The Pirates in an Adventure with Scientists (2012)

AMAZING! How did I miss this!? Where the hell was I when it came out?! I remember vaguely seeing some kind of promotion but I just thought "Ugh, more pirates!" for some reason, despite it being clearly Aardman I thought it was going to be full of stupid American jokes, fuck, it was so British! An amazing voice-cast and the jokes, both verbal and all the beautiful visuals. God, it was lovely! It made me instantly go out and buy it.

Also it made me finally fancy Hugh Grant after hearing that women fancy him for twenty five years, now that he's a clay pirate I totally get it.

The Omen (1976)

JD picked out some films as he always does when I go to visit, he knows I like horror films but can't watch them on my own (which is why Celia and Lauren have to watch one every time they visit) Why had I never seen the Omen before?! Why didn't I know who was in it!? It was great! and it had a great cast!! At the end I said "I can't wait to find out what happens next!" and JD said the other films are rubbish and apart from Sam Neil in the third one, have rubbish casts. Boooooo! 

The Village of the Damned (1960)

We also watched this one on the same day. It was GREAT!

Star Trek into Darkness (2013)

When Calum came to visit we all saw the new Star Trek film, I saw it again with my dad in Hebden Bridge, which was great because I haven't been there for ages, I love all the sweeties you can buy and cups of tea and hot chocolate. I got through two packs of poppets and a highland toffee bar probably for under a pound. Best cinema in Britain.

Anyway, I liked the film because I'd seen Wrath of Khan and so I got that it was just a big rehash of bits of that- Also I've heard the episode of Fags, Mags and Bags (Radio 4) Wrath of Khan which is also a rehash of that- but HILARIOUS. But I don't think you need to know Star Trek to enjoy this one. I didn't really know Star Trek when I saw the last one but I still totally loved it! 

Everyone agrees without Cumberbatch the film would be average though. Hooray for the return of Jermey Irons/Alan Rickman Die Hard type British Villains, well done Cumberbatch, use your acting talent to camp and laugh and use that voice!!

Broken (2013)

I can't remember if I saw this rehash of To Kill a Mockingbird before or after some of these April/May films but I thought it was brilliant and violent and haunting and horrible and brilliant. It was a film Anna and I wished we'd seen with our parents and with our boyfriends but that we didn't want to watch again in a hurry because it was just so traumatic! 

Rory Kinnear's ham-eating was a good comic moment for us but in context just as frightening as the rest of his great performance. All actors involved brill- Cillian Murphy was great. Tim Roth was praised at the time but I don't know why, he was barely in it and he didn't add much when he was. 

Scenes from a Poisoner's Life by Nigel Williams

Last week I went to the Oxfam bookshop, my friend Lotte told me she had been reading a lot more since her fiance started doing strange shifts and waking her up at odd hours to leave the house, I bought a book too so she would not think I was an uncultured fool.
I bought this book by Nigel Williams. I knew it would be easy to read as I enjoy his radio series HR (now on it's fourth series on BBC radio 4, Friday mornings) but books being easy to read has not been the problem for me lately. A lot of books I've started have been easy to read and lots of them good (some of them shite of course) I couldn't continue reading Giles Coren's book How to Eat Out after I got food poisoning (again), it just wasn't something I was desperate to pick up while still feeling iffy... Jamaica Inn I read half of because of a job I thought I might get but it was so dreadfully familiar to reading my own self-indulgent drivel that I started to think I might be Daphne Du Maurier reincarnated, doomed to write tosh forever. And then there are other books I've started and read usually more than half of then just forgotten about. I can't bring myself to blame 30 Rock. I definitely needed to watch five series in a row with no break for reading, sleeping, eating or working.
Anyway, I read Nigel's book and maybe it's just because of modern life that I found the concept of 12 short self-contained stories connected by the months of the year brilliant- you know, perhaps my attention span is horrendous and I need bite-sized literature. Or maybe it was just that he writes these shorts so well. It was like listening to the radio.
Or maybe it was just exactly what that three word review said on the the back; "Modern Wodehouse suburbanized." Am I that much of an arse that I can only read Wodehouse or his modern day equivalents? I think perhaps I am. Well, who cares. I went to the Arthritis Research bookshop and got another of Nigel's to take on my holiday tomorrow and I'm jolly well I'm looking forward to reading it.

Goodnight Mr Tom, Touring, York Opera Grand

Lovely show! I always watch the tv film when it's on and it was just as good, Oliver Ford Davies was wonderful as Mr Tom, probably much more moving than John Thaw but I've alway preferred him anyway... Good and gruff to begin with and excellent dad to Will almost immediately!
The puppet dog was brilliant as was the girl who performed her, we never saw her face til she took her bow at the end.
We all sobbed of course. Brilliant.

Shirley Valentine (1989)

The next time someone good does Shirley Valentine on stage I'd really like to see it. I enjoy the film and I think even though it looks SO eighties, the script and the performances are good enough to keep it timeless, at least it hasn't suddenly become dated. But I would love to see it as it was originally, a monologue. Pauline Collins as Shirley is by far, head and shoulders above everyone else, the best thing in it, and so she should be she won enough awards for doing the monologue on Broadway and the West End before they turned it into a film. It must have been fun for her getting to actually go on the fab holiday she'd spent three years talking about on a stage set like a crappy kitchen with chips and egg on the cooker.

This Is England '88 (2011)

I saw This is England (2006) when it came out at the cinema, it was really good and then I forgot about it, when This is England '86 came on the telly and was all about Woody and Lol's wedding and breakup and her murdering her rapist father, well, I thought it was excellent, the best thing I'd sen on tv for years and years. Why didn't I write about it on the blog? Maybe then I would have remembered how much I'd enjoyed it and I wouldn't have somehow managed to miss this one! '88 was on last Christmas and is a sort of nativity story, it wasn't as gripping as the last series but I really enjoyed it. It was just about how Lol and Woody were both so sad without each other. I like stuff like that, I like depressing romances.

Misfits Series Three (2011)

 

Series three saw the departure of favourite Nathan and the arrival of new favourite Rudy. No need to worry about your show when Joe Gilgun climbs aboard. Yes, seeing him there reminded me how good This is England is, more about that later.
It was a good series to end it on. I watched the first episode of the new series but I won't be watching the rest, it seemed to have lost all charm and it was violent and not funny. If Kelly had stayed it would have been ok, she was my other favourite, but she is gone. Ho hum.
Anyway, I enjoyed those three series of the Misfits they were in a league and genre of their own, Matt Smith's Doctor drunk and on heroin, Being Human but high, Buffy but bum-raped by Rudy's apathetic self-interested side.

Misfits, Sesaons 1 & 2

I've been meaning to watch it for ages, we've had the boxset of series 1 & 2 for a year and it's remained unopened, still cellophane wrapped. Well, I opened it, and I watched all 13 episodes within a couple of days, probably could have done it in one if I didn't have to have so many naps! The kids are charming, talented and good looking and the stories are mad, funny and stupid and just what you want when you're ill. Series 3 arrived this morning, me and Dad-Y are going to watch some tomorrow, he's ill too, so we can both enjoy it. I've seen the ads on tv for the current 4th series, it looks naff with none of the original characters in it. Yes I'm sad Nathan is gone, but I love the actor who plays Rudy so I'm still really looking forward to this third series, series 4 I don't think I'll bother with, hopefully the third will be like the 4th series of Breaking Bad, a suitable ending. Kelly better not die, she's my favourite now Nathan's gone

My Week with Marilyn (2011)

Anna saw it at the cinema and said it was shite, which was a shame because I'd fancied seeing it because I wanted to see how Kenny tackled being Larry- to me it seemed the perfect casting.
My dad rented it and we watched it together. I thought it was brill! A great British ensemble piece and I actually managed to enjoy Judi Dench (there's a first!)
Also, just as I expected, Kenny nailed it. At some points I forgot he wasn't Olivier.

Anonymous (2011)

Good take on the 'who wrote Shakespeare's plays' theme. Nice acting and good story even if the script was a bit terrible, and I love it when acting families play older and younger versions of the same character. See photo of Joely Richardson playing young Queen Elizabeth and her mum Vanessa Redgrave playing older Bess. Thumbs up from British-actor-geek Amy!

My Dog Tulip (2010)

Rob and I watched this animated film online, I think it was on BBC4 a couple of months ago. The animation styles were wonderful, something about them reminded me of cartoons of my youth, ones like Padington Bear and King Rollo, very British and nostaglic. And after spending the day with Polly (Rob's dog) it was very fun and appropriate, though not so fun when we went downstairs to find Polly had ben sick on the carpet...

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

I wish I'd had a comfier seat because this film was long! It was good though, it looked good and it was a good one for keeping your brain going. It took a couple of hours before anything exciting happened though and it was a bit of a sausage-fest. No women apart from Tom Hardy's squeeze but then Tom Hardy was the Bond character in this spy film, Mark Strong was a bit at the beginning as well and I like him.

Anyway, was the book as gay as the film? The bit I enjoyed the most (apart from Tom Hardy being beautiful) was Mark Strong's heartbroken face and those big brown eyes crying at the end, AW! Sausage-fest.

A Dance to the Music of Time (channel 4, 1997)

Like a cross between Brideshead Revisited and the Camomile Lawn in that some of the characters are charming like in Brideshead and then all the actors were replaced by older actors who look and act nothing like them in the final episode- like in the Camomile Lawn.
BUT the Camomile Lawn did this much more successfully because throughout the wartime episodes they cut to the 1980s scenes and showed some of the older-selves so that the audience had time to grasp who was who, also they used Jennifer Ehle's mum, Rosemary Harris, to play her so that was really good casting! It was only at Max's funeral when we had to believe that formerly handsome young secondary characters had grown into the most hideous of old extras that it disappointed- this is what happened in ADttMoT, except it wasn't secondary characters, it was the lead.
My mum told me that when my parents first watched it they honsetly believed that the actor who had played the lead (James Purefoy) through the first three films must have died. It was the only explanation they could think of to why they suddenly had another actor play him! That's how much it disturbs the flow of the story! Ok, this might sound odd but here's the real issue, it wasn't that they replaced the actors- it was that they replaced SOME of the actors and put aging makeup on others, and it seems completely at random! James Purefoy suddenly turns into John Standing, Miranda Richardson gets no age makeup and is the same age in 1943 as she is in 1963, Simon Russell Beale is Simon Russell Beale aged 14 to 84 but with bad prosthetics. Why replace some actors and not others!?
Ho hum, I'll get away from the casting problems and onto the story problems.
The Camomile Lawn has no real story, it's about a bunch of inbred poshies bonking during the war. This pretends to have a story but is basically the same sort of thing but with less bonking. I compared it to Brideshead because it follows some boys from school after the first war, Oxford, through their jobs and up to the second war. Also there's the usual characters, James Purefoy as the lead is the Charles, Paul Rhys is the Sebastain but there's also a rake and a fop and a marxist amongst the bunch of pals AND, most importantly there is the brown-nosing flesh-crawly creep, Widmerpool (Simon Russell Beale). It was like watching Brideshead if suddenly Brideshead was not about beauty but about that fat fuck Boy Molcaster and all the boring shit he got up to!
Simon Russell Beale was really good as the creep but- and I know this sounds weird, considering he's so theatre famous- I've never seen him in anything before and I've always assumed he would be like that in every role he plays. He has never appealed to me, he practically lives at the National Theatre, collecting awards a dozen at a time every year, but I just have no desire to see him or any of the plays he appears in. Obviously if he decided to do a play with young Rory Kinnear I would have to make an exception and maybe I'd see the light, but until then he just makes my flesh crawl and this show really didn't help.
In conclusion Paul Rhys was the best thing in it, his Sebastain-esq story was extremely tragic and well acted, his end was horrific.

Submarine (2011)

Saw this film more than a month ago with Anna! Thought it was ok. Love that kid who used to be in Young Dracula and then stole the show in that episode of Being Human ("Get off me you gay lord!") Always been a fan.
His character was great and played very very well but considering it was mainly about his love for girl-in-red coat, I felt her character was extremely badly written and boring.
I can see the film becoming one of those films loved by ridiculously clever but arrogant teenage boys who identify so much with the character that they can't see that he's actually a twat and therefore they are also twats. I can see said boys yearning for a girl like the one in the film, loving her despite her faults, thinking that she is the perfect woman. But the thing is, the girl character was one-dimensional, seriously, she was, doesn't matter if you see that she's only a prick 'cause she's worried about her mum, she was still a boring character- and a twat.
That's the problem with these sorts of films. The people in them are not people you should aspire to be or be friends with, they are tools. If I want to see a film about teenage outcasts living in the middle of nowhere I will watch Napoleon Dynamite because at least Napoleon has good intentions.

Never Let Me Go (2011)

Pointlessly I went to see the depressing Never Let Me Go, I say pointlessly because it was to give Roger and Anna some alone time in the flat, but the only showing was at 6pm so when I got back they still hadn't even had dinner, so they had to put up with me then sitting in the living room doing my work for a couple of hours and I had to put up with feeling like crap!
The thing is, I knew it would be horrifically depressing! I knew there would be no happy ending, because there just wouldn't! They had a purpose! They fulfilled it! This isn't America! This isn't The Island! Anyway, I waited for something unexpected to happen, but nothing did, they lived for a bit and then they died, the end. If you've seen the trailer you've seen the film. I don't like Carey Mulligan, I don't think Keira's ever any good and I didn't like Andrew Garfield, I just kept thinking; he is going to be such a weird shaped Spider-man.

V for Vendetta (2006)

So after seeing all these British actors I felt like rounding off my trip home this weekend with another dose of ensemble on DVD. Eddie Marsan and Guy Henry have a line each while sitting at a table with Tim Piggott-Smith (who is proper brill in this film), Ben Miles and Stephen Rea. Stephen's sidekick Gravesy plays the Sergeant Troy to his Barnaby (I watched a good Midsommer Murders today, it was one of the ones with Richard Johnson in it) Stephen Fry pretends to be an actor, Roger Allam gets naked, Mrs Jeremy Irons gets killed nicely and John Hurt makes a joke out of the fact he was in the film 1984.

The only problem I have with this film- well, I don't like all the torture Natalie Portman goes though but she does have that accent...- is that, Britain is this Hate-State and it needs to be brought down through revolution, yeah? Why does it have to be shown this by an Australian and an American? Pah! You don't even see V's face so why can't he be voiced by a Brit? Don't give me that 'But it has to appeal to wider audiences' shit! Bloody Yanks.

The King's Speech (2011)

And speaking of ensemble pieces... What a vast array of British talent in the background of The King's Speech! Yes, Colin Firth was brilliant (even in the mandatory British film sweary routine- fuck bugger fuck tits, etc.) Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter were their usual good support but look at the rest! And I'm not talking about Timothy Spall (they wheel him out for every Brit-flick) or Gambo or Luvvie Jacobi, I'm talking about Anthony Andrews! Adrian Scarborough! Claire Bloom! Jennifer Ehle! All these people lurking in the background having barely a line between them!
Bertie Portal stood behind Colin Firth in practically every scene! That man is a joy on stage! It's ridiculous!
I loved spotting them all and knowing their names, I am such a geek.