Elephant Juice (1999)

Elephant Juice is a 1999 movie from the creator and one of the directors of the seminal BBC series (and a big favourite of mine) This Life. The divine Daniela Nardini, who made her name in that show as Anna, the post feminist icon, appears here too as part of the Generation X ensemble in a story that sits comfortably somewhere between This Life and Cold Feet.

I'm classing this as a first watch even though I feel almost certain that I've seen it (or at the very least some of it) before. It seems fitting somehow, as Elephant Juice itself seems very much like a half forgotten film. The DVD (which I picked up cheap, arguably for Nardini) is one of those early '00s affairs, when 'special features' basically meant you were given the added opportunity of scrolling through pages of long text which outlined cast and crew filmographies and production notes. In the latter notes, the director Sam Miller uses the phrase 'pre-millennial zeitgeist' when describing the film and I guess your opinion of the film ultimately depends on whether such a phrase endears you or sends you running to the hills. Make no mistake, Elephant Juice details the troubled lives of a group of relatively privileged London based Gen X yuppies in the latter stages of the twentieth century. It is writer Amy Jenkins' belief that when we approach thirty we enter a second stage of the traditional coming-of-age phase which is supposed to set us up for the rest of our adult lives. With this in mind, our characters are aware that time is moving on and that they either a) should be in a relationship with 'the one' or b) should be making the relationship they are in fit, despite all the warning signs that it is perhaps not going to. Jenkins will argue that this is a common theme that will speak universally to an audience, so why doesn't Elephant Juice work?

Well apart from the fact that it's a romantic comedy drama that seems utterly devoid of laughs, I think the main issue here is that the characters, whose predicaments we are supposed to universally relate too, just aren't all that likeable. Sean Gallagher's emotionally inexperienced Billy is our point of identification, but he's just too wet both in terms of writing and in performance to truly endear us to him. His best friend Will (Daniel Lapaine) is a familiar cretin; attractive to women, arrogant and completely ruled by his genitals. His friendship with Billy is built on the fact that as long as Billy is emotionally undeveloped, then he too can get away with being an immature love rat. Will is in a relationship with long suffering Jules (Emmanuelle Béart, in her first English film) who Billy secretly holds a candle for, but Will is also sleeping with anything that comes into his orbit, including Billy's new girlfriend Dodie (Kimberley Williams) and Daphne, Daniela Nardini's character; a troubled soul not unlike This Life's Anna, who is just starting a relationship with the level headed, sensitive Frank (Mark Strong) Rounding out the ensemble are gay couple Graham and George (Lennie James and Lee Williams); Graham is older, more experienced with the scene and keen to settle down, whereas George is an androgynous young model who is still experiencing life. Of the whole bunch, it's these latter characters (Daphne, Frank, Graham and George) who are situated on the periphery, who are the most interesting and the fact that the film doesn't focus as much on them makes it a bit of a chore.

The film is structured in quite a free form way, with a dinner party providing some ballast and scenes in which the respective dramatic arcs are shaped by a series of preceding inter-titles that take their cue from the kind of question/chapter headings you would find in popular self help books of the time. As a time capsule depicting the dilemmas of relationships for twentysomethings in late twentieth century Britain, Elephant Juice is perhaps handy enough. But ultimately, and perhaps because of Jenkins and Miller's roots, it feels less like a film and more like a one-off TV drama, and overall there's a whiff of unnatural pretentiousness to the proceedings that makes it hard to connect fully despite some good performances, chiefly from Béart (who subtly draws on her émigré status to build on her character's isolation and misplaced loyalty to Will) and the reliable Nardini, Strong and James in support.

Grimsby (2016)

Firstly, it's called Grimsby. I refuse to call it by its lame American title, The Brothers Grimsby, which doesn't even make any sense - Grimsby isn't their surname, it's where they're from!

Anyway, on to the film...

Grimsby is Shameless meets James Bond. A ribald, gross-out and utterly silly cartoonish comedy from that king of offensive puerile humour, Sacha Baron Cohen. If you like the man, then the chances are you'll enjoy the film. If you don't then it really won't be your cup of tea.

Like The Dictator, Grimsby is a purely fictional tale. I think I prefer it when Baron Cohen uses a narrative rather than playing 'candid camera' on the general public in the guise of one of his characters. Though, I'm aware I'm in a minority here, as more people rave about films like Borat and Bruno than they do The Dictator.

Baron Cohen stars as Nobby, a knuckleheaded, feckless football fan with a Gallagher-esque haircut who hails from Grimsby and has not seen his kid brother for twenty-eight years, when he was adopted by a family from London. His brother Sebastian thrived away from Grimsby and was recruited by MI6 to become a sleek assassin and one of their top Bond-esque agents. He's played by Mark Strong, who gamely approaches the role completely straight. When Nobby gets wind of where to find his brother, he gatecrashes a charity gala and inadvertently gets his brother framed as an enemy agent in the eyes of his paymasters at MI6. Together, they go on the run across the globe and attempt to foil a sinister eugenicist plot that I imagine Iain Duncan Smith would greatly admire -  eradicating the working classes of the world to solve the population problem.

The film boasts an impressive cast of supporting players but sadly wastes a good deal of them. Indeed, blink and you'll miss turns from David Harewood, Rebecca Front, Alex Lowe and Miles Jupp, all of whom I expect ended up on the cutting room floor. But there's Ian McShane and Isla Fisher at MI6, Penélope Cruz as an A-list actress with an interest in global health care and, representing Grimsby, we have the likes of Johnny Vegas, John Thomson, Ricky Tomlinson and, best of all, Rebel Wilson in another scene stealing role as Nobby's girlfriend that brings plenty of laughs yet once again requires her to do little more than laugh at her own appearance. 

As funny as she is, just once I'd like to see her appear in a film in which her figure is not the central joke. Unfortunately it's something I doubt we'll see until/unless she writes her own material and has the confidence not to go for the obvious. Some surprise appearances from Captain Phillips actor Barkhad Abdi and Precious star Gabourey Sidibe also lift the film.

Whilst some of the film's biggest gag setpieces don't fly as well as one imagines Baron Cohen et al expected, you have to marvel at their commitment to utter gross-out spectacle. Better for me personally was some of the one liners and smaller setpieces - such as Nobby's ill timed cheer at hearing the England football result at the charity function just as a wheelchairbound boy reveals he has AIDS - and the unexpected political bite found in Baron Cohen's affectionate support for his characters.

Whilst not a huge success - the direction only seems assured of itself with the big comic setpieces and the computer game shoot 'em up style action, losing some of the appreciation necessary for the smaller, but no less vital character comedy moments - Grimsby is nevertheless short and colourful enough to impress. It's certainly got more oomph and more belly laughs than Dad's Army. And any film that gives Donald Trump AIDS, is alright by me!

Blood (2012)

If you haven't seen Conviction, the excellent 2004 BBC3 drama series by Bill Gallagher than chances are you'll love Blood, the big screen adaptation from the same writer which BBC2 broadcast last night.

But if you have seen the original, this remake from director Nick Murphy is largely surplus to requirements. It's a stylish and gritty enough affair and it benefits from a tight focus condensing six hours into just 90 minutes but it's got several flaws that ensure it cannot achieve the same heights of the original drama series.

Conviction starred William Ash, Ian Puleston-Davies, Reece Dinsdale, Laura Fraser and Nicholas Gleaves as five detectives investigating the gruesome murder of a teenage girl in or around Manchester. Their main suspect is a local man with a history of sexual offences played by Jason Watkins but frustratingly the evidence they need to prove he did it remains elusive. After a drunken party, the Ash and Puleston-Davies characters kidnap their prime suspect and take him to the woods with the intention of gleaning a confession through scare tactics and interrogation, but Puleston-Davies goes too far and kills him. From there the two detectives have to cover their tracks and, when new evidence comes to light, they find they must face up to the sobering and shocking realisation that the man they killed was actually innocent all along and that the real killer remains at large. 

Blood follows this same plot but reduces the central characters in the squad from five to three, dropping Laura Fraser's character altogether, and excises several subplots. Stephen Graham takes on the William Ash role, whilst Paul Bettany plays an amalgamation of the roles previously taken by Ian Puleston-Davies and Nicholas Gleaves - who was Ash's older brother in the series. The film keeps the sibling structure at its heart but unfortunately I didn't buy for one moment that Bettany and Graham were brothers. The believability of the characters and the central conceit in Conviction was that Ash was an impressionable young detective standing in the shadows of both his older brother and his now retired and senile father (David Warner in the series, Brian Cox here) and falling under the spell of the bombastic, older Puleston-Davies. Bettany doesn't have the same force of nature style that Puleston-Davies brought to the character and its hard to see the assured Graham being easily led by him, older sibling or not, or indeed anyone. In fact its actually a shame they didn't cast Graham as the more quick tempered, manipulative character really. The cast assembled by director Nick Murphy is a strong one, but they're not firing on all cylinders. I'd argue Bettany is actually the weakest of the four so its a shame much of the film rests on his shoulders, meanwhile Mark Strong, normally always an effective presence on screen, is largely wasted as the quirky, quiet loner of the team played so memorably by Dinsdale in the original series.

As you've probably guessed from reading this by now, I am a fan of Conviction which told its story in a very satisfactory manner because it placed its characters at the heart of the story and allowed you time to explore them and understand them. Blood is an average, enjoyable film that benefits greatly from atmospheric direction and the use of the still, austere Wirral locations (though its refusal to specify its whereabouts on film, with Cox and Graham adopting cockney style accents to fit in with the predominantly southern English actors cast here is a bit disappointing) but it's only real plus  - that it tells the story of Conviction in a quicker and more efficient manner - is ultimately also the thing that scuppers it. If I want to watch Conviction but haven't 6 hours to spare, then Blood would come in handy but as it is, I'd recommend the original over this.

Welcome to the Punch (2013)

I'm a big fan of Eran Creevy's debut movie Shifty. Following the success of that film, Welcome To The Punch is the naturally bigger budget more mainstream follow up.

Could it be as good as Shifty? A great follow up movie from a promising director in much the same way that Clio Barnard's The Selfish Giant (reviewed this week) was as good as The Arbor, her debut film?

Well, no. No it's not.

Creevy takes the tropes of an American or Chinese action thriller - all neon at night, slo mo shoot outs and unspoken stand offs/bonding - and transplants them to a London that feels like it's supposed to be five minutes into the future (though I'm not entirely sure if that's the script's intention) I'm not normally the sort of person who dismisses an action film as being unrealistic simply because the thrills depicted are set in my home country, because I find that a flawed argument; America do these implausible police action adventures and no one ever bats an eyelid, in fact they're highly praised. But that said, there's something that doesn't ring true throughout this film and I'm not entirely sure I can put my finger on it. It's just a bit shallow. It looks fantastic, but it's all style and little substance and that's despite the intriguing and quite political motivation that causes the carnage.

Creevy assembles a brilliant cast. McAvoy and Strong are really great leads and it's fun to watch them circle one another in the twists and turns of the cat and mouse narrative, though I think Strong's strong silent style has him winning on points. I've heard some criticism about McAvoy in this and to be honest I didn't find him much an issue personally, though perhaps to accurately reflect/mirror and bounce off Strong, they could have done with casting someone of a similar age to him, like Pacino and De Niro in Heat for example.

There's also Peter Mullan, Daniel Mays (from Creevy's Shifty) David Morrissey and the chilling Johnny Harris. Oh and blink and you'll miss Jason Flemyng (also of Shifty) an actor whose career now seems to consist of doing small cameos as favours!

Unfortunately, Creevy really lets down the equally accomplished female actors in the production. I counted - I think - four; an actress playing Mullan's wife who appears for all of 10 seconds, the brilliant Ruth Sheen who plays Harris' nan (bit of an age quibble there, as no way is Sheen old enough to be Harris' grandparent!) This Life's Natasha Little as an MP's spin doctor and Andrea Riseborough as McAvoy's junior partner. All are wasted in underwritten supporting roles that fall into the chauvinistic trap these kind of movies constantly perpetuate - all women are helpless victims whose pain is only shown to inflict further pain on the male protagonists (like their pain, fate and emotional development are the only ones that matters) or just bitches on the make. It really sucks, especially to see the talent of a young and vibrant performer like Riseborough going to waste. 

Welcome to the Punch is a fun beer and pizza watch in that its enjoyable and diverting enough but its a somewhat disappointing follow up for Creevy.

Playhouse Presents : Third Series Review

Playhouse Presents is a series of self contained TV plays made and broadcast on Sky Arts. Each episode is written by a different writers and stars a different cast. I love them because, at the present time, this is the only opportunity to see the stand alone play on TV. There have been some really great offerings since the first series commenced in 2012, with two plays going to a full series; A Young Doctor's Notebook and Nixon's The One. A third series concluded this week and this is a review of each play that featured in this third run.

The Dog Thrower is a short offering from Jon Ronson, the opener to the third series of Sky Arts excellent diverse and quirky series Playhouse Presents. A virtually dialogue free half hour scored by Belle and Sebastian, it concerns 'The Charismatic Man' (Friends star Matthew Perry) throwing his dog in the local park and finding an acolyte in Tim Key. Their unusual canine practices find favour at first, with the lovely Kimberley Nixon making at eyes at Tim Key, but when a reporter doctors a photograph of one of the dogs in flight, society soon turns against them.

There's actually something of a modern parable behind this seemingly slight and rather twee set up. Ronson explores the immediacy of changes in opinion and reaction thanks to message boards and social media and how people can become vilified by society for their practices.

The thoughtful message may be subtle but it is there, amidst some gentle laughs and some wonderfully cute dogs.

It's another great start to Playhouse Presents.

Nosferatu In Love is a wonderful little short which gives us an all too rare display of Mark Strong's comedic acting as an errant actor (a version of himself) who, following news that his wife wants a divorce, goes AWOL from the shoot of a remake of Nosferatu and finds himself, on a night out, getting mixed up with ne'er do wells. Beautifully shot in monochrome, with a great sense of the strange and alien - in this case the actor adrift and heartbroken in the Eastern Europe locale - and a cracking soundtrack.

The Cruise is the third offering in the current run of Playhouse Presents and is, on the surface, a much less quirkier and more traditional storytelling affair than its two predecessors, yet the kinetic visual style of writer/director Stewart Suggs nonetheless keeps this rather more grounded tale off the wall. Employing fast cutting techniques, an overall sense of urgency and, in some cases, panic and tension and a broad bright primary colour canvas makes this a distinctive juxtaposition for what is at heart an almost Victoria Wood style comic vignette.

Jane Horrocks and Jason Watkins  star as Jackie and Andy, a married couple approaching their silver wedding anniversary, which they intend to celebrate with a cruise and an entry in the liner's talent show competition. However it soon becomes clear that Andy has cold feet and the remainder of the plot is about discovering just what the cause is for his secret last minute nerves. 

Horrocks and Watkins make for a pleasing double act, borne from previously working as something of a partnership in Sky's hit and - mostly - miss supermarket sitcom Trollied. They're both very capable and personal favourite actors of mine, though I do feel that Watkins was going a little bit OTT in some of his character's Northern vocal inflections here. 

Overall, The Cruise is probably the lesser of the Playhouse run up until this point in the series; a light and superficial half hour of entertainment enlivened by the visual style and the assured comedic playing of its central performers.

If Night Shift, the latest instalment in the third series of Sky Arts Playhouse Presents, reminds you in someways of the BBC's late 90s controversial and groundbreaking faux documentary drama series The Cops (a favourite of mine) then there's a good reason for that; it was penned by Jimmy Gardner that show's co-creator who sadly died in 2010.


It's strange to see someone's script come to life four years after their death but it's fitting that it has as what Gardner had to say is always worth listening to. The premise may be simple and slight - we follow one squad car patrolling the streets of South East London on the solitary night shift of the title - but its a good one, with great performances from Daniel Mays and Ashley Walters, two of the finest and realistic young British actors currently out there. They hold our attention throughout the half hour as 'Guv' and 'Armani', fighting the mundanity as much as the increasing bureaucracy of the job.

Oh dear. Foxtrot has to be the first real disappointment in the current run of Playhouse Presents I'm sorry to say.

A dark twisted tale of revenge gone wrong, Foxtrot isn't exactly original and for all its obvious belief that its offering something wry and delicious in terms of gender identity one feels its been done before, and done better.

I'm starting to wonder if Billie Piper isn't a one trick pony. She impressed greatly and to much surprise in the Doctor Who reboot  (though how quickly I grew sick to death of the incessant Rose mentions and returns following her original exit!) but has subsequently performed disappointingly average in her subsequent projects and playing a stripper here isn't all that different from her role as the sex worker 'Belle' in ITV's oddly successful Secret Diary Of A Call Girl. 

Ben Whishaw has come a long way since playing Pingu in Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris' Nathan Barley, and quite rightly too, because he's a real talent. But he's wasted here in a triflingly small role with a twist in the tale you can see coming a mile off. I know he has a legion of fans, especially female ones, and I'm sure they'll be delighted to see him bare arsed in one scene but is that really enough?

The only real talent on screen here is Lindsay Duncan, dripping delicious menace as Mrs Dalloway (oh, my aching sides) a madam/crime boss. She gets the best lines, but even then they are few and far between.

As for the other performer in the film, Alice Sanders, I can't see I've seen her in anything before, but she equips herself well enough with the slim material on offer here, despite being saddled with another obvious twist, revealed mercifully early on. 


Two obvious twists in one 30 minute film? It really doesn't bode well does it? I hate to rate something that attempts to be different, that has such a strong cast and that is a short film so low but I really feel writer/director Polly Stenham has left me no choice. Sorry.

Ralf Little and Nick Moran are two actors who the adage never judge a book by its cover could easily be given. Their careers may have commenced (and in some respects continued) as a gormless northerner and mockney upstart, yet it is their work behind the camera that has proved them to be far more than that with Moran being responsible for the Joe Meek biography Telstar and Little (alongside fellow actress Michelle Terry) is behind the gentle Sky One comedy The Cafe. Together, Little and Moran are responsible for the script to Space Age.

Good sci-fi has a habit of clearly conveying present day concerns and issues in a fantastical or heightened environment. Space Age keeps up that tradition, with Little and Moran's script exploring how society views its older population. The notion of sending OAPs into space, to start a new world and sacrifice themselves for future generations on some previously overlooked planet, is an interesting and intelligent one, yet I'm not altogether sure this medium conveys it as well as it ought to. This is despite some very good performances from Richard Wilson and Simon Callow as the two aging astronauts and the vocal talents of Robert Vaughn as the Hal-like ship's AI computer.


It's visually quite impressive thanks to filming in an unusual Polish film studio that was created to look like a space ship interior but the 2001 overtones make it feel too familiar, ultimately almost scuppering the real message about the aged at the heart of the piece.

Until Damned, I'd come to think/worry that this third series of Sky Arts Playhouse Presents had placed all its goodies up front first with The Dog Thrower and Nosferatu In Love preceding what has, in fairness, on the whole been some fairly average films.

Thank heavens then for this little cynical gem from Jo Brand and Morwenna Banks about social workers.

I must admit my hopes weren't high; a comedy drama about social work written by the writer and star of BBC4's excellent Getting On (Jo Brand) which she explained was essentially 'Getting On in Social Services' didn't sound too promising - where's the originality? Why not just do another - much desired - series of Getting On? Then there was the prospect of uber irritant Alan Davies in the cast list and the notion that comedy and social work has already been done, and brilliantly so, with Radio 4's excellent Clare in the Community starring Sally Phillips.

But thankfully Damned surprised me, proved me wrong and impressed me. This is the kind of humour I love; gallows humour, real life, weary and cynical. It's probably down to the fact that, although I've never actually been a social worker, a lot of the jobs I have had in my career have had some cross over with such work. The horrors and day to day pressures which confront the team in Damned are met with the same dry and off colour humour that I have used when faced with the same situations myself. Indeed, one former colleague text me to say Alan Davies seemed to be playing a version of me! Speaking of which, he wasn't as annoying here as he has been in other things and the cast around Brand were all excellent, including her old Getting On chum Ricky Grover, Rebekah Staton playing the kind of character she's become famous for and 'The Actor Kevin Eldon' as a man suffering from mental illness and delusions whose activities were largely ignored simply because he proved useful around the office!


A series of this would do very nicely indeed.

Now this is how you do it.

Much as I loved Jo Brand's Damned last week in the Playhouse Presents strand it did feel more like a pilot for a potential series than it did a self contained play. So here's to Tim Firth, a writer I've long admired ever since his wonderful series Preston Front in the 1990s, for showing everyone how its done and creating the real star of this series; the beautiful and bittersweet Timeless, starring the veteran Sylvia Syms and, making her acting debut, the supermodel Cara Delevingne.


The plot was a neatly contained, clever one;  Delevingne's Chloe, has her  great-grandmother Alice staying with her whilst she's anxiously waiting and worrying about her fiancee Luke, fighting in Afghanistan. When an Army official unexpectedly comes to the door bearing bad news, the  natural assumption is that something had happened to him.

The clever twist to the plot, however, meant it wasn’t her but Alice whose loved one had been found – in Iceland, 39 years after his plane went down, where his body had been preserved in a glacier ever since. In the latter half of the film the pair travel to Reykjavik so Alice could say goodbye.

It's a shame that so much interest in this production was around whether Delevingne was much cop at acting or not because it detracts from the play itself which is a shame. For what it's worth, my opinion is that she gave a relatively good account of herself throughout the performance with only the occasional cold sounding reading of her lines. It wasn't easy material for her, she had to go from the sulky 'babysitter' of her great grandmother (Syms) to strong support who could finally view her elderly relative as a real person with her own valuable life experiences, and she had to do this in just 30 mins via one extreme moment of trauma which saw her fall to the floor in uncontrollable tears.

Syms on the other hand was as wonderful as always showing a life time's skill and talent for nailing a role, playing the comedy and the tragedy of the script perfectly. She really should be at widespread national treasure status by now.

Rounding out the cast was Jaye Griffiths as the RAF 'messenger'. It was a nicely jittery performance of an earnest enough person who had found herself in a job she wasn't perhaps best skilled at, and allowed some comedy to cut through the poignancy of the script.


The final play in this run of Playhouse Presents, Timeless proved that they really saved the best for last.

So, to rank;

1. Timeless
2. Damned
3. The Dog Thrower
4. Nosferatu In Love
5. Night Shift
6. The Cruise
7. Space Age
8. Foxtrot

Looking Up Old Friends

As BBC2 celebrates its 50th, I find myself watching once more one of the finest dramas the channel has ever put out. 

1996's Our Friends In The North was seminal appointment television. I was engrossed first time round and, having it watched it a couple of more times down the years and again now, I'm equally just as engrossed.

Captives (1994)

Captives is a solidly made credible human drama, the likes of which were typically made in the 90s either like here as a small British film, or on British television. Occasionally this feels like it could belong just as easily in the latter camp. I don't mean that as an insult, as I think our country did sterling work through one off drama and plays in the 90s, though I do feel some of the score for this at least screams TV; its opening theme in particular being very dated.

I do wish we could make more thought provoking intense little human dramas like thus now though.

At Captives core is the truly electrifying and sensual chemistry between its two leads Tim Roth and Julia Ormond, they both excel and convince completely in their roles. The supporting cast often feels like a who's who as it is littered with familiar faces including Keith Allen (playing somewhat against the character as written it feels to interesting effect) Colin Salmon, Annette Badland, Tony Curran, Peter Capaldi, Siobhan Redmond and a young Mark Strong. There's even a brief appearance from Kenneth Cope looking like a Halloween exhibit!

The London of the film is dour, overcast and dark, often only illuminated by the neons of tubeway caffs and insalubrious pubs. In other words, it's London! And as someone who has worked in prisons on a visitor/regular basis like Ormond's character I can say that those scenes of the inside are rather realistic, helped in no small part by shooting in an actual HMP. I would quibble slightly at some of the protocols; I don't think they'd let Ormond through without a routine search and they normally keep the wing closed off when showing a new person around, but these are things that may have been done differently in the 90s or indeed in different HMPs.

Watching films from this era though can be an eye opening experience as it does make one feel a little old. Little things like seeing pubs displaying signs like 'Open All Day', phonecards and boxes and the design of Coca Cola/Pepsi on vending machines...stuff that if you don't properly think about it feels like yesterday and/or still the norm come crashing down on you as you realise it is nearly twenty years ago. Frig.

In short I loved Captives and it seems a shame it is so little seen (I recall it in the BBC1 schedules late night some years back but it seems to have dropped out of circulation now) it's an engrossing 90 minutes although I'm not totally convinced by the ending. Nevertheless it's probably the ending one wants.