Tag: Keith Allen

Eddie the Eagle (2016, Dexter Fletcher)

Eddie the Eagle is charming. It’s assured–great script from Sean Macaulay and Simon Kelton–and a wonderful sense of time and place (eighties UK and Europe, then Canada) from director Fletcher. Fletcher’s got some problems I’ll get to in a bit but Eddie’s got a phenomenal feel. It’s a deft homage to eighties popular filmmaking, with an ecstatic synthesizer-ish score from Matthew Margeson. It’s also extremely self-aware of how films have changed since then. Fletcher’s use of sports montage and one-liners–he’s a competent director, but he has a hard time with the first act.

Eddie’s an inspiring, true story movie. It’s about this British guy (Eddie) who, while not an athlete, ended up in the Olympics. I’d never heard of it because… you know, sports. Taron Egerton is the lead, Hugh Jackman is his trainer. Jo Hartley and Keith Allen are his parents. All of them give great performances. Jackman’s giving a really strong movie star performance. Hartley and Allen have to be comic relief but also entirely human and relatable. Egerton’s performance is thoughtful and deliberate. He’s playing a colorful (in reality) person and he gets past the color.

In some ways, Eddie makes fun of its own Britishness to get by. It’s well-produced Britishness, but there’s a wink about it all. It’s oddly appropriate, as the action moves to Germany, because it orients the audience quite comfortably. We’re in the British perspective, we’re looking in on the European, just like Egerton would be if the character had time to do anything but ski jump.

The ski jumping is where Fletcher gets into his most trouble. He’s better directing the actors than he is shooting scenes of the actors, but that problem is far less significant. Eddie is about the sport of ski jumping; it seems like it should be an important thing to show. Fletcher botches most of it. He and cinematographer George Richmond love the scale of the film–the mountains, the mountain ski villages, the ski jumps–and they convey it well. There’s just nothing in the filmmaking when it comes to the jumps. They get better, but they get better because they’re less ambitious (mostly just close-ups on Egerton) and the audience is identifying with Egerton more and more throughout the runtime.

Fletcher, Macaulay, Kelton, Egerton, Jackman, everyone–Margeson, he needs another call out–they do strong work. Fletcher’s inability as an “action” director aside, he is the one who makes the film so frequently rewarding. Eddie the Eagle’s really good.

And awesome cameos from Jim Broadbent and Christopher Walken.

Shallow Grave (1994, Danny Boyle)

Shallow Grave has bold colors. The production design–by Kave Quinn–isn’t particularly good. Over ninety percent of the film takes place in a rather boring apartment. But that boring apartment has a lot of bold colors. Sure, photographer Brian Tufano doesn’t know how to shoot those bold colors to make them effective, but he doesn’t know how to light any of the other scenes either. Grave is slick and economical, but no one–not the actors, not director Boyle, certainly not writer John Hodge–ever makes it feel particularly creative. It’s got a low budget so they shoot it like a play. With occasionally interesting, but inert, visuals.

As far as the actors, of the three principals–Ewan McGregor, Kerry Fox, Christopher Eccleston–only McGregor shows any life. None of them have much character depth to work with, which obviously doesn’t help. Eccleston eventually gets the biggest part of the film, but he’s so poorly handled through the first act, he doesn’t do anything interesting. It’s not his fault, there’s just nothing interesting in that script of Hodges’s.

The film, ostensibly a thriller, is often tedious. The script has some funny dialogue exchanges–the trio live in that boldly color apartment and mock prospective tenants they do not like–but not enough to even temporarily disguise the logic holes.

Boyle’s composition is often excellent and Masahiro Hirakubo’s editing is outstanding. But there’s just not enough to the film. It’s trite, cynical, forcibly amusing. Grave’s one controlled misstep after another.

1/4★

CREDITS

Directed by Danny Boyle; written by John Hodge; director of photography, Brian Tufano; edited by Masahiro Hirakubo; music by Simon Boswell; production designer, Kave Quinn; produced by Andrew Macdonald; released by Polygram Filmed Entertainment.

Starring Kerry Fox (Juliet Miller), Christopher Eccleston (David Stephens), Ewan McGregor (Alex Law), Ken Stott (Detective Inspector McCall), Keith Allen (Hugo), Peter Mullan (Andy), Leonard O’Malley (Tim) and Colin McCredie (Cameron).

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Captives (1994, Angela Pope)

Nearly seventy percent of Captives is a fantastic romantic drama. Julia Ormond is a newly divorced dentist who starts working part-time at a minimum security prison, where she begins a liaison with inmate Tim Roth. Frank Deasy's script concentrates primarily on Ormond and her experiences–with occasions scenes for Roth amongst the inmates, but that first seventy minutes of the film is from Ormond's perspective.

Director Pope carefully, meticulously presents Ormond's story, from her experiences with her ex-husband, her friends, her family, herself. The romance with Roth is an otherworldly occurrence, much different from the noise and movement of Ormond's regular life. Most of their initial scenes–he's on a release program so he can attend college (the film establishes him as an okay guy real fast)–are in static environments. It's actually after that seventy minute mark, when Ormond disappears for a week of the present action and Roth becomes the protagonist, where Pope finally brings Roth into Ormond's motion-filled world.

It's a terrible scene too; they're arguing on a busy roadway. The acting's great, but the scene's bad, because after the seventy minute mark, when Captives all of a sudden becomes a thriller and no longer a quiet mediation on class and marriage and other such things, the movie falls apart.

Ormond's work here is indescribably fantastic. Roth's great and everything, but Ormond's performance is singular.

Pope's direction is solid; good supporting turns from Keith Allen and Colin Salmon.

Excellent photography from Remi Adefarasin.

Captives misfires, Ormond and Roth do not.