Tag: Robert Carlyle

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All the rage

 

© DNA Films / Sony Pictures Releasing

 

Danny Boyle is a venerated British filmmaker.  His resume includes nasty wee Edinburgh crime noir Shallow Grave (1993), zeitgeist-surfing ‘cool Britannia’ classic Trainspotting (1996), Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and the opening ceremony to the 2012 London Olympics that, briefly, gave Britain a little street credibility in the eyes of the world.  Obviously, the small-minded and idiotic result of the Brexit referendum in 2016, when a narrow majority of British people voted to leave the European Union, put an end to that street cred.

 

However, as a connoisseur of zombie movies, I feel Boyle’s biggest cultural contribution might be directing the 2002 movie 28 Days Later, which was written by novelist and fellow-filmmaker Alex Garland.  This follows events after the escape from a research laboratory of a virus that transforms its victims into wrathful, slavering, hyperactive zombies.  28 Days Later helped to establish the idea that zombies don’t have to lumber mindlessly and slowly, as they had in nearly all zombie movies prior to 2002.  They could be fast.  They could run.  That’s although the film doesn’t actually feature typical, reanimated-corpse zombies, but virus-infected people who are duly referred to as ‘the infected’.

 

As in all good zombie movies, Boyle’s infected act as metaphors.  In 28 Days Later, they symbolise the rage that’d lately become common in British society.  Terms like road-rage, air-rage and even shopping-trolley rage had only recently entered the country’s vocabulary in 2002.

 

In the first sequel to 28 Days Later, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s underrated 28 Weeks Later (2007), the US Army occupy Britain after the epidemic.  There’s an obvious metaphor at work here too.  The Americans set up HQ (and marshal together the survivors) in a supposedly safe area of London they call the ‘Green Zone’, their efforts to end the contagion actually lead to it spreading among those who were hitherto uninfected, and their firepower ends up killing friend and foe alike…  All horribly reminiscent of what the real-life American military was doing in Iraq at the time.

 

Now Boyle and Garland have reunited to make 28 Years Later, the first part of a projected new trilogy in the franchise – the second film is already in the can and will be released next January, and the third one will be made if the first two make money.  Later in the trilogy, Cillian Murphy, the breakout star of 28 Days Later, is supposed to be returning in the role of Jim, the character he played in the original film. And before you read further, beware – from here on, there will be spoilers for all three movies made so far.

 

© DNA Films / Sony Pictures Releasing

 

Well, 28 Years Later‘s metaphor is pretty on the nose.  Britain, overrun by the infected, and with a few uninfected inhabitants surviving in isolated, heavily-fortified communities, has been quarantined from the rest of Europe.  Other European countries’ navies patrol it to make sure nobody carries the infection off its shores.  (28 Weeks Later ended with the virus making it to France, but we’re informed that that outbreak was contained.)  So infected Britain in the 28 Years Later universe is a symbol of Brexit Britain in our universe.

 

Actually, an expository map shows Ireland infected and quarantined too, though nobody mentions this in the film.  It’s a grim echo of the prediction once made by arch-Brexiter and gobshite Nigel Farage that, post-Brexit, Ireland would follow Britain out of the EU.

 

28 Years Later begins in a village on an island off the English coast, connected to the mainland by a causeway that, thanks to the tide, is underwater much of the time.  The villagers are depicted living a low-tech lifestyle: rearing sheep and pigs, growing vegetables, cooking full-English breakfasts on wood-burning Raeburn stoves, sipping home-brewed beer in the local pub and participating in singalongs under an ancient portrait of Queen Elizabeth II.  This would no doubt appeal to many of Nigel Farage’s supporters, longing for a simpler version of England back, say, in the 1940s, that never really existed – prior to multiculturalism, wokeness and other such evils.  And no, I can’t recall seeing anyone in 28 Years Later’s village scenes who’s a person of colour.

 

The movie centres on Spike (Alfie Williams), a twelve-year-old lad who’s grown up on the island and is facing a daunting rite of passage.  His father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is taking him for the first time to the mainland, where he’s expected to prove his manhood by using his bow and arrow on the infected and making a few ‘kills’.  (Bullets have run out by this point.)  Jamie’s timing of this seems tactless since his wife, Spike’s mum, Isla (Jodie Comer) is currently bedridden, stricken by a mysterious illness that has her oscillating between lucidity and delirium.

 

Following their sortie on the mainland, Spike learns of the existence of a man called Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) who’s been living there alone and has dedicated himself to building a spectacular ‘bone temple’ using the remains of, and commemorating, all those who’ve perished since the contagion began 28 years ago.  Though evidently mad now, Kelson was, back in civilised times, a doctor – one thing Spike’s island home doesn’t have.  So he brings his sick mother to the mainland, in search of Kelson, hoping he’ll be able to cure her.  Along the way, they encounter a Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryding), stranded in England after the patrol-ship he was on sunk off its coast.  They acquire a baby, birthed by an infected woman but somehow uninfected itself.  And, predictably, they have to contend with the infected.

 

These are mostly similar to the infected in 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later, but some have devolved and others evolved. There are swollen, leprous-skinned specimens called Slow Lows, crawling along the ground and stuffing their mouths with worms.  Conversely, there are also Alphas: hulking, superstrong, superfast and relatively more intelligent, all beard, hair and muscles (and large, swinging willies), with a penchant for not only ripping their victims’ heads off but for pulling their spines out through their neck-stumps.

 

© DNA Films / Sony Pictures Releasing

 

Well, I’ll say first of all that 28 Years Later certainly isn’t perfect.  It has much that’s inconsistent and illogical.  Firstly, scriptwriter Garland shifts the goalposts regarding the infected.  In the 2002 film, the survivors realise they only need to stay alive for the length of time it takes for the infected to starve to death because, basically, they’re too crazy to eat.  They bite and infect their victims but don’t munch on them.  In 28 Weeks Later, they have all starved to death and the US Army decide it’s safe to enter Britain.  When the virus strikes again, it’s because of a survivor (Catherine McCormack) who’s a medical anomaly – she unwittingly carries the virus without showing any symptoms of it.  In the new movie, though, it transpires the infected can eat.  They’ve sustained themselves mostly by preying on the red deer that now roam Britain in huge herds.

 

It’s Boyle and Garland’s franchise, so they can reboot it any way they like, I suppose.  But it’ll be interesting to see how they square this with the return in the upcoming sequels of Cillian Murphy from 28 Days Later.

 

Also, the contagiousness of the infected’s bodily fluids that was so dangerous in the earlier films – Brendan Gleeson succumbs when a drop of blood falls into his eye in 28 Days Later, Robert Carlyle when he gets saliva on his lips in 28 Weeks Later – is disregarded here.  Humans cheerfully impale and hack at the infected at close quarters without fearing arterial sprays.  Taylor-Johnson encourages his son to fire arrows into the infected practically point-blank.  And I can’t see how a human embryo can gestate inside an infected mother for 40 weeks without the resulting baby emerging from the womb as a slavering, bite-y, red-eyed little monster itself.  Science goes out of the window sometimes.  The existence of the Alphas is explained as certain people reacting to the virus like they’re suddenly ‘on steroids’.  But I can’t imagine a virus transforming some of its victims into what are basically deranged versions of Jason Mamoa.

 

Other things are illogical too.  Fiennes’ character slathers himself in iodine until he’s almost as orange as Donald Trump because iodine seems to repel the virus.  In this post-apocalyptic world, where does he get all his iodine from?  He’s survived in the infected-infested wilderness for decades, gradually building his bone temple, but how?  He refers to a river helping to keep the infected at bay, but late on an Alpha comes stomping into his abode without any apparent difficulty.  And the temple’s centrepiece, a towering pillar of skulls, is alarmingly precarious when Alfie first encounters it.  He touches it and a few skulls immediately fall off.  Yet later, it’s strangely solid when Alfie has to climb to its very top.

 

But, despite all that, I did enjoy 28 Years Later and would probably give it eight out of ten.  Boyle orchestrates the horror sequences with customary panache, while the tension is leavened with both humour and pathos.  Much of the humour comes from Spike’s interactions with the Swedish soldier, who’s from an uninfected world where life has developed into the 2020s along lines we’re familiar with.  He talks of smartphones, being online, using delivery drivers and ladies having ‘work done’, all to the bewilderment of poor Spike (and to the amusement of the Singaporean audience with whom I saw the film).

 

© DNA Films / Sony Pictures Releasing

 

Meanwhile, there’s pathos when Spike finally gets his mum to Fiennes’ Dr Kelson.  The latter is not, as we’d expected, a dangerous madman like Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, but a thoughtful, pacifistic man who, with his bone temple, has found an unconventional way of dealing with and acknowledging the massive horror he’s witnessed around him.  And Kelson helps Spike learn some painful life lessons.  I thought Gleeson’s death in 28 Days Later, caused by a freak accident that wouldn’t have happened if he’d been standing a few inches to the side, was one of the saddest scenes in horror movies.  But there’s one here that equals or surpasses it for tragedy.

 

The performances greatly enhance the movie.  Young Alfie Williams is a revelation as Spike, likeable from the start, but getting more likeable as we follow him through the often difficult and harrowing learning curves the plot throws at him.  Taylor-Johnson is effective as Jamie, a man who’s a good dad but not a good husband, while Comer makes Isla a rounded and convincing character.  During those moments when the script lets her be cogent, we understand why Spike takes the risks he does in getting her to a doctor.  But Fiennes ultimately steals the show.  After the intensity of the movie’s first two-thirds, his appearance as the kindly Kelson is a relief, indicating that some humanity and decency has survived in this brutal world.

 

But I’m not happy about the film’s ending, especially as it comes so soon after Fiennes’ gravitas.  Its final minutes have upset a few people with their unexpected reference to a dark episode in recent British history, but I don’t mind that.  I think it’s a pretty audacious move by Garland’s script.  Rather, I don’t appreciate the goofy, cartoony manner in which those last minutes are filmed, which jar with the sombre tone of everything that’s happened previously.  This makes me nervous about what the sequel will be like (and it isn’t directed by Boyle, but by Nia DaCosta).

 

One reason why I like 28 Years Later overall is its setting: northeast England, where I lived in the early 2000s.  The island the survivors are holed up on is actually Lindisfarne, Holy Island, which as far as I know hasn’t appeared in a film since Roman Polanksi directed Donald Pleasence in Cul-de-sac there in 1966.  I cycled to Lindisfarne once, and I can only assume that when Spike and Jamie go sprinting along the causeway to it in 28 Years Later, they don’t have a strong east wind blowing into their faces like I did when I struggled along it on my bike.  Here are a couple of photographs I took then:

 

 

Meanwhile, I’m no expert on northeastern accents and I couldn’t distinguish between a Geordie one, a Mackem one and a Smoggie one.  However, to me, most of the cast at least try to sound like they come from that part of the world, which is nice.

 

Also, the film is a welcome reminder of the northeast’s beautiful landscapes and I guess at least some of it was shot in Northumbria’s Kielder Forest.  Its depiction of local geography is rather barmy, though, giving the impression that you can walk in a few hours from Lindisfarne to the Angel of North (which is south of Gateshead) or to Sycamore Gap (which is off the A69 from Newcastle to Carlisle, between Hexham and Haltwhistle).  Sycamore Gap hit the headlines in 2023 when the iconic sycamore tree there was cut down by a pair of morons who deserved to have their heads ripped off and their spines pulled out of their neck-stumps.  Sweetly, in 28 Years Later, Boyle digitally restores the tree because, in the movie’s timeline, that act of vandalism never happened.

 

This brings the series full circle for me because it was in northeast England that I originally saw 28 Days Later.  Indeed, I saw it at a special premiere event at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which both Boyle and Garland attended.  They introduced the film beforehand and answered questions from the audience afterwards.   Boyle seemed laidback and was even unruffled when a member of the Geordie audience told him he hadn’t liked the look of the film, shot on digital video cameras, at all.  Garland was more combative and sounded particularly pissed off when someone mentioned the makers of another 2002 zombie movie, Resident Evil, who’d claimed he’d copied the beginning of 28 Days Later from the beginning of their film.  Garland pointed out that both films were obviously inspired by the opening chapter of John Wyndham’s classic end-of-the-world novel Day of the Triffids (1951).

 

After the screening, I was tempted to put up my hand and ask Garland why the infected took so long to die.  If they were too crazy to eat, wouldn’t they be too crazy to drink too, and wouldn’t they die of thirst a lot sooner?  But I decided not to, not wanting to infect him with the rage virus.

 

© DNA Films / Fox Searchlight Pictures

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Favourite Scots words, P-R

 

From pixabay.com / © Dimitris Vetsikas

 

Today, November 30th, is Saint Andrew’s Day, the national day of Scotland.  Also, I’m in the middle of reading Douglas Stuart’s 2022 novel Young Mungo, which is set in Glasgow during the 1990s and is choc-a-bloc with cherishable Scots vocabulary: bevvy, chib, doo, midden, schemie, sook, smirr, tattie–bogle, wean, winchin’…  Thus, this seems an opportune time to post the latest instalment of my attempt to catalogue my favourite words from the Scots language.

 

Patter (n) – A long time ago, I remember Iain Jenkins, my English teacher at Peebles High School, trying to explain to my class why William Shakespeare placed Mercutio’s monologue about Queen Mab in the middle of Act 1, Scene 4 of Romeo and Juliet.  After all, the monologue didn’t have any bearing on the plot that came before or after it.  It was merely Shakespeare showing off his own verbal flamboyance and inventiveness.  Eventually, Jenkins exclaimed, “Patter!  It’s just patter!  It’s Mercutio indulging in a bit of patter!”

 

Patter, then, is smooth talk, smart talk or funny talk – often delivered by someone, like a politician or a salesman, who’s trying to sell you something.  The word crops in phrases like, “I gave her the auld patter,” or “Enough ay yer patter!”   And a person who comes out with it a lot is called a patter–merchant.  The city of Glasgow seems full of patter–merchants, surprisingly enough.

 

Pawkie (adj) – used to describe a person possessed of a dry and quietly mocking sense of humour.

 

Pech (v) – to gasp or wheeze breathlessly.  In Robert Louis Stevenson’s short supernatural story Thrawn Janet, you get the line: “Even the auld folk cuist the covers frae their beds an’ lay pechin’ for their breath.”

 

© Kypros Press

 

Peely-wally (adj) – looking pale and sick-looking.  That’s why in Solo (2013), the James Bond ‘continuity’ novel written by William Boyd, there’s a bit where an injured Bond is scolded by May, his formidable old Scottish housekeeper, for looking ‘awfy peely-wally’.

 

I’d assumed this was derived from ‘peeling wall’, something that obviously doesn’t look healthy.  But I’ve recently learnt that peely comes from an early 19th century word peelie, meaning ‘a gaunt, pale person’.  And wally is a Scots word meaning ‘made of china’.  Even now, people refer to an ornamental china dog as a wally dug and to false teeth (once made of porcelain) as wallies.  So peely–wally really means ‘as pale as china’.

 

Peep (n) – the lowest level at which you can set a gas flame before it goes out.  To ‘put someone’s gas at a peep’ is to seriously knock them out of their stride or deprive them of their vigour.

 

Peewit (n) – a lapwing.

 

Pieces (n) – sandwiches.  Years ago, while I was living with my Dad, I got a job at a local warehouse.  I needed to make myself a packed lunch every morning, to eat during the short break I got in the middle of the day.  My Dad would always inquire before I left the house if I’d remembered to get my pieces together.

 

Pisht (adj) – drunk.  Just as the Eskimos are said to have a hundred words for snow, there must be at least a hundred words in Scots for being inebriated.  See also arsed, bevied, bleezin’, blootered, buckled, fou’, gubbered, hingin’, minced, mingin’, miraculous, miracked, mortal, reekin’, reelin’, steamboats, steamin’, stocious, wellied, etc.  This, of course, is a tragic reflection on the state of the Scottish psyche…  I wrote, whilst sipping a large whisky.

 

From pixabay.com / © rebcenter-moscow

 

Plook (n) – the curse of many a Scottish person’s adolescence,  plooks are pus-filled pimples.  It was rumoured at my school that every time you ate a Mars Bar, you got a plook.  The adjective is plooky and, predictably, this figured in countless playground insults: “Ye plooky bastart, ye!”

 

Plump (n) – as in ‘a plump ay rain’, i.e., a sudden downpour.

 

Poke (n) – a small paper bag.  I suspect this word is most commonly heard in Scotland’s chippies, where people request ‘a poke ay chips’.

 

Poultice (n) – an arsehole.  For example, “Thon Boris Johnson is a right poultice, so he is.”

 

Puddock (n) – a frog.

 

Pure (adv) – popularised by the actress Elaine C. Smith, whose character in the Glasgow-set comedy TV show City Lights (1984-1991) used the catchphrase, “Pure deid brilliant!”  Placed before adjectives to amplify their meaning to the nth degree, it crops up in phrases like ‘pure mental’, ‘pure radge’ and ‘pure sleekit’.

 

Puggled (adj) – exhausted.

 

Quaich (n) – in the words of the Meriam-Webster dictionary, ‘a small shallow drinking vessel with ears for use as handles.’  These days, ornate quaichs are often used as pint-sized trophies at Scottish sports events.

 

Quine (n) – a girl or young woman.  This is commonly used in Scotland’s North-East, where boys and young men are also described as loons, so you hear a lot about quines an’ loons.  In the early 1990s, a group of Scottish feminists, including the journalist Lesley Riddich, started up a magazine called Harpies and Quines – harpy being a word commonly used in Scotland to describe a grumpy, ill-tempered and mean-minded woman.  The famous high-society magazine Harpers and Queen failed to see the joke and attempted to sue them.

 

© Channel Four Films / Polygram Filmed Entertainment

 

Radge (adj) – violently wild and crazy.  Used as a noun, it refers to a mad hooligan.  It had humble beginnings in Eastern Scotland, where it may have come from a Romany word with a similar meaning, ‘raj’, but radge was for a while a trendy term used the length and breadth of Britain.  This was because of its copious use in Danny Boyle’s hit movie Trainspotting (1996), where it was associated with Robert Carlyle’s ultra-violent character Frank Begbie.  I seem to remember the author Irvine Welsh, on whose novel the film was based, remarking disgustedly that he’d heard Hooray Henrys using the word radge in London wine bars.  And I also remember Q magazine running an interview with Robert Carlyle under the memorable headline RADGE AGAINST THE MACHINE.

 

Rammy (n) – a fight or brawl.  A stairheid rammy is a brawl that breaks out among the womenfolk in the staircases and on the landings of Scotland’s urban tenement buildings.  During the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, a heated television debate between then-SNP deputy leader Nicola Sturgeon and then-Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont was described afterwards by journalist Ruth Wishart as “a right good stairheid rammy” that “made strong men avert their eyes”.

 

Randan (n) – a drunken knees-up, as in “He’s away oot on the randan!”

 

Rector (n) – the Scottish term for headmaster.

 

Redd (v) – to tidy up.  I’ve rarely heard this verb used in Scotland, or at least in the parts of it I’ve inhabited.  But I frequently heard it during my childhood in Northern Ireland, where a good number of the people are descended from Scots.  My Mum would frequently explain, “Get this room redd up!” or “Give that place a wee redd!”

 

Riddy (n) – an embarrassment.  As in: “Liz Truss!  What an absolute riddy!”

 

Right (adj) – uttered with the appropriate intonation, right becomes a contemptuous response, dismissing something that another person has just said.  Though for maximum impact, use the phrase Aye, right.  “Maggie Thatcher wis the best prime minister since Churchill?  Aye, right.”  And indeed, Glasgow’s annual book festival is called Aye Write.

 

© Glasgow Life

 

Rone (n) – the length of guttering along the edge of a roof for collecting and removing rainwater.

 

That’s all for now.  More Scots words, and more example-sentences that insult famous Conservative Party politicians, will come shortly…

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Coltrane’s sweetest notes

 

© BBC

 

Actor and comedian Robbie Coltrane, who died on October 14th, seemed part of the furniture in British TV shows and films when I was in my late teens and twenties.  His performing talents, gallus manner and considerable physique made him impossible to ignore.

 

Also, as someone who’d grown up mostly in Scotland, I – and everyone I knew – appreciated the fact that he was a Scottish lad.  Originally, he’d been one Anthony MacMillan from Rutherglen, with his stage name inspired by the great jazz saxophonist John Coltrane.  It’s fair to say that Scotland did not get much attention in the London-centric media of 1980s Thatcherite Britain, except when it fleetingly made the news as the site of yet another factory or colliery closure. (Admittedly, things are only slightly better in 2022.)  Thus, seeing Coltrane on popular, national telly or in movies reaching international audiences, and seeing him be unashamedly Scottish too, felt like a victory.

 

Anyway, here are a dozen of my dozen favourite TV and cinematic moments involving Robbie Coltrane.

 

The Young Ones (1984)

Coltrane made three appearances in the groundbreakingly anarchic BBC comedy show The Young Ones.  I remember him best in the episode Bambi, which may have been the first time he registered on my radar.  Bambi is the one where Rik (Rik Mayall), Vyvyan (Ade Edmondson), Neil (Nigel Planer) and Mike (Christopher Ryan) appear on University Challenge (up against a snooty team from ‘Footlights College, Oxbridge’ comprised of Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Ben Elton), while Motorhead play The Ace of Spades in their living room.  Observing the shenanigans through a microscope is Coltrane as a genteel, old-fashioned Scottish doctor (“Absolutely amazing! Human beings the size of amoebas!”), possibly modelled on Dr Finlay in the 1930s stories by A.J. Cronin.  Coltrane brings the episode to an abrupt end when he accidentally drops an éclair on the specimen slide, burying Rik, Vyvyan and co. in creamy goo.

 

Laugh???  I Almost Paid My Licence Fee (1984)

During the early 1980s, Coltrane featured in three TV comedy sketch shows, Alfresco (1983-84), which also featured the afore-mentioned Fry, Laurie, Thompson and Elton; A Kick Up The Eighties (1984); and Laugh??? I Almost Paid My Licence Fee (1984).  In the latter, Coltrane made several memorable appearances as a West-of-Scotland Orangeman called Mason Boyne.  With his imposing bulk and craggy features, and wearing a black suit, bowler hat and sash,  Coltrane certainly looked the part.  Laugh? was produced by BBC Scotland and this was one of the very few times when the broadcaster was bold enough to have a go at the Orange Order and its paranoia about all things Popish.  “It’s all here, Matthew Chapter 2, Verses 1-10,” says Boyne, citing the Bible in support of his assertion that the Pope is the Antichrist.  “All you have to do is… jumble the words up a bit.”

 

© BBC

 

Caravaggio (1986)

Throughout the 1980s Coltrane had supporting or minor roles in many British or made-in-Britain films.  These include, incidentally, several forgotten fantasy and science-fiction ones: Death Watch (1980), Flash Gordon (1980), Britannia Hospital (1982), Krull (1983) and Slipstream (1989).  Okay, Flash Gordon hasn’t been forgotten – unfortunately.  Anyway, in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, he gives a performance that’s stayed in my memory more than most.  He plays Scipione Borghese, the 17th century cardinal who becomes the patron of the turbulent Italian painter.  As usual with Jarman, there’s striking set design, deliberately littered with anachronisms, and the film sees the debuts of Tilda Swinton and Sean Bean.

 

Mona Lisa (1986)

Coltrane also provides good support in Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa.  He plays Thomas, a garage-owner who offers sanctuary for the movie’s main character, old friend and harassed ex-convict George, played by the incomparable Bob Hoskins.  Thomas has no bearing on the film’s plot, which sees George employed by a gangster (Michael Caine) to drive around and look after high-class prostitute Simone (Cathy Tyson), whom he gradually falls in love with. But the friendship Thomas offers George is one of the few specks of light in a bleak film.  His best line comes when he walks in on George while George is watching a dodgy video he’s obtained – discovering to his horror that it features his beloved Simone in some hardcore porn.  Innocently, Thomas asks, “Channel 4, is it?”

 

Tutti Frutti (1987)

The pinnacle of Coltrane’s 1980s work, the tragi-comedy series Tutti Frutti is surely the best piece of television to come out of Scotland.  At the time, I remember the New Musical Express hailing it as ‘the best TV show ever’, though sadly those know-nothing kids running the 2022 online version of the NME didn’t even mention Tutti Frutti in their Coltrane obituary.  Written by John Byrne, Tutti Frutti has Coltrane as Danny McGlone, who’s drafted in to sing for a vintage Scottish rock ‘n’ roll band called the Majestics after their original singer, Danny’s older brother, is killed in a car accident.  The Majestics are on a death-spiral, largely due to the antics of guitarist Vincent Driver (Maurice Roëves, who died last year).  Driver styles himself as ‘the iron man of Scottish rock’, but his personal life is a destructive shambles.  The band’s conniving manager Eddie Clockerty (a never-better Richard Wilson) doesn’t help things, either.

 

One consolation for Danny is another recent addition to the band’s line-up – guitarist Suzy Kettles, played by Emma Thomson with an impressively convincing Glaswegian accent. He gradually falls for the sassy Suzy, though she has her own issues – an abusive ex-husband, who happens to be a dentist.  Can Danny and Suzy get together while, around them, everything descends into a hellhole of fights, farce, humiliation, depression, knifings, suicide and extreme dental violence?  Due to copyright problems over its title song, written and recorded by Little Richard in 1955, Tutti Frutti didn’t get another airing for a very long time.  Happily, it’s now available on DVD and three years ago was shown again on BBC Scotland.

 

© BBC

 

Blackadder the Third (1987)

Coltrane played the celebrated lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson three times on stage and screen.  His best-remembered performance as the famously irascible Johnson is in the Ink and Incapability episode of the much-loved TV comedy Blackadder, wherein the crafty title character (Rowan Atkinson) and his hapless minion Baldrick (Tony Robinson) accidentally incinerate the one and only copy of Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) prior to its publication.  This leaves them with just one night to write a replacement dictionary before Johnson finds out and inflicts his wrath upon them.  In the funniest scene, Johnson boasts that his dictionary “contains every word in our beloved language.”  To which Blackadder offers him his “most enthusiastic contrafibularities.”  He sticks the knife in by adding, “I’m anaspeptic, phrasmotic, even compunctuous to have caused you such pericombobulation.”

 

Henry V (1989)

Sir John Falstaff, a prominent character in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, is actually dead at the start of Henry V.  However, in this cinematic version, writer and director Kenneth Branagh couldn’t bear to leave out the portly, garrulous rogue, so he showed Coltrane as Falstaff in an all-too-brief flashback.  Falstaff was a role Coltrane was clearly born to play and it’s a tragedy he never got cast in a proper adaptation of the two Henry IV plays (or for that matter The Merry Wives of Windsor).

 

Nuns on the Run (1990)

Nuns on the Run, which has Coltrane and Monty Python’s Eric Idle as criminals trying to escape some nastier criminals and taking refuge, and donning disguises, in a convent, is truly a one-joke film.  That joke is seeing Coltrane dressed as and pretending to be a nun.  It’s a pretty hilarious one, I have to admit.  Though totally inconsequential, Nuns on the Run works better than another comedy he was in during the same period, The Pope Must Die (1991).  North American distributors, nervous about the film’s sacrilegious title and noticing Coltrane’s girth, unsubtly renamed it The Pope Must Diet.

 

© HandMade Films / 20th Century Fox

 

The Bogie Man (1992)

This TV film adapted to the small screen the Alan Grant / John Wagner comic book about a Scotsman with psychiatric issues who believes he’s Humphrey Bogart (or characters Bogie played in the movies) and goes around fighting crime. The TV version was panned by the critics, disowned by Grant and Wagner, and as far as I known has never been reshown.  While I found it underwhelming, I enjoyed Coltrane’s performance as the lead character – occasionally, when not channelling Bogart, he lapses into impersonating Sean Connery and Arnold Schwarzenegger too.  Also, Craig Ferguson, years before he became a superstar on American television, gives a nice supporting turn as the cop on Coltrane’s trail.

 

Cracker (1993-95)

Arguably Coltrane’s greatest role, his work in Cracker as Dr Edward ‘Fitz’ Fitzgerald, a criminal psychologist helping out a dysfunctional team of detectives (Christopher Eccleston, Geraldine Somerville, Lorcan Cranitch) won him the British Academy Award for Best Actor three years in a row.  Grim and intense, with the only humour coming from the arrogant, flamboyant and self-destructive Fitz, the show was at its most gruelling during its To Be a Somebody story at the start of season 2.  This involves a terrifyingly credible killer (Robert Carlyle), who’s ended up the way he is largely because of trauma he suffered in the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster.  It also features the murder of one of the show’s main characters.

 

© Granada Television

 

Goldeneye (1995) and The World is Not Enough (1999)

Coltrane’s entertaining turns as ex-KGB man Dimitri Valentin, now a would-be entrepreneur in post-Communist Russia, are among the highlights of these two Bond movies, which have Pierce Brosnan playing 007.  Valentin certainly gets the best lines.  In Goldeneye, when Bond holds a gun to the back of his head and he hears the click of its safety catch, he observes: “Walther PPK, 7.65 millimetre. Only three men I know use such a gun.  I believe I’ve killed two of them.”   And in The World Is Not Enough, when Bond interrogates him about sultry oil tycoon Elektra King (Sophie Marceau), whom Bond has recently bedded, and demands, “What’s your business with Elektra King?”, he retorts, “I thought you were the one giving her the business.”  Valentin, who runs a hellish-sounding country-and-western club in one film and a caviar factory in the other, was devised at a time when Russian oligarchs could be depicted as lovable, comic Arthur-Daley-from-Minder-type grifters; and not sinister billionaires laundering mountains of dirty money in the City of London and buying their way into the heart of the British establishment.

 

From Hell (2001)

Like The Bogey Man, this movie adaptation of Alan Moore’s labyrinthine graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, published in instalments from 1989 to 1998, was disdained by its original creator.  However, if you can erase all memories of Moore’s From Hell and focus solely on the film, it’s decent.  For one thing, it looks at the Ripper’s hideous murders from the perspective of characters commonly neglected in previous films on the subject – his female victims.  Coltrane gives a solid performance as Sergeant George Godley, the loyal, capable and intelligent assistant to the film’s hero, the vulnerable, opium-raddled Inspector Frederick Abberline (Johnny Depp).  A scene where Godley and Abberline are filmed from behind as they approach the funeral ceremony of one Ripper victim, dressed in black suits and bowler hats, even evokes Laurel and Hardy.  (In fact, at one time, Coltrane and Robert Carlyle had tried unsuccessfully to get a Laurel and Hardy movie off the ground.)

 

Thereafter, Coltrane achieved global popularity playing Hagrid in eight Harry Potter movies and got regular gigs doing voice-work in items like The Gruffalo (2009) and Brave (2012).  None of this was my cup of tea, but good on him for securing well-deserved fame and, presumably, fortune too.  It’s just a pity that a few years ago ill-health caught up with him, which deprived our TV and movie screens of his always-welcome presence.

 

© Eon Productions

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Stop getting Bond wrong! (Part 1)

 

© Eon Productions

 

When I’m browsing through a newspaper or magazine website, or a website devoted to popular culture, no headline is more likely to fill me with despair than the one ALL THE JAMES BOND FILMS RANKED FROM WORST TO BEST.  (Well, maybe except for the headline FLEETWOOD MAC TO RELEASE NEW ALBUM.)  That’s because such articles invariably get Bond wrong.  And that’s because they’re written by young, acne-pocked dipshits with zero life experience and less-than-zero knowledge of James Bond in either his cinematic or literary incarnations.  Or, worse, they’re written by someone from the older end of the Generation X demographic, i.e., they were a kid during the 1970s and believe Roger Moore was the best actor who ever lived.

 

Now that the latest Bond epic No Time to Die is being released – after a zillion Covid-19-inspired delays, which had me worried that by the time it finally was released poor Daniel Craig would be turning up at the Royal Premiere with a Zimmer frame, hearing aid and dentures – there’s been another rash of these hopelessly ill-informed articles, in the likes of the Independent and Den of Geek.

 

So, to sort out this confusion, misinformation and stupidity once and for all, here is my – and hence the correct – ranking of all the James Bond films from best to worst.  Don’t even think about arguing with me.

 

© Eon Productions

 

24: Die Another Day (2002)

Winning the unenviable title of Worst Bond Film Ever is Pierce Brosnan’s final outing as 007.  Because it was released in the 40th anniversary year of the franchise, the makers of Die Another Day packed it with homages to the previous 19 films, such as bikini-ed heroine Halle Berry rising out of the sea like Ursula Andress in Dr No (1962) or villain Toby Stephens swooping into central London with a Union Jack-emblazoned parachute à la Roger Moore in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977).  But these homages, as well as seeming smug, highlight how inferior Die is in comparison.  And with the film’s stupid plot contrivances (an invisible car), its derivativeness (what, another killer satellite?), its Carry On-level, innuendo-ridden dialogue and Madonna’s horrible theme song, we’re talking greatly inferior.  What I hate most about it, though, is its use of Computer-Generated Imagery during the action sequences, an insult to the stuntmen in the old Bond films like Vic Armstrong, Terry Richards, Eddie Powell and Alf Joint, who did those stunts for real and made them so viscerally exciting.

 

23: Octopussy (1983)

I remember seriously not liking Octopussy when I saw it because it seemed desperate to cash in on the recent success of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and deposited Roger Moore in a version of India populated with palaces, turbaned swordsmen, fakirs and snake-charmers, which had only ever existed in the imaginations of Hollywood scriptwriters and looked ridiculously corny by 1983.  Having worked in India several times since then, I suspect I would hate it even more now.  The film’s one saving grace is the sub-plot taking place in its other main setting, Germany, which has Steven Berkoff as a deranged Soviet general wanting to knock NATO for six by engineering an ‘accident’ with a nuclear warhead.  Opposing, and in part thwarting, Berkoff’s insane plan is General Gogol (Walter Gotell), who appeared in half-a-dozen Bond films as 007’s respectful adversary and occasional ally in the KGB.  Indeed, I’d say Octopussy marks Gogol’s finest hour.

 

22: Moonraker (1979)

Moonraker also attempted to cash in on a recent hit movie, in this case Star Wars (1977).  Thus, it has Roger Moore going into outer space in search of a stolen space shuttle.  It piles silliness upon silliness: not just the far-fetched science-fictional plot, but also sequences with gondolas turning into speedboats, speedboats turning into hovercraft, speedboats turning into hang gliders, steel-toothed villain Jaws (Richard Kiel) crashing through the top of a circus tent, Jaws finding a girlfriend, and so on.  Michael Lonsdale as the big villain Hugo Drax gives Moonraker some dignity it really doesn’t deserve.  Brace yourself for the inevitable “He’s attempting re-entry!” joke at the end.

 

© Eon Productions

 

21: The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)

Another entry in the series where the only thing going for it is the villain, the impeccable Christopher Lee as the super-hitman Francisco Scaramanga.  Elsewhere, Lulu warbles the cheesy, innuendo-slathered theme song (“He’s got a powerful weapon / He charges a million a shot!”), Britt Ekland is barely contained by her bikini, and redneck comedy-relief American policeman Sheriff Pepper (Clifton James), who was so annoying in the previous film Live and Let Die, makes an unwelcome reappearance even though the film’s set in East Asia.  Pepper just happens to be holidaying in Thailand with his wife when he bumps into Bond again.  (He refuses to have his picture taken with a local elephant, telling Mrs Pepper: “We’re Demy-crats, Maybelle!”  Surely not.)

 

20: Live and Let Die (1973)

And that brings me to Live and Let Die, in which Roger Moore makes his debut as Bond.  From all accounts Moore was a lovely bloke and he kept the franchise massively popular during the 1970s and 1980s, but his lightweight acting style meant the character was far removed from the one imagined by Ian Fleming in the original novels.  Even by 1973’s standards, Live and Let Die’s plot about a villainous organisation of black drug-smugglers, headed by Yaphet Kotto’s Mr Big, dallies worryingly with racism, although Moore’s presence actually defuses some of that.  His portrayal of Bond as a posh, silly-assed Englishman gives the bad guys some gravitas in comparison.  I suspect modern audiences might feel more uncomfortable with Bond’s pursuit / stalking of love interest Jane Seymour – Seymour was only 22 years at the time while Moore, already in his mid-forties, was old enough to be her dad.  The film’s spectacular speedboat chase anchors the film in most people’s memories, though it’s spoilt somewhat by the involvement of the aforementioned Sheriff Pepper.  The theme song by Paul McCartney’s Wings is, of course, great.

 

© Eon Productions

 

19: A View to a Kill (1985)

A View to a Kill, Roger Moore’s final film as Bond, is often ranked bottom in lists like this, but it at least has something most 1980s Bond movies lack – memorable villains, i.e., Christopher Walken’s Max Zorin and Grace Jones’s Mayday.  Also, Moore gets to form an agreeable double act, for a while, with Patrick Macnee and I like how General Gogol pops up at the end to give ‘Comrade Bond’ the Order of Lenin.  Still, the film contains much duff-ness.  Duran Duran do the theme song and one unkind critic once described Simon Le Bon’s vocal performance as ‘bellowing like a wounded elk.’

 

18: Quantum of Solace (2007)

Daniel Craig’s second appearance as James Bond, in which he comes up against a sinister, secret organisation called Quantum, was savaged by the critics.  When I watched the film, I remember thinking it didn’t seem as bad as everyone made out.  That said, I can hardly remember anything about it now.

 

17: The World is Not Enough (1999)

A frustrating film, The World is Not Enough has much going for it, including Sophie Marceau and Robert Carlyle as the baddies, Robbie Coltrane returning as ex-KGB man / lovable rogue Valentin Zukovsky, and a plot that anticipates Skyfall (2012) wherein Judie Dench’s M is threatened by a villain whose relationship with her is more complex than one of simple professional enmity.  And like Skyfall, it has scenes set in Scotland, the introduction of a new Q, and an explosion that rocks MI6’s London headquarters beside Vauxhall Bridge in London.  Plus, the theme song by Garbage is the best one in yonks.  But the quality stuff is cancelled out by some rubbish bits, including Denise Richards as Bond girl Christmas Jones – so-named, apparently, to allow Pierce Brosnan to crack a joke about ‘coming once a year’.  Particularly cringe-inducing is John Cleese’s debut as the replacement for Desmond Llewelyn’s Q, here making his 17th and final appearance in the franchise.  Not only does Cleese clown around to no comic effect whatever, but the scene where he’s introduced is also the one where Llewelyn bids farewell and Cleese’s slapstick robs the scene of its poignancy.

 

16: Diamonds are Forever (1971)

Diamonds are Forever features a beyond-caring Sean Connery, enticed back into 007’s shoes by a 1.25-million-pound paycheque after George Lazenby jumped ship, in a lazy film where the plot meanders nonsensically from one action set-piece to another and the visuals are packed with easy-on-the-eye spectacle and lavishness.  At least it’s pretty funny.  It depends on your tolerance level for sledgehammering 1970s political incorrectness whether or not you enjoy the banter between gay assassins Mr Kidd and Mr Wint.  (Sticking Connery into a coffin and feeding him into a crematorium furnace: “Heart-warming, Mr Kidd.”  “A glowing tribute, Mr Wint.”)  However, uber-Bond-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld is very amusingly played by Charles Gray.  While he’s wreaking havoc with a deadly laser beam mounted on a satellite, he sneers: “The satellite is now over Kansas.   Well, if we destroy Kansas, the world may not hear about it for years.”

 

© Eon Productions

 

15: For Your Eyes Only (1987)

For Your Eyes Only makes a noble attempt to bring the franchise down to earth again following the excesses of Moonraker.  Mostly, it works nicely as an action / adventure piece, although the villain Krystatos, played by the normally reliable Julian Glover, is a bit drab. More effective is the excellent Michael Gothard as the taciturn Belgian assassin Locque.  Alas, it runs out of puff towards the end.  After some exciting mountaineering stunts while Roger Moore and the good guys ascend to a mountaintop monastery / villains’ lair, the climactic battle is a damp squib.  Also, there’s an excruciating ‘comic’ final scene where Margaret Thatcher (played by impressionist Janet Brown) phones Bond to congratulate him on a job well done and ends up speaking instead to a randy parrot: “Give us a kiss!”  “Oh, Mr Bond…”

 

14: Goldeneye (1995)

Pierce Brosnan’s debut as Bond, after the franchise had endured a six-year hiatus, won a lot of praise.  I find it slightly unsatisfying, though.  It tries a bit too hard.  There’s a bit too much packed into it, a few too many twists and turns, as it tries to prove to audiences that a Bond movie can still be relevant and with-it in the 1990s.  Also, its good intentions are undone by the occasional piece of Roger Moore-style silliness and a cobwebbed plot-MacGuffin – yes, it’s another killer satellite threatening the world, or in this case, the City of London.  Sean Bean and Famke Janssen are cool as the main villains, though it’s a pity that Alan Cumming and Joe Don Baker are both allowed to act with their brakes off.

 

13: Spectre (2015)

Another Daniel Craig Bond that got a critical kicking, I think Spectre deserves a little more love.  The film brings back Ernst Stavro Blofeld, played here by Christoph Waltz as a Euro-trash scumbag who commits crimes against fashion by not wearing socks under his loafers.  Also back is Blofeld’s insidious criminal organisation SPECTRE.  (After decades of legal wrangling, the Bond producers had by 2015 won the right to use Blofeld and SPECTRE again in the franchise.)  However, Spectre’s Bond / Blofeld backstory earned hoots of derision.  Blofeld, it transpires, is the son of Hannes Oberhauser, the man who looked after the young James Bond after his parents were killed in a climbing accident.  Oberhauser much preferred little James to little Ernst, leaving his biological son with some serious personality issues.  Yes, it sounds contrived, but I didn’t have a big problem with this, since the adoptive father-figure of Hannes Oberhauser existed in the original, literary Bond universe created by Ian Fleming and Bond referred to him in the short story Octopussy, published in 1966.  The opening sequence in Mexico City, filmed by director Sam Mendes in one long, supposedly continuous take, is brilliant, but the film’s attempts to incorporate / retcon the previous Daniel Craig Bond films into its plot are clunky.  For example, we learn that the Quantum organisation in Quantum of Solace is only a subsidiary of SPECTRE.  Another negative is the comatose theme song performed by Sam Smith.

 

© Eon Productions

 

And my next blog-post will rank the remaining Bond movies from number twelve to number one.