English Christmas

Johnny English Reborn (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)I managed to avoid seeing any films at the cinema in November. This is good news for the multiplex chain known to Kermode fans as World of Cine but not for me as I am paying them for a card which pays for itself only if I see more than two films a month. As I used to see at least one a week and sometimes three in a day, it isn't usually a problem justifying the card.

Yesterday I began to rectify the problem, although having set out to see three or four, I only saw two before heading home to warm up and eat. The usual SPOILERS AHEAD altert probably needs to be given.

The two I saw were both lightweight holiday fodder: Johnny English 2 (Reborn) and Arthur Christmas. These were somewhat guilty pleasures as I can't deny that they are flawed and are not going to be vying with the Seventh Seal or Citizen Kane for the status of classic pictures...but I'm afraid I enjoyed them.

Part of this may be that it was such a pleasure to be looking up at a big screen once more, while being deafened by the sound system, after a break from the pictures for several weeks.

Johnny English doesn't stand up to much scrutiny in the plausibility stakes but who doesn't like a spy spoof now and again and who can resist Rowan Atkinson, at least when he isn't being the even more obnoxious Bean?

We meet our man English, who was our top spy and had even received a Knighthood but has had a terrible fall from grace, somewhere in a sterotypical Tibetan monestry where he is filling in the time receiving an education in the martial arts and mental discipline. The chief aspect of these appears to be aquiring the ability to face repeated kicks in the conkers without it bringing tears to the eyes. Anyone who has seen a slapstick film in his life will have filed this information away in the certain knowledge that it will be of significance later. A wack-in-the-knackers joke is too good not to use twice.

Image by Autoviva.com via Flickr
For reasons far less preposterous than the appointment of Rufus T Firefly as leader of Freedonia, our hero is recalled to duty, traumatised though he has been by his experiences in MOZAMBIQUE (cue gurning and twitching from Rowan at every mention of the word). Of course it turns out that the death of the President was not his fault (well as far as I can see it resulted from his idiocy and chauvinism as usual but his redemption is a plot point of sorts).

Anyway, unlikely plot aside this is mostly a number of slapstick set-pieces which seem to work, if my audience laughter detectors have been correctly calibrated. O.K. I enjoyed it too and even smiled. I can't really see why though as most of it was unsophisticated Benny Hill-like slappery of a very old school and this plays against a key problem for me. Image via Wikipedia

The problem is that Johhny English is not a total incompetent accidentally saving the day having provoked a number of near-disasters. No. He is also a highly-trained secret agent. Far from an everyman, he is someone trained in mental discipline, helicopter flying, parachuting, linguistics... There seems to be a point where the franchise, or is it Rowan himself, wants to be James Bond. There is even some love interest for our man with the exploding umbrella.

I'm all for the willing suspension of disbelief but he is definitely more 007 (a la Roger Moore perhaps) than say Frank Drebin or Cluseau are efficient cops. There are times when the Bond franchise itself has some fun (in the workshops of the Quartermaster i.e. "Q" for example) when JE is just a straight copy rather than a parody.

Rowan is getting a bit long in the tooth now though still just the right side of debonair so I hope they have the third in the trilogy lined up soon I don't think another eight year wait would be a good idea.

Here he had some very good support from the excellent cast too, although the sometimes magnificent Gillian Anderson didn't have much to do in this with a perhaps underwritten role as English's modernising boss.


Gillian Anderson (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)The idea of a female M of course is familiar from real-life as well as the Bond films and the conflict between that and the male chauvinist agent is also already there but this contrast between her desire for modernisation and English's old school desire for Bondian weapons and cars, is not made much of comedically. Once again it may be a problem to parody what is already played for comedy. Even back in the days of Connery's lethal and slightly cruel Bond, some scenes were played for comedy and by the time of the mighty eyebrow the action and comedy were completely intertwined. Amongst the rest of the cast, the outstanding actor for me is Daniel Kaluuya as English's sidekick Tucker. I first became aware of him recently as the best thing in the chilling television horror series "The Fades". He is a very charismatic actor, with a talent for comedy but a range much wider than that and I hope he gets the writing and opportunities he deserves.

Anyway never mind the whinging and nit-picking. I'm not a Bean fan but I loved Blackadder and I'm very happy to see old rubber face up there on a screen again.


The second film had something in common with the first, in that I enjoyed it...with some guilt and reservations. I love animation and always have, from Harryhausen to Miyagi, from the great Disney features to Warner Brothers shorts, from Tim Burton to Shrek, and just as Pixar had never let me down (until Cars Two confirmed something I didn't want to believe) Aardman had never done anything I didn't love. Perhaps they still haven't but just as the first Cars rang alarm bells about Pixar so Arthur Christmas put some worries in my mind.
 Arthur Christmas (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

The first shock is that this time it isn't characterful fingerprints-in-the-plasticene quirky British Wallace and Gromit claymation. It is slick glossy state-of-the-art (well not quite but near it) computer animation. In the main it looks great (although I really didn't like the texture of Santa's beard) and some of the fabrics etc., look fabulous: This sort of thing has come a long way. In some ways though this is the antithesis of Wallace's hand-made gadgets thrown together from household junk. How does Santa deliver all those presents? Magic? No, technology. A vast "space ship" and a mission control with thousands of elves with computers.

Of course I am being churlish, the spirit of Christmas, sleigh, reindeer etc., all play their part but it never completely returned to magic and I'm not sure I really like the fact that thousands of children are being presented a view of Santa as a businessman who retires and hands on the family firm every few years. Any sense of awe and mystery clinging to the old chap have been efficiently vaccuumed away.

Call me old-fashioned but I think I'd have given them Miracle on 42nd Street rather than all the explaining away this might create in a family taking young children to see it. If I had seen it on my own on television I might have just enjoyed it, with its pace and inventiveness and all the little sight gags which may reward another viewing.

Seeing it in the midst of an audience of families made me look at it from another perspective and look for the "heart" that was present in films of my childhood. Is it too clever and sophisticated for a children's Christmas film? Has Aardman lost something important in throwing out the plasticene, the wonderful models and the painstaking stop-frame animation? I'll be interested to see where they go next. Meanwhile there is a lot of fun to be had from Arthur and a lot of Aardman still to be found in the detail. The voice cast is top notch too, with stalwart British lovies Imelda Staunton, Jim Broadbent and Bill Nighy part of the Santa family and Hugh Laurie as the ambitious Santa offspring in charge of all that technology.

For all my characteristic whinging I did have a lot of fun on my day at the pictures and one that extended into the credits as usual. As is often the case I was alone in the cinema by the time the extra Johnny English scene in the kitchen came up and was also the only one to see the silhouetted elf throw snowballs at the screen at the end of the Aardman credits.