St Helens, England, 1944
I can't tell you how much of a rush that opening caption from The Keeper gave me. You see, it's not often that a film is set in my hometown. Not just my hometown, but on the very streets immediately beyond my front doorstep and within my local pub. And OK, they didn't film it here, they filmed it in rural Northern Ireland, which doesn't really look anything like here but yeah, let me have my moment.
Bert Trautmann is a legend here in St Helens. Arriving in the town as a German POW, his prowess as a goalkeeper soon caught the attention of St Helens AFC's manager Jack Friar, whilst his good looks captured the heart of Friar's daughter Margaret. Of course, being a former soldier in the Wehrmacht (and one awarded the Iron Cross to boot), Trautmann's reception in the town was initially a hostile one in the immediate aftermath of the war, and this struggle to be accepted was further magnified when he signed for Manchester City, one of the biggest clubs in England, in 1949. But Trautmann's gentlemanly conduct, his desire to move on and make the best of things, and his outstanding performances on the pitch soon won even his fiercest critics over. As a player with Man City, he will forever be remembered as 'the man who played on' when, during the 1956 FA Cup Final, he broke his neck but refused to leave the pitch until victory was secured.
It is very weird watching a film set in your hometown though, seeing locations on screen purporting to be places you know, and seeing household familiar actors portray people whose children, grandchildren and relations you also actually know to talk to. As I say, the location filming doesn't really look much like what St Helens looked like during this period (nowhere near industrial looking enough really) and the exterior location of the Junction Inn (my nearest pub) is particularly unrecognisable, I mean it's called the Junction because it's directly opposite the train station so to not factor that in was a bit remiss, but they've clearly worked from photos of the now demolished 'town ground', as us St Heleners affectionately called the team's ground, as the stands as depicted brought back memories. I often have an issue about accents and getting them right (and wrong) in films and it's fair to say that no one on the screen here really convinced me as coming from St Helens, with the possible exception of Barbara Young as Grandma Sarah. John Henshaw, who plays Jack Friar, is performing in his usual Manchester Ancoats accents, whilst Freya Mavor (playing Margaret) and the rest of the cast are doing a generic northern accent that often sounded more Yorkshire to my ears than Lancastrian. To be fair, St Helens is a strange accent these days, with no two people ever really sounding the same; some sound proper Lancastrian, whilst others sound scouse, but the former was definitely the way to go for the actors here. Did any of this detract from me appreciation of the film? No, not really. I'm just glad that they got some good details in - such as the team singing 'When the Saints Go Marching In', a St Helens anthem used for both football and rugby league - and have bothered to tell the story in the first place. It's been a long time coming; the actor Warren Clarke, a staunch Man City fan*, had long harboured a desire to make a film of Trautmann's extraordinary life and it's a shame that he didn't live to see this.
I can't fault the performances either; David Kross is very good and believable as Trautmann, both on and off the pitch, and he possesses good chemistry with Mavor, an actress who is fast becoming a crush for me. John Henshaw is always good value, that goes without saying, but I did feel that the likes of Gary Lewis, Dervla Kirwan, Dave Johns and Julian Sands were a little wasted in their supporting roles. As a film, I wouldn't say The Keeper did anything spectacular and may hold little interest for anyone outside of the north west or those who do not follow football, but it was a very enjoyable watch that didn't seek to simply gloss over Trautmann's war record and the discomfort he felt about having to perform such a duty. I may be reading a little too much into it here, and I have to be a little careful about what I say, but in some respects The Keeper feels a little timely now as a Brexit movie. St Helens, to my eternal disappointment, was a leave voting town (as indeed were so many towns scarcely troubled by immigration and who had previously benefitted greatly from EU funding) so there's something of a contemporary resonance in seeing characters purporting to be from here (and later from Manchester) telling a German immigrant to go home and treating him with vitriol. Now obviously with the war, these people had a much greater and more genuine reason for hating a foreign migrant than any xenophobe has towards a wholly innocent one in today's climate, but I felt that the parallel was still there nonetheless and that the harmonious message of forgive and forget that the film has is one that is needed now more than ever. Then again, with the news as it is, maybe everything I view feels like it's shot through with Brexit nowadays.
*One other famous Man City fan also makes a contribution to the movie; Noel Gallagher's song, 'The Dying of the Light', plays over the closing credits.
"...Starring as Billy Moore is Joe Cole, a former National Youth Theatre player and Screen International Star of Tomorrow recipient. Cole has been no slouch in the past few years, notching up impressive credits from his breakout role as John Shelby in the hit BBC period crime drama Peaky Blinders to a BAFTA-nominated performance in the Black Mirror episode, Hang the DJ. He has even courted Hollywood with roles in last year’s veterans drama Thank You For Your Service and 2015’s cult horror Green Room, but it’s perhaps fair to say that for all that he still isn’t a household name. That slight anonymity actually works in A Prayer Before Dawn‘s favour, because what’s integral to this film is Billy’s foreignness. It is simply Cole’s milk-white torso, rather than the star status of an A-lister, that makes him stand out from the broiling tumult of similarly semi-naked and heavily inked Thai convicts. As the only westerner and English speaker incarcerated there, the bewilderment and isolation he feels is key to his specific ordeal and this is palpable for the audience too, as we are forced uncomprehending down this hellhole alongside him. The danger he faces, as warders and inmates bark and threaten, is credible in a way that a bigger name with a greater baggage of roles behind him would simply be unable to pull off. We know that just around the corner the trailer is waiting for them…with the lesser known Cole, you can believe he’s actually living this nightmare. This may not be the film that affords him the mainstream commercial breakout that is surely on the horizon, but the kudos it will gain in critical and professional circles is further proof of Cole’s ability to pick his roles well...."
Read my full review at The Geek Show
Time was, Hollywood would make a Nancy Kerrigan biopic. A story about how, an exceptional figure skater and appropriate ambassador and role model for America was heinously attacked and suffered potentially career-damaging injuries but, to the amazement of all, overcame the odds to win a silver medal at the Winter Olympics. Cue stirring music over look of triumph on the actor's face, fade to black and wait for the Oscars to roll in.
But something very interested has happened to Hollywood in that the focus has shifted. Now, the industry want to tell the morally complex stories. They're more interested in the ambiguous (anti) heroes and heroines who occupy the grey areas, or simply the out and out villains, than they are the good guys now. This approach can often fall flat on its face (Pain and Gain), other times it can divide audiences (The Wolf of Wall Street) and sometimes, it's pulled off like a triple axel. I, Tonya is that triple axel.
Everything about I, Tonya more or less works. The soundtrack is brilliant, Margot Robbie delivers an incredible performance, and there's a good balance between the drama and the humour. This last bit in particular is key, because the absurdity of what occurred in 1994 cannot be ignored. They say truth is stranger than fiction and Craig Gillespie and his screenwriter Steven Rogers certainly get that in their approach to the subject matter. Earlier this year I read Seinfeldia by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, a book that explores how the TV series Seinfeld not only impacted upon the world at large but that it also seemed to subconsciously shape it too. Was it really the reality of 1994 that a man called Newt Gingrich was in the senate and that the rivalry between two figure skaters led to a brutal yet deeply incompetent assault, Keishin Armstrong argues, or was it a Seinfeld episode? Gillespie addresses not only the bizarro situation by willfully heightening its comic potential (Paul Walter Hauser's Shawn Eckhardt is clearly a Newman-like contact of Kramer's) but by repeatedly breaking the fourth wall to acknowledge the wildly contradictory opinions expressed by the real-life protagonists. In doing so, he borrows liberally from Michael Winterbottom's excellent 24 Hour Party People. That's the kind of thing that can be very foolish to do, but if you're going to steal you may as well steal from the best, and thankfully Gillespie manages to make it work for his own purposes.
It's not a flawless film though. It could be argued that Gillespie is too cavalier with the incidences of violence that occur throughout (and are integral to) the movie. The scenes of domestic violence are played almost comedically, as if it's just another happy-go-lucky chapter in the life of Tonya Harding and that can send out all kinds of wrong messages. This is further expounded by the fact that, in choosing to represent all sides of this conflicting tale, he allows Jeff Gillooly to dismiss any accusation that he was ever violent towards Tonya, just as later Tonya is shown to shoot at a fleeing Jeff, before turning to camera to assure us that, from her POV at least, this never actually happened. It is here that the film is most reminiscent of Winterbottom's aforementioned Factory Records biopic, with its infamous scene of Buzzcocks' Howard Devoto cleaning a toilet in which his fictional self is seen screwing Tony Wilson's first wife, Lindsay. "I don't remember this happening" he says to camera. In both films, it's a funny scene, but it ought to be remembered that these scenes stem from personal pain someone has gone through and that they only exist to act as a compromise in order to avert lawsuits.
Likewise the film has a duty to Kerrigan that it often fails. Gillespie becomes so fixated on Tonya's story that he forgets to pay the victim in all of this the respect she deserves. It's a real shame that, for a film that was keen to address how hard a hand life had dealt a talented young woman like Tonya Harding, it didn't want to give any such due to Nancy Kerrigan. Maybe I'm a touch to sensitive but when the film was released I did have to wonder what Kerrigan made of all this sudden interest in the people who, the court found, attempted to ruin her life. Maybe the truth is Kerrigan wanted nothing to do with the movie, I don't know, and that's fine of course and totally understandable too, but Gillespie ought to have known when to draw the line at some of the opinions expressed in Rogers' screenplay purportedly from Harding herself.
Overall, it might not have got the full marks from the judges, but I, Tonya comes damn close. I really enjoyed this and I think Robbie thoroughly deserved her Oscar nomination and probably should have got it with her performance here. I wish I could say the same about Allison Janney who did pick up the gong for Best Supporting Actress. Don't get me wrong, she's really great in it, but it's an easy Oscar win for a part that has all the work already done for a performer. The Academy love those grouchy scene stealing turns.
BBC4's bijou biopics of beloved British talent from yesteryear was once a regular fixture on the channel, but budgetary restrictions saw them bring their original drama output to something of a close after 2013's Burton and Taylor. This means that anything approaching such a format is now done with some irregularity, saved for special occasions such as Christmas, so it's only fitting that their attempt to tackle the story of Eddie Braben now: the unsung gag writer of Morecambe and Wise, the comedy double act who dominated the Christmas schedules of days gone by.
When I first heard that BBC4 were making Eric, Ernie and Me, I was impressed by the casting of Stephen Tompkinson as Braben, but confused and apprehensive by the casting of Mark Bonnar and Neil Maskell as Eric and Ernie. Tompkinson is one of our most versatile actors, adapt at both serious drama and broad comedy, capable of many a dialect and bearing a passing physical resemblance to the man himself. I knew then that he'd have no trouble portraying the scouse market trader who went on to write gags for everyone from Charlie Chester to Ken Dodd, and whose 2004 autobiography The Book What I Wrote shed light on time writing for Eric and Ernie and arguably formed the basis of this drama. Mark Bonnar is an actor I'm rather keen on thanks to his deadpan turn in the sitcom Catastrophe, but the thought of this thin, prematurely silver haired Scottish actor portraying the bespectacled jester, Eric Morecambe was a bit of a stretch for my imagination, and ditto Neil Maskell as Ernie, an actor best known for playing a variety of laddish hard men culminating in his best known role, that of Jay in Kill List. I began to wonder why they didn't just cast Jonty Stephens and Ian Ashpitel whose stage act is to recreate Eric and Ernie and appeared on our screens as such just last Christmas in the Eric Idle (less than) spectacular The Entire Universe.
But now I've seen this I know why they opted for Bonnar and Maskell. What I perhaps didn't expect from this drama was the fact that the story was just as much about Morecambe and Wise as it was about Braben. There's a key scene when, at the behest of Braben who is reeling from nervous exhaustion due to the gruelling schedule set by the boys, the BBC suggest that the Christmas show should accommodate a more variety feel, including musical numbers that recall the days of old Hollywood. Ernie is immediately in agreement, but Eric rules it out flatly, demanding they stick only to the familiar routine of gags and sketches which would mean the same workload for Braben. Aware that a long held ambition is about to be snatched away from him by his partner, Maskell's Ernie asks for a private word with Eric and, in what follows, I instantly realised that the film required some proper actors in the role rather than - and no offence meant to Stephens and Ashpitel, who are obviously actors in their own right - a pair of highly skilled imitators. Bonnar and Maskell would never convince as the much loved Morecambe and Wise, but there were times when they most assuredly were Eric and Ernie. Bonnar in particular taps into the drive that was required for a performer who was so 'on' all of the time; and the demands that kind of behaviour made on those around him, as well as the reasons why he was so determined (he intrinsically knew, following his first heart attack with which the film opens on, that he was living on borrowed time and needed to make his mark) are not pussyfooted around in this biopic as Tompkinson's Braben goes from being an outgoing genial family guy to an utter shell of a man as the constant shuttling from Liverpool to London, the endless rewrites, and the necessity for perfection expected from him by the BBC and the boys take their toll.
It's a shame though that some roles are less well cast. I used to quite like Alex Macqueen (pictured above on the left) from his days in The Thick of It, but it became apparent long ago that he approaches each role he takes in the same manner and with the same plummy accent and over enunciated delivery. He cannot play anything other than Alex Macqueen (seriously, if you haven't seen him trying to play it straight as a dubious MP in the third season of Peaky Blinders then drop everything and do so now, he stinks the place out trying to act tough yet perform in exactly the same manner) and that's fine, plenty of actors just play versions of themselves, but when you're hired to play someone who once walked this earth and did so in recent memory, it really won't do. To see him playing Bill Cotton here, exactly like every other role he takes, is laughable to anyone who actually recalls the real Bill Cotton. When you have actors really trying to recreate something of these figures, not just Eric, Ernie and Eddie Braben, but also some fleeting imitations of Vanessa Redgrave, Glenda Jackson and Andre Previn, it really does let the side down.
At just an hour, Eric, Ernie and Me doesn't outstay its welcome and gives you a flavour of the men who made Christmas throughout the '70s; finally allowing Braben's contribution the fitting tribute that both he and it deserves. It serves as a fitting companion piece to Victoria Wood's earlier biopic Eric and Ernie which looked at the double act's formative years.
"Stop being such a mardarse"
The fact that this is almost literally the first thing said in England Is Mine tells you that it is indeed a biopic of the early years of one Steven Patrick Morrissey. It's up to you whether you regard him as an infuriating miserabilist or genius. Or perhaps both.
I approached England Is Mine with some trepidation - not because it's 'unauthorised' (would we ever expect Morrissey to give his blessing?) but because it's had some pretty terrible reviews. To which I must say, where they watching the same film as me?
I think where people have gone wrong is in expecting the film to be an out and out Morrissey biopic - and, to that end, a biopic of The Smiths; the amount of whispers I heard in the frankly deserted screening I attended that were along the lines of 'this is just gonna be about his life before The Smiths isn't it? - rather than a touching and heartfelt coming of age drama about life as a 'back bedroom casualty'. When watched in that context, it's obscene to think that England Is Mine has received so little praise, because I genuinely think it handles the concepts of loneliness, isolation and of struggling with mental health issues with an empathetic and deft touch.
Much of this success comes from not only the strong characterisation found within the script written by director Mark Gill with co-writer William Thacker, but in a superlative central performance from Jack Lowden as the lad himself. Both the performance and the writing acknowledge that what we're actually witnessing here is a chrysalis moment: a series of transitional states that turns Steven Patrick Morrissey into Morrissey, arguably the most important frontman figure in British music in the last thirty years. The initial stages of the film are devoted to Morrissey as the gauche, square peg in a round hole. An ill at ease, awkward in his own body youth (two jeering teenage girls refer to him as 'Lurch' when he refuses to engage in their chat), this is someone who cannot accept his own self, let alone his place in the world. He has the innate sense that he is different, that he wants different things, but he hasn't the ability or confidence to bring this about for himself. It's only when, aided by the encouragement from his art student friend Linder (Jessica Brown Findlay) and appalled by the notion that he's spend his days as a wage slave at the local Inland Revenue office, he finally finds the courage to use music as his outlet. This happiness is short-lived however when he realises the chance of stardom is not open to him, and the next persona of Morrissey we see is one he has no say in choosing for himself; Morrissey the youth in the midst of a breakdown. Finally, on coming out of his depression thanks to some sound advice from his doting mother (Simone Kirby) he starts the journey of becoming the Morrissey that we all know now (or at least think we know) and that fateful encounter with one Johnny Marr (Laurie Kynaston).
Built around this great central performance are some really solidly written, identifiable and well played supporting characters - three of which are enjoyable female. Katherine Pearce's Anjie Hardie (she who utter the immortal 'mardarse' comment at the top of this review) is wonderfully reminiscent of every socially shy, reticent boy's put-upon, long suffering and sarcastic girlfriend (and I know I had one myself). She's immensely protective of Morrissey - her radar for rough boys looking for kicks ensures he doesn't 'get twatted' on the way home from a club - and shares his morbid fascinations (picking up a book about The Moors Murders in Morrissey's bedroom she wonder aloud if he ever thinks that the fate that befell those poor children could have just as easily happened to them; an accurate reminder of just how much of a shadow was cast from those heinous acts over children of the northwest in the '60s and '70s - indeed, I once heard someone in a pub perhaps rightly claim that Manchester never had the swinging sixties because of Hindley and Brady) as well as his belief that he is something special, but she's frustrated by his inability to be proactive: "The world isn't gonna come to you" she complains after another example of her social wet nursing and hand holding falls flat because of his suffocating shyness.
More successful in terms of coaxing Morrissey out his shell is Linder Sterling who enters the story just when he needs her the most. The photomontage artist is portrayed by Jessica Brown Findlay, casting that I was initially wary of, not because I dislike Brown Findlay - I don't, I really like her - but because I feared she was too known from previous high profile performances for the role. Now I see that this wasn't a baggage but a blessing: It's only right that Linder has some star appeal as it not only helps to point out right from the off that this is someone destined to go places, but also imbues the role with the necessary quality to convince both as Morrissey's verbal sparring partner and a prime mover on the Manchester punk scene.
Lastly, there's Jodie Comer as Christine, one of Morrissey's co-workers at the Inland Revenue (an accurate depiction of the drudgery of the civil service, that is blessed by a wonderfully comic caricature of a small-minded and ineffectual manager played by Graeme Hawley). Vacuous and attractive, Christine is a character that both repels and (to an extent) appeals to Morrissey. He's awkward from her attentions and despairing of her banal tastes and, by keeping her at arm's length, he will ultimately suffer at her hands, but her character is just as important as Linder or Anjie's - she's the archetypal 'heroine' of some of the many cutting and critical lyrics in the songs that Morrissey would go on to pen.
So many of the reviews for the film raise the fact that none of these songs put in an appearance as evidence that England Is Mine is a disappointment. But again, did they really expect to hear tracks by The Smiths in a story concerning the period before The Smiths? For me personally, I think England Is Mine tells the story it wants to tell in the best possible way it can and, barring a few scenes of Morrissey watching his beloved kitchen sink dramas or Coronation Street or rubbing shoulders with other budding Mancunian musicians who went on to become Joy Division etc, I really can't see how the film could be improved upon. It's a deeply evocative and atmospheric piece, more reminiscent (to me at least, at times) of Terence Davies trilogy than of Corbijn's Control. Slow, and low key yes, this is an origins story if you like.
A final aside; the screening I went to (just over a fortnight ago now) at Liverpool FACT's Picturehouse had just ten people in it including myself. Two of these were an elderly couple whose presence rather surprised me. They spent much of the film whispering, laughing and then finally - the man at least - snoring. I'm not sure whether Morrissey would disapprove or approve of that.
It's central construct of playing witness to your own past might be as creaky as the boards the middle-aged Barbara Windsor is treading, and the script has a fair few clunkers, but Babs is mostly saved by some peerless performances that make this a amiable way to pass ninety minutes, but some way off the kind of satisfying success ITV biopics like Jeff Pope's Cilla enjoyed.
Samantha Spiro is effortless as the middle-aged, seemingly washed up Windsor, as you would expect from someone who jokingly admits to having played Windsor for half her life now (she had previously played her at the National in 1998's Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick, reprising the role for the TV adaptation, Cor Blimey, in 2000) but it's Jaime Winstone who really shines here with the role of the young Babs, capturing her sexy look, her defiant pluck and that infamous wiggle and giggle that made her both a national treasure and the wet dream fantasy for many of schoolboy in the 1960s. Neither actress goes for an impersonation, as that wouldn't be enough to sustain a biopic alone, but they capture an essence of the person remarkably well.
They're both nicely supported (ooh-err!) by Nick Moran as Windsor's father, the man whose love she was constantly searching for throughout her life, an unfortunately all too underused Leanne Best as her mother (why give her so little to work with? Best is a brilliant performer who lifts anything she appears in), Luke Allen-Gale as bad boy Ronnie Knight, and the inspired casting of Zoe Wanamaker as Joan Littlewood and a wonderful spot of mimicry from Robin Sebastian as Kenneth Williams. Only Alex MacQueen as Windsor's agent jarred; I know he has his screen persona of the prissy, over-enunciating dullard of dubious sexual orientation, and I have liked him in many other things, but it's the only thing he does in each role he takes and it just doesn't sit well when he's required to act outside of comedy or as something or someone else - look at his ineffectual turn as a political villain in series three of Peaky Blinders, and it's the same here.
When the film actually settles down to focus on Barbara's big break with Littlewood's legendary Theatre Workshop, Babs comes alive, but Tony Jordan's script feels compelled to throw in too many in-jokes (the Dame reference, the Carry On style score) and flat footed references ('you've an offer for a film...the producer is Gerald Thomas' *clunk*) that consistently hold the film back and shy away from the answers it's naturally searching for as the film refuses to pinpoint why it feels Windsor's potential was ultimately as squandered as it was, leading her to throw her lot in with the Carry On team. I also really felt like the whole thing was hampered by the little meta-touch of crowbarring the real Windsor into the film; I'm not so cold-hearted to begrudge her her song at the end (performed to an audience made up of the cast and crew, which was a lovely touch) but the other two instances in the middle of the film just feel wrong and out of place, threatening to sink the whole affair. On this occasion, less would have been more.
With its '60s period detail, its associated jukebox soundtrack and its great romance, ITV are clearly hoping for another hit like Cilla or Mrs Briggs with Tina and Bobby, the story of the great love between England's World Cup winning skipper Bobby Moore and his wife, Tina. However, they've neglected to include the one key ingredient that made those two previous productions so acclaimed; Sheridan Smith.
As Tina, Michelle Keegan is no Sheridan Smith. She served her time on the cobbles of Coronation Street, where I believe she was extremely popular, but since then she has muddled her way through a high profile starring role in BBC's Our Girl (where she appeared to give a performance akin to a Suranne Jones tribute act in mumblecore mode) and now this, with a London accent that goes all over the place.
As Bobby, Lorne MacFadyen fares much better and he keeps his own native (Scottish) accent in check, but he's hampered by the fact that Bobby's just a starry sideshow in former EastEnders scriptwriter Lauren Klee's hands. Because this is Tina's story, the ambitions of the production lie squarely on her shoulders as portrayed by Keegan, and they're just to slender to carry it, whilst Klee's corny, soapy dialogue further scuppered any admirable intentions.
It also didn't help that the production is so obviously cheap too. Mixing black and white footage of the action on the pitch with the reactions of the cast in the stands was a bad idea, but far worse was to come when Tina and Bobby jetted off to Spain for their honeymoon - including a risible studio shoot against a blue sky backdrop that reminded me of '80s sitcom Duty Free.
Ultimately, Tina and Bobby may be about one of our fondly remembered golden couples, but in depicting their love it has all the emotional depth and resonance of a soppy photo story from a '60s teenager's magazine. I'll give part two a try but right now the feeling is 'they think it's all over...'
We often bemoan the loss of culture in a society that makes stars and so-called national treasures out of reality TV performers, but the fact is this is nothing new. Britain has always loved an oddball who, following some unlikely attention grabbing moment, enjoys their fifteen minutes of fame. Get your stupendous tits out during a rugby union match between England v Australia at Twickenham? Enjoy the spotlight, Erica Roe - she even has a real ale named after her! Deputy leader of Liverpool's Militant Labour City Council accused of corruption? Yup, take the spotlight Derek Hatton, in fact - here's a menswear modelling contract and a TV ad for Sekonda too. And then there was Michael Edwards, aka Eddie the Eagle.
Now granted, Edwards did a little bit more than streak topless across a rugby pitch or come to the attention of the criminal justice system and be condemned evermore in the political world to achieve his popular fame. With a lifelong determination to become an Olympian, Edwards put the work in to become a downhill skier but a lack of funding and a failure to qualify for the '84 games led to him performing a spectacular about-face; exploiting a technical loophole, he went on to become Britain's sole ski-jumper, qualifying for the '88 Winter Olympics in Calgary. He was the epitome of an amateur, mediocre at his chosen sport but with an unshakeable belief in the old adage that it is the taking part that counts. Britain, loving an underdog as much as an oddball, was happy to shine the spotlight once more, to celebrate and to take the eccentric Edwards to their hearts. Following the games, he became a bizarre British populist hero - not just in the UK, but in much of Europe too - with many appearances on TV, advertising campaigns, and even attempts at a singing career. It was the kind of story you simply couldn't make up - and when you come across one of those, the first thing you should do is dramatise it.
This film has been in development hell for almost ten years before its release this year. Originally slated to star Steve Coogan and directed by Declan Lowney, by 2009 Lowney claimed it would actually be Harry Potter star Rupert Grint who would step into Eddie's skis rather than Coogan. However that too fell through and the film seemed no more, until producer Matthew Vaughn and director Dexter Fletcher arrived with Vaughn's Kingsman star Taron Egerton happy to take the lead. The subsequent movie lands upon the celebratory tone that so enraptured Edwards in his heyday but greatly embellishes and mythologises the man's life and experiences at Calgary, tipping its hat to the tropes of so many inspirational sports biopics that it almost feels like an affectionate spoof of the genre itself at times.
So, what is the fiction? Well for a start, whilst Edwards was indeed a no-hoper in the field of the ski jump - being heavier than his fellow competitors, farsighted to Mr Magoo standards, and totally self-funded - he was a proficient downhill skier who had relocated to Lake Placid, New York post-'84 to improve his chances of qualifying for the downhill team next time around. It was there however that, on seizing upon the loophole, he began to train for the jump under the tutelage of John Viscome and Chuck Berghorn - neither of whom feature in this film. Instead, the film's writing team of Sean Macaulay and Simon Kelton mine the previously successful underdog sports drama Cool Runnings - which concerned the Jamaican bobsled team of the same winter games - to create a drunken fallen hero of the sport who gains redemption by mentoring our keen amateur. Played by Hugh Jackman, this character's journey of winning back the approval of his former coach (played, even more bizarrely, by Christopher Walken) actually threatens to upstage Eddie's ultimate triumph in a manner that really should have been reconsidered at the draft stage.
But what of Eddie himself? Well I have little experience with Egerton but found him to be the perfect choice to play Edwards, walking a tightrope that provides an accurate impersonation of the heavily bespectacled gurner without detracting from the drama and heartfelt characterisation that is required from such a biopic. The script requires him to centre his performance on the aforesaid celebratory tone of loving the underdog, but personally I always found Edwards a curious mixture of a joke and a bit of a bighead. This latter less attractive trait underlines Edwards' speech in the film during the press conference in which he announces his intention to tackle the 90m jump; "I love jumping," he announces, "almost as much as I love proving people wrong" The film doesn't explore it, but it's easy to see that Edwards, having got a bite of the cherry, wanted the whole buffet for himself too.
Fletcher's film adheres to the genre of the feelgood, against all odds movie beautifully and, with its training montages and its synth heavy soundtrack (featuring both songs from the '80s as well as the tax dodging dullard Gary Barlow bringing together a plethora of pop stars from the period to produce new material), it actually feels like a biopic that could have been made at the very time the film is set. It's an interesting achievement and once again marks the actor-turned-director Fletcher down as an intriguing filmmaker to watch. Eddie the Eagle is a better film that his last - the Proclaimers jukebox musical, Sunshine on Leith - but it is still some significant way behind his enjoyable and skillful debut, Wild Bill. This old Press Gang fan however was very happy to see Fletcher had cast his former co-star from that kids show, Paul Reynolds, in the small role of a journalist with The Scum newspaper.
Heartwarming and with great period detail, but surprisingly light on laughs, Eddie the Eagle probably achieves what it sets out to do, though what it sets out to do is all too familiar (Cool Runnings is essentially this movie) I didn't feel the love or indeed the hate that others feel about it. It just felt OK to me, and I wonder if it would impress me more if I had no history or knowledge of Edwards prior to it. In short, I think this is the kind of film that would be better received in territories that don't really know Edwards the clown who Britain made a strange, quasi-national treasure in his heyday, or by a generation who came long after the 1980s. Though that said, the film has got me thinking about the idea I had once about that fat British guy who wanted to be a sumo wrestler back in the 80s or 90s...I still think there's a film in that. I wonder if my fellow St Helener Johnny Vegas would be interested?
In September 2004, CBS’s 60 Minutes, anchored by respected veteran anchor Dan Rather, led with a story that cast doubt on the then president George W Bush's service as a Texas Air National Guard pilot from 1968 to 1974.
In the aftermath of the story breaking, the authenticity of the key documents that shaped CBS's story was called into question, along with the conduct of the reporting team led by producer Mary Mapes who were forced to cut corners to reach deadlines enforced on them by the channel itself. Critics were quick to argue that the team had been duped, that the documents were fake and that poor and biased journalism had sought to tarnish an incumbent president seeking reelection. Pretty soon, the story was no longer about whether Bush shied away from active service and was protected by his superiors thanks to political pressure, it was about the documents and the doubt thrown upon them, and then eventually the CBS news team itself became the news. With pressure from above and arguably from the White House itself, 60 Minutes was subsequently forced to retract and apologise for the story they broke and Dan Rather's twenty+ years with CBS came to an acrimonious close, whilst Mapes - who received a torrent of vitriolic online abuse and unbearable scrutiny - never worked in TV news again.
Truth, the directorial debut from James Vanderbilt(the screenwriter of David Fincher's acclaimed Zodiac), is based on Mapes’s own memoir, as such it's only right that the film comes firmly down on Mapes's side - something which some critics and audiences don't seem to appreciate. Like the actual event it depicts, Truth has had some unfair and unjust scorn and derision poured upon it and I cannot see why. Sure, its script is a little hokey and it tries a little too hard to be inspiring in a year when Spotlight rightly walked away with an accurate and rewarding experience of crusading journalism at its best. Truth was perhaps always going to play second fiddle (and arguably even third fiddle when you consider how Aaron Sorkin's second season of The Newsroom detailed a fictional duping perpetrated against the news team) but the brickbats it has received does make me wonder if the nature of the story CBS sought to break is still the key here. Or maybe people just didn't want to see a film in which the heroes lose and the ultimate findings are, in the general consensus, begrudgingly considered inconclusive at best, or scurrilously false at worst.
Cate Blanchett is her usual reliable and impressive self as Mapes, a celebrated journalist juggling the demands of the job in this new demanding media world which sees stories being fitted around Billy Graham and Dr Phil specials, her troubled and abused childhood and her own family life, whilst Robert Redford provides a stately, dignified presence as Rather. It's just a shame that the rest of the team, including Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace and Elizabeth Moss (the silly scientologist clearly not taking the message from the film to 'ask questions'), are given scarcely fleshed out or developed characters to perform.
I grew up reading Agatha Christie novels and was a big fan well into my mid teens. I also enjoyed the adaptations of her novels, so I was always a little disappointed that this biopic based on the intriguing, mysterious brief disappearance of the author in 1926, proved just as elusive to me during my days of fandom as Christie herself was for those 11 days AWOL. It was just never on TV, so I never got around to watching Agatha until now.
It wasn't worth the wait alas. Maybe I'd have appreciated more when I was an avid Christie reader (I must admit its been some twenty years since I last picked up a novel of hers) but where I've seen other reviews call this movie respectful and reserved, I felt it deserved another description; anemic.
It's so disappointing how this movie squanders what remains to this day a fascinating puzzle. We can accept that, faced with her husband's desire for a divorce, Christie fled from the world, adopted the alias of Teresa Neele (the surname of her husband's lover) and booked into a hydropathic hotel in Harrogate. It might not be our own first course of action, granted but it is perhaps an understandable one. When she resurfaced, her actions remained shrouded in mystery, with two doctors diagnosing a Fugue state of amnesia and no mention of the events in her autobiography. But what did she actually do in those 11 days? What was she thinking? What was truly her state of mind?
Kathleen Tynan's novel - on which this film is based, the author co-writing the screenplay with Arthur Hopcroft, the man responsible for the BBC's adaptation of John Le Carre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - proposes that Christie was not necessarily running away, but was in fact carefully and coldly plotting something. In itself this is an interesting theory, but the film ultimately cannot concentrate on its own supposition and distracts itself by an ill advised romance/connection it saddles itself with between Vanessa Redgrave's Christie and Dustin Hoffman's wholly fictitious visiting American journalist Wally Stanton, hot on her trail.
It's a stilted ponderous production that really could have benefited from a much more droll, knowing and wicked approach concerning the author and how her homicidal, violent imagination seems to be impinging upon her reality, but all life is utterly squeezed out of the film despite a relatively fine performances from Redgrave, who depicts Christie as a subdued, bruised eccentric, and an OK one from Hoffman as a stiffbacked, confident motormouth, even if he does seem a little out of place in an English period drama.
The puzzling location shoot - merging Harrogate in Yorkshire (where Christie turned up) with Bath in Somerset - doesn't help matter either.
When the BBC announced that they were axeing BBC4's original drama budget in 2013, we all presumed that that year's Burton and Taylor would be the last bijou biopic of the tumultuous lives of our homegrown stars.
However, with the arrival of this BBC iPlayer original drama - the first of its kind; a straight to the digital service free-to-download production - focusing on the glory days of snooker in the 1970s and 1980s, there may be a revival yet.
The Rack Pack, a comedy drama about the fierce rivalry between chalk and cheese snooker players Alex 'The Hurricane' Higgins and Steve Davis, is also possibly the first really good film about the sport - just beating that old cheap and cheerful Bob Geldof favourite Number One.
Luke Treadaway stars as Higgins, the hard drinking, chain smoking, trick shot taking Northern Irish braggart whose cavalier playing style revolutionised the game in the 1970s, dragging it out of the smoky back rooms of working men's clubs and a few idle spectators into the living rooms, hearts and minds of the general public, at its peak over 18 million to be precise. But just as Higgins so successfully rode the wave of one revolution, he badly underestimated or simply failed to see the wave that roared up in the '80s and has kept on to this very day - that of wheeler dealer promoter and manager Barry Hearn's businessification of the sport. The key proponent of that change was a young player from Romford called Steve Davis.
Played uncannily by Will Merrick, Davis was everything that Alex Higgins wasn't; a gawky nerd, he preferred milk to alcohol and his personality was (initially at least) so non existent that the shrewd Hearn (played by comedian Kevin Bishop) chose to capitalise on what anyone else would call a flaw, proclaiming his boy to be 'The Robot' of the game, whose impenetrable, stony faced aura quickly got under the skin of his fellow players, chief amongst them Higgins, of course.
Naturally it is Treadaway as Higgins who has the showier, more dramatic role. The Alex Higgins story is the story of a man whose talent was quickly submerged by his excesses, his wild temper and the inner demons that chipped away at him until eventually he had nothing left, not his game nor his wife played her by Nichola Burley. The problem with such a story of course is that it is one that is now very well known thanks to numerous documentaries and biographies on the man himself, as well as being a tale as old as time. Virtually every rock star and sport biopic (and virtually all of the BBC4 ones prior to this) follows this very same familiar path which means viewers are left with something akin to compassion fatigue towards Treadaway's fine performance of The Hurricane's downfall. No matter how great Treadaway is in the role - and he really is great, and this is despite having to adopt the Northern Irish accent and having to work extra hard to convince as a man he doesn't physically resemble - it's ultimately hard to get that involved in this well-worn, poignant scenario. It wasn't the only aspect of The Rack Pack that was familiar either; the heavy jukebox saturation of the film became quite irritating long before the first half was even up. I love my music, but did we really need the hits of ELO, Cream, Ian Dury and The Blockheads etc playing over every other scene?
The film is on much safer, more enjoyable ground with its lighter aspects which are delivered brilliantly by the almost Del Boy and Rodney like pairing of Merrick's Davis and Bishop's Hearn. It's also smart funny too and nicely avoids the usual knowing gags at the expense of the era it is set in. The script by Shaun Pye, Mark Chappell and Alan Connor plays for keeps and in the hands of these performers it's onto a winner, just as Hearn's Match Room was at the time, second guessing the corporate potential of snooker with its tie-in's to everything from aftershave and coffee to pop music and TV chat shows. Cast as the go-between from Higgins' world to that of Davis and the players of today is James Bailey as the young Jimmy White. As 'The Whirlwind', White was Higgins' protege but he rode the waves and managed the transition better than his mentor could. He's still hanging on in there now, playing alongside the younger 'stars' with their pasty expressions, prematurely balding hairlines and paunchy frames. But unfortunately, the game is nowhere near as lively as it was in Higgins and Davis' heyday.
"Remember this," a washed up Higgins says in the final scene, a teary eyed final confrontation between him and the smart and assured Davis "When I die I'll get the romantic obituaries, you can keep your fucking money"
When The Hurricane died in 2010, he was proved right. He got them in droves.
The Rack Pack is available to view on iPlayer.
