Tom Hooper | 90 mins | download (HD) | 15 / R
I have no love for football. Quite the opposite, in fact. I’d certainly never heard of Brian Clough before this film came along. I didn’t even bother to put it on my list of 50 Films I Didn’t See last year, despite its relatively high-profile release (here, anyway) because I wasn’t interested — and I’ve put Twilight and High School Musical 3 on those lists before now. (Which definitely says more about me and my dubious list-compiling criteria than it does about any of the films involved.) I’m not even entirely sure why I wound up watching it, to be honest; a mixture of it being free to download in HD and a couple of recommendations.
But I’m glad I did, because, even though it’s technically about football, The Damned United is a little bit brilliant.
For one thing, it’s not actually about football, not really. It’s about Brian Clough, what he was like, why he behaved the way he did. Of course it operates in the world of clubs and divisions and transfers and training and fan love and fan hatred, but those intricacies don’t really matter in themselves. What matters is how Clough reacts to them, how he uses them, how they motivate him and make him and ruin him. I care no more about football than I did before the film began, but I still enjoyed and engaged with every minute of the film.
The main person to thank for this is Michael Sheen, who, as I’m sure you know, stars as Clough, manager of Derby County and, later, Leeds United. Some have claimed Sheen is just a talented mimic, 
an impressionist who can act a little, due to his penchant for playing real people with unerring accuracy — Kenneth Williams in Fantabulosa!, David Frost in Frost/Nixon, Tony Blair in The Deal, The Queen and The Special Relationship — but those people are wrong. I have no idea if Sheen’s Clough is anything like the real man — though, based on form, I imagine he’s spot on — but it’s an outstanding performance regardless. Effortlessly charming on first encounter, apparently likeable even away from the media spotlight, any flaws are easily overlooked because he seems like a nice bloke. But this isn’t an airbrushed hagiography (unlike the amusing US poster): the cocksure and awkward-to-work-with man beneath the charismatic veneer is gradually revealed.
Of course this is partly down to Peter Morgan’s screenplay, particularly its two-headed structure that plays Clough’s 44 day stint as Leeds’ manager at the same time as the six preceding years that led him there — which initially seems needlessly complex but unveils its reasoning as Clough’s character is simultaneously revealed by each thread — but it’s also unquestionably in Sheen’s performance. There’s no shocking revelation, no big change for the character — he’s not obviously a different man at the start and the end — but the viewer is led to see the reality, the complexity, which comes out by getting to know the man over 90 minutes. The fact Sheen hasn’t, to my knowledge, bagged a single award for the role is testament to either a glut of good performances last year or indifferent bias (such as my own).
Though this is Sheen’s show, the rest of the cast give able support. Most notable is Timothy Spall as Clough’s right-hand man, Peter Taylor, the quiet force behind Clough’s showy, mouthy public face. Their relationship is — in nasty modern parlance — a “bromance” (I apologise), a fact only underlined by the final scene. It may not be apparent until late on, but if the film is Clough then his relationship with Taylor is its heart. It’s a subtler role that Spall still manages to pull everything out of. Colm Meaney and Jim Broadbent are also noteworthy, as Clough’s unknowing rival and his increasingly exasperated chairman respectively.
Morgan’s screenplay and Tom Hooper’s direction are mostly very good, with some irritants. Intertitles telling us what’s happening should either have been dramatised or dropped — some are needlessly repetitive, others could easily have been turned into a short scene or a couple of lines of dialogue. “Show don’t tell” and all that. On a related note however, the graphics showing clubs moving up the league table, and displaying full-time scores from key matches on screen, works just fine, and sometimes excellently: the simple statement “Leeds 0 – QPR 1” speaks volumes (yes, even if you don’t like football — it works in context).
Hooper’s primary flaw is to indulge in a form of close-up framing which we’re seeing more and more, particularly in British TV dramas (they did it all the time in Luther, for example, 
and I seem to remember it in Red Riding too), and which is frankly irritating. Essentially, it involves placing the actor’s head (or more of the body, should it be a longer shot) in the lower half of the frame, with the top half being completely empty — blank wall, or sky, or whatever. It looks like the 16:9 image has been framed for 2.35:1 and someone forgot to crop it. I don’t know if there’s something I’m missing, but I don’t see the point of it, ever.
Still, such niggles pale next to Sheen’s work. I don’t imagine The Damned United will do anything to change anyone’s attitudes about “the beautiful game” (pfft), but that’s irrelevant. Sometimes an outstanding lead performance isn’t enough to make a film — just look at Ray — but other times, it is. Love or loathe football, this is an exceptional character study.
Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour return for the fifth film in the Road to… series.
I’ve awarded to each belies how much I enjoyed them, with Morocco in particular worth a fourth. But I think it’s also fair to say these films are a rather dated style of entertainment. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — as noted, I still think they’re fun, and I’m sure many others do and would too — but plenty of modern viewers would find them (to be polite) too quaint.
Daylight is a disaster movie; the kind they apparently made lots of in the ’70s, and has seen a revival (to some degree) thanks to Roland Emmerich and his brand of apocalypse-bringing. This was made in the ’90s though and, lacking any self-aware qualities, might be seen as a throwback. Whether that matters is probably an issue for more well-versed disaster movie fans than I.
Which Characters Would It Be Most Tragic To Lose and started to work his way through them until he reached the end of the screenplay. I suppose it’s flat-out good advice for a disaster movie, but, try not to get too attached.
inadvertently overshadows the whole film. I suppose any shot of the Center calls up those memories now, but it’s unfortunate that this one comes at the end of a disaster movie.
He’s put down the 
Relocated in the war years, the Musgrave manor is currently a home for convalescent soldiers, providing no end of potential suspects. Some may guess the culprit from the off, others will land upon them at other places throughout proceedings, but it seems to me there’s still enough going on to keep us guessing.
Back in this blog’s early days, I established the rule that where a different cut of a film was not significantly different to the original version it wouldn’t be counted towards my total (assuming I’d seen the original, that is — if it’s the first time I’ve seen any version of the film, it still counts). There’s no hard criteria for what counts as “significantly different” though. A couple of additional minutes? No. A lot of additional minutes? Yes. Where’s the line between “a couple” and “a lot”? No idea. Thus far, I’ve left it up to “a feeling”, perhaps not always correctly (the 
but other than that if you’d told me this was the cut I watched in cinemas I’d believe you. This longer cut doesn’t make the film better or worse, just less suitable for younger viewers.
It’s still riddled with flaws, mind. Some of the dialogue is fairly atrocious (but at least it’s only some); exposition is often blatant and repetitive (we’re told what the preferiti are three or four times in as many minutes); some of the deductive leaps are a bit much; and the whole antimatter bomb still seems scientifically suspect. It all depends how much you’re willing to forgive, really. In a similar vein, one of the most contentious issues of Dan Brown’s novels is his use of “truth”. He mixes well-researched fact with his own creation at will, often leaving you to wonder if what you’re hearing is pure truth, truth bent to the plot, or a total fabrication. But then this isn’t a history or art lesson, it’s a mystery thriller, and if one wants to know more I’m sure there are books to read and documentaries to watch.
#90 
Night at the Museum is fine. And by “fine” I mean less “of high quality… worthy of or eliciting admiration” and more “good; satisfactory”.
Perhaps it makes it a little disjointed — “here is our character-centric opening; here is the bit we actually wanted to make; here is an exciting climax” — but the tale still rattles by.
The interest of the piece for us normal, sensible folk, then, lies in what it exposes about this world: the ludicrous lengths they go to; the shockingly inflated sense of self importance. As with The September Issue, it presents no narration and a lot of long takes of documentary footage, leaving the viewer to draw their own conclusions. But there are conclusions to be drawn. Wintour is as much a closed book here as in the main film, but there are moments — glances, affectations, turns of phrase — that reveal a little bit more of the truth behind her icy demeanour.
“Remakes are not as good as the original” is one of the rules of filmmaking. Of course there are plenty of exceptions, and everyone has their own opinion, and most modern remakes are expressly about making a quick buck from a US audience who can’t watch a film and read at the same time rather than making a better quality film — but, more or less, the rule persists. It may have won him an Oscar, but the consensus seems to be that 
It does have its moments: a couple of songs are shoehorned in (even if there’s only two or three and each gets two or three airings) and the cast do succeed in making some of their indulgences entertaining. Nonetheless, this would definitely be for Rat Pack fans only had it not been for the remake… and, really, there’s no reason the remake should change that.
Origin stories are, as we well know, all the rage at the moment, and so Ridley Scott follows in the footsteps of 
a likely-fictional creation, and so the style is suitably believable, whether it be precisely factual or not.
Mark Strong in a villainous role (it might be nice to see him play a good guy sometime, I’m sure he’s capable). Danny Huston’s King Richard is a nicely revisionist take — not the flawless hero we’re used to seeing — which sadly gets too little screen time. Oscar Isaac’s Prince/King John is suitably brattish and inconsistent, but by playing the part fairly straight he doesn’t come close to being as memorable as Alan Rickman, Keith Allen or Toby Stephens in the key villain’s role.
after numerous scenes of them doing stuff, they just are. King John ums and ahs about various things, and if we’re being charitable his chief characteristic is ‘changeable’; and if we’re not, he’s a weakly-written, inconsistent character. Do I believe he’d go charging into the fray during the climax? No, I don’t. If he’d gone in when it was virtually over, just so he could later claim he had? Yes, that would fit.
I wanted the reviews to be wrong; for Ridley Scott’s Gritty And Realistic™ take on Robin Hood to be worth the potential of the concept. In places, it almost is — the era is evoked stylishly, the battles are largely well-staged if not perfect — but it drags, and ultimately Robin only becomes Robin Hood proper at the film’s end. (In fact, a surprisingly large amount of the trailer was taken from the film’s closing minutes, obviously to imply the usual Robin Hood story.) It’s copied Batman Begins and Casino Royale too precisely in this respect, perhaps. It also makes it feel like nowt but setup for a sequel, over-explaining how (this version of) Robin came to be where he was. As the final card says, “And so the legend begins”.
