The Life Of Chuck (2025)

Based on a short story by Stephen King, The Life Of Chuck is adapted into screenplay form and directed by Mike Flanagan. For those expecting horror, however, you should be warned. As made clear by the marketing, this is actually one of the non-horror treats from King, and Flanagan has taken the opportunity to revel in an onscreen world full of optimism and, well, love.

Things work backwards, chronologically, but the main thing to know is that, as the title suggests, this is all about Charles 'Chuck' Franz (played at various points in his life by Cody Flanagan, Benjamin Pajak, Jacob Tremblay, and Tom Hiddleston). Chuck grew up with his grandparents (played by Mia Sara and Mark Hamill), likes dancing, and eventually gets used to the comforting idea that we each contain multitudes. We are the sum of everyone and everything we've ever experienced, even if it can seem as if we haven't done very much with our lives.

It's hard to hate The Life Of Chuck, and it could be argued that this is the kind of fantastical escapism that people need right now (considering the state of things here in 2025 . . . note to any time travellers reading this, SEND HELP). I was surprised to not really love it though. The first act leads up to an obvious enough reveal, even for those who haven't read the source material, and it was a mistake to try to play things off like a big mystery.

Narration from Nick Offerman helps a lot, and his voice is as wonderful as ever, but the rest of the cast is quite a mixed bag, aside from everyone playing Chuck (standouts being Pajak and Hiddleston). Chiwetel Ejiofor is wonderful as a teacher, Marty Anderson, but Karen Gillan isn't so good as his ex-wife, a nurse named Felicia Gordon. Mia Sara is lovely as the grandmother, Hamill overdoes things slightly as grandpa. Then you have many others who are just sorely underused, including Rahul Kohli, Matthew Lillard, and Annalise Basso. There's time for some superb drumming from The Pocket Queen AKA Taylor Gordon though, and Trinity Jo-Li Bliss is a winning presence to convincingly motivate our lead to keep enjoying his talent for dance.

One big set-piece at the halfway point is what you're ultimately left with here. The messaging of the movie is very good, but it's a fortune cookie homily that is somehow paradoxically given too much of the screentime and yet not enough of it. That one set-piece ties everything together so beautifully that it still works though, and thinking of that moment should make most viewers smile and appreciate the beauty and connections of life. It's just not quite enough. Reminding us that we contain multitudes should be done with much more of an emphasis on the multitudes. The Life Of Chuck tries to tell be grandiose and intimate at the same time, which leads to it feeling caught in between the two, and not being as successful in either approach as it could have been if Flanagan had figured out another way to present the material.

I enjoyed this while it was on. I would probably rewatch it. I didn't love it though, although it seems to have worked much better for a lot of other film fans. Maybe it will grow on me whenever I do end up giving it a rewatch.

6/10

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Mubi Monday: The Deep Blue Sea (2011)

Perhaps most easily viewed as the antithesis of Brief Encounter, this look at love, marriage, sex, and loss oozes quality from start to finish. It might look dreary throughout, a deliberate choice, and the exploration of the main themes may be quite depressing, but it's a fantastic showcase for the talents of the oft-overlooked Rachel Weisz.

Weisz is Hester Collyer, a young woman stuck in a marriage to Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale) that doesn't satisfy her. This is her excuse for beginning an affair with Freddie (Tom Hiddleston), a dashing RAF pilot who is trying to make the most of his time after doing his part to help win the war. Unfortunately, Freddie isn't as committed to the relationship as Hester, although how much of Hester's contribution comes from love, how much is lust, and how much from a sense of duty is hard to tell, especially as her husband, who has refused to give her a divorce, does his bit to allow her a way back to her marriage.

Based on the play by the prolific Terence Rattigan, The Deep Blue Sea is directed by Terence Davies, who adapted the material for the screen, in a way that dances between the big outbursts and the quieter moments of sadness. It mimics the extreme highs and lows of such a relationship, and does so without inadvertently turning the whole thing into some kind of parody of this kind of thing. That's easier said than done, considering the oh-so-Britishness of it all, the difference between what characters try not to say in public and what they shout aloud in relative privacy, and the old-fashioned values at the heart of it (and, no, those values are not shown as necessarily being any good).

When I mentioned Weisz being oft-overlooked I was mainly referring to my own view of her, but I also don't see her praised enough by film fans when general discussions are taking place. That's a shame, because she's almost always very good. Her skill is particularly noticeable here, playing a woman who feels the need to supplicate herself as she tries to keep hold of a man she loves, even though he doesn't feel things as strongly as she does. Hiddleston works well in the opposite role, happily revealing a colder and more cruel persona as he tries to distance himself, all juxtaposed alongside the sweeter moments in which he uses his charm and attractive smirking ways. Beale also does very well, taking on the least interesting of the three lead roles and allowing his character to regain your sympathy once his initial anger has abated.

It would have been very easy to push everyone here to go bigger, to take every scene to a point at which it starts to hammer you over the head, but Davies is the right person for the material, keeping things nicely quiet and underplayed throughout, the occasional Hiddeleston outburst aside (and I don't think anyone can keep Hiddleston from having an occasional outburst).

8/10

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

Prime Time: Early Man (2018)

It was only a matter of time until Aardman delivered a movie that left me even slightly disappointed. The fact that it took this long, and that Early Man is still an enjoyable enough bit of fun, if not one I will rush to rewatch, is testament to the quality of their work. From Chicken Run to the Wallace & Gromit movie, and then the wonderful The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists! I even really like Flushed Away, and enjoyed the slightly lower-tier movie outing for Shaun The Sheep. And I couldn't even begin to narrow the gags down to a Top 10 if we were to discuss the many wonderful short films they have made (although Gromit laying down enough track ahead of himself as he speeds along on a model train will always be my favourite of the lot).

Early Man is the story of a group of cave-dwelling people who end up being displaced from their valley by some giant machines, all controlled by men who are living it up in the Bronze Age. When one man (Dug, voiced by Eddie Redmayne) goes to find out more, he ends up challenging the more advanced people to a game of football. Winning will get them their valley back, but losing will see them used as miners.

Director Nick Park, who also developed the story idea with Mark Burton (and Burton wrote the screenplay with James Higginson), doesn't seem to be too sure of what he wants here. There are the usual wonderful visual gags, although not as many of them as we've had in his previous films, but the combination of the prehistoric setting and football match challenge makes for a strange combination that doesn't quite work. Some people will be wanting more dino-centric gags, others may want some more time with the football, and neither group will be wholly satisfied with the end result.

There's another problem though, and that is the voice cast. It's just not very . . . good. Eddie Redmayne is perfectly acceptable in the main role, but that's all he is. Never the most charismatic or warm performers, his voice work is at least better than most of the roles that utilise his entire physical presence. Tom Hiddleston and Maisie Williams both do okay, the former as an enemy and the latter as an ally, but they're hidden behind some pointless and silly accents (unless my old ears have started to deceive me). Timothy Spall is a welcome presence, Rob Brydon does well, Miriam Margolyes is an amusingly stern Queen, and there are a number of familiar British celebrities making up the rest of the main troupe.

Despite those story and cast issues, Early Man still does enough to make for a fun 90 minutes (well, closer to 80 minutes before the end credits roll), and I am sure that younger viewers will appreciate it more than I did. It does, after all, have dinosaurs, cute rabbits, a helpful boar named Hognob, and a cast of obvious heroes to root for and villains to boo and hiss at.

6/10

Early Man can be bought here.
Americans can buy it here.

High-Rise (2015)

Based on yet another "unfilmable" novel by J. G. Ballard, High-Rise has been a film that many people have been trying to bring to the screen for decades. The man who finally succeeded where others failed is director Ben Wheatley, helped along by a screenplay by Amy Jump.

The plot sees a man named Laing (Tom Hiddleston) moving into a modern apartment block (aka a fancy block of flats) in 1970s England. The block is full of amenities and luxuries, but only those higher up in the building get to access more of the good stuff, turning the whole building into an obvious microcosm of society. And when people start to upset the order of how things should be, it's not long until the whole environment devolves into an anarchic mix of violence, debauchery, and death.

The thing that threw me about this film is how quickly viewers are thrown into some outright strangeness. Even the earlier scenes, which are supposed to be showing normal life in the apartment block, are just plain odd. And then things go from 0-100 very quickly, with oddness turning into the bizarre and then the absolutely insane. I kept wondering what I had missed, or what scenes had been excised in the editing process and never put back where they should have been. Then I stopped wondering about it. I just started to enjoy the atmosphere of the film, immersing myself in the environment, which is when I started to appreciate everything that this had going for it.

First of all, even by his own standards, this is impressively ambitious directing from Wheatley, managing to make the central building seem both like an entire city and also like a horribly claustrophobic cocoon, depending on just how well things are going. He also keeps all the character shots and cinematography in the strange retro-futuristic style of the apartment block.

The script by Jump may be a muddled mess at times, and that's hard to deny, but it's also full of cutting lines, great individual moments, and a smoke-filled, languid, atmosphere that becomes hazier and hazier as the minds of the central characters start to fray and break.

Then you have the cast. Hiddleston is great in his role, barely holding on to his precarious position in the building from the very beginning, and there are also fantastic performances from Elisabeth Moss, Luke Evans, Peter Ferdinando, and Jeremy Irons, the latter as the architect of the building and the top resident (of course). Sienna Miller, James Purefoy, Keeley Hawes, and Reece Shearsmith also lend solid support, each one playing a memorable resident who may be for or against Hiddleston's place in the heirarchy of the structure.

This isn't a film to watch if you want an easy ride, and it's not even one to watch if you need something that makes sense throughout. It's a dazzling, dizzying, strange experience. Almost like leaning over the top balcony of a tower block and looking down through a kaleidoscope. While other people throw protesting victims over to meet their gravity-hastened demise. And of course I mean that as a compliment.

8/10

Get the disc here.
American friends can pick it up here.

War Horse (2011)

This Steven Spielberg movie, based on a popular play written by Nick Stafford which was based on the children's book by Michael Morpurgo, is an easy target for critics to take aim and fire at. There's no denying that it has many moments that exemplify the very worst of Spielberg's predilections and there will be many people for whom this is just absolute anathema. Nevertheless, I quite enjoyed it.

Peter Mullan plays Ted Narracott, a farmer who doesn't really have much luck in life. Mind you, he doesn't always help himself, like when he decides to outbid his landlord (David Thewlis) for a horse that everyone knows will be of no use to him for ploughing purposes. He gets the horse, but is also indebted to his landlord. It looks grim, grim indeed, but his son, Albert (Jeremy Irvine), has faith in the horse and sets out to prove everyone wrong by leading it around the field and getting it to pull the plough. Sadly, despite the horse showing great tenacity, there's not enough done to keep the farm safe and so Ted sells the horse to an army Captain (Tom Hiddleston). Albert is determined that they'll be reunited one day and he signs up for the army as soon as he's old enough, but there's no guarantee that he'll ever actually see his horse again or, indeed, survive the perils of war.

Yes, it's overloaded with sentiment in places (thanks to Spielberg and the music of John Williams) and yes, there are too many shots with rays of sunlight just providing an aura for the lead characters, thanks to cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, but this is still an enjoyable family adventure that will take you through a range of emotions before the end credits roll.

The best thing about it is the quality of the cast. As well as those already mentioned (Mullan, Thewlis, Irvine, Hiddleston), viewers gets to see the following actors in a variety of small and large roles: Emily Watson, Niels Arestrup, Benedict Cumberbatch, Geoff Bell, Eddie Marsan, Toby Kebbell and Liam Cunningham. Even the lesser-known (and unknown) cast members do a great job, with Celine Buckens making a good impression as young Emilie, a girl who also makes a connection with the titular horse.

There are one or two moments of darker content in the movie, but they're handled with kid gloves and moved aside in plenty of time for the next uplifting sequence. People will accuse the movie of being far too sugary and heavy-handed for its own good and it is, but it's also just a nice, old-fashioned adventure story with plenty of great moments throughout.

7/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/War-Horse-Blu-ray-Region-Free/dp/B00742SSEW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1356070669&sr=8-1

Avengers Assemble (2012)

And so it appears at last (albeit with an annoying title change so that we easily confused Brits don't think Steed and Emma Peel are coming back to the big screen this year), the  film that looks set to be the mightiest of superhero movies, the royal rumble of the Marvel cinematic universe, the geekgasm for comic book fans. With Joss Whedon directing (and co-writing the script with Zak Penn), Avengers Assemble actually manages to be all of this and more.

For anyone adjusting to the sunlight and the sights around them after coming out of some decade-long hibernation, here is the plot. Loki (Tom Hiddleston), last seen causing major trouble for Thor (Chris Hemsworth), has managed to get himself to Earth with a device that can run on self-sustaining energy and grow more and more powerful. Loki hopes to use this device to bring a warring alien race to Earth, cause mayhem and chaos, and then lord it over all he surveys. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) really doesn't want this to happen so he enlists the help of the superheroes that he knows and thinks up to the task. Captain America (Chris Evans), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor, Dr. Bruce Banner/The Incredible Hulk (played by Mark Ruffalo in both forms), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and, hopefully, Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner). The biggest problem is that these characters don't play well together, something that Loki soon realises as he puts strain upon strain on their relationships (even completely taking over one or two characters to do his bidding). There's also the ever-dependable Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) and Agent Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders).

Most of the cast here have already grown into their characters in a previous movie (with Robert Downey Jr. perfecting his great patter in two enjoyable Iron Man films) but viewers may be most surprised to find that the person who comes near to stealing every scene here is Mark Ruffalo, arguably the best onscreen interpretation yet of the man who fears his own uncontrollable strength and rage. In a script full of great one-liners he also comes close to bagging two of the top five spots (though the absolutely greatest retort comes from Loki in a comment so funny that the cinema audience I saw the film with was laughing hard for the next full minute). But the best, and most impressive, thing about Avengers Assemble is just how everyone gets their share of great moments without the movie feeling overlong or bloated in any way. You may go into this film with a favourite that you're looking forward to seeing but I guarantee that you come out of it loving the entire group and struggling to pick an outright favourite moment. Which all goes to show just how much praise Tom Hiddleston also deserves for making Loki such a memorable and worthy villain, a perfect mix of camp and menace and scheming (his outburst to Black Widow in one particular scene ranks up there with some of the very best rants by cinematic baddies ever).

The writing is as sharp as you would expect. Okay, this isn't necessarily a film for complete newcomers (if there ARE any) but it sketches out enough details to keep most people happy and it does a great job of following major plot strands through a whole cat's cradle of different sub-strings. There are also at least four great action set-pieces, just as important to a film of this type, and the barnstorming finale features a superb mix of CGI, witticisms and sheer spectacle.

As you would expect from Whedon, he knows what fans want. I think that most people will be like myself, eager to like the film even before the opening titles come up. But with great anticipation comes, of course, the chance for great disappointment. Thankfully, there's absolutely nothing to worry about here. Whedon shows in almost every sequence that he knows just what audiences want, the action may be fast and frantic on many occasions but there are many times when the camera is pulled back and viewers are allowed to revel in a moment of sheer fan-pleasing awesomeness (be it simple joy at the scale of the action or an extended shot of Hulk having a smashing time).

2012 is already shaping up to be a great year for BIG cinematic spectacle (I am also drooling with anticipation at the thought of going to see Prometheus and The Dark Knight Rises) and Avengers Assemble has already set a very high bar for blockbuster quality. Did I want to go back and watch it again as soon as the credits rolled? Yes. Am I looking forward to reliving the whole thing on shiny disc format? Yes. Am I already very, VERY eager for a sequel? I think you know the answer to that one.

9/10

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