Ian McKellen

The Christophers

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Lori looks at Julian

The story goes that Steven Soderbergh and Ed Solomon wrote The Christophers for Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel without having any idea if they’d do it or not. According to the IMDb trivia on this film, Soderbergh and Solomon didn’t even know McKellen and Coel, which is plausible in Coel’s case – she’s only been around a relatively short time – but surely not in McKellen’s. It’s the sort of film that Soderbergh knocks out between big projects. For every Ocean’s 13 a Kimi, for every Magic Mike a Presence – that is to say: tiny cast and crew, controlled location, films that could almost be stage plays. Here, McKellen is a fruity … Read more

Flushed Away

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Roddy the Rat holds on tight in Flushed Away

Aardman, the animation house that gave us Wallace and Gromit, announced the ending of their collaboration with DreamWorks (Shrek) just as Flushed Away was released. And watching it, you can understand why. High on sentimentality and laden with backstory, it’s a DreamWorks movie with Aardman touches, rather than what Aardman probably hoped for – an Aardman movie with DreamWorks muscle behind it. A good movie that could have been a great one, in other words, though the good stuff makes it worthwhile. The over-complicated story tells the tale of Roddy St James, a privileged London pet rat (voiced by Hugh Jackman) who gets “flushed away” down the toilet and into the sewers, where … Read more

X-Men

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Hugh Jackman as Wolverine in X-Men

The origin story of the Marvel Comics characters which, as in the original print version, struggles with the sheer number of characters. It’s a SFX-heavy titanium-shelled blockbuster that pits one team of mutants (headed by good guy Patrick Stewart) against another (bad guy Ian McKellen). Guy being the operative word – X-Men isn’t too bothered with the sexism of its source material. Take that name for starters. Men? X-Persons, surely. The men in the comic, as in this adaptation are all gutsy and have traditional masculine attributes: Professor Xavier (Stewart) has brains; Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is a hairy brute; Cyclops (James Marsden) has nuclear-level laser sight; and as for naughty Sabretooth and Toad … Read more