Macbeth (2015)

"What's done cannot be undone..."

I consider myself a Shakespeare geek. I know all but a handful of his plays. I've read the sublime Macbeth several times, but have only ever seen it performed once: at Leicester in 1990 when I was far too young to appreciate what I was seeing. I was surprised, watching this film, that I know the play much better than I thought. Certainly enough to realise ths film is, well... underwhelming.

On paper it has a lot to recommend it. It's a fairly faithful adaptaton of one of Shakespeare's finest plays. It's a realistic evocation of 11th century Scotland (look, no kilts!) with authentic accents, a shockingly rare virtue which adds a lot and hides many faults elsewhere. It stars Michael Fassbender, a very good actor. The cinematography is bleakly artistic, with subdued colours and severely bleak locations.

And yet... this bleakness doesn't serve the play. Fassbender and Marion Cotillard are excellent but their performances seem to lack charisma here in ways they don't elsewhere- perhaps Justin Kurzel is not an actors' director? The gloriously poetical lines seem to be cancelled out at every turn by a crushing dullness that pervades everything.

The locations are haunting. The performances good and often excellent. The film beautifully shot almost if not wholly on location... yet I find myself yearning for a stagey old BBC 1970s style production with multiple cameras.This fim seems to please the critics, but it disappointed me.

Judge Dredd (1995)

“I never broke the law. I AM THE LAW!!!”

This isn’t my first viewing, of course, but the last time I saw this film was on VHS and when John Major was prime minister. It’s probably one of those much-maligned films that benefit from being seen some time later.

There’s no doubt that the film has its flaws. A phoning-it-in Sylvester Stallone is woefully miscast, and the film spends most of its running time breaking the sacred commandment that is Thou Shalt Not Remove Dredd’s Helmet. The Angel family are also shovelled pointlessly into the film with no real development, and it’s very obvious that the Mega City One Street scenes, in spite of the rather good design and use of CGI, are shot on a small set shot to look bigger than it is. You’re also made painfully aware of the flat studio floor.

Still, if you look past these flaws,  and the first two in particular, we actually have a bloody good script here and, while clearly straining against the budget, things generally look pretty impressive. Dredd’s characterisation is perfect (with lots of “I knew you’d say that”) and the world of Mega City One and the Cursed Earth is both faithfully and clearly presented in a way which gives us a world true to the 2000 A.D. strip and a film which works pretty damn well for those who, like myself, are not necessarily huge Dredd fans. A complex plot is made admirably easy to follow, there’s lots of humour, and we have the clever including of Fergie as a much-needed Everyman  for us to identify with

The whole thing, inevitably, looks very ‘90s now, and nothing dates the film as much as the stunt casting of Stallone just because he’s a big name. But this is certainly a cut above most ‘90s sci-fi B movies and manages to overcome its flaws. I enjoyed it.

Oh! What a Lovely War (1969)

"The lights are going out all over Europe..."

The cast for this film is ridiculous. Aside from the people I've tagged at the bottom we have the Master himself, Anthony Ainley, as a British staff officer. We also have Thorley Walters, Nanette Newman, Gerald Sim, Edward Fox, Angus Lennie, Dirk Bogarde, Derek Newark, Ralph Richardson, Maggie Smith, Susannah York, John Mills and (uncredited) Jane Seymour and John Woodnutt. All in the same film. It's absurd.

This is Dickie Attenborough's epic film version of the famously improvised musical by Joan Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop. It's a thing of magnificence but it does, of course, present a very Marxist view of the First World War. You certainly don't have to be a Marxist to subscribe to the view that this was not a "just" war but just a silly dynastic struggle between old empires, the War of the Spanish Succession with trench warfare and mustard gas; I'm not, and I do. But it certainly helps. However, this film is a strong proponent of the old "lions led by donkeys" view, an unpopular view in many quarters these days. From the arrogant xenophobia of the British officers towards their French allies to a doddering and uncomprehending Franz Ferdinand declaring war on Serbia this is not a flattering portrait of those in power.

Thing is, though, it's magnificent. As a musical (all the songs are versions from the trenches) it revels in the freedom from realism while maintaining a clever structure through the use of one family's ground level point of view and of the sinister photographer figure.

There are so many fantastic set pieces, from the British recruitment propaganda to the moving Christmas fraternisation between the British and Germans in 1914 (the top brass cancel their leave!) .But the structure, message and intricacy of the whole thing is quite something to behold. A thing of magnificence.