Fresh Cinders

In his time Kenneth Branagh has acted as D H Lawrence and Henry Vth,  Jimmy Porter and Iago, Reinhard Heydrich,  Shackleton and Larry Olivier.    You cannot say that he is a one trick pony.

He has also has directed seventeen movies in a variety of genres, including a CIA thriller, Jack Ryan; Shadow Recruit,  a Marvel adventure, Thor,  a thriller/comedy, Sleuth, the opera The Magic Flute, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,  Peter’s Friends and  seven of Shakespeare plays.   He even tried a Hitchcock lookalike, Dead Again.    And now he has directed Cinderella?   For Disney?  With glass slippers and blue birds?   No subversion, not even irony?   With neither parody nor  deconstruction?  Well yes, he has, and he has made a rather fine job of it too.  

Cinders is played by  Lily James, with Cate Blanchett as her step-mother and Richard Madden as the Prince,  along with  Helena Bonham-Carter, Stellan Skarsgard, Derek Jacobi,  Nonso Anozie, Ben Chaplin.    Many of the secondary cast seem to have come from Downton Abbey and/or Game of Thrones, so for some of us at least they are unfamiliar faces.   They are also, apart from Ms Blanchett, British.    That saves us from clashing accents,  giving a consistence to the dialogue, a consistency that carries into the other areas of the movie, its tone, music, design and mise-en-scene.     That last quality is hard to define, and even to spot, but you do notice it when it is not right.    Not consciously, perhaps, but with a sense of unease.  Of things not quite hanging together. 

The script is by Chris Weitz, who previously adapted Philip Pullman’s magnificent trilogy His Dark Materials.   Sadly only the first part, The Golden Compass, made it to the screen owing to powerful American ‘Christian’ opposition.    That was no easy task, but he delivers the same clear narrative lines and character development here as there.   Even Cate has a chance to play for our (limited) sympathy.     Helena Bonham-Carter is the Fairy godmother, and relishes it.  I like to see HB-C relishing.   Personal aside;  I attended the play Don Carlos in London a few years ago and during the interval had to push my way between HB-C and Tim Burton.  Really, I had to.   You can guess which way I faced, and when for a second I looked down – looked a long way down,  she really is quite tiny – into her eyes,   that second lasted for a hundred years.    Just thought I’d share that.

The original Disney film of Cinderella was the animation of 1950.  In 1998 Andy Tennant co-scripted and directed Ever After,  a Cinderella Story,  ‘the true story’,   with Drew Barrymore and Dougray Scott as the lovers and Anjelica Huston as ‘Mother’.   This gave it a historical setting – 16^th century France – and was, it seems,  well made.  It came out hard on the heels of another adaptation of a tale,    Snow White; A Tale of Terror,  with Sigourney Weaver as the stepmother set in the time of the Crusades and much  grimmer - pun intended.   It seems the original tales were for adults, not children,  and were truly dark.   A new edition of these has just been published.   

The new Disney film tells it straight. It cost an estimated $95 million to make but the mone is, as they say, all up there on the screen, with a magnificent palace,  sumptuous costumes and   charming special effects.    The music is by Branagh’s long time  collaborator  Patrick Doyle and is suitably period and lush.    So is the cinematography by another past collaborator, Haris Zambarloukos.   The Production Designer was Dante Ferretti, who has worked with Martin Scorsese a number of times.    So has Sandy Powell, the British costume designer.   They work well together. 

So what do we have here?   A perfectly straight forward,  beautifully made, well acted  account of a charming fairy story that has not been seen (straight) on our screens for 65 years.    

I really cannot remember the Disney cartoon clearly enough to compare it with this, but if this is what we have for the next 65 years it is good enough for me.     I do hope Disney will release the DVD soon, and drop their annoying habit of hanging onto them to make scarcity add the their value.     

PS.  Talking of DVDs I hope the we will soon see the release of Branagh's wonderful MacBeth, staged during last year's Manchester Festival.      Theatre friends of mine who have attended many productions of the play - and taught it - say it is the  best they have ever seen.  It was certainly the best I have ever seen, as stated elsewhere in my blog.     

Cheeky CHAPPiE does not cheer me

Some years ago an advertising agency was given the uneviable task of persuading people to drink Babycham again.   For years this cheap and cheerful bubbly had been a laughing stock, as fashionable as support stockings.    Some desperate genius came up with the line ‘Babycham? it’s so far out, it’s in.’     I do not know if Babycham sales improved.

If only Chappie was so far out it’s in.     If only it was bad enough to be a great bad movie.    I left the cinema in a state of aesthetic culture shock.    I sensed that a small group of other people who had left the same auditorium were also reeling, and joined them.     We were united in our view.  This is One Really Bad Movie. 

I enjoyed Neill Blomkamps first film, District 9.    It was an original passionate political parable, an attack on any kind of racism or xenophobia,  made by South Africans in Jo’burg, but making the oppressed race real off-planet aliens.    The ‘xeno’ in xenophobia means ‘ different’ and these aliens were truly different.      Blomkamp’s second movie, Elysium,  with Matt Damon and Jodie Forster onboard,  was also about oppression, and I enjoyed its first two acts.   The way the third act degenerated into SFX and violence – and a singular lack of narrative logic – could be put down to the usual effect that big bucks and crass studio oversight can have on new directors.  See Gozilla.    Or rather don’t. 

But can we blame the Columbia Studio for Blomkamp’s Chappie?    I do not think so.  This is a poor thing, but it is his own.    In fact it is based on a short, very short, spoof ad. written by Blomkamp and his wife Terri  Tatchell way back in 2004, before District 9 was made.    Once more we are in Jo’burg, and some reviewers have assumed that like District 9  this film it is about political  oppression, this time inflicted on the local population by a robot police force.    But no, those who face these super-cops are heavily armed criminals, not subjugated citizens, and they have been brought in because of the heavy casualties the human police are suffering.       Deon (Dev Patel)  is the young programmer who created the robot software,  but he has higher ambitions.    He wants to endow them with AI,  the ability to think and act not just independently, but with a real moral sense.   More, he wants them to have an aesthetic sense and be creative.       When he tries to sell this idea to his boss (the woefully wasted Sigourney Weaver)  she laughs him to scorn.      Have you forgotten that you work for a corporation making Police Robots? she asks.    But Deon carries on his work all night, telling his video blog at one stage that he has almost cracked the programming problem,  just a few more terabytes of code to write  he says,  and two hours later he has done it.   He has written those ‘few more terabytes’ in two hours?    Ah, but of course  he had a can of RedBull to help him, delivered in one of the most outrageous examples of product placement I have ever seen in the movie.  

Denied permission to install this software in a working robot Deon steals a damaged and decommissioned one.      Meanwhile a trio of ‘kooky’ crims decide that the way to defeat the robocops is to find a remote to turn them off, and kidnap Deon and his now robot.   At this point the movie has opened up some interesting themes,   and I had hopes that it could join Her and Ex Machina as an intelligent exploration of AI.    We do see Chappie, as he is soon called, learning.    He is like a baby Deon tells his kidnappers.    I have to educate him.   But this cognitive and development education theme is badly fluffed.    Already I was wondering  is this meant to be  a parody of the films it clearly quotes?  Is it a caper thriller/comedy?   Has it any depth?    I still do not know what it was meant to be.        It is not parodic enough, nor does it build on any of the films it references in any interesting ways, and it is certainly not thrilling or comedic enough.       

We have seen so many robots and AI computers before.   The Copbots way back in THX 1138,   Sonny struggling with ethical and loyalty decisions in IRobot.       The chilling android David in Prometheus,  Hal  in 2001.    We have genuinely thoughtful movies such as  AI, Her and Ex Machina.   But here even Chappie’s minimally sketched  education cannot be compared to that of Frankenstein’s Creature,  nor his charm to that of  WALL-E.     I noticed that the poster says CHAPPiE.    Was that meant ot have some significance?      

However, when this creation  turns on his maker, Deon, outraged by the discovery that when his battery dies so will ‘he’,  my hopes rose again.  Maybe we would have a discussion around the Theodicy question of how a ‘loving’ God can allow death and suffering in the world;  but no.    No light is shed here.    This is not a philosophical movie.  

The plot soon becomes random.    Things happen simply because the Director needs them to happen, with no logical drive.    At one stage our crims visit a supplier to buy high the explosive  they need for the Big Heist.    We never find out what this heist will actually involve.     But while in the supplier’s stronghold they say Oh, and we’ll take those too.   ‘Those’ are  Sony PS4.     Why do they want them?    Simply because in a later scene Chappie will need them (no doubt to match the Sony laptops used throughout).    But no matter, when we have no real narrative sense of what is happening Hans Zimmer’s  music is blatantly used to tell us what is happening in dramatic terms, and what we should be feeling.   The music is so explicit that it might stand on its own without needing the rest of the film to illustrate it.    That really could be an improvement.   

Sigourney Weaver has little to do here, save lend her iconic presence.  She has made many fine films, and she has been happy to work off Ripley in other sf films in amusing ways, especially in the wonderful Galaxy Quest and the slightly less than wonderful burt amusing  Paul.    But sometimes seeing her name on the poster can raise unfulfilled expectations.   It does here.   Hugh Jackman plays the villain, a rival engineer who wants to discredit Deon’s work in order to boost sales of his own gigantic Robocop copy.    He plays his part well, and is game enough to display a mullet as he does so.    Dev Patel is fine,  but he really isn’t asked to do to much with his bland, naïve character.  Sharlto Copley, first revealed to us in District 9 , provides the motion capture and voice of Chappie.    To see a robot moving like a three year old, a teenager and then a ‘cool gansta’ is fun, and he does it well.  The voice, however, becomes annoying after a while.     A couple of South African musicians, known as Die Aantwon, are cast as the criminals who become Chappie’s ‘mother and father’, and they also amuse, but their characters have no depth, and their development from vicious criminals to a pair of caring – even heroic - people has no foundations or emotional logic.

Blomkamp is a gifted, creative and committed film maker.   He is still learning his trade, and I am sure he has a long  career ahead of  him.   It cannot be easy to listen to older and wiser voices when you have made an impressive debut,   but I think he needs to if he is going to improve on Chappie.