Horrible Histories: The Movie - Rotten Romans [PG]

Dir: Dominic Brigstocke

We had the Horrible Histories books when my brother and I were kids. I have particular memories of having them in the book box we used to put together to occupy us on long car journeys. They were great, combining gross and funny facts with a solid overview of the history of the period they were covering. I had grown past them by the time the TV show came about, but having always heard positive things about the show, I decided to check out its first feature film venture.

The basic story has several prongs. Orla (Emilia Jones) wants to be a Celtic warrior with the army Bouddica (Kate Nash) is raising, but her protective Dad (Nick Frost) doesn’t want her to have a sword yet. Atti (Sebastian Croft) is sent to Britain with the legion as punishment when one of his clever ideas backfires, offending the young emperor Nero (Craig Roberts). Almost as soon as Atti arrives, he’s captured by Orla.

It is always a challenge to review a film that simply isn’t interested in me as an audience member. Rotten Romans is unapologetically for kids, often quite little kids. In that respect, it’s fine; the fart, poo and vomit jokes will provide them some undemanding laughs. Everything is done with a big, broad, energy that talks at the audience rather than down to them and it keeps the brand intact in that amongst the gags, kids will learn a few things about the Roman empire and its war with the Celtic tribes.

As a piece of filmmaking and for an older audience, amiable though it is, Horrible Histories: The Movie doesn’t really work. It’s one thing making a film for kids but, costume design aside, this one does often wear its cheapness rather too visibly. Sets feel a bit rickety and there is a definite sense that certain scenes had to be rushed through, notably the poorly choreographed and noticeably small scale battle of Watling Street. More problematic is the fact that, despite a fairly starry cast with plenty of funny people in it, the jokes just don’t connect frequently enough. As the Roman military leader Paulinus, Rupert Graves definitely sells his running gag of always talking in the third person and the payoff is fairly amusing, but Craig Roberts’ petulant Nero could easily have been pushed to a more comically extreme place and Lee Mack’s running joke as a centurion who misses Rome never manages to find a laugh. This is also an issue with most of the film’s songs, which are sporadic enough that you’re never expecting one and which generally miss the mark.

In the lead, Emilia Jones (who I couldn’t place initially, but discovered I’d recently seen in Pascal Laugier’s Incident in a Ghostland) is an appealing presence. The screenplay never pays her desire to be a warrior off that satisfyingly, but that’s not for lack of effort on her part. She and Sebastian Croft have fun with the growing (platonic) relationship between their characters, they just don’t have the material to work with. Perhaps the most entertaining part of the film is Kate Nash’s Boudicca. The recasting of the queen who united the Celtic tribes in rebellion as a rock star is the film’s best comic idea and one that serves to provide kids with a way to relate her to their own time. For her part, Nash seems to be having a ball, she delivers Boudicca’s songs with energy and has a couple of the better jokes.

This isn’t a deep film. The final song rushes to find something like a happy ending and has a message about sharing that is a good thing to have kids walk out remembering and feels especially positive given the times we find ourselves in. On the other hand, it’s not particularly in keeping with the rest of the film which, though it always frames it out, is surprisingly heavy on killing for something so clearly aimed at a very young audience. Overall, Rotten Romans has a few things that work and a handful of fun moments, but for an audience over eight, while it’s good natured and never a chore to watch, it’s just not consistently funny enough.

★★

Japanese Movies: Godzilla ['54] / Vengeance Is Mine / Rashomon

Godzilla ['54]  [PG]
Dir: Ishiro Honda

Godzilla looks like, and has often been thought of, as a silly film about a giant dinosaur, spawned by radiation, destroying much of Japan. It is that film to some degree, and it’s possible to have a good deal of fun watching it that way, but there are other ways to look at Godzilla that give it rather more depth and place it in an interesting context among the world cinema of its time.

The film isn’t subtle about its anti-nuclear stance, and that makes it interesting in the larger context of 1950′s science-fiction, which, in the US, was driven by nuclear and cold war paranoia (look at their own films about giant mutated things, like the wonderful Them!) This is especially interesting coming from Japan, because, of course, they are the only country to have been attacked with nuclear weaponry, and were the first place to see the real devastation it caused. In Godzilla the monster is as much – metaphorically speaking – a walking H-Bomb as it is a giant mutated amphibious T-Rex. Now, the film comes across as quite silly as it tries to explain Godzilla (particularly when it dates dinosaurs to 2 million years ago, I mean, I know I shouldn’t be nitpicking, but that’s a 63 million year mistake), but, unlike the 1998 Roland Emmerich directed remake, it’s at least using its sometimes laughable explanations to say something. It’s not the most intelligent nuclear paranoia sci-fi, but Godzilla still feels interesting at a thematic level today, especially with the Fukushima disaster still relatively fresh in the memory.

At its heart though, for me, this was largely a fun monster movie. While most monster films now hold the main attraction back for at least an hour (often to justify a bloated running time), here director Ishiro Honda shows his hand just twenty minutes in, and that never stops Godzilla, in the next seventy minutes, from being a cool or a threatening presence. There is, now, a bit of a hokey feel to the special effects, which are sometimes quite obviously a guy in a suit stomping on miniatures. It doesn’t really matter though, the cheese factor is always high with a monster movie, and actually the monster itself looks good, and is well served by the black and white stock, which, for me, makes it feel more imposing (maybe because I just find it sillier when it’s a big green monster. The major set piece – the destruction of Tokyo – is very well realised, and makes much more sense then the remake’s New York rampages, mostly because here Godzilla doesn’t just vanish into thin air all of a sudden.

Godzilla holds up pretty well, almost sixty years on from its release. The script and performances are reasonably basic, but the deliver the story, the metaphor and the set pieces assuredly, but Ishiro Honda elevates the film with some stylish direction and impactful use of the monster. I’m not sure it’s quite the classic that some of the American sci-fi films of the 50′s are, but it’s an entertaining film that still has something to say today.

★★★★

Vengeance Is Mine  [18]
Dir: Shohei Imamura

I picked Vengeance is Mine as one of this month’s featured films because I really liked the first film I saw by director Shohei Imamura (The Insect Woman) and because I love vengeance films. Unless I missed something, this isn’t a vengeance film, however, it does share many of the traits I found so interesting in The Insect Woman, wrapping them up in a compelling narrative about an apparently motiveless serial killer, Iwao Enokizu (Ken Ogata) as Police interview him (almost completely off screen) about his 78 days on the run.

The film doesn’t senastionalise Enokizu’s life and crimes, rather it follows him quite dispassionately as he marries against his parents wishes, before leaving his wife (Mitsuko Baishô) with them when he’s imprisoned for the first time and then when he laves prison and fails to fit back in the film follows his murders and his escape to a guest house/brothel where the madam (Mayumi Ogawa) falls in love with him. In fact, the structure somewhat reminded me of The Insect Woman, in that Imamura is interested in more than the sensational, he digs into his protagonist’s life, and the lives around him, and like the earlier film Vengeance is Mine also has two pretty distinct halves, here largely defined by the dominant female presence in Enokizu’s life.

As much as the main storyline commands the attention, there is also great stuff around the edges, not least the creepy and intense attraction between Enokizu’s wife Kazuko and his Father Shizuko (Rentarô Mikuni), which threatens to come to a head while Enokizu is first in prison. This puts an extra, disturbing, dynamic into each of these relationships, and makes them just as gripping as the storyline about the murders.

Of course being that the film hardly deal with the killings themselves, especially in its long middle section, it relies on the actors to provide the tension, and they absolutely deliver. Ken Ogata is brilliant as Iwao Enokizu; communicating to us how unhinged and dangerous he is, while allowing us to see how he puts up a convincing mask of normalcy to the people around him. One great scene has him impersonating a lawyer, and despite knowing who he really is, you see why his marks buy into the fiction. Mitsuko Baisho and Mayumi Ogawa are both excellent as the women who – at least initially in Baisho’s case – love this charming killer. Wisely, neither they nor Imamura play on the danger they are in, and so what violence does occur is more shacking and scarier. What violence there is is pretty nasty. The film mirrors Zodiac somewhat in its structure, with two brutal and extended murder scenes happening right up front, and then the violence staying off screen for, in this case, almost the entire rest of the 140 minute running time. I’ve often seen violence in Japanese films rendered as outlandish splatter; high pressure hoses spraying blood from neck wounds etc, but Imamura does it differently; this violence is up close, extended, personal and difficult, and that’s why the film gets under your skin.

There are elements here of the later Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which also puts a motiveless, patternless serial killer in his social context (though this film offers a resolution, where that one does not), and if slight overlength and occasional digressions from the thrust of the film keep Vengeance is Mine from being quite as good as Henry, it’s a close run thing and this film really makes me want to dig in to Imamura’s work at the first opportunity.

★★★★

Rashomon [PG]
Dir: Akira Kurosawa

Confession time: I am a 31 year old who has the gall to call himself a film critic, and this was the first time I had ever seen an Akira Kurosawa film. I know. Shut up. Kurosawa is one of those filmmakers with a reputation and a filmography so big that it’s almost intimidating; do you start with a classic and risk disappointment? Do you start with something lesser known and build to the famous work? I decided to start with a notable film, and one that I knew something about going in because of its pervasive influence. How pervasive is that influence? Pervasive enough that anthropologist Karl G. Heider coined the term ‘Rashomon Effect’ to describe the effect of perception on the subjectivity of recollection. Or, to put it in simpler terms…

Rashomon unfolds the story of what looks to be the rape of a woman (Machiko Kyo) and the murder of her husband (Masayuki Mori) by a notorious bandit (Toshiro Mifune). The story is told from four perspectives, each related as testimony in court, first by the bandit Tajomaru, then by the wife, then by the spirit of her dead husband (speaking through a medium) and finally by a woodcutter who witnessed the events. We watch each version unfold as reconstruction.

The structure of Rashomon has been emulated many times (a notable recent example being Zhang Yimou’s Hero) and it is easy to see why. The way the film unfolds makes demands on us as an audience to think about each version of the story, and to decide which of the versions – if any – we find credible. The great strength of the film is that it is equally as easy to find yourself sucked into any version of the story,because there is never anything truly outlandish suggested, and the performances always remain consistent and strong throughout. It’s also possible to see each story as somewhere between lie and fantasy, because we only ever see the events as a story told after the fact, and because the forest clearing where Kurosawa stages most of the action feels almost like a self contained world, a little removed from the real (this also seems to be suggested by the slightly unnatural shimmering light).

Toshiro Mifune was often said to be Kurosawa’s alter-ego, I hope that’s not the case here, but he’s brilliant as the sometimes unhinged Tajomaru. The moral code the people in this film seem to live by is difficult to relate to (much conflict revolves around the fact that once the Woman has been raped somebody has to die, because she cannot stay married to her Samurai husband while there is another man alive that she has been with), but when these ideas are expressed by Tajomaru, who seems crazed at his trial and driven into something of a frenzy by the first appearance of Kyo’s character you see them as coming from a place that is driven not by an idea of honour but by his lust for the woman.

Machiko Kyo’s character is probably the one who changes most in each telling of the story. In all versions she is a victim, but what happnes after the rape varies greatly. In her own version the woman is further victimised by a husband who stares at her with contempt, but in others she is more manipulative, spurring on the fight between Tajomaru and her husband. Kyo is excellent, shading the character slightly differently in each version of the story; giving her strength in some and emphasising weakness in others. It’s the film’s most complex role, and she does it great justice. Masayuki Mori has rather less to do for much of the running time, given that he spends a lot of his screentime tied to a tree, but he’s very effective in what is a rather cold and unsympathetic role.

Rashomon is a complex film, and I’m sure there is much more to it than the relatively simple question of which is the true version of events. As an introduction to Kurosawa I felt it was ideal; it’s short and moves fast through its multi-levelled story, but never forgets to pause for breath or to give its few characters real colour. It looks beautiful, and is cut intelligently and relatively fast for its time, which injects both pace and variation into what could – given that it takes place largely on a single confined set – become a slightly stagy visual experience. I’ll certainly go back to this film in future, because I feel that, as great as I found it on a first watch, I’ve a lot more to get from it yet.
★★★★★

Anna Karenina [12A]

Dir: Joe Wright

Before I even begin I should admit upfront that I've not read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, nor seen any of the other film and TV versions that have been made over the years, so I am coming to Joe Wright's telling of this story about as fresh as is possible. I'm not sure that's the ideal way to watch this radically stylised telling of what is, at its heart, a simple story, but I was surprised by how much I - for the most part - enjoyed it.

Director Joe Wright has a bit of a mixed record with me, I enjoyed his lightweight Pride and Prejudice, loved the first third of Atonement, but struggled with the rest, and found Hanna to be a very mixed bag, with some outstanding things in it.  Anna Karenina is his most ambitious work, and, despite the luminous beauty of Keira Knightley in the lead, it is Wright who is really the star of this film.

The technical quality of Wright's filmmaking has been undisputed since Atonement's ambitious D Day set piece shot, but he has truly excelled himself here.  For a while this was planned as a straightforward adaptation of the novel, with Wright scouting locations in Russia, but just a couple of months before cameras rolled the visual concept was completely changed, and it was decided that the whole film would be set inside a theatre - all the world's a stage indeed.  Obviously this has huge impact on the design and the choreography of the film.  Wright has always seemed a classical filmmaker to me, and his Karenina is right out of the 1940's.  The film I kept seeing the influence of was Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes, in terms of the design, the movement (characters frequently move in a way that could be called balletic, and do mid scene, on screen, costume changes) and in terms of the way Wright directs his actors.  This isn't to say that Anna Karenina isn't its own film, for all the influences it feels like Wright is doing something that is original, and frequently very impressive.

It's a dazzling looking film, and an intelligently and evocatively designed one, whether it's the moment that Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) leaves a stately home to find his brother in a slum; a journey that takes him up above the stage, among the ropes and cables, or the moment he decides to return to his farm, and a backdrop is removed from the stage to reveal a snowy meadow, I was often left amazed at how well the stylistic choices work.  It takes a while to adjust, but after twenty minutes I found myself simply accepting the setting; it seems perfectly natural that after hearing that his wife is pregnant with another man's child Alexei Karenin (Jude Law), goes and sits in a chair in a spotlight at the front of a stage, because Wright has fully established a world here; one that is heightened, of course, but still one that feels credible, if not 'real'.

That same period of adjustment is also needed for the performances, which, to varying degrees, tend towards the theatrical.  Matthew MacFadyen, for example, is an overblown riot as Anna's brother Oblonsky, and clearly the beneficiary of most of screenwriter Tom Stoppard's comic instincts, it's always great to see Oblonsky in the film, because MacFadyen's performance leavens the seriousness and potential po-faced nature of the rest of the film. 

On the other end of the scale is Jude Law, whose reserved performance as a seemingly closed off Karenin, keeping his emotional cards close to the chest and not confronting his wife even when her behaviour, frankly, would warrant it, is perhaps his best ever.  What's really great about Law's performance is that he lets us see everything that is going on beneath Karenin's controlled exterior; the anger, the hurt, all of it is written on his face, but it's never overplayed.  The supporting cast is excellent, the aforementioned Domhnall Gleeson must by now be counted among the best young actors around, and he and Alicia Vikander; the young Swedish actress recently seen in A Royal Affair, make the secondary love story between Levin and Anna's cousin Kitty rather affecting (there is a lovely scene in which they communicate with blocks with letters printed on them).  Also impressing in smaller parts are Kelly MacDonald, Olivia Williams, Holliday Grainger and Emily Watson, among many others.

I always feel I have to make excuses for being a fan of Keira Knightley's.  Well, forget it, I'm done making excuses.  As I said, I've not read the book, but for the story being told here Knightley seems well cast.  Like Jude Law, she suggests a lot beneath the surface.  In early scenes, when she goes to a ball where Kitty is, essentially, being unveiled as a prospect for marriage proposals, we get a real sense of history; of how this was Anna ten years ago, and this plays into the relationship with Law and to her attraction to Aaron Taylor-Johnson's Vronsky.  Good as Knightley is, and she's great, emotionally matching her character's physical transformation from hemmed in society lady to wild haired romantic running off with her lover, her performance is somewhat undermined by Taylor-Johnson's.  The Kick Ass star makes for a rather pallid and charisma deficient Count, and seems to have missed the tone of the film, underplaying to the point that he doesn't allow us to believe in the operatic scale of Anna and Vronsky's need for each other, we buy it from Knightley's side, but there is a lack of that grand passion in Taylor-Johnson's performance which can't quite be repaired by either the sumptuous imagery or the good work going on around it.

That the film as a whole manages to overcome this flaw really does attest to its many other strengths.  Seamus McGarvey's cinematography is stunning, and is likely to be in contention for an Oscar (assuming the Academy has any taste), but the style is far from the only reason to get out and see this Anna Karenina.  It may not be perfect, but quality performances abound and, for the most part, it has the substance to match its style.  This is easily Joe Wright's most complete and best film to date, and I'm excited to see where he goes from here.
★★★☆☆