District 9

District 9

Director - Neill Blomkamp

Writers - Neill Blomkamp & Terri Tatchell

Stars - Sharlto Copley, David James, Jason Cope

 

One of those films that I enjoyed much more the second time around. When I first saw it upon release, I was eager for its potential: its premise being aliens coming to earth and receiving the treatment and response that typically greets refugees. There’s no subtlety in this text and I usually take such obvious thematic presentation as I would punk polemics and rap rants. What I remember upon seeing it for the first time at the cinema was disappointment that it just descended into a shoot ‘em up fisticuffs, and some credibility doubts with them just breaking in and finding the lab they wanted within about five minutes. The sharpness of its premise stunted by traditional genre pleasures.

 

But this time around, with expectations aligned with what I knew was going to happen, I enjoyed those genre pleasures, was less inclined to dwell on doubts and criticism because I tuned in more to the b-movie action tropes. More of a ‘Robocop’ or even ‘Westworld’ frequency. The satire is still there, but a little lost to firefights. What there is is plenty of sympathy for the aliens and criticism for institutional and general racism.

 

Presented with the awesome reality of aliens, the human race just reverts to xenophobia. But also, the presentation of aliens as refugees with all the social and political complexities involved is not how movie aliens are usually presented: this is a far cry from the awe-inspiring contemplation of, say, ‘Arrival’. It’s not a deep discussion of the subject, because this has the pell-mell motion of action b-movie, so you won’t get the narrative of what the black and indigenous communities think and feel, or how their social status has been affected by the aliens’ arrival. But there is an overall condemnation of the marginalisation, exploitation and the bigoty visited on the aliens which keeps a live current throughout. It certainly portrays a far too plausible and recognisable reaction (‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ is a pipedream, its positivity childish in comparison). However, the resolution that it’s a good thing that the aliens go back to where they came from is unhelpful. It’s the context that resonates rather than any questions or answers.

Once it’s clear ‘District 9’ won’t be a deep discourse on the subject of the disenfranchised, what we are left with is the tribulations of Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley), rise and downfall. Like the first infamous segment in ‘The Twilight Zone Movie’, it’s a tale where the guy facilitating violent discrimination with a clipboard and prejudicial legalise finds roles reversed. In this case, he inhales something extraterrestrial and transforms, via a body-horror interlude, into an alien. He’s a scumbag happy to exploit and wallow is his role in the Hostile Environment and evicting the aliens who meets his comeuppance. He takes a long time to redeem himself and even then, it’s more a case of just desserts, although the film does give some sympathy.

It’s conveyed at first through documentary and found-footage style, building up pictures from news reports, etc, as Wikus is happy to front fly-on-the-wall propaganda. But the film is happy to dump that pretence as action demands, although it never relinquishes hand-held. And it’s the image of the spaceship hanging over Johannesburg is likely to be the chief lingering image.

 

The aliens are great: some smart, some stupid, some lumbering, some insect-elegant, gullible, forlorn, aggressive, etc. This could be seen as inconsistency, but the positive interpretation is that they are recognisably as myriad as any other species. After all, we don’t know any tier system or hierarchy they may have (the intellects and the workers, for example). Both cookie and intimidating, persecuted and troublesome. They are a convincing early-ish display of dominant digital effects by Weta Workshop – it’s a Peter Jackson production – that still hold up. It’s not above going for the cute kid alien angle either.

 

It suffers from some of the weaknesses of b-movie action – why speechify when and not shoot? Let’s take it on trust that he’ll just remember the way to that lab – and perhaps it doesn’t quite jump from its distinctive, potent premise as highly as it could, but it’s fun, quick, and pertinent enough. Blomkamp and Coley arguably have never quite met the early promise of this debut, but it still maintains its position as a genre favourite.

Curse of the Crimson Altar

 

Curse of the Crimson Alter

Aka: The Crimson Cult

Director – Vernon Sewell

Screenplay – Mervyn Haisman & Henry Lincoln from a story by Jerry Sohl

Stars – Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, Mark Eden

 

Starts in rip-roaring fashion with a buxom blonde being whipped on a sacrificial alter by a near-naked amazon whilst a dirty old priest looks on. Having been introduced to our typically staid hero, the Swinging Sixties vibe continues (as much as it censorship allows) with a big house party of wild abandon (e.g. painting breasts, pouring booze on breasts, etc). Much of the debauchery and witchy rituals look like they are auditioning for a salacious slot in such Mondo efforts as ‘Primitive London’. 

 

Manning hangs around and discovers that the atmosphere is sinister with the legend of Lavinia Morley, Black Witch of Greymarsh. Witch burning town festivals, psychedelic nightmares, blood oaths, threatening masked juries, sleepwalking, secret passages relatively easily found all follow. When stabbed in a dream, Manning wakes to find he has been stabbed in real life, but this barely seems a conundrum to him and certainly no inconvenience to shagging his host’s daughter. In fact, the film’s sexual politics are decidedly dated, what with Manning’s somewhat presumptive and aggressive come-ons. And it all ends up underwhelming and a little perfunctory – don’t these things end on the rooftop? Yes, let’s do the rooftop!

 

Based on HP Lovecraft’s ‘A Dream in the Witch House’ (uncredited), antique enthusiast Robert Manning (Mark Eden) goes in pursuit of his missing brother and gate-crashes a party at a stately home, finding himself taken as a welcome guest. “It’s as if Boris Karloff is going to pop up at any moment,” Manning deadpans – and lo! Boris does turn up, in a wheelchair, condescending and full of potent and invitations to see his collection of torture instruments. Of course, it’s Karloff and Christopher Lee that give it class (Lee’s no-nonsense sincerity and Karloff’s uncampy ham), but it’s Michael Gough that steals the show as a batty short-lived servant. Eden is uninteresting and quite bullish, like Connery’s Bond without the charm.  Virginia Wetherall’s natural no-nonsense appeal is squandered and all Barbara Steele has to do is to is look imperiously green.

 

Enjoy by simply stuffing the plot holes and cliches with the lashings of unintentional camp.

The Kitchen

 

The Kitchen

 

Director – Andrea Berloff

Writers – Andrea Berloff - based on the comic book series created for DC Vertigo by Ollie Masters & Ming Doyle

Stars – Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, Elisabeth Moss 

 

Andrea Barloff’s directorial debut is an adaption of a DC Vertigo comic set in the ‘70s telling how three abused and/or neglected mobsters wives take over the business in Hell’s Kitchen when their husbands are put away. So, the grounds are there for a look at misogyny, violence, gender relations, etc., and if there are any doubts about its feminist intent, there are endless shots of the ladies striding together to a groovy soundtrack. But there is something that doesn’t quite gel, doesn’t quite convince in motivation: with comics, there is plenty of room for the reader to fill in the lacunas, but Berloff doesn’t quite cohere across the time-jumps. There’s the sense of posturing rather than solidity, that it lacks in fully making sense.

 

Which leaves its three esteemed leads a little hit-or-miss, although Elizabeth Moss comes out least unscathed. Tiffany Haddish becomes increasingly one-note and Melissa McCarthy is left floundering. Of the men, Domhall Gleeson is the most intriguing (though his touted psychopathy is ultimately no more than anyone else). And we don’t quite get a montage of them sexying-up, but they definitely get less home wifey and dolled up the more criminal they become. There’s a fleeting gag about what they should wear to meet an opposing mob boss, but it’s another potential insight barely given air.

 

And there’s not a lot of consequence for all the killing that goes on: for all it spanning of years, it’s not so interested in long-term effects. The problem is we are meant to hold up these ladies as fighting against and besting the masculine world of gangsterdom, but there is little besting or bettering when, for all their womanly smarts and pouts of determination, they are just as ruthless and brutal as the men. Exploitation may get away with self-made Angel of Vengeance assassins, but this isn’t that.  They are not icons, even if the film posits that they are right down to the ham-fisted “outta my way” final moment.

Leave your panic at the door - album

My new long player, "Leave your panic at the door" is on Bandcamp now. It's an electronically-inclined effort with bits of electropop (sort of) to ambience. Made during this second year of lockdown, of course.

Fake thriller beats, upper class war on lower class animals, friendship promises, relationship abstractions, fake solar system beats and fake automaton beats, a swooning lady phenomenon, neediness in pieces, lifestyle genres, the last signals from a skull.

 

Pig

Pig

Director - Michael Sarnoski

Writers - Vanessa Block & Michael Sarnoski

Stars – Nicolas Cage, Alex Wolff, Adam Arkin

 

Anyone coming for shouty madcap Cage will be sorely disappointed, because here he is totally in service to the prose of the film as a whole, not just punctuation. It’s a quiet, towering Sasquatch of a performance. Going in knowing very little – they steal his pig; he wants it back – I probably thought it would go the ‘John Wick’, ‘Nobody’ route, and indeed it is filmed with those beats in place, albeit in a very sombre register. But it’s not that either, for it has different goals. For a start, it’s almost so washed out that it’s austere, and it is slow, committedly serious and deliberate and ends on a great, bare bones cover of Springsteen’s ‘I’m On Fire’. It’s a mood piece.

 

(And I feel the need to put a reminder that you should stop reading now if you haven’t seen the film.)

 

Those action-revenge beats are in place: there’s illegal fights, a wealthy nemesis, and Rob spends most of the film with a bloody beard (which nevertheless doesn’t stop him from getting to a prestige restaurant; and he must smell a treat too). And indeed, it’s as if John Wick’s superpowers were a photographic memory and legendary culinary skills instead of super-assassin past. Cage is Rob, a committed hermit with the required irascibility, earning cash as a truffle hunter and selling to Alex Wolff. But these are characters to be coloured-in, and the character study that emerges is one of a talented man scarred irreparably by grief and a fatalism and over-sensitivity; an over-sensitivity, we might guess, compounded and made unbearable by that photographic memory. Rob’s intelligence and empathy becomes increasingly evident and is never clearer than when he is confronting/talking to the restaurant chef (a sublime scene between David Knell and Cage at the peak of their control).

 

It’s a film concerned with subtle shifts, and although Alex Wolff as Amir is often shoved aside as a used and abused observer, and although we don’t get to see it, one could imagine these events have changed him more than anyone. His is a fine performance of natural empathy trying to get out from under the veneer of bolshy business hotshot.

 

Where you might think it is leading to an explosive showdown of some kind… but the showdown is the making of a meal rather than a shootout. The methodology is repeatedly to set up an to undercut expectations. Again, the film follows the beats of a vengeance thriller, even to leaving him a hermit with his tapes which a shallow action film would see as a poignant character beat, but the residual feeling here is different: there’s no satisfaction of “he’s had his vengeance and now everything is back in its rightful place”. ‘Pig’ is after something else: a story of what we care about and the husks it makes of us when that’s taken away.

Guns Akimbo

GUNS AKIMBO

Writer & Director - Jason Howden

2019, Germany-New Zealand-United Kingdom

Stars – Daniel Radcliffe, Samara Weaving, Ned Dennehy

 

It starts with a nihilistic introduction by villain Riktor (Ned Dennehy) that sounds like it’s criticising audiences always wanting violent entertainment and all else is a kind of virtue signalling. Indeed, it’s protagonist is a vegetarian pacifist, but he’ll soon see the shortcomings of his better aspirations when his hands are fixed with guns – turned into literal handguns – and put into a kill-or-kill-be-killed online game. But in fact, the film is totally attuned to Riktor’s credo. It’s “mindless fun” and so will sneer off any criticism. The other retort seems to be Samera Sarah strolling in and shooting people and places up to ska (is the fact that she seems to carry an invisible arsenal with her at all times a gaming gag?).

 

And then almost immediately after the villain’s introductory narration, we get the protagonist voiceover explaining that this was the day that changed everything, so that’s already two mayor strikes down for me and we’re not even five minutes in. There is a surfeit of bad writing. But, you see, Jason Howden’s previous film ‘Deathgasm’ wasn’t only braindead fun: it was rude and crude, scatalogical and frequently very funny, but simultaneously skewering and celebrating its Heavy Metal culture. Its juvenile nature was totally appropriate to its protagonist and doctrine. ‘Guns Akimbo’ doesn’t pull off or justify the same trick, although it tries to have its cake and eat it in other ways too: taking a swipe at cowardly “keyboard warriors” (“Think you’re man enough?!”) but also making them the eventual kickass hero.

 

Daniel Radcliffe has become a fairly reliable brand to follow, for he seems inclined to more intriguing projects and always visibly committed, however they turn out; and as Miles he certainly grounds ‘Gun Akimbo’ with a nerdy clumsiness and relatability (although those unaware of his wider catalogue might just see no further than Harry Potter Swears!). But we are meant to be cheering on an online troll here. Ned Dennehy is tattooed and villainous, but there’s almost the sense that he’s not fully into it, that there are moments where his innate actor almost surfaces (anyway, he’ll never be as repugnant and as scary to me as he was as Paudi in ‘Calm With Horses’).

 

Samara Sarah has doesn’t have to do anything more than walk in an shoot shit up to another blast of trendy song, a horny boy's vision of a bad girl. Oh, she's damaged too!! It's almost unintentionally funny when the story tries to grant her some earnest humanity and backstory (she has PTSD with fire! … but wait, wouldn’t that make her a less effective killing machine in this context? How the hell did she survive which such a weakness?). But it’s all pose and no trousers. It’s of the attention-deficit school of directing, where you’re never 10 seconds away from a camera tilt, superfluous jump-cut or song. It’s also greatly inspired by gaming culture and excessive fight scenes, but it has none of the style of ‘Hardcore Henry’ (which was equally braindead but audacious and convinced me more) or even the ability to pace things out or make you feel the excess like ‘John Wick’. For me, it’s Miles’ encounter with an alley homeless guy that is the funniest and most memorable encounter, where Rhys Darby as said hobo doesn’t feel chained and restrained by a perfunctory and often lazy script (let’s note the realism of a gunshot’s volume first thing and then forget about it from thereon; we own the police, but we only really see one crooked cop).

 

From the start, ‘Gun Akimbo’ feels like someone trying to ape the better action films he loves, but not nailing it – edgy lawless premise; still frames to name characters; cartoon palette and ultraviolence; random camera tricks and effects that mean nothing; and lots of obvious songs. Lots. Because it desperately grabs the songs, hoping for cool. But in the end, if you get anything from this may depend upon whether you accept a hammer fight played out MC Hammer as funny or edgy. Too confused to be genuine satire.

Dune - notes on Frank Herbert's novel and Denis Villeneuve's adaptation

 

Dune

Frank Herbert, 1965

 

Fortuitously, Villeneuve’s first part of adapting Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ finishes just at the point I had read up to in the book at that time (halfway). The novel has sat in my “to read” pile since I was a teenager smitten with science-fiction, and I have no idea why it has taken a lifetime to get around to reading it. Perhaps I was intimidated by its reputation as “difficult” and/or “dense”? Well, it is dense and uncompromising and the world-building is exemplary, the kind I already knew from Jack Vance; although Vance feels pulpier and Herbert more serious in intent. World building is the genre’s chief pleasure and super-power. It’s enthralling and its place as One Of The Best and Highly Influential is obvious and well earned. It is full to bursting with detail, characters, culture and political intrigue and themes without losing focus or reader.

            

Its themes are the grandest: the intersecting of politics and religion and economics, cultures and war and guilds and totalitarianisms, of mesiahs and their followers, etc. It is full of snippets of wisdom dispensed in fake memoirs and political and religions tomes. It is full of the mechanics of politics and schemes that often feel like the Machievelli’s ‘The Prince’, or Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’. For example: How you pay for military might? Make prison planets. And peppered with existential wisdom such as, “How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.” Or, “the real universe is always one step beyond logic.” But the observations are full of intelligence rather than the platitudes that beset religious enlightenments.

 

‘Dune’ is heavily steeped in Middle Eastern culture – the precious spice = oil, for example – and has much commentary on colonialism and exploitation of resources. Yet whilst sympathetic and respectful of the Fremen natives, it’s a royal outsider that rallies and guides them. The gender politics are slippery too: women are concubines and witches, but they also seem to hold formidable behind-the-curtain power and connivance – they are certainly equal matches for the men, even in combat. The Bene Gesserit, for example, are a formidable sisterhood of female plotting and power committed to a breeding programme meant to result in the Kwisatz Haderach, a calculated Chosen One. Indeed, that they are apparently  "influenced by the tales of Maria Sabina and the sacred mushroom cults of Mexico" (says Wiki) shows the rich variety of inspiration that Herbert used. ‘Dune’ touches on too many bases, surely, to be accused of just one. It’s jammed packed full of weighty ideas and observations.

 

The guiding point is the apparent “Chosen One” status of Paul Atreides, the fifteen-year-old heir to the House of Atreides, trained in arcane ways by his mother and given to visions and reactions from others that he is Muab D’ib, a religious coming. ‘Dune’ certainly wasn’t the first, but one can see its popularity and influence as a seminal Chosen One narrative, even if others overlook its questioning intent. Paul himself is initially reluctant and disbelieving, although events soon bring out seemingly preternatural abilities. The Chosen One status drives him directly in conflict with his mother: he resents her for her part in putting him in that position, the Bene Gesseret breeding programme. By the finale of the novel in which Paul is given the chance to face down and outwit all his enemies and rivals, he is giddy with his omnipotence, even if the last melee is a close call highlighting his mortality. Yet this is tinged with Paul’s cynicism and self-awareness of his status as myth generator that defines his character. And as the fulcrum to several Chosen One legends, this self-awareness and cynicism culminates with his alternating whichever he needs to best his rivals (Paul Atreides, Muad’Dib, Kwisatz Haderach). Herbert may have been influenced by Arthurian mythology, but ‘Dune’ is not fascinated with Romantic Heroism of infallible protagonists. For Herbert, "Dune was aimed at this whole idea of the infallible leader because my view of history says that mistakes made by a leader (or made in a leader's name) are amplified by the numbers who follow without question.”*

 

It's a grand achievement, the mixture of hard and soft science-fiction, of convincing ecological and political realities mixed with futuristic fantasy consistently compelling and intelligent.

 

 

Dune

Director - Denis Villeneuve

Writers - Jon Spaihts (screenplay by), Denis Villeneuve (screenplay by), Eric Roth (screenplay by)

Stars - Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Zendaya

 

And a serious tone, somewhat humourless, is what Villeneuve brings, which seems to me thoroughly in keeping with the novel. This is in inevitable comparison with David Lynch’s madcap adaptation. As Mark Kermode notes, in Lynch’s version there is always a distraction, so you are never bored even as it is unravelling before your very consideration. It’s somewhat a highly enjoyable, compelling misfire where the art design and costumes and effects amaze even as the narrative flounders in seeking purchase. There’s a lot of amusement to watch it gleefully pummel onwards, almost-but-not so-bad-it’s- good. Arguably, the few notes of humour tried for in Villeneuve’s ‘Dune’ stick out like a sore thumb, but they are fleeting moments – and seemingly all deceptively crammed in the trailer, which is edited like a Marvel Universe teaser (Action! Quips!).

 

What I found satisfying in Villenueve’s‘Blade Runner 2049’ was the subversion of the “I’m The Chosen One” trope. That’s the very foundation of ‘Dune’,** a primary text for this trope indeed, but I heard a criticism on the Kermode & Mayo film show where someone found all the foreboding and premonitions tiresome, but that is at the crux of the narrative, for it’s all about Paul Atreides being foretold as M’uad Dib. But he is reluctant, not happy at being manipulated into this prophecy; he’s conscientious and he is angry at his mother’s apparent manipulations at making him The Chosen One.

 

One other major criticism is that he is a White Saviour, but the character of Paul is a little more complex than that, and certainly Herbert’s vision is more informed. ‘Dune’ is about colonialism, all the political power play and wrongful disregard of the natives for the sake of plundering the resources. Khaldoun Khelil*** is enlightening on the problems of representation in Villenueve’s adaptation, and certainly in a post-MCU casting world, the casting could/should have been cannier – and surely Iannucci’s ‘The Life and Times of David Copperfield’ showed up the shallowness and inadequacies of the mentality of general casting. Indeed, changing the character Dr Liet Kynes to a black woman (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) hints at greater diversity already being an option.

 

In terms of language, it eloquent in the manner we may associate with canonical classics, but unlike Lynch’s ‘Dune’ it’s not near-impenetrable. There’s long exposition narration to begin with, the kind that always raises puts me dubious, but luckily that is just a stumbling block to the story proper. The secret sign language between Jessica and Paul is a good visual innovation to convey the Bene Gesserit training that they share, which is all embodied in the novel’s prose. Similarly, it does away with voiceovers to replicate the novel’s articulation of thoughts, the kind of voiceover that Lynch used (which I actually liked, in retrospect).

 

Any fan of B I G spaceships will be in Heaven here as they rise from lakes, block out most of the screen as characters disembark, or even the ‘thopters resembling dragonflies. It’s a film with scope and scale with plenty of faultless CGI. There is of course wonderful set design, from the greenery of Caladan (a sequence more expansive than in the novel) to the spacious chambers, endless sand banks and tunnels of Arrakis. It’s perhaps not as shocking/suprising as that of Lynch’s version, but it perhaps feels more organic, more realistic. Surely many will feel like Jonathan Romney: 

 

 “Nowhere near as enjoyable as Villeneuve’s inspired Blade Runner 2049, Dune is an achievement for sure, but watching it is rather like having huge marble monoliths dropped on you for two and a half hours, to the resounding clang of a Hans Zimmer score.”

 

Timothée Chalamet is, of course, too old to match the fifteen-year-old Paul Atreides of the book, but there is a precociousness he exudes, a boyish maturity if you will that suits the character. Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica is surely more weepy than in the book, but like the rest of the star-studded cast, she knows how to play this kind of high theatre. Only Zendaya comes across as an ill-fit, coming too obviously from the American school of feisty female acting (but this may be unfair in the long-run).  

 

Lynch’s version is more fun, but Villeneuve wants to get close to the novel’s sombre tone, and this he does. And perhaps those who enjoy Lynch’s camp appeal may not enjoy Villeneuve’s sincerity and vice versa. And of course it’s twice the reward if you go for both, and there are plenty of us. Villeneuve’s style is of a restrained, underplayed tendency, not typical of the blockbuster style, more an approach associated with indie. So, whereas there is all the spectacle you could want, the dramatic conveyance will leave many cold (certainly, many didn’t engage with ‘Blade Runner 2049’s layers, thinking it lacked for story). And anyway, ‘Dune’ is not a warm story, but a tale of calculation and survival in an objective and manipulated design. There’s something battered about these characters rather than adventure action archetypes.

 

I came away from Villeneuve’s ‘Dune’ with a sensation that I had been wowed, and like his ‘Blade Runner’, that it would be on a second watch that I would truly and fully engage. And of course, this is only half the story.

 

·       *  Herbert, Frank (1985). "Introduction". Eye. ISBN 0-425-08398-5.

·     ** So to speak. One comment came about ‘Dune’ was that it was his response to Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ series.

· *** I owe thanks for this link to Derek Anthony Williams https://www.facebook.com/theneofuturist

Mogul Mowgli

Mogul Mowgli

 

Director - Bassam Tariq

Writers - Riz Ahmed & Bassam Tariq

Stars - Riz Ahmed, Anjana Vasan, Aiysha Hart

2020, UK-USA

 

Bassam Tariq’s debut – about a rap artist on the verge of some success when he’s stricken by a crippling illness – juggles neo-realisms with dreamy surrealist interludes to avoid being totally kitchen sink.

 

Tariq And Ahmed’s greatest achievement is in portraying how ordinary lives are steeped in conflict of family, culture, expression, generation and of the self. Even down to a rap battle where the conflict is between Pakistani and Black experience (aside from dropping to “your mum/dad” insults). The picture it paints of familiar bonds and the lived experience of this particular generation and culture feels authentic. Every scene is infused with the struggle for identity, chaffing against the strictures and expectations of class, gender, culture, creed, all that. We are constantly told to Live The Dream and Be Yourself and The World Is Yours because advertising has found that’s the way to make a lot of money, but reality has a way of showing that to be the con job it is. Zed wants to say something about this, about his community, but sometimes you get ill and it doesn’t happen.

 

Characters are gruff rather than sentimental in a rough-and-tumble way that is perhaps a feature of class. Love is expressed messily but sincerely just by loyalty and being there. And Zed’s talent is real, and ultimately his plight and struggle for relevance and dignity are moving (the phone call to an ex and the final bathroom scenes are heart-breaking). If the film sometimes feels messy and confused about what it’s doing, that’s thoroughly in line with Zed’s mindset. It is about identity, after all.

 

‘Mogul Mowgli’ is also a film where the bathroom is the regular theatre of humiliation, overcoming of odds and family battles and bonding: these are the arguably the best scenes. A character study that takes it time building a heady and relatable emotional charge. Riz Ahmed’s performance of an artist’s sophistication existing beneath the blunt edges and demands of his character, culture and ambition, trying to be profound and truthful, is exceptional. He makes Zed’s frustration with everything a tangible, hugely relatable thing. And any young angry artist can knows his spikey passion, surely. The rap artform may not be to your taste, but rarely has there been such a down-to-earth portrayal of being a working class artist and never hitting the mark you’ve been so impassioned for. Life gets in the way.