3:10 to Yuma (2007)

When it’s on: Sunday, 1 July (10.00 pm)
Channel: Channel 5
IMDb Link

Delmer Daves adapted Elmore Leonard’s short story, 3:10 to Yuma, for the screen in 1957, putting together a psychological Western that did as much as any to undermine the clear cut eternal tale of good guys and villains. Glenn Ford played a wanted outlaw who was captured and sent with a posse (which included Van Heflin’s small-time rancher) to boom town Contention in order to catch the ten past three train to Yuma’s prison. Ford’s gang hunted him for themselves, determined to retrieve their leader, and Heflin faced a race against time to deliver Ford to the service as they closed in. Despite the simplistic plot, the film focused heavily on Ford’s charismatic baddie, a fully rounded character who needled Heflin all the way to his destiny but had the humanity to do what was right in the end.

A big fan of the film, James Mangold was eventually handed a sizeable $50 million budget to remake it half a century later. He’d already done so unofficially with his earlier Copland, which carried overtones of High Noon, the Zimmerman classic that cast a shadow over Daves’s 3:10 to Yuma. But now he could take a stab at the real thing. Not only did the money allow him to make a fine looking picture, it also gave him the opportunity to assemble an excellent cast. Russell Crowe took on Ford’s outlaw, Ben Wade, whilst unlikely hero Dan Evans was offered to Christian Bale. Two of Hollywood’s hottest talents were thereby on board, and with them Mangold could delve deeper into their stories in order to make the shift in the characters’ attitudes credible to twenty first century audiences.

For me, Bale’s been one of the most versatile actors for some years. Possessing the kind of inscrutable handsomeness that makes him capable of turning from terrible to good characters at will, he’s called on here to do more than repeat Heflin’s noble ‘blue collar’ worker. His Evans is a Civil War veteran who’s lost a leg in the fighting and has since taken up ranching with his family. The move’s a thankless one as drought threatens his livelihood, making him easy pickings for the creditors who torch his barn due to his inability to keep up the payments. His elder son William (Logan Lerman) despises him, while he has the awful sense of failing his wife, played by Gretchen Mol. He takes the job of accompanying Wade to Contention because the $200 reward is something he can’t turn down. In short, he’s an obviously more pathetic character than in the earlier version.

As for Crowe, there’s a marvellous undercurrent of violence to his character. The charisma, surface sensitivity, articulacy and dab-handedness with sketching aside, the impression one gets is of a man who can turn on the nastiness at any moment, and do it with a smile. Crowe seems to love playing the outlaw whose more than just a heavy, almost as though he knows he’s got the plum ‘Glenn Ford’ role and slips with ease from soft spoken charm to ultra-violence.

Just as it did in the original, 3:10 to Yuma turns on the conversation between Dan and Wade in the Contention hotel room as they await the train’s arrival. Whilst the impending violence builds up outside, both men learn about each other, develop some mutual respect and get the sense that each has something the other misses from their lives. Penniless Dan is both appalled and tempted by the possibility of large sums of money Wade offers to him in exchange for freedom. The outlaw envies his unlikely captor for the stability of a quiet family life. It’s a riveting sequence in the film. Both actors are easily the equal of the lines they’re speaking and what is implied behind them, giving their banter a natural quality that grows organically in terms of affection.

Whereas Daves’s film makes the hotel its focus, perhaps mindful of the lower costs involved in filming on a single set, Mangold splices a number of action scenes before we get to this stage, covering the journey to Contention through Apache held territory that the 1957 picture glossed over. There’s also much more of Wade’s gang in this one, in particular his deputy (Ben Foster) who emerges as both a psychopath and devoted to his captured leader. The gunfights, when they happen (and they do, a lot), involve cannon-loud shots that earned the Sound Mixing department an Academy Award nomination.

3:10 to Yuma: ***

Up in the Air (2009)

When it’s on: Sunday, 24 June (9.00 pm)
Channel: BBC2
IMDb Link

I’ve now worked in the public sector for 14 consecutive years. I remember well enough the reasons for doing so. Beforehand, I had a job with some petrochemical giant, one incidentally whose name you can’t write without including the word ‘hell’, and whilst there was much of it that I liked, the corporate culture was at distinct odds with what I wanted from my working life. It became clear that face fitting was easily as important as one’s employment record, which sat ill with me. I recall a colleague being told that he was due for promotion, but one of the conditions of his step up was that he had to sever all ties with another employee who just wasn’t liked by the management. He did it as well.

Since leaving, I probably haven’t earned as much as I could. I’ve done some boring, boring jobs and felt shackled in various ways, but then there’s things like the steady wage, the pension (far from gilt-edged, Daily Mail readers, but it’s better than anything I might expect to get otherwise) and the security. With a mortgage, family, commitments, etc, the knowledge that I’m not going to have ‘that’ call to the manager’s office, perhaps without any prior notice, matters. I’m never going to be faced with Ryan Bingham, thank goodness.

In Up in the Air, George Clooney plays Bingham, whose job is basically to jet around American cities and fire people. Companies get him to do their dirty work because they don’t want to do it themselves, and Bingham’s good at it. He can ease his way through sacking after sacking, each one smoothly executed because he has so few commitments of his own that he doesn’t really have to empathise with people’s sob stories about keeping up the house payments, feeding the family, etc. Bingham’s only real ambition is to work his way into as many courtesy services and elite memberships as humanly possible. He’s the man who strolls straight to the front of an empty baggage check at the airport whilst you’re stuck in an endless queue. His dream is to score ten million air miles, which means continuing to do what he’s doing.

But this ‘idyll’ is threatened by the new ideas presented to his company by Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), a young Cornell Business graduate who suggests firing people over an internet feed, meaning not having to leave the office to do the job. With the economic climate never better for the business of letting people go, Natalie’s proposal removes the human touch of face to face discussion for the production line of sackings by Skype. It also impinges on the very things Bingham values about his job, not to mention the relationship he’s developing with fellow frequent flier Alex (Vera Farmiga). She’s the same as him. They meet in a bar and compare corporate hospitality cards. Their friendship is based on sex in hotel rooms, agreed in advance via comparing itineraries and working out when they’re staying in close proximity.

The plot revolves around Bingham taking Natalie off on a job of work schedule, the pair sharing the firings across various cities. Gradually, the work takes its toll on her. Telling people they’re dismissed to their faces hits Natalie hard. She’s from the tweeting culture, after all, where everything’s done remotely. Having to watch people break down, get angry or tell her they’re going to throw themselves off a bridge doesn’t meet with her expectations of the job. It turns out that she’s only there to begin with because she’s gone to where her boyfriend is, and then he dumps her. This makes Bingham consider his own priorities – his transitory lifestyle, his minimal contact with family and the questions over where he’s going with Alex.

Director Jason Reitman (who also produced the film alongside father, Ivan) keeps things ticking over nicely, never taking obvious avenues in the course of the action and going for some neat choices in photography. Those aerial shots of Americana – especially the postcard frames that pop up over the credits – are quite beautiful, and Reitman ensures his characters appear to move organically through the tale, not overly directing them so it feels like the camera’s just following them about their business. As for Clooney, it’s a tailor-made role, the usual shades of Cary Grant updated for the twenty-first century, only he knows when to let the emotion crack open his austere presence.

The real plus is the film’s non-committal ending, the possibility that Bingham could be doing the same thing for years and years. Only by the close, the job’s become a trap rather than the thing he loves, and it would be lovely to picture him firing himself in the end. Or that bloke from the company I used to work for…

Up in the Air: ***

Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

When it’s on: Friday, 15 June (9.00 pm)
Channel: More4
IMDb Link

One of the nicest side-effects of the DVD revolution is the opportunity to watch ‘director’s cut’ editions of our favourite films. Often enough, this translates into some footage that didn’t quite make the theatrical version being shoehorned in, presumably whether the director’s had anything to do with it or not, but that’s fine with me. You want me to have an extra forty minutes of a Lord of the Rings movie? Don’t mind if I do.

I can’t think of anyone who’s done more director’s cuts than Ridley Scott, whose every work appears to be the subject of a revised edition at some point. The notorious example is, of course, Blade Runner, and the five-disc copy I own. Blade Runner’s a great film, but in fairness I don’t need umpteen different versions of it. To date, I haven’t cued up the workprint on the fifth disc, and I can’t imagine ever feeling the need to do so. Enough Deckard. More than enough ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Too much of the bloody paper unicorns. And, you know what, I didn’t mind the narration…

Scott’s reached a point now where one expects the director’s cut; I recall Robin Hood being released on DVD as an extended director’s edition, as though just to get it out of the way. And then there’s Kingdom of Heaven, my personal nomination for the film that’s been most improved following the addition of 48 minutes’ worth of extra material. In fact, I would go on to suggest that the director’s cut is the best of the ‘revival epics’, an outstanding piece of work on both a technical and narrative level that fleshes out its characters, provides a better historical context and throws in extra lashings of medieval tragedy.

It’s worth noting what a bold movie Kingdom of Heaven was to begin with. Much was made upon its release of writer William Monahan’s attempts to produce a screenplay that wouldn’t offend twenty first century viewers – in fact, it’s a script that appears fairly true to its most controversial character, Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb, or Saladin, the Sultan who is treated in the film as a towering figure of nobility and enlightenment. The Knights Templar, the other hand, emerge as its villains, the epitome of boorish Westerners on the make and in the ‘Holy Land’ for whatever they can take from it.

Also brave is the decision to make a serious film about the Crusades at all. Most people know basically what the Crusades were (though when I was at school, it was discretely airbrushed out of our History lessons), and there have been some very good documentaries on the subject, not least this recent series from the BBC. Less is known of the era’s politics, its various and ongoing tensions between contemporary factions. Kingdom of Heaven takes as its subject a real moment in history, the events leading up to and including Saladin’s recapture of Jerusalem. In order for it to make any sense, it has to explain everything – the various characters, their motivations and the broader historical narrative. That’s a lot for it to do, and a major job to get all this on the screen without sounding like a lecture. On the whole, both versions of the film succeed, though the director’s cut, with its padding, does a much better job of putting across all the necessary information.

The one character radically altered from historical reality is the film’s main focus, Balian of Ibelen, played in the film by Orlando Bloom. Actually a noble, in Kingdom of Heaven he starts as a blacksmith in some medieval French village, clawing out a living in a land pockmarked by death, dirt and disease. Lamenting the suicide of his wife, Balian’s life changes with the arrival of Baron Godfrey (Liam Neeson), returning briefly from Ibelin with the intention of finding his bastard son, who turns out to be none other than Balian himself. Godfrey gives Balian the opportunity to join him in the east, an offer that’s rejected initially but after the latter murders his brother, a corrupt priest played by Michael Sheen, he sees in Godfrey the chance to atone for the sin of his wife’s suicide by becoming the best of knights in the Holy Land. Soon enough, he enters Jerusalem and takes his place on the canvas of Middle Eastern politics as the leprous King Baldwin (Edward Norton, wearing a mask throughout the film) tries to keep the uneasy peace between Christians and Muslims, both placating Saladin’s vast army and keeping at arm’s length the ambitious Templar, Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas).

Everything you need to know about Balian is in the saying carved into a beam of his blacksmith’s shop – What man is a man who does not make the world better? Orlando Bloom, at the height of his fame when cast in the film, was handed the difficult job of making his character both credible and inspirational. He had to carry a huge movie on his shoulders and duly gained weight for the part, appearing muscular and doing all he could to shrug off the ‘pretty boy’ catcalls that were becoming the stock criticism of his talent as an actor. These were based in no small part on his performance in the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, in which he was handed the wooden, callow role whilst Johnny Depp got the best lines and Keith Richards impersonation. In the director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven, his expanded scenes show what a fine performance he actually put in. Capable of carrying the story and featuring in scenes – excised from the theatrical version – that demonstrate Balian’s ability to inspire and lead, there’s nothing at all wrong with his acting. Unfortunately, the shorter edition of Kingdom of Heaven that made it into theatres left a lot of this stuff on the cutting room floor, giving us in turn a truncated Balian who feels caught up in the tumultuous events in which he happens to have been dropped.

It’s an important point. If viewers don’t believe in Bloom’s Balian, then much of what makes the film work is lost. It becomes a tale about people in whom we can’t invest. Worse still than Bloom is the treatment dished out to Eva Green. Playing Baldwin’s sister, Sibylla, in the theatrical cut she comes across as little more than a medieval slapper, falling for Balian yet betrothed to Guy and handing him the kingship when Baldwin succumbs to his illness. What’s lost is her character’s entire background, which forms a small but vital sub-plot restored in the director’s cut. Without this, it’s difficult to see a point to Sibylla and certainly there seems little motivation in the ‘in shock’ character she has become by the film’s close.

Elsewhere, there are memorable turns from Brendan Gleeson, as Guy’s boorish henchman, and Jeremy Irons as a cynical Knight Hospitaler who exists to despair over the loss of mission to the Christian occupation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Both characters are as fine in the theatrical version as they are in the expanded edition. David Thewlis has a neat supporting role, and Ghassan Massoud is the epitome of assiduous nobility as Saladin. Kingdom of Heaven has a wealth of famous names popping up in minor roles – Kevin McKidd, Alexander Siddig, Philip Glenister, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Iain Glen (indeed, by coincidence, much of the cast of Game of Thrones appears in some shape or form), and small, crucial roles for Bill Paterson and Robert Pugh ended up being cut.

But where both versions of the film really come into their own is in the visual sense. Always capable of producing ravishing ‘looks’ for his films, Scott places Kingdom of Heaven within a historical setting that appears so authentic he might as well have invented a time machine in which to send his cast and crew back into the twelfth century. The two major battles look incredible and it’s practically impossible to tell where the human actors finish and the CGI takes over. The best shot, that of the Christian forces appearing on the horizon at a critical moment, really is superb, particularly the sight of an enormous cross glistening in the sun. That apart, the costumes and design work take some beating. I recall a comment about Scott’s Robin Hood in which it was wished that the film could have been anything like as good as the effort plunged into the way it looked. Kingdom of Heaven is every bit as lustrous. One of the closing shots, which depicts Saladin striding through Jerusalem’s former cathedral, Christian flags falling to the floor around him, demonstrates just how much attention has gone into the detail throughout. Only it’s better than Robin Hood because the plotting is so rich in detail and layers. I’d go so far as to argue that the director’s cut is an improvement on Gladiator, only it had the misfortune to be made later.

Sadly, the version screened in cinemas is the one scheduled by More4. It’s still a powerful piece of work, though the rushed story of certain characters and loss of subtlety makes it a film that isn’t always easy to follow. The politics are too complicated and the level of characterisation all too uneven. Yet the early part of the film, the scenes set in France, are wholly immersive and it’s only later, once Balian takes the route where people speak Italian until they speak something else, that it starts to lose its way.

Kingdom of Heaven: ***

Alexander (2004)

When it’s on: Tuesday, 12 June (11.00 pm)
Channel: ITV2
IMDb Link

There are a couple of flawed instances of epic cinema made in the wake of Gladiator on TV this week. As a lover of this sort of stuff, I’m going to tackle Kingdom of Heaven in time for its Friday screening, but tonight we get Alexander, Oliver Stone’s white elephant from 2004. It cost a truly epic $155m to make, just about clawed back its production costs thanks to the overseas market and remains one of the director’s most derided works.

Stone never appeared to get over the unfavourable reception for Alexander. Like Count von Schlieffen’s infamous plan, he tinkered with it relentlessly, releasing a director’s cut on DVD that basically reordered the theatrical version, later putting out an extended edition that threw in the kitchen sink. Whatever he did, nothing seemed to work, perhaps because, as in the grand German scheme to win a European war on two fronts, it was fatally flawed in the first place.

There’s no doubt Alexander the Great’s adventures deserve a treatment on the big screen. Stone wasn’t the first to tackle the subject. The trouble is that, even with a space of three hours there’s just too much to fit in. A story like his ought to be told over a series of films, perhaps splitting it into the early years, the conquest of Persia and finally the eastern expedition. Alexander was clearly someone who could do in a day what it took most people a month to accomplish, and then there’s his background, his family, the rise of Macedonia and its control of the Greek city states under his father, Philip. There are many themes to explore, event upon event to recount and the whole context of Alexander the Great within the sweep of world history to be covered. Given all this, Stone’s film could do little more than pick and mix from Alexander’s story to produce an incomplete picture. We’re introduced to situations and characters, the latter often played by the most iconic actors available, only to be whisked off onto some other tangent and leaving confused viewers to catch up. My favourite part of the tale is the cutting of the Gordian Knot and the heavy symbolism it implied, but this is excised from the film entirely.

In the meantime, Stone tries to have his cake and eat it, ensuring we know that Alexander is gay, or at least bisexual, yet making his relationship with Hephaistion quite chaste and inoffensive. Maybe he wasn’t allowed to show anything stronger than brotherly embraces and longing looks, especially when sitting on such a hefty budget, but my feeling is that if you’re going to make a historical film that promises a realistic, warts and all perspective, then the worst thing you can do is cop out just to spare the feelings of a demographic. To make matters worse, the male object of Alexander’s affections is played by Jared Leto, certainly a beautiful man yet reduced to a mumbling whisper. Stone proffers Irish accents on the Macedonians to emphasise their lowly background compared with the rest of Greece, and while a powerful and effective move it doesn’t favour actors who can’t master the brogue, like Leto.

Alexander himself is taken on by that most Irish of actors, Colin Farrell. Criticised for  being made to ‘blonde up’ he’s actually rather good in the part, not so famous that the film becomes a showcase for his talents but capable of standing tall in such a big production. Val Kilmer plays Philip and nearly runs away with the show, fortunately being assassinated before he can overshadow his son entirely. In a more bizarre casting decision, Angelina Jolie gets the part of Alexandra’s mother, Olympias, sporting a thick Slavic accent (her character is from a region that became modern day Croatia) and cavorting with snakes. The effect is to depict the ambitious Olympias as some kind of Gorgon, in the broadest sense, but it’s a muddled image because Jolie is just too glamorous to make it work. She’s fine in the scenes with Alexander as a child, but when she’s arguing with Farrell later, both going for the full Oedipal effect, the single year’s difference in the actors’ ages makes it look altogether weird.

A further irritation with any Stone movie is his tendency to use imagery so obvious that he might as well appear on the screen in key scenes to explain what he’s trying to pull off. Sometimes, these moments are surprisingly effective – Attulus (Nick Dunning, who’d enjoy the same scenery chewing role in The Tudors) is boasting about his family’s rise in the Macedonian court, and then he fixes Alexander with a look of such open hate that it’s clear our hero’s paranoia is picturing the meaning behind the words. At others, it’s awful. The eagle that glides above Alexander’s route east, only to vanish once he’s advanced too far, is based on his legend, but it’s a point hammered relentlessly. Various things Alexander says and does cuts to shots of Philip’s wall paintings of Greek mythology in order to ram home the comparison. The camera uses a red filter in depicting one battle that’s turned into a field of slaughter. Alexander makes a decision that goes down well with his men and sees, for an instant, his dead father looking on approvingly. Yuck!

But then, Alexander isn’t a complete mess. I confess to having watched it more times than the film probably warrants, once using a day off to see it at the cinema (incidentally, it’s the last time I remember the pleasure of an intermission) and viewing the Director’s Cut DVD periodically. Perhaps it’s because beneath the sludge, there’s something a bit special that got lost amidst the swathes of story flitting almost randomly from one moment in Alexander’s life to another so even the most attentive viewers become disorientated and, worse still, are forced to fill in bits of the saga for themselves.

The recreation of the Battle of Gaugamela – in reality, just one in a string of battles won by Macedonia over the Persian Empire – is incredibly well done. Not only does it depict much of what really happened on the field, it plays perfectly into Stone’s quick cutting hands; all the smoke, cries, stench of gore and confusion are present and correct on the screen. It also features the best of Vangelis’s music, which elsewhere is as overwrought as the melodrama it’s scoring. Stone uses his ’15’ certificate to full effect in depicting severed limbs and speared torsos – even now, the damage done by Darius’s chariot wheels makes me wince.

There’s also a noble attempt to screen the moment the army revolted on the banks of the Hyphasis River in India, Rory McCann getting the actual lines spoken by Alexander’s general, Craterus, as recorded by Roman historians. The widening gulf between the King and his forces is traced cleverly as Alexander abandons his Macedonian roots to take on the trappings of as Persian oligarch. And then there’s the use of that enormous budget. In places, it’s quite possible to see where all the money went – Alexander is a fabulous looking piece of work in terms of set design and costumes, and the shot of Babylon’s fabled Hanging Gardens is gorgeous.

Is it enough? Sadly not. Like Robert Rossen’s 1956 effort, which starred Richard Burton as the Great one, it’s too wide a canvas. Too much is going on behind the scenes. Stone may very well have chosen the best moments in Alexander’s life to commit to celluloid, but his is far from a complete picture and the weight of detail absent from the script is unforgivable. The director tries to get around it by having an aged Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins) narrate the events of Alexander’s life, but like the ramblings of an old man his tale is all over the place and tends toward a pat summary that does nothing to satisfy. The film’s tagline is Fortune Favours the Bold; sadly it doesn’t on this occasion. Fans of the story may wish instead to check out Michael Wood’s In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great, the TV historian’s epic 1997 journey into Asia that covers just about everything and does a far better job of explaining the man.

Alexander: **

Goal! (2005)

When it’s on: Saturday, 9 June (2.45 pm)
Channel: BBC2
IMDb Link

The football’s here! Euro 2012 means lots of lovely international matches on the telly, most fans making an initial date with the sofa to soak up every last minute of it before they get a week or so in and wonder whether life would really be better if they caught Greece taking on Russia. For those of us who follow England in these things and are cursed with being born after 1966, each tournament is a frustrating experience, a torment of going out on penalties at the quarter finals stage and believing, wrongly, that this isn’t good enough. At least this time, nobody’s expecting too much of the Three Lions. The TV schedules reflect this by not screening the usual slew of football films. There’s no When Saturday Comes, and that’s a good thing. No Escape to Victory, which somehow bridges a football match and The Great Escape, though the virtue ends there. Sadly, BBC4 often used to fling out a series of decent documentary films around this time, but Roy’s Boys have failed to inspire a repeat performance.

What we do have is Goal!, Danny Cannon’s FIFA-backed saga of a nobody who makes good over the course of the yarn. It’s the eternal fictional staple, the sort of fluff you used to read in comics as a kid, tapping into the emotions of every footie obsessed youngster because, well, it’s the stuff of dreams, isn’t it? You’re strutting your groovy stuff for the school/local team, when you spot a stranger on the sideline. He’s watching you. Making notes. Why, isn’t he the chief scout for Fulchester United? Yes, yes he is, and what’s this? He’s chatting to your coach, handing over a card and now you’re being called over…

In essence, this is the story behind Goal! only told on a grand scale, with a decent budget, real football teams, footage shot in actual training facilities used by genuine players, who turn up also. Our hero is Santiago Munez (Kuno Becker), an illegal immigrant from Mexico who’s now living in Los Angeles. He works, ekes out a living, but he just happens to be a wizard with the ball and, sure enough, he’s playing for his park side when his talent is noticed by former scout, Glen Foy (Stephen Dillane). Foy knows raw ability when he sees it. He arranges a trial for ‘Santi’ with Newcastle United, though the youngster has various pitfalls to overcome before he can even board a plane. Eventually making his way to the ‘Toon’ and via a series of incidents that threaten to derail his career, he gets his trial, his spell in the Reserves and ultimately a place in the first team, which coincides with the Magpies’ crucial run-in to clinch a Champions League place. The star striker they’ve signed, Gavin Harris (Alessandro Nivola), is a playboy enjoying the high life and out of touch with his public. Santi meets a girl, a local nurse named Roz (Anna Friel) who impresses him with her grounded feelings about footballers. The manager (Marcel Iures) is a wise Arsene Wenger type who both sees Santi’s potential and is frustrated by his adventures. Back in LA, our hero’s world weary dad (Tony Plana) thinks his dream will turn out to be just that.

There’s nothing new here. The above, spoiler-free paragraph suggests how the film will end, and yes, it’s just what you think. It’s every bit as riddled with clichés as one might expect, Santi’s progress to the top beset with happenings and events that come straight from your nearest boy’s own tall tale. Several elements save it from complete oblivion. The first is Becker himself. As the main character, he’s nobody’s idea of the next De Niro, yet he’s just the right mix of naivete and energy, with a boyishly handsome, wide open face that expresses all his emotion and desire in block capitals. Becker knows enough to look suitably awestruck when he interacts with Alan Shearer, David Beckham or Nivola’s made up star player. It’s a winning performance that just about does just what it has to in order for us to invest in him.

Secondly, Cannon manages to inject a sense of urgency in what happens, to keep the story moving along at the pace of a blistering counter-attack. This is filmmaking for the Sky Sports generation, match footage and training exercises soundtracked with the sort of rock music routinely played over a Sunday lunchtime goals compilation. Favourites like Oasis and Kasabian add muscle to the action as though it’s what their music was born to do. And the camerawork involving the games isn’t half bad. Often enough, these are the Achilles heel of all football films. Even the sainted Escape to Victory looked plodding when the match took place, despite featuring a host of legendary faces and the Ipswich first team. Not here. Goal!’s blend of actors and real players works really well. Steven Gerrard shadows Santi. Frank Lampard stars against our hero’s Newcastle boys. The appearance of big names like Raul, Zidane and Beckham (the latter’s cameo is enough to ensure his acting career should end here) gives the film a degree of authenticity, a place in the real world. There’s even a beautifully chosen shot of Sven-Goran Eriksson chatting up a blonde.

And yet the biggest flaw of the film is pretty much unavoidable. Conceived in Hollywood, by film people who wanted to bring football to the big screen, its contrived narrative (from a script written by Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais) can’t compete with the spontaneous drama of the real thing. By an unfortunate coincidence, its UK release came a couple of months after Liverpool’s win over AC Milan in the Champions League final, a match in which Rafa Benitez’s side hauled itself back from a three-goal deficit to clinch the tie on penalties. As the momentum of the game shifted from the Italians, real sporting virtuosity was taking place on the pitch, much as it did when an Azzurri side inspired by the adversity of match-fixing scandals back home overcame Germany in a thrilling World Cup semi-final. Compared with this, how can a football fiction possibly measure up, particularly one that, at heart, tells an age-old story that ends in box ticking, predictable glory?

It could be worse, and it was. If Goal! has a heart, it’s in its rags to riches central character. In the sequel, Santi gets his big money move to Real Madrid, which tells the story of a rich boy for whom it’s difficult to care. Goal! was intended to be a trilogy, ending with our man at the World Cup. But by Goal! III, the budgets and interest had all but dried up, leading to a straight-to-DVD release that had little but some stock footage from Germany 2006 and an embarrassed performance by Nick Moran to recommend it. Even Kuno Becker had the sense to restrict himself to a small guest role by that stage.

Goal!: **

A Very Long Engagement (2004)

When it’s on: Thursday, 7 June (3.20 pm)
Channel: ITV1
IMDb Link

Jean-Pierre Jeunet followed the immensely popular Amelie with 2004’s A Very Long Engagement, an adaptation of Sebastien Japrisot’s novel. Also starring Audrey Tautou, the gamine, eponymous star of Amelie, this film was released with a big budget, a host of stars (including a pre-Piaf Marion Cotillard and Jodie Foster’s small role) and thousands of extras.

It’s a film centred on World War One, a conflict that has been dwarfed by Second World War movies in Britain and America but, perhaps unsurprisingly, carries especial resonance for France. Losing a generation of young men to the fighting on the Western Front, the Tricolor also suffered the ignominy of court-martialling thousands of deserters, including many who self-mutilated in an effort to be sent home. It wasn’t long before the authorities got wind of such stunts, executing many as they sought to keep up the number of willing bodies prepared to go over the top and get themselves machine gunned for their country.

The soldiers’ desperate craze for shooting bullets through their own hands forms the subject of A Very Long Engagement. Tautou plays Mathilde Donnay, a young girl from Brittany who attempts to find out what has happened to her fiance, Manech (Gaspard Ulliel). Mathilde learns that Manech fell increasingly into depair whilst in his trench, suffering his own bullet and, along with four others condemned to stay in no man’s land (the blasted to bits area between the French and German lines). Refusing to believe he’s dead, despite all the evidence – including a grave – pointing to the contrary, Mathilde starts to investigate. What she pieces together is the story of all five condemned men, their wives and sweethearts, and the corrupt system that allowed French generals to ignore pardons issued from the Presidency. Her research also puts her on the trail of Tina Lombardi (Cotillard), a woman in a similar position to her but one who resolves her issues by killing those she sees as culpable.

As a story, A Very Long Engagement is all over the place, weaving from Mathilde’s tale in 1920, back in time to the trenches, mixing Jeunet’s filming with stock footage and using overlays to convey the characters’ thoughts. An anecdote about the past quickly reverts to the relevant events being dramatised before snapping back, and there’s the jarring clash between Mathilde’s picture postcard life in rural Britanny and the horrors of the front. But this is entirely the point. In one scene, Mathilde asks to be taken to the killing ground where Manech died, only to find it’s now a field, the trenches filled in and crops grown to mask the horrible things that happened there. Jeunet spares little in terms of awful detail. Whilst there’s remarkably little blood as soldiers are mowed down, the camera highlights the dirt, rain and grime of war on the Western Front. Men sleep with rats. Food is invariably served cold. A French soldier wears German boots because they’re better quality and can cope with the often waterlogged ditches that are their home. Shells fall often, the sick fear on the mens’ faces evident as the explosions deafen and they’re covered in displaced muck. Manech’s reasons for his emotional ruin are obvious, not just in Mathilde but the idyll in which they were both raised and came to love each other.

Mathilde is every bit as adorable as one might expect. Lame as a consequence of the polio she contracted as a child, she nevertheless has a cheerful determination to find Manech. At the moments when her hope seems to have gone, she retreats to her room and plays the tuba, replicating the sound of distress calls. Just as there’s a clear juxtaposition between the worlds of Mathilde and Manech, the contrast with Tina is also explored, the latter using sex and death while Mathilde relies on her charm and the support of an endlessly patient family. Cotillard plays Tina as nothing less than a beautiful angel of death. Jodie Foster is another lover of one of the condemned men. He asks her to bear another child because that will give them six and six children will get him sent home. Unfortunately, he can no longer have children and asks her to sleep with his friend, which leads to an unlikely love affair.

Fans of stories with multiple tangents will be well served. The tales spinning off from the central one are diverting and uneven, but the theme is the same and concerns the effect war has on everyone. The filming is, in places, absolutely breathtaking, from the sweeping camera angles following Mathilde’s train journeys to Paris, to the lingering shots of soldiers who survive in the alcoves they’ve fashioned in the trench walls. There’s a really fine bit of work that precedes the first time Mathilde and Manech make love. As he goes through a series of matches to light the dark, each time he blows one out she removes an item of clothing. It’s both innocent and sexy, and a real change in tone from the standard Hollywood love scene where the characters just seem to go at each other with unrestrained passion. There’s no lack of that quality here, but it’s more considered, certainly more stylish and, like many other scenes from this film, quite memorable.

A Very Long Engagement: ****

The Queen (2006)

When it’s on: Thursday, 31 May (8.00 pm)
Channel: ITV3
IMDb Link

You’ll forgive me if this entry gets a bit ‘bloggy’ (and if you can’t, there’ll be another one along tomorrow), but that’s what you get with a historical drama that covers such recent ground. I think most of us know what we were doing on the day we learned Princess Diana had died. Whether you cared about her or not, it was one of those ‘out of tune’ moments, the sort of impact news that stunned the world because relatively young royals, or even former royals, just didn’t snuff it like that, instead lingering on into quiet infirmity. It’s difficult to believe a more shocked reaction if the news headlines had trumpeted the arrival of curious extra terrestrials on our planet.

I remember exactly what I was doing. In the final stages of moving from our flat in fashionable West Didbury to a house in the more suburban eastern end, the future Mrs Mike and I were off to clean up the old place so we could get our deposit back. With all our furniture shifted, we took our cleaning products and a radio, only to learn to our horror that every station simply rotated the same three or four songs betwixt sombre announcements of the royal passing. I seem to recall some anodyne Toto nonsense being played again and again. The level of grief intensified. Early during the following week, the first shop in Didsbury Village announced it would be closed during the funeral on Saturday as a mark of respect and this was steadily followed by all others, as though everyone was trying to out-mourn each other in the face of ever-increasing wailing that frankly became rather surreal.

Personally, I didn’t care. Not one bit. I had nothing against Diana, but I wasn’t the slightest bit interested in her either. To me, the levels of press intrusion she faced probably were beyond any semblance of reasonable proportion; then again, she was an expert media player and knew exactly how to court the tabloids. You can’t live in the public eye to the extent she did and expect much in the way of privacy. In any event, I was 25. On the day of the funeral, I answered the phone with a cheerful ‘Mo(u)rning!’ and went to the pub I knew would be frequented with like-minded people to get well and truly soaked.

I didn’t know much about the temporary hatred of the rest of the Royal Family, the topic of Stephen Frears’s The Queen, because I wasn’t bothered. But I knew all about Tony Blair, expertly mimicked in the film by Michael Sheen. As a Labour Party member, I voted for him to be leader in 2004 in the wake of John Smith’s death. I liked Smith. He came with massive dollops of credibility, yet compared with Blair he was old school. The new leader brought fresh energy to the table, vital as the Conservatives lurched towards the end of their long, long tenure like a slowly dying, sleaze-riddled leviathan. In short, I opted for whoever I thought would win. True to form, Blair looked like a Prime Minister long before he eventually took office. It felt as though good times were on the horizon. And then three months into his tenure, the most famous woman in the world died.

Diana only appears in The Queen via media footage of her, yet her shadow looms over the Royal Family, an ‘establishment’ of which she was apparently never a part. Her death provokes ill feelings towards Queen Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren) as the monarch refuses to bend royal protocol in lamenting her demise. Eventually, her mind is changed by Blair, a more astute judge of public opinion who steadily urges her to play a role. Yet before this happens, the Queen faces accusations of being blinkered and uncaring, retreating to Balmoral with her family and trying to let the mournathon cry itself out miles away. Bluff Prince Philip (James Cromwell) takes the children on deer hunting expeditions to take their mind off it. A wavering Prince Charles (Alex Jennings) oscillates between familial duty and attempting to bridge the gap with Blair. As for the PM, he swans around in a Newcastle United shirt, taking in trendy Republican sentiments from Cherie (Helen McCrory) and accounts of how well he’s doing in the opinion polls from a horribly oily Alistair Campbell (Mark Bazeley).

Pre-Spitting Image, it was difficult to imagine anyone getting away with this sort of thing, a ‘warts and all’ (well, nearly) hard stare at the inner chambers of the monarchy and about real people who are still alive. Yet Frears gets it about right, transforming a ruler who’s been on the throne during most peoples’ living memories yet whose feelings remain by and large a mystery. It works because Mirren’s Elizabeth is on the money, drily witty and introspective, completely believable as someone capable of spellbinding Tony Blair. Her best moments come perhaps during her pithy little asides with Robin Janvrin (Roger Allam), her Private Secretary. Baron Janvrin was, in reality, still a Deputy in 1997, but it’s a small inconsistency and the warm relationship between the on-screen pair is obvious.

In a film where the small moments count the most, its most moving scenes concern the Queen’s sighting of a magnificent Red Deer whilst she’s stranded alone on the road from Balmoral. Later, the deer’s killed, shot by a stockbroker and clearly dying a slow, painful death. It causes HRH some dismay, and it’s here you discover the beast wasn’t meant to represent Diana at all, but instead the Institution to which she belongs and that she must save.

The finest irony of The Queen is that it ends with Blair at the height of his powers and feeling he’s now his monarch’s equal. She reminds him that the day will come when he’s in similar trouble. In the year the film was released, the PM was serving out his final days in office and facing heavy criticism for the war in Iraq. Its screening today comes as the UK prepares to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee, which seems to have rekindled this country’s love affair with its Royal Family. In the meantime, Blair’s appearance at the Leveson Inquiry found him confronted with accusations of being a war criminal. He remains the model for satirists wishing to create fictional politicians for whom popularity is everything. Queen Elizabeth continues to be largely enigmatic. No prizes for guessing who’ll be the more fondly remembered.

The Queen: ***

The Road (2009)

When it’s on: Sunday, 27 May (10.00 pm)
Channel: BBC2
IMDb Link

Post-apocalyptic films are nothing new. A couple of weeks ago, I covered I am Legend on these pages. Made two years before The Road, it proved there was life in the genre, yet John Hillcoat’s latter work – adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel – is kind of the anti-I am Legend. The theme of loneliness is discarded for one of almost unremitting bleakness. Will Smith lived in relative comfort even in an empty New York. The Road portrays an America in which all good things have gone. Its world is a dying one in which the few remaining humans scratch out the meanest of existences.

Most of the critical acclaim for this film went to actors Viggo Mortsensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee as Man and Boy, but equally good are the cinematography and production design. The Road presents a land without colour. Its washed out, grey palette is utterly appropriate and as repellent as the main characters in their dirt and ancient clothes. Some unexplained catastrophe has taken place on a planetary scale. Man and Boy make their way towards the sea, doing all they can to avoid human contact – because most surviving people prey on the weak for food – in the kind of hope that could be futile, indeed it’s implied that the end of their journey won’t necessarily end well, but Man can’t allow Boy to fall into despair. So they travel, walking past lifeless trees and ruined houses, occasionally stopping to search for food, treating every noise with suspicion, pushing a shopping trolley that’s laden with their few meagre possessions.

An early scene that takes place in an old mansion – where Man discovers exactly what happens to many of the surviving people – provides a harrowing note of drama, yet much of the film’s interest lies in the dynamic between the leads. There’s a lovely balance of sensibilities – Man regretful and slowly dying of cancer; Boy hopeful and open – and a real honesty. The chemistry is beyond doubt. Yet there’s tension also. Man’s belief that everyone they come across must be hostile is sometimes correct, but more and more it’s apparent that he’s alienating them from any possibility of connecting with anyone else. Boy’s exasperation with his father increases as he longs for company, and in that company a sort of hope and continuity. Their past life is outlined in flashbacks, which depict the life Man had with his wife, Woman (Charlize Theron), before the catastrophe, and her mental anguish at giving birth in a dying world.

One of the more impressive aspects about The Road is the relative lack of CGI. Parts of it were filmed around the areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina, which replicated the environment of the film. It’s believable, because it’s really there. The same’s true for the lack of meat on Mortensen’s bones. Ever the method actor, Mortensen starved himself and took to wearing the same clothes and not washing for weeks, eventually getting turfed out of stores for the way he smelled. In the film, this clash between the two worlds is made explicit in a scene where Man and Boy uncover a secret hoard of provisions. For two days, they’re able to live like people used to. The tender way Man smokes a cigar gives an almost heartbreaking image of things lost, never to return.

The Road isn’t an easy watch. Its effort to depict a realistic post-apocalyptic backdrop ensures the lack of colour and indeed life. Man and Boy look ill because they most likely are, half-starved and exposed to an environment that has killed just about everything in it. Yet the emotional core is sublime, the acting between the two leads first rate, whilst cameos by some well respected performers – Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce turn up, playing very different people – are entirely credible.

The Road: ****

I am Legend (2007)

When it’s on: Thursday, 17 May (10.00 pm)
Channel: ITV2
IMDb Link

The first half of I am Legend is brilliant, the first ten minutes especially so. I’ve always thought CGI is best used with static objects, where it can produce wonderful results, and it’s deployed to great effect here in recreating New York as a dead city, devoid of people. Flora is creeping back onto the Manhattan streets. Brooklyn Bridge is a collapsed ruin. Wild animals run and hunt along the empty boulevards. There’s no one… no one that is but Robert Neville (Will Smith), who spends the daylight hours cruising the roads at the sort of top speed never seen outside Grand Theft Auto. It’s three years since the events that led to this state of affairs. Neville believes he’s the last man on earth. He leaves messages on all radio frequencies. They aren’t returned. He practises his golf off the wing of a fighter plane that nobody will ever sit in. The sound of glass shattering in the distance should be satisfying, but there’s no one with whom to share the moment.

Smith’s great as Neville. Considering for much of the film, he’s the only human actor on the screen, he makes a demanding role look effortless. The cloying loneliness his character ought to be feeling appears natural, and it comes out in delightful, unexpected moments, as in the conversations he holds with mannequins that he’s arranged in a DVD store, or the way he talks to his German Shepherd, Sam, like there’s a real two-way dialogue. These bits are so good that once the actual tension in the story arrives, it’s almost disappointing.

And sadly, this is where it starts to fall apart. Neville isn’t alone in the city. There’s a reason for him barring the doors and windows at dusk and sleeping with a gun. Far from being empty, New York is home to mutant monsters, victims of the plague that has wiped out most of the people. Only able to come out at night, there’s nothing other than rage within them. Neville’s a scientist. He doesn’t know why he’s immune, but he spends time testing out various cures based on his own blood. Our first meeting with the ‘Infected’ is powerful stuff. Sam runs after a deer into a disused building and Neville has little choice but to follow. He knows what might lurk in the dark recesses within, and sure enough he comes across a nest of the creatures. They’re ‘asleep’ and he has to back away without making a sound.

The ‘Infected’ are fine when they’re viewed in shadow or the things howling in the night outside Neville’s fortified townhouse. It’s when we get to see them properly, in their full CGI glory, and it sucks because the downside of computer generated imagery is things that move and need to look like they’re alive. By all accounts, the producers did an exhaustive series of tests before giving up on actors wearing make-up and prosthetics and opting, disappointingly, for creations with no weight whatsoever.

Fans of the Richard Matheson novel upon which this film is based are likely to feel ill served also. The book can’t be recommended highly enough (I personally love the audiobook, read with suitable atmosphere by Robertson Dean), particularly because it carries such a satisfying twist in the tale that the entire concept of ‘legend’ is turned on its head. 1964’s American-Italian adaptation, The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price and made on a tight budget, is a lot more faithful to the source material. The 2007 film fails to trust Matheson’s concept, instead going for a shirked second half in which Neville indeed finds a cure, along with a woman (Alice Braga) who turns up at the optimal moment wittering about a survivors’ camp. The build-up to the finish drops the natural suspense in favour of action, for no very good reason. But it could have been even worse. There’s an alternative ending available on certain DVD editions (not mine; I went for pure vanilla) that offers a more feelgood conclusion. It would have made even less sense and turned the Copout-o-meter up to 11. As it is, the bleak philosophical climax served up by Matheson is entirely jettisoned, and for what?

I am Legend: **

Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)

When it’s on: Thursday, 10 May (11.15 pm)
Channel: Film4
IMDb Link

And there’s me thinking that Sweeney Todd was a real person! He started out as a character in a penny dreadful called The String of Pearls (serialised in 1846-47), and quickly became the subject of stage plays. Over time, promoters hyped the story as a recounting of the facts, or at least based on real-life, and it’s always possible that Victorian London could very well have witnessed such monstrosities (one just has to read Dickens to tap into hints of the ghoulish goings on beneath the surface).

Various film versions followed before a production of Stephen Sondheim’s musical, Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street was given the green light. Once Tim Burton was attached to the project, the director’s usual muses – Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter – also got involved, with questions asked of what the film might amount to. Burton’s films had previously contained musical sequences but he’d never directed an out-and-out musical. Depp and Bonham Carter hadn’t sung professionally before. Fortunate then that the result was a bloody marvel.

It turns out, all misgivings aside, that Burton was the perfect choice to helm Sweeney Todd. Bringing his now traditional Gothic sensibility to the look of the film, the camera prowls along London’s inky streets, all shadows, swarthy characters and a den for dark deeds. Every corner suggests some awful menace. The brighter areas emerge as little better. The film’s patrician character, Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), is corrupt. Years before, he set false charges against a barber named Benjamin Barker (Depp) because of his lust for his wife. Barker was duly sentenced to a life sentence of hard labour in Australia, but now he’s back, seeking revenge under his new identity of Sweeney Todd. Soon settling back into his old barber shop, with the help of Mrs Lovett (Bonham Carter), who sells ‘the worst pies in London’ from the store below, Tood is reunited with his chosen instruments of vengeance, his straight razors, and the quest for retribution begins.

The script for Sweeney Todd picks and chooses from Sondheim’s musical, honing in on the revenge narrative and making a bee-line for the gorier aspects of the story. The blood-letting, when it comes, is horribly real. Sweeney Todd earns its 18 Certificate, a risky decision on the part of the production that pays off because the gloves come off in terms of what it allows itself to show, which is just about everything. There must have been a conscious moment of decision at some point early in the film’s development – hey, this is a story about a murderer, whose victims are then baked into pies and everyone loves the pies – where they had to choose whether to treat the material lightly or give it the full gory treatment. They went for the latter. Good call.

A regular actor for Burton, Depp again underwent extensive make-up processes to transform himself into the white faced, murderous ghoul that is Sweeney Todd. In a role utterly without cuteness, he’s the ideal man for the job, suffusing Todd with nothing but the pure drive for vengeance. It obsesses him to the point that he barely functions when not acting out his murders. He also has little but hate for London – early in the film, as he’s sailing into the city with Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bowers), both sing about it, but whereas Hope’s verses are filled with optimism, Todd imagines a hole in the world like a great black pit, inhabited by the vermin of the world.

Once one gets over the channelling of David Bowie in his singing voice, Depp’s performance can be relished as a cracker stuffed with malevolence and moral emptiness. Better still is Helena Bonham Carter as the tragic Mrs Lovett. Pathetically imagining a future for herself and Todd (realised in a segment that has the unlikely pair on a beach holiday – Depp has never looked more depressed), she becomes his willing partner in crime when she agrees to use his victims as ingredients, which has the unexpectedly happy side effect of making her pies not just edible, but cornering the market.

It’s all going to come to a sticky end, of course, but before that there’s blood, blood and more blood, coursing through the credits and from Todd’s grisly barber’s chair, which is fitted with a special trapdoor he can operate with a switch that turns the former patrons into meat pie fillings. The dull thud of their bodies onto the stones below is as sickening as any number of cut throats.

Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street: ****