to his characters that have you on his side from the very beginning and there's some added ingredient here watching this Englishman trying to plod on under the glare of an Australian sun (for that is where the film is set). Simone Landers is very good as young Thoomi, the inverse of Andy, a child trying their best to protect their father, and Anthony Hayes and Caren Pistorius play the kind of characters you often see in a zombie movie, ones that behave in ways that show a moral compass birling and whirling around differently in a world gone mad (well . . . that's more Hayes, really, but both have moments to keep you on your toes until you figure out how things are going to play out).

Cargo is a very good film. It uses some very familiar zombie movie moments, but they're all given that twist because it's a parent and child trying to survive them. It's also a great illustration of how to expand an impressive short into a feature. There are three key scenes here that are taken from the short film, but everything in between feels like a nice addition to the world, and to the story, in stead of just material used to pad out something that should have just stayed a short (as happens with a number of these things).

Not a film for those who need an excess of shambling undead, buckets of gore, and the standard third act situation of survivors being cornered and gradually overrun by hordes of zombies, Cargo is one to watch if you're wanting some horror with heart. If you're sitting there from the very beginning, rubbing your hands with glee, wondering when the baby will get eaten then it's probably best that you find something else to watch.

8/10

There's A disc available here.

Prime Time: Ali G Indahouse (2002)

Maybe it's the passing of time mellowing my attitude to what I once viewed as crimes against cinema. Maybe it's because I have actually now seen more movies that ARE crimes against cinema (including at least two feature films for British comedy creations that were nowhere near as much fun as Ali G). Whatever the reason, I decided to rewatch Ali G Indahouse this week for the first time in over a decade, expecting to put myself through some pain, and I did not hate it.

The plot sees a number of ridiculous coincidences leading to Ali G (Sacha Baron Cohen) becoming an elected MP. For everything he says and does that could be disastrous, or at least a major social faux pas, he somehow goes up in the estimation of Joe Public. But Ali doesn't realise that he is being used as a pawn by a scheming politician (Charles Dance) who wants to oust and replace the Prime Minister (Michael Gambon).

The history of small-screen British comedy being adapted into feature films is a troubled one. For every success you can name at least half a dozen failures (I'm not going to name them here, some people may become curious and seek them out, which will make me feel guilty for their temporary madness). Ali G Indahouse at least manages, thanks to the script by Cohen and Dan Mazer, to give fans of the character a lot of what they will enjoy. His constant attempts to be cool hide a very obvious lack of cool, but his own lack of self-awareness almost manages to make him still seem . . . cool, when he's not being a complete moron.

Director Mark Mylod may have a filmography overflowing with TV work but he does a decent enough job here, especially as he obviously has to work within the constraints of the silly plot. The fake start is a bit annoying, perhaps more so because we've now seen the big cinematic opening segue into something smaller and more intimate in many other TV-to-feature openings, but it's decently paced, energised by a very enjoyable soundtrack (equal parts genuinely good music and dollops of cheese), and helped by the fact that luminaries such as Dance and Gambon are very willing to go along with even the more juvenile gags.

And that's the biggest problem here. I laughed quite a few times, to my own surprise, but none of the scenes worked that were supposed to provide the biggest guffaws (Ali G handcuffed to some railings that are being cleaned by a blind man, the moment our main character meets the Queen, naughtiness in the residence of the PM that is heard by the guests while the PM is in a meeting with a guest, and more). Yet there were enough smaller chuckles, often just single lines of dialogue, that kept me amused enough throughout.

Cohen doesn't act, he creates characters that he completely embodies with ease. So, despite the varying quality of the gags here, he's consistently excellent in the role. People who forget that Martin Freeman is in this should give it a rewatch to remind themselves that . . . Martin Freeman is in this. He's a friend to Ali G, as is Tony Way, and is arguably even more ridiculous and desperate than our lead. Dance and Gambon suffer their indignities with aplomb, Kellie Bright is good as the famous Julie, referred to at almost every opportunity by Ali G as "me Julie", and Rhona Mitra has a small role as an attractive temptress helping Dance to reach his end goal.

If you don't like the character of Ali G then you're not going to like this film. If you do like the character of Ali G then you still may not like this film. It's not ever going to be essential viewing, or anyone's favourite comedy, but it's not the travesty that some might lead you to believe, especially compared to some British comedies that we've been subjected to in the past few years.

5/10

You can buy the movie here.
Americans can pick it up here.

Black Panther (2018)

Chadwick Boseman returns to play T'Challa (aka Black Panther), after making a great impression in Captain America: Civil War, and even the most casual film fan cannot help but notice that this film has made quite an impact, even when considered alongside the rest of the Marvel filmography. It's been the kind of success story that leads to one hyperbolic review after another, and then the inevitable contrary opinions. It's been called the best Marvel movie ever. It's been singled out as something having huge social and cultural importance. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in between the extremes.

I'm not going to go into every plot beat here. Suffice to say, T'Challa is about to become King of his land, Wakanda, and he also has to consider how he wants to lead. Should Wakanda remain hidden away from the rest of the world, or should all be revealed in an attempt to start helping those less fortunate? There's also a fun villain to be dealt with (Andy Serkis), some extremely badass women (Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira, and Letitia Wright), and someone who may just want to force Wakanda to change, whether the people want to or not (this last figure is played by Michael B. Jordan). All of these players do fantastic work, with Gurira and Jordan being standouts. Boseman is a solid lead, but not half as charismatic as many of those around him, nothing to be ashamed of when the cast also includes the wonderful Angela Bassett, Forest Whitaker, Sterling K. Brown, and David Oyelowo, among others.

First of all, Black Panther is a solid Marvel movie. It's not great though, and it's certainly not the best of the lot, at least not in terms of simple entertainment value and superhero antics. The action beats are, for the most part, a bit understated, and this is a more thoughtful look at how best to use superpowers (be they physical or societal).

Director Ryan Coogler continues his hot streak, also teaming up with Joe Robert Cole to work on the script here, and his decisions transform what could easily have been a generic superhero film, with a different cultural flavour, into something that somehow remains focused throughout on both the superficial fun and also the issues that will encourage dialogue long after the end credits have rolled.

While I have already mentioned the notion of how power can be used, there's more to Black Panther than just that. Perhaps it's almost inevitable, given the natural resources that Wakanda has (it contains a huge amount of vibranium, apparently), that viewers are given comments on colonialism, both subtle and not-so-subtle. There's also the obvious element of representation and equality running throughout the whole thing, themes explored within the film that bleed beyond the edges of every frame and emanate out towards every viewer, for better or worse (in the case of idiots who view it as an antagonistic assault on their fragile egos).

While not the perfect modern classic that some might want it to be, the fact that Black Panther so expertly blends blockbuster beats with a relevance and social conscience for an audience demographic who rarely see representation on this level is well worth celebrating. I think that it IS an important film in the here and now, and I think it has been long overdue. But, most of all, I think that it's a good film. And that, as silly and shallow as it may sound, comes before everything else, and then allows everything else to work as well as it clearly has.

7/10

Black Panther is available to order here.
And there's a different, kind of American-flavoured, link here.

Ghost Stories (2017)

Ghost Stories is a live stage experience, written by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman, that I am saddened to have never experienced. It was supposed to be quite terrifying, and I do enjoy being scared witless. Thankfully, although I have no idea how closely this adaptation sticks to the source material, I now have this film version to help contribute to my underwear laundry bill.

Having heard Nyman discuss the long road from stage to screen for this project, it seemed clear to me that the story was one full of classic horror movie genre tropes that everyone knew couldn't just be transferred back from the stage. What was intense and terrifying in a live production would just feel hokey and cliched when placed onscreen. Thankfully, that didn't stop them working hard until we ended up with this, a film that feels both very traditional and yet also, somehow, fresh and lively.

Nyman stars as Professor Goodman, a debunker of supernatural phenomena who is asked to investigate three cases that are believed to offer absolute proof of another world around us. Those three cases involve Paul Whitehouse as a night watchman encountering spookiness in an abandoned building, Alex Lawther as a teenager who regrets the choice of route on his late-night drive home, and Martin Freeman as a businessman who claims to have felt an evil presence in his own home while his pregnant partner was hospitalised.

Yes, essentially a portmanteau film (once the prime stomping ground of Amicus back in the heyday of British horror cinema), Ghost Stories manages to break the problems often associated with those films - a weak link here and there, pacing issues, building and sustaining tension - by weaving details, some subtle and some more obvious, throughout each tale, as well as the material bookending the film.

I always tell people, if I am forced to choose, that my favourite type of horror movie is a zombie movie. Put a zombie in it and I will watch it. Which means I have watched a LOT of awful zombie movies. But the only type of horror movie to really affect me is a good ghost film, and Ghost Stories is certainly a good ghost film. After a fairly light start to the proceedings, the atmosphere starts to build, and the frights start happening, in a way that reminded me of that classic horror story all about the house where nobody had ever survived the night. You know the one? It's a creepy little tale that builds to something quite intense, and this is the cinematic equivalent of that, although there are a multitude of other influences and nods, from The Turn Of The Screw to The Signal-Man.

But for anyone wondering if this would be TOO literary or stagey, or sedate, fear not. There are plenty of jump scares, some very sudden and some coming along as the required pay off to sequences of sustained tension unlike any I can think of in modern horror cinema. There are also some images that will, to use the technical term, freak you the fuck out. And the dread, don't forget the dread. It's the atmosphere of dread that makes the film almost unbearable at times though, seeping through almost every frame once things get going and never letting viewers relax, despite the very occasional moments of humour that provide a fleeting respite.

The writing and direction from Dyson and Nyman is fantastic, which you would expect from the two men who would surely have been so close to this material for many years already, but the performers also deserve praise. Nyman has always been a great presence onscreen, and turns in yet another great performance, but Whitehouse gives the kind of everyman performance necessary to drag viewers swiftly into the first fully-fledged segment of terror, young Lawther adds another great turn to his impressive roster of credits, and Freeman manages to twist his usual perceived happy-go-lucky demeanour into something, well, rather different.

A brilliant, heady brew of the classic and the modern, Ghost Stories is to be applauded for the way it gives fans what they want, even if they didn't realise what they wanted. It's smart, it's steeped in the history of the genre, it's bloody audacious at times (in ways that some might balk at), it freely mixes stylistic touches in whatever way best serves the narrative, it keeps drawing together the main connective tissue on the way to "the grand finale", and it's one of the scariest films I have watched in years.

Highly recommended, and I'll be very impressed if we see a better horror movie this year.

9/10

Ghost Stories is probably a while away from shiny disc form, but keep your eyes peeled for it when it gets a wider release (in cinemas and then in stores).

The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies (2014)

Just to get up to speed, here is my review of the first and second movies in The Hobbit trilogy.

I was hesitant about this, the final, instalment of The Hobbit trilogy. It was, after all, stretching out the finale into something that I never really wanted to see onscreen. The big battle sequences in both The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings books were always the dullest passages for me, and the movies have so far proven to be almost equally dull when depicting those scenes. Oh, they have the spectacle and grandiosity that makes them entertaining, but it all becomes hard to care about when you're just watching one army swarming around another.

Carrying on from where the previous movie left off, this cinematic adventure focuses on the trouble caused by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) when he gets to take his rightful place in the heart of the mountain that was previously home to a fierce dragon named Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch). It's not long until Thorin is afflicted with a sickness that lets greed and paranoia overrule his good nature, in turn losing him the loyalty of Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and his fellow dwarves, who could be named Prancer, Dancer, Blitzen, etc. for all the time they get on screen. All of this leads, inevitably, to the battle that makes up the main title. And that's about it.

There are many little moments to enjoy here. The attention to detail is wonderful, as it has been in every Tolkien-related movie that director Peter Jackson has had a hand in (first The Lord Of The Rings trilogy and now this lot). But details don't always add up to great cinema. Neither does spectacle and scale. They can stave off boredom, but aren't really anything without a decent script and characters that you care about. This is where the final Hobbit movie gets things sorely wrong.

It's easy to like Bilbo Baggins, and a relationship sketched out between elf Thauriel (Evangeline Lilly) and dwarf Kili (Aidan Turner) is quite sweet, but nobody else stands out. Thorin is busy being warped by greed, Bard (Luke Evans) is heroic enough but a bit bland, Thranduil (Lee Pace) is as cold as ever in his singular mission to keep his people safe, and Gandalf (Ian McKellen) has been bordering on self-parody for years. Billy Connolly adds some life to proceedings when he appears, as a dwarf named Dain, but it's too little too late at that point.

All of the performers do well enough with what they're given. They're just not given much, thanks to the weak script by Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyen and Guillermo del Toro. The emphasis is clearly on action for this war-filled final chapter, but that is no excuse when the previous movies have always managed (or almost managed) to surround big action set-pieces with humour, warmth and characters that you don't mind hanging around with for so long. This feels like the longest movie in the series yet, despite being the shortest (until the inevitable wealth of deleted scenes are added back in, at any rate).

I'm not saying that this is a waste of your time. It's the end of an era, in some ways, and worth a trip to the cinema if, like me, you've seen all of the others on the big screen. I'm not saying that there aren't some great one-on-one fights that show some of the individual lives at stake. The final 30-40 minutes is full of solid action and great moments. It just comes along after 100 minutes of material that constantly verges on being mind-numbingly boring.

5/10

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Nativity! (2009)

Martin Freeman is Scrooge. Okay, he's not Scrooge, but he plays someone who gets very grumpy around Christmas time. Which, in simple terms, equates to him being Scrooge. Or, at the very least, A Scrooge. He's also a teacher, ordered by the headmistress (Pam Ferris) to organise the upcoming nativity play. While being grumpy, putting up with a juvenile assistant (Marc Wootton), and generally wishing that he could be left in peace until the festive season was over, he also lies to someone about the fact that his nativity play is going to be viewed by some bigwigs from Hollywood, brought over especially by his ex-girlfriend (Ashley Jensen). This lie, of course, gets out and about, and it grows and grows until there looks to be no good way to resolve the situation.

Written and directed by Debbie Isitt (with plenty of room for improvisation), Nativity! is a film full of some easy laughs, but it is also too busy trying to make viewers feel moved with a lot of clumsy, emotional content shoehorned into almost every sequence. We can't just laugh at Freeman being grouchy to little kids, or Wootton being amusingly childish, oh noooo. We have to remember that Freeman is grouchy because of the emotional damage that he experienced some years ago, and we have to remember that Wootton does make the kids laugh, but people in charge of little ones should also remember their responsibilities.

And as for the troublesome kids? Let's not forget that they may already have their own issues, be it a need for some more attention, a blustery front to cover up insecurities, or a turbulent home life.

The cast is at least full of familiar faces, all doing decent enough work. Alongside Freeman, Ferris, Wootton and Jensen there is Jason Watkins, Alan Carr and even small roles for John Sessions and Ricky Tomlinson. And then there are those kids. While they may not be the best bunch of youngsters to have graced movie screens, they're a likable bunch of rogues and cutie-pies, often raising a smile just by looking cheekily at the camera.

While it may be a bit too sweet and cloying for many, myself included, there are still a few decent moments sprinkled throughout Nativity! And, anyway, Christmas is the time for the sweet and cloying, so you may find it worth a watch while the decorations are hanging up and you just want some undemanding entertainment.

5/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nativity-Danger-The-Manger-DVD/dp/B00EE6C4IW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1386013600&sr=8-2&keywords=nativity+dvd

Saving Santa (2013)

Christmas movies are pretty easy to make, as are family movies. Well, that's what ABC and other channels, churning out numerous TV movies every year, would have you believe. And, in a way, they're right. Both require some kind of sweetness, a moral lesson to be learned (usually), and an environment for the main characters that is distinctly . . . . . . . . . . . movieland. The former also requires snow.

But making a GOOD Christmas and/or family movie, that's something different altogether.

Saving Santa is almost good, but it doesn't quite do enough to warrant any repeat viewings. It's the story of an elf named Bernard (voiced by Martin Freeman). Bernard likes to invent things, and always rushes to present his latest inventions to his peers, in the hopes of becoming more than just the elf responsible for clearing up the reindeer droppings. Unfortunately, there always seems to be some malfunction. This time around, the malfunction temporarily disables the cloaking of the North Pole base. It's not visible for long, but it's long enough for Neville Baddington (Tim Curry) to see it and make his move. He wants to get Santa and find out his secrets. He wants to know how he can make all of his deliveries in one night, so that he can use the same tactic to make his delivery company the fastest ever. The answer, as Santa shows Bernard during the calm before the storm, is time travel. Knowing the secret, Bernard decides to go back in time to stop everything going wrong. And that's when things start to get a bit complicated.

Although it's animated nicely enough, and the second half improves things greatly after a mediocre opening, there's just nothing here to make Saving Santa stand out. Freeman is fine in the lead vocal role, and Curry is great as the villain, but the support from Joan Collins, Ashley Tisdale and Tim Conway is as bland as the rest of the movie. Noel Clarke is fun, as the leader of a defence squad, but he's not in the movie for all that long, sadly.

The direction by Leon Joosen and Aaron Seelman is serviceable, I suppose, with the script by Ricky Roxburgh (based on a story by Tony Nottage) never rising too far above average. The time travel stuff starts to get more and more entertaining, and it's quite cleverly done, but the dialogue disappoints and none of the supporting characters, with the exception of reindeer Blitzen, make much of an impression.

And let's not mention the truly awful songs that punctuate proceedings every now and again. It's enough to make you want to stuff plum pudding in your ears. There are much worse movies to watch if you have undemanding children wanting to watch something new, but it's certainly worth trying to convince them that they should just rewatch the delightful Arthur Christmas instead.

5/10

http://www.amazon.com/Saving-Santa-Martin-Freeman/dp/B00GFUB21U/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1385982579&sr=8-1&keywords=saving+santa