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The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 2 – Propellant 23
Set mostly in the airport at Marseille (a studio just to the north of London, apparently), this tight and fast episode gets underway with a passenger on a plane arriving from Tripoli getting very distraught and claiming he’s about to die. Without giving too much away, he does die, gratifyingly for the foreign spies who are after a flask of a highly volatile rocket fuel, Propellant 23. Unfortunately for them, the flask gets lost in the shuffle. Has it fallen down the back of a seat, been taken home by a light-fingered airport luggage worker, been drunk by the hotel barker who touts for business in the arrivals lounge, or been whisked away … Read more
The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 1 – Mr Teddy Bear
Ian Hendry has left, Patrick Macnee has been bumped up to star and Honor Blackman has been drafted in as a sidekick who’s not just a pretty face. But there’s more than just those cosmetic differences – if they are just that – going on. In the opener for series two, it’s clear things have gone just a tiny bit self-referential too and that The Avengers is beginning to push against not just the envelope of its own founding principles, but also against those of television. The self-referentiality comes in the opening scene, set in a TV studio where a notable traveller and writer is about to be interviewed in some highbrow arts show … Read more
The Avengers: Series 1, Episode 15 – The Frighteners
The 15th of 26 episodes in the first series is a story that Humphrey Bogart might recognise. A tale of a greasy heel sending his thugs around to put “the frighteners” on a society lothario who is wooing the impressionable daughter of a local business big noise, it looks and feels every inch like a film noir. It’s something director Peter Hammond clearly relishes and, on a TV budget, he does impressive things with pools of shadow, out of which loom both goodies and baddies. Two levels of baddies, what’s more – the Deacon (Willoughby Goddard) is the sweaty and corpulently effete manager of muscle, while Sir Thomas Weller (Stratford Johns) is the … Read more
The Avengers: Series 1, Episode 6 – Girl on the Trapeze
The sixth episode of the series (numbers two to five having vanished) and we’re edging into what would later be familiar Avengers territory. There are devious foreigners, a complex plot and a surprising amount of agency for the female sidekick. Dennis Spooner’s screenplay concerns a woman throwing herself off a London bridge into the Thames, an act which Dr Keel (Ian Hendry) just happens to witness as he’s on the way to a party. Being a public spirited chap he rushes down the steps to the river, where a passing copper and a swarthy type with a thick accent are already on the scene. The woman is dead, but there’s not much water … Read more
The Avengers: Series 1, Episode 1 – Hot Snow
In many ways the British TV series The Avengers was the Beatles of TV. The series was created in 1961 by Sydney Newman (who also created Doctor Who) as a gritty black and white TV programme very much in thrall to existing 1950s styles and finished in 1969 a spy series with kaleidoscope eyes. Over its long and winding run people came and went, sidekicks were added and dropped and women became an increasingly important part of the mix. Like all long-running series it became a stopping off point for all sorts – stars on the climb and on the wane, directors learning their craft, scriptwriters ditto. Christopher Lee and Charlotte Rampling are … Read more
The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire
An urgent, informative film asking all the right questions – or how the rich people stole all the money Here in Brexit Britain we find ourselves in a peculiar situation. In spite of having done pretty well out of the European Union, what with various rebates, opt-outs and special deals, fifth richest country in the world and all that, the country suddenly rebelled, and stormed out of the arrangement in a strop, angry about something that no one can quite articulate – it might be the straightness of bananas or immigrants or democratic accountability, or something else entirely. Meanwhile, the political left largely appear to have lost their connection to their working class … Read more
Northern Lights
When is a feature film not a feature film? When it’s only 53 minutes long is one possible answer. Not that it matters too much in writer/director Nicholas Connor’s debut in a category we might just choose to call “definitely not a short”. Perhaps I’m being a dick, because all the elements of the feature are here – characters, a setting, a recognisable story arc, a satisfying conclusion – just boiled down to a nourishing concentrate, like a delicious stock. According to a dedication at the end of the film, Connor’s drama is inspired by the work of Chris Cyprus, a Mossley-based (Greater Manchester) artist whose work could be very loosely called a mix … Read more
3 October 2016-10-03
Out This Week When Marnie Was There (StudioCanal, cert U) Directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, the guy at Studio Ghibli who isn’t Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata, this is Japanese animation studio’s final, so Ghibli say, film. And it’s a typically sweet, anglophile story about a typically bereft child called Anna finding typical solace in the supernatural realm – a ghost, called Marnie, who lives in the big deserted house over the bay from Anna’s aunt and uncle. Adapted from Joan G Robinson’s Norfolk-set classic, it’s slow-moving and less loaded with drama than Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies or Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, but it’s undeniably sweet, and charms with its familiar Ghibli-style animation – 2D, … Read more
26 September 2016-09-26
Out This Week Love & Friendship (Curzon, cert U) Sly arch social observer Whit Stillman meets a very similar property in Jane Austen, in his adaptation of her novella Lady Susan – about a dangerous sexbomb widow trying to get both herself and her daughter married off to money. As with all Stillman films it is immensely talky, and Kate Beckinsale is in it too, as she was in 1998’s The Last Days of Disco, and is rather excellent as a younger, sexier weaponised version of Austen’s Mrs Bennet, mouth always on the go, eyes all over the room as she jockeys for social position. It’s a fiendishly plotted thing, all stratetic plays by … Read more
19 September 2016-09-19
Out This Week Everybody Wants Some!! (E One, cert 15) About perfect, Richard Linklater’s ode to university life when he was a lad is a portrait of 1980s guys just hanging out and having fun, getting laid, listening to music, crashing parties and playing sports. Not much work gets done. It’s done in an Altman-esque overlapping style, pumps music of the era onto the soundtrack and is thick with cultural references to make us feel like we’re there – Space Invaders games as recreation, My Sharona on a car radio, the Burt Reynolds moustache still a non-ironic look. There are no big names and you’d be tempted to think Linklater is aiming for … Read more
12 September 2016-09-12
Out This Week Green Room (Altitude, cert 18) Jeremy Saulnier’s follow-up to his debut subjects a band of likeable punk nobodies to sustained extreme attack by a gang of neo-Nazi thugs. If it doesn’t quite suck the air out of the lungs as his brilliant Blue Ruin did, that’s because Saulnier to his credit is trying something new. Blue Ruin was an exercise in controlled, prolonged dread; in Green Room he’s seeing if he can pull the legs off the spider, re-attach them, then pull them off again. And repeat. Strangely enough he can. There are name actors here – Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots and Patrick Stewart, who underplays nicely as the big daddy … Read more
5 September 2016-09-05
Out in the UK this week Florence Foster Jenkins (Pathe, cert PG) Tackled recently in the French film Marguerite, the story of Florence Foster Jenkins – the tone-deaf 1930s New York socialite who insisted she could sing – gets another trot around the block courtesy of Stephen Frears. Frears makes it a less pathetic, more screwball story, as if Fred and Ginger had stepped out for a minute, to be replaced by a non-dancing Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant – actually, there is a dance moment, and it’s there, deliberately, to underline what Frears and this film are about. As with Marguerite the joke is on us rather than her, her inability to … Read more
