IS THIS THING ON?**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 8

IS THIS THING ON? is an absolutely delightful romantic dramedy based, rather improbably, on the life of Liverpudlian stand-up comedian John Bishop. Safely transposed to contemporary America, the movie stars Lego Batman Will Arnett and JAY KELLY’s Laura Dern as an unhappily married couple and parents of two sparky ten-year old boys.  As the movie opens they call time on their marriage: she stays in the suburban marital home with the dogs and the kids and he moves to an apartment in the city. Both are good people. In fact everyone in the movie is good people.  Yes they were unhappy and they split but there was no infidelity and there’s very little meanness.

What separation gives them is the chance to discover their identities as middle-aged people separate from each other and their identities as parents.  Who are they when considered on their own terms and in isolation?  She filled the void after retiring from sport with having a family but now goes back to coaching. He walks into a bar and is too cheap to pay the cover charge so ends up doing an open mic stand up slot. He discovers a whole new side of himself as well as a wonderfully welcoming and inclusive community of comedians.  And suddenly, both happy, the couple can be happy with each other.

This is a movie that could be sentimental and twee and obvious but it’s actually rather finely balanced and beautifully observed. Given that it was written by three men and based on an autobiography of a man, I was surprised by how well it captured the emotions of a middle-aged woman who sacrificed her career to raise a family. Bradley Cooper’s direction is assured and unshowy except for one bravura scene that takes us from an argument in an attic into a stand-up show.  The acting is universally good although perhaps the two leads were a little too old for their parts. Bradley Cooper has an hilarious and scene-stealing supporting role as a struggling actor. I also really loved how Cooper captured the energy and excitement and friendship of the stand-up scene.  He seems to have an authentic and love and appreciation of stand-up comedy and it shines through.

In a sense, this film is the lighter comedy counterpart to AFTER THE HUNT. It’s  a grown-up nuanced film about grown-ups with real marital issues but that shows how real marriages endure and even thrive on honesty and forbearance.  More of this please!

IS THIS THING ON? is rated R and has a running time of 124 minutes. It will be released in the USA on December 19th.

THE LEGO MOVIE 2: THE SECOND PART

THE LEGO MOVIE 2 is a delightful, visually inventive, wonderfully funny movie that kept me thoroughly entertained. I have no idea whether kids would find it as funny as so much of the humour was knowing and seemed aimed at adults with a familiarity with the latest MAD MAX film, for example.

The film picks up where the original movie left off. The conceit is the same.  We have a framing device of a kid playing with lego. The adventures he acts out become represented in animated form in the lego world.  As the first movie ends, the kid sister shows up with her giant duplo bricks - a threat to his intricately built lego world. This sets up the conflict in the second movie. Our band of lego heroes led by awesome nice guy Emmett (Chris Pratt) have to band together to find the duplo invaders led by "TheQueenofWhateverIWannaBe" (Tiffany Haddish). Along the way we get a nice time travel story and of course a touching resolution about playing together.

I laughed till I cried watching the film. The Mad Max spoof - the arrogant angst of Lego Batman - the visual hilarity of Duplo world - another superb scene-stealing cameo from Richard Ayoade as a lego ice cream cone - annoyingly catchy pop songs that are knowingly telling you how annoyingly catchy they are - there's nothing not to like here.  But as I said - it just all feels so adult. I would be interested to hear how kids responded to it. 

THE LEGO MOVIE 2: THE SECOND PART has a running time of 107 minutes and is rated PG. The film went on global release last weekend. 

THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE

THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE is a consistently hilarious, smart and actually rather moving animated comedy from the team that brought us THE LEGO MOVIE. It's easily the best DC movie in the current reboot, and that includes the gloomily nihilistic Nolan films that it spoofs. To be sure, to get the most out of the film if you're familiar with many many iterations of Batman on screen - from the early Adam West TV show, through Michael Keaton to Nolan and the Battfleck.  But you don't need to be a fanboy - just someone who's lived through the last decades of pop culture enough to understand the tropes that this film is ribbing - the idea of Batman as a hugely egotistical psychologically damaged billionaire whose very existence requires the very supervillains he wants to protect his city from.  

In this film, Will Arnett plays Lego Batman as a lonely douchebag obsessed with his own abs, reluctant to let anyone into his life for fear of losing them as he lost his parents years ago. His deliberate isolation is broken when adopts a son (Robin - played by Michael Cera) while distracted by the pretty new Commissioner Barbara Gordon (Rosario Dawson) and butler Alfred (Ralph Fiennes) forces their intimacy by revealing to Robin that one of his two dads is Batman.  The emotional arc of the story is thus whether Batman can admit that he likes having a family of sorts - Albert, Robin and Barbara.  And that he even likes having the Joker around. Meanwhile, the plot sees the Joker abandon his usual band of Batman villains to recruit an even scarier evil army of assorted fictional villains (everyone from King Kong to Sauron) to force Batman to acknowledge that he's his arch-enemy.

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES

Unsurprisingly, I did not have a good time watching this latest live action feature film in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise.  I came to it neutral, having enjoyed the cartoons as a kid, but finding the previous films dull and the so-called witticisms of the turtles grating.  This reboot does little to change that diagnosis.  The best that can be said about it is that after the "alien origins" scare, the story is faithful to its source materials.  The four turtles, named after Renaissance painters, are mutated into humanoid ninja-fighting vigilantes who live in the sewers with their jedi master mutated rat-father Splinter.  They have a female friend and accomplice called April O'Neil, who's a pretty journalist and an evil nemesis too. In this film, that's a corporate greedy bastard who wants to infect the city so that he can sell it a cure and become massively rich - and of course, that cure comes from stringing up the turtles and extracting their mutated genes.

I found the relentlessly-alecky banter from the turtles really grating and there's none of the charisma that, say, Corey Feldman brought to the original voice-cast. Megan Fox does her standard pretty girl in distress thing as April O'Neil and it's not so much her fault that the part is woefully underwritten. But even weirder, we have Will Arnett, fifteen years her senior, playing her goofy cameraman. There's meant to be sexual tension between the two but it just comes across as creepy and icky.  Finally, we've got Whoopi Goldberg as April's editor - utterly wasted.

The movie is made in a very workmanlike way. You've got all the martial arts scenes and special effects and loud music and the compulsory sprinkling of "kowabungas". There's nothing to get excited about and the final thirty minutes just descends into a loud and rather dull working through of gears.

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES has a running time of 101 minutes and is rated PG-13.    The film is on global release.

THE NUT JOB

It is probably unhealthy that so much of our animated children's movie come from Pixar. It leads us to certain expectations of what makes a great film. We want cuddly cuteness our kids can relate to, enough wit for the adults, a positive learning message and something that tugs a little on the heartstrings. These movies are produced to such a high quality and are so good on a number of metrics that any independent features have a tough job to impress us. Which doesn't mean they can't. But THE NUT JOB isn't that movie.  

This is a Canadian, South Korean production which shows in the irritating Psy-loaded end-credit.  The handsome CGI animation doesn't push the boundaries of how one depicts animals and I found the orchestral score over-insistent.   But the problem is really an over-complicated story - too many factions of animals, an over-complicated motivation for a heist. There are park squirrels and city animals and a shortage of nuts for winter and then something about breaking into a nut shop next to a bank and substituting the contents of the vault..... I'm actually getting bored now trying to relate it back to you.  But even this could have been overcome had it not been for the lack of any real charisma or wit from the voice cast. We all know Will Arnett is funny, so why isn't he funny as the rebellious purple squirrel hero, Surly? In fact, if anyone steals the show it's Brendan Fraser as the grey squirrel Grayson, who has an over-inflated opinion of his own heroism. Meanwhile, Katherine Heigl is utterly forgettable as the love interest, Annie the red squirrel. 

Overall, there's nothing to spark the imagination or move the heart in this film. It's well enough drawn but I doubt anyone would watch it a second time.  One for the kids on DVD and that's being generous.

THE NUT JOB has a running time of 85 minutes and is rated PG. The movie is on global release.

Random DVD Round-Up - THE LEGO MOVIE

If Marxist theories Slavoj Zizek made an animated kids movie, THE LEGO MOVIE would be it!  It'a audacious in its deep satirical criticism of modern consumer culture - creating an alarming but entertaining picture of a dystopia where people are subjected to an almost Orwellian fascist mind-control - fooled into buying over price coffee, too busy watching mindless TV shows to notice that big corporations rig the elections.  The ultimate irony is that this movie was produced by yet another corporate behemoth, and its gratingly catchy theme song "Everything's awesome" itself became a non-ironic hit, raking in ever more phat cash for President Business at Warner Brothers.

Random DVD Round-Up 4 - JONAH HEX

JONAH HEX should've been superb in the way that SOLOMON KANE was superb.  Based on pulp comics written by John Albano and illustrated by Tony DeZuniga, Jonah was a late ninteenth century bounty hunter in the Old West, sold to the Apaches by his father, his face disfigured by scars in  a tribal ritual, bound to protect the innocent, and battling alcoholism.  Jonah had no superpowers or skills other than being a damn fine shooter, and was the classic lone anti-hero.

The movie version of Jonah Hex abandons the simplicity of the original. It's as if the scriptwriters, Neveldine, Taylor (of CRANK fame) and William Farmer, just didn't trust the source material to be exciting enough, although as the former have disowned the script, perhaps the original was more coherent and faithful? Whatever the truth, the film version of Jonah Hex is given superpowers - he can speak to the dead - and his disfiguring scars aren't from an Apache battle but from being branded by his nemesis, evil Confederate general, Quentin Turnbull. The plot is also shoe-horned into contemporary political allegory, with Turnbull a kind of anti-Unionist terrorist determined to blow up the White House, and Jonah hired by President Grant to stop him.

The result is a short film (it's barely an hour and ten minutes long sans credits) that feels mashed up in the editing booth - over-stuffed with characters and allegory - and never given the time to breathe and establish itself. Josh Brolin's Jonah Hex is suitably brooding, but John Malkovich must go down as the most environmentally sustainable actor of all time, recycling his typical baddie tropes as Turnbull. Megan Fox looks sultry but is given little else to do as Hex's love interest, and actors of the calibre of Michael Sheen are wasted in small roles. It is a film destroyed in re-writes and conflicting visions - an unloved bastard of a film - and a crying shame.

JONAH HEX was released in summer/autumn 2010 and is now available to rent and buy.

Kids' flick round-up 1 - DESPICABLE ME

So I caught two kids' movies this week - both of which feature an Evil Mastermind who isn't as evil as he makes out to be. In both cases they have minions called Minion, and a Nemesis who out-evils them both. Both movies are set in the kind of juiced up day-glo world only animation can give us, and both try to have their cake and eat it - splicing cuddly feeeeeeelings with pop-culture banter and post-modern winking-at-the-audience in-jokes. And both feature all-star casts. I liked both, enjoyed both, but only one really moved me, and that's DESPICABLE ME.

In the old days, before the Berlin Wall fell, being Evil was easy. You leaved in a creeeepy Addams family house, you tortured people with medieval spiky things, and you affected an accent half-Soviet half Peter-Lorre. But poor anti-hero, Gru (Steve Carell), has been outpaced and outclassed by a young whipper-snapper called Vector (Jason Segel) who lives in a proper shiny evil lair complete with shark-tank and CCTV. Gru is evil, but hapless. Vector is evil, efficient, cocky and a royal pain in the ass.

Of course in our post-modern confessional culture no-one's really evil. Poor Gru had a mother straight out of developmental hell: nothing was ever good enough for her. And poor Vector was picked on at school. Really, these guys are just lovely, squeezy, fluffy little bunny rabbits on the inside.

So, when Gru adopts three cute cookie-selling orphan girls in order to use them to get access to Vector's layer, we know he's going to have his heart melted by them. And when he gets turned down by the Bank of Evil for the loan he needs to steal the moon, we know that his new kids and his minions, called Minions, are all gonna band together and build him a rocket ship anyways, MacGuyver styl-ee. Because, friends, we aren't in the world of Lemony Snicket, but little orphan Annie.

DESPICABLE ME is just, plain, no-nonsense cute. It tugs on the heart-strings. It's corn-dog cheese. But who doesn't love it when Gru does something selfless for the first time in his life and incinerates a fairground stall because the provincial dolt manning in has cheated his little girl out of a stuffed unicorn? And who doesn't cheer when Dr Nefario (Russell Brand) and the Minnions all band together to back Gru and build the rocket - pledging faith against all reason, all hope and all experience?

To be sure, Universal studios have tried to inject some adult-pleasing post-modern wit along the lines of movies such as SHREK and MADAGASCAR, but this is largely a distraction. Having a sign above the Bank of Evil saying "Formerly Lehman Brothers" is hardly Swiftian in its rapier-like subtlety. And having Gru use modern colloquial idiom just confuses his character with that of the ruthlessly teen-modern Vector. Nope. The strength of DESPICABLE ME is that we care about Gru and his girls, and we will him to succeed. And while this movie is no TOY STORY, it understands that underneath all the clever design and witty puns, ultimately, any movie, but especially a children's movie, succeeds in direct measure to how far its main characters elicit our sympathy.

DESPICABLE ME is on global release.

MONSTERS VS ALIENS - nothing special

MONSTERS VS ALIENS is a rather didactic, sporadically funny CGI animated film from DREAMWORKS - the studio that brought you SHREK. In contrast to SHREK, the incessant pop-culture references have been toned down, as have the fart jokes. Indeed, this movie makes a stab at being sweet and relying on old-fashioned physical humour in the manner of PIXAR movies. What hasn't changed is the classic DREAMWORKS didactisim. If SHREK is all about not being superficial and having self-esteem, MONSTERS VS ALIENS reads as a proto-feminist tract on female self-empowerment. Now, I'm the last person to object to such material, but it should at least be leavened by a steady stream of jokes. And on that score, MONSTERS VS ALIENS is well behind MONSTERS INC or THE INCREDIBLES, if not as out and out dull as BOLT 3D.

Reese Witherspoon is typically charming and engaging as Susan - a woman transformed in size and strength when hit by a meteor. She is sequestered by the government with other monsters, renamed Ginormica and asked to take-on an alien invasion by Gallaxhar, who covets her new powers. The movie is about Susan learning to embrace her strength and not to underestimate herself. It's also about her dumping her callow boyfriend (Paul Rudd) who can't cope with dating a woman who is more famous and powerful.

Where the movie does well is in its set-piece action sequences. I also loved Seth Rogen, Hugh Laurie and Will Arnett as the Monsters; Rainn Wilson as Gallaxhar and, most of all, Kiefer Sutherland as General W.R.Monger. I was less impressed by Stephen Colbert as President Hathaway (although that may have been due to his part being under-written - the scene where the President greets the alien probe is painfully unfunny.) But my biggest criticism is that the movie's moral message was just very heavy-handed and got in the way of the fun.

Finally, a quick word on the increased use of 3D. This movie uses 3D in the old fashioned "stuff coming out of the screen at you" manner rather than the pretentious "immersive" technique used in BOLT. I'm not convinced that either add anything to the movie-going experience. Rather, aren't we all convinced that it's just a cynical ploy to foil the pirates? The only recent movie I've seen where 3D actually enhanced the experience was Gil Kennan's brilliant MONSTER HOUSE.

MONSTERS VS ALIENS is on release in on global release.

Random DVD Round-Up 4 - THE BROTHERS SOLOMON

Bad taste alleged comedy in which two intelligent but infantile brothers (Wills Arnett and Forte) decide to shock their dad out of a coma by surrogate fathering a child. Yes yes. The result is as unfunny as the plot is plausible. Clunky direction, thin writing, forced humour make this straight to dustbin as opposed to straight to video.

THE BROTHERS SOLOMON was released in autumn 2007, promptly fell like a stone, and is available on DVD should you care to waste ninety minutes.

Random DVD Round-Up 2 - MONSTER IN LAW

MONSTER IN LAW is a deeply unfunny, painfully badly written rom-com rip-off of MEET THE PARENTS, from director of the infinitely better LEGALLY BLONDE. J-Lo stars a sweet girl who meets-cute with a sweet doctor (the anodyne Michael Vartan). They get engaged to the horror of his Barbara-Walters-like mega-successful mother, played by Jane Fonda. Coming back to the big screen with this role will go down as one of Fonda's biggest career mistakes. It's amazing to me that a woman who has been so politically engaged, and given such outstanding performances, would make such a shockingly banal film, playing such as two-dimensional character, so badly. Her character schemes against J-Lo's character. J-Lo's character schemes back. And then there's a ridiculous and unbelievable final scene where everyone gets mushy.

Pure cinema trash.

MONSTER IN LAW was released in summer 2005. It is available on DVD.

HORTON HEARS A WHO! - by far the best of the recent Dr Seuss adaptations

Like many of you, I grew up reading Dr Seuss, so his books are a cherished part of my childhood.* That's why it hurt so much when Jim Carrey and Mike Myers' live action versions of his books were less CAT IN THE HAT than Smelly Cat. But prejudice aside, I am pleased to report that HORTON HEARS A WHO! is a giant step forward. First off, the minute you see the animation you realise how intrinsically right it is to forgo actors dressed in prosthetics. Dr Seuss should feel whimsical and magical rather than forced and deliberate. And no matter how good Carrey and Myers are as comedians, they never managed to make all that make-up seem, well, natural. Directors Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino also make the right choice in keeping a lot of Dr Seuss' famous rhyming couplets in a voice-over narration from Charles Osgood. I particularly liked their little conceit of having Horton day-dream in Seuss' trademark 2-D style!

But back to basics. For those who don't know, you're in for a treat! Horton is a large, happy-go-lucky elephant who stumbles upon a delicate little speck sitting on a flower. He hears a little voice and makes contact with the tiny little Mayor of Who-ville, who lives in a miniature world upon that very speck. Horton and the Mayor realise that unless Horton can put the speck in a safe place, Who-ville will be destroyed by all the commotion. But first, Horton and the Mayor have to gather the courage to hold on to their belief in each other's existence; and to fight for the right to br heard, no matter how big or how small they are.

The directors handle the animation beautifully and the voice-cast also do a superb job. Steve Carell is charming as the Mayor and Jim Carrey is absolutely hillarious in a slightly more modulated performance than he typically gives. The script-writers manage to keep to a minimum the post-modern in-jokes that cover modern animation like poisonous pustules. And the defiantly pop-culture reference they do include - having Horton imagine himself as a manga hero - is absolutely brilliant. My only slight criticism is that the material is too thin for the run-time. Frankly, they could've trimmed the film down to 70 minutes and we would have all gone home as happy as after 85 minutes but without having mainlined as much glucose from the tofee popcorn.

HORTON HEARS A WHO is on release in the USA, Argentina, Chile, Germany, Russia, Singapore, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Estonia, Iceland, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, Spain, Belgium and the UK. It opens next week in Egypt, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Australia, Hong Kong and Croatia. It opens on March 27th in Croatia. It opens in April in France, the Czech Republic, Greece, Israel, Italy and Turkey. It opens in May in South Korea and in Japan in July.

*I even went to the same college as Dr Seuss, although I must confess that by the age of 16, the fact that John Le Carre was an old boy was far more impressive to me.

SEMI-PRO - Ricardian cinema

Will Ferrell was a hysterically funny bit-part player in frat-pack comedy, OLD SCHOOL. And in ANCHORMAN: THE LEGEND OF RON BURGUNDY, he got a showcase for his very special brand of comedy. Ferrell typically plays middle-aged men clinging onto the last vestiges of some earlier minor league fame. They are desperate, emotionally vulnerable men who act like spoiled children when real life catches up with them. They can be vicious and mean to their best friends and alienate their loved ones. But somehow these freaks always redeem themselves and come out smiling. I use the word freak advisedly. Ferrell's signature style is to selflessly embarass himself in the pursuit of a cheap laugh. No costume is too ludicrous - no nude scene over-looked. It's as though he is so deperate to raise a laugh that he throws himself onto the mercy of the audience. "Okay, what I'm doing here may be pretty lame, and you may have seen it in every other film I ever made, but I'm trying so very hard, pleeeeeeeeeease love me!"

The problem is this: Will Ferrell has been in so many films spoofing the 1970s that his movies now strike me as stale, cynical, lazy cash-ins. I haven't genuinely belly-laughed at a Ferrell movie in years. On the other hand, you can't damn his movies completely. After all, his attention to the costume and production design and his willingness to whip himself up into hysteria is, well, admirable.

The sad truth is that I have a lot of respect for Ferrell, but his movies have been delivering diminishing returns to the £10 ticket price ever since ANCHORMAN. And let's face it, why do you need him return to the screen as a semi-pro basketball player doing basically exactly the same schtick as he did as a racing car driver or weatherman? Ferrell is a great actor. It's time that producers and script-writers rose to the challenge and gave him a new outlet for that talent. Otherwise he's going to turn into a sad pastiche of himself.

SEMI-PRO is on release in the UK and USA. It opens in Iceland on March 7th; in Singapore on March 20th; in Australia on April 3rd; in France on May 14th and in the Netherlands on May 22nd.

BLADES OF GLORY - lament for the hillarious cameo

, ANCHORMAN, DODGEBALL....and now BLADES OF GLORY. Identikit comedies, often born of SNL sketches, featuring a couple of crazy characters with 1970s hair-dos - under-dogs, odd-ball couples, or ego-maniacs that go through a redemptive narrative arc. In general, I get a kick out of these movies, but of late I've noticed a worrying tendency toward under-written scripts, lazy visual gags and lame cameos.

BLADES OF GLORY is a case in point. The film-makers assume that Will Ferrell and Jon Heder can simply stand in front of a camera in crazy hair-dos and induce laughter in the audience. And when Ferrell's rock'n'roll thowback and Heder's camp teen-idol start ice-skating - that really is funny. But as soon as we leave the ice-rink and enter into the actual story of the film, the witty one-liners are scarce and the whole project has the damp, mouldy smell of Formula and Star-Vehicle.

Heder and Ferrell's characters are champion ice-skaters and sworn enemies. Banned from competing in the singles competition after a televised punch-up, they are foreced to enter as the first all-male pairs couple - thus prompting a lot of odd-couple comedy and some funny training montages. A sub-plot has a sinister brother-and-sister skating team send their sweet sister to spy on the new all-male pair and to break up the new "couple" by sleeping with both of them. Naturally, we have a nice redemptive narrative arc for the obnoxious Ferrell character and a sweet romantic ending for Heder's character.

So far as it goes, BLADES OF GLORY is fine. The skating routines are funny, and the intervening plot is harmless if sadly unfunny. I just feel that film-makers are getting away with sub-par scripts by relying on audiences good-will toward the stars. For instance, this movie includes a cameo by Luke Wilson. He is not given a single funny line and his presence is, frankly, unnecessary. It's as if, just by having him there, the film-makers will remind us of cooler movies like OLD SCHOOL - making BLADES OF GLORY look funny by association. Similarly, the movie has a cameo of Brian Boitano. Boitano doesn't SAY ANYTHING. But again, BLADES OF GLORY hi-jacks a little of the edginess of SOUTH PARK.

BLADES OF GLORY is on release in Canada, the US and the UK. It opens in Singapore, Argentina, Russia and Italy in April; in Belgium, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Denmark, Iceland, Mexico, Norway, Sweden and Brazil in May; in Australia in June; in Spain in July; in Finland and Turkey in August and in France on October 3rd.