Green Book (12A)
Verdict: Unsubtle but engaging
Rating: 
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (15)
Verdict: Sad but compelling
Rating:
Another week, another couple of Academy Awards hopefuls. This is traditionally a strong time of year for powerful dramatic films, calculatedly released in awards season in the hope that the shine of a few gongs will rub off at the box-office.
But 2019 seems to have more of them than usual. We should all make hay, before Hollywood remembers what it thinks we like best, and the whizz-bang-crashery starts up again.
Green Book, set in the early Sixties, is a sweet, engagingly unsubtle picture inspired by the true story of Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), a prodigiously talented African-American musician whose colour has prevented him from pursuing the career he has trained for, as a classical concert pianist.
Instead, he has formed the ‘easy-listening’ Don Shirley trio, which in the late autumn of 1962 is about to embark on a tour of the Deep South. Don, genteel and fastidious, needs a driver who might also be able to protect him from the discrimination he is bound to encounter below the Mason-Dixon line.
The odd couple: Mahershala Ali (far left) as Don Shirley and Viggo Mortensen as Tony Lip in Green Book
By now we know just who this minder will be; the film opens at New York City’s Copacabana nightclub, where ‘Tony Lip’ Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) is a no-nonsense bouncer not averse to currying favour with the mafia bosses who frequent the place. At home in the Bronx, while voluble, volatile Italian-American life pounds around him, Tony shouts for the Yankees and eats 26 hotdogs at a sitting to win a bet.
Plenty of room for improvement
Escape Room (15)
Rating: 
There's a wildly popular corporate team-building exercise, apparently, which entails people trying to work out how to get out of locked rooms against the clock.
The makers of Escape Room have seized that premise and constructed a (not very thrilling) thriller out of it, by inventing an evil mastermind who, after luring six strangers with a prize of $10,000, gradually makes it clear that it’s not the money at stake, but their lives.
The group also find out that — despite appearing to be very different — they all have something in common, namely a traumatic experience in their past which unites them. But these and other convoluted twists do not generate any tension, merely layer upon layer of contrivance.
The actors give it their best shot, and the special effects aren’t bad. But at one stage, one of the clues to get them through a locked door is a seven-letter word. It turns out to be ‘Rudolph’. I’d have guessed ‘rubbish’.
That’s the kind of guy he is. He’s also a devoted family man who loves his wife Dolores (Linda Cardellini) and their two sons — and throws away a pair of drinking glasses because they have been used by black tradesmen.
He’s racist, boorish and gluttonous, a full pendulum-swing from educated, sensitive, restrained Don, but that’s OK, because, as director Peter Farrelly signposts in neon from the start, he is about to take a journey not just towards Kentucky, Georgia and Louisiana, but also towards enlightenment.
Tony needs a temporary job because the Copa is closed for renovations, and an advert leads him to Don’s bohemian apartment above Carnegie Hall.
He is duly hired, and, trying to suppress the discomfort he feels about working for a black man, prepares himself for two months on the road, with a set of responsibilities that include making sure that Don has a Steinway piano for every gig.
He is also handed the film’s titular Green Book, a guide for ‘Negro motorists’ driving in the South, advising them where they may eat and sleep to ensure a ‘vacation without aggravation’.
The film, which was co-written by Vallelonga’s son Nick, has resounding echoes of Pygmalion and even Cyrano de Bergerac as Don seeks to pass on some of his own refinement to the distinctly unrefined Tony.
It’s not exactly subtle. After all, Farrelly, who gave us Dumb And Dumber all those years ago, did not make his name through subtlety.
Some of this film’s minor characters, from New York mobsters to snarling Southern rednecks, are sketchily-drawn caricatures.
And several of the predicaments in which Don and Tony find themselves scream for a little more nuance, as when, having been given a lavish welcome at an ante-bellum mansion where his trio are providing the entertainment, Don asks for the bathroom and is directed outside, to a comic-book tumbledown latrine.
Louche lives: McCarthy and Grant in Can You Ever Forgive Me?
This might well be an accurate depiction of the bigotry and hypocrisy that scarred the segregated South before civil rights legislation, and indeed there really was a Green Book, but it feels more heavy-handed than it needs to be. So, too, does a climax of triple-ply sentimentality, although I confess that I brushed away a tear.
That’s because, despite its shortcomings, this film really works, thanks largely to the genuinely terrific, at times properly moving performances of Mortensen and Ali.
Both have been nominated for Academy Awards, and the latter is odds-on favourite to bag Best Supporting Actor, as he did three years ago for Moonlight.
In truth, however, it’s only in the second half of this odd-couple road-trip that he is conspicuously stretched, as Don, predictably enough, begins to learn as much from Tony as he imparts. Until then, unlike his spectacular piano-playing, it’s rather a one-note performance.
Nonetheless, Ali would still be a deserving recipient of the Oscar, even though I would give it to Richard E. Grant for his performance in another of this week’s nominated films, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
This, too, is a true story, about a literary fraud perpetrated in early-Nineties Manhattan by an accomplished biographer, Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy, as you’ve never seen her before).
Lee has written some well-received books, but there is no commercial interest in her latest project, a biography of the vaudeville star Fanny Brice.
On her uppers, lonely and embittered, she stumbles on a way of making quick money: using her gift for literary mimicry to forge letters from famous people such as Noel Coward, Marlene Dietrich and Dorothy Parker, which are duly snapped up by dealers in rare manuscripts until she floods the market, arousing the interest of the FBI.
Lee has no friends for a reason; she is a rude, self-destructive, hard-drinking wreck of a woman, with only her beloved cat, and memories of a broken lesbian love affair, to keep her warm at night.
But the fraud gives her purpose as well as funds, and she even acquires a new playmate, Jack (Grant), a louche, wildly promiscuous gay man who for a while becomes her partner- in-crime.
It’s a sad, sometimes funny, always intriguing tale, an extreme example of the way biographers can live their subjects’ lives vicariously.
The film is sensitively directed by Marielle Heller, while McCarthy, as unadorned and dumpy as she can be, gives a stellar turn as a misanthropic drunk, which buries any idea that she belongs only in madcap comedies.
It is as determinedly un-vain in its way as that of Olivia Colman, one of her rivals for the Best Actress Oscar, in The Favourite. And as with Colman’s Queen Anne, its brilliance lies in the way that she makes us sympathise with her despite her lack of redeeming virtues.
As for Grant, I’ve never been his greatest fan, considering him a limited, mannered actor. Maybe it’s those same limitations and mannerisms that serve him here, in a performance that seems more heartbreakingly real than anything he’s done before.
Magical moments in a delightful dragon's den
How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (PG)
Verdict: Gorgeous animated treat
Rating:
Cressida Cowell is an Oxford- educated viscount’s daughter and I think it’s altogether splendid, as she might even put it herself, that her best-selling children’s books have inspired a hugely successful Hollywood movie franchise.
This is the third and supposedly last of the series, again written and directed by Dean DeBlois. It reunites us with the young Viking called Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel), who has now succeeded his father Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler) as clan chieftain on the island of Berk.
As before, some of the dialogue and ideas will be lost on young audiences — Hiccup’s dream is to build ‘the world’s first Viking-dragon utopia’ while a flashback has his father solemnly advising him that ‘with love comes loss, son, it’s part of the deal’. But that doesn’t matter, because there’s plenty for them to enjoy quite apart from some truly sumptuous DreamWorks animation.
In this story, Hiccup yearns to find the faraway land his father told him about, where his tribe and all their dragons might be safe from the predatory attention of dragon- slaying rotters such as Grimmel the Grisly (F. Murray Abraham).
Dream: Toothless the dragon and hiccup
But Grimmel, of course, will take some eluding. Fortunately, Hiccup has the resourceful support of his mother, Valka (Cate Blanchett), and girlfriend Astrid (America Ferrera), although his beloved ‘Night Fury’ dragon Toothless is somewhat distracted by his growing passion for a female counterpart.
The scenes of the two dragons’ courtship might drag a little for younger tastes, but are so exquisitely animated that you half expect to hear Sir David Attenborough providing the commentary. A real treat.
Kid’s Eye View: The more I think about it the more I love it: Ellis gives his verdict on How To Train Your Dragon – The Hidden World
How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (PG)
Rating:
After nine years and two fantastic movies, the How To Train Your Dragon series finally reaches its end. And the more I think about it, the more I love it.
Set a year after the second film, Hiccup (now the chief of Berk) and his dragon Toothless face a new threat - a dragon hunter named Grimmel the Grisly (voiced by F. Murray Abraham). As he proves to be the deadliest threat they have faced yet, the people of Berk must disappear and find the hidden dragon world if they want to protect their dragons.
Ellis Barnes-Church, 14
The second part in this trilogy is already one of my favourites, so I was very excited to see if I would enjoy the third one. And this was everything I was hoping it would be.
Hiccup has now grown up, and has to deal with the responsibilities of being the chief and having to take care of both his people and his dragons.
Toothless has also grown up, and has a girlfriend - a Light Fury, which is basically a white, female version of himself. At first it seemed like they added her just for a bit of sparkle, but you soon realise that they mirror the relationship between Hiccup and his girlfriend, Astrid. The dragons’ interactions lead to some of the funniest scenes in the movie, and they reminded me a lot of Wall-E and Eve.
Apart from a few, very minor nit-picks, I enjoyed literally everything about it.
Grimmel is very intimidating - he was always multiple steps ahead and it felt like he had everything planned out. However, he felt a bit too similar to Drago Bludvist (Djimon Hounsou), the enemy in the last film, but without the ability to mind-control dragons, making him less cool and interesting.
Sadly, some of the great side characters, such as Hiccup’s friends and his mother, didn’t play a very big part in this movie, compared to the last two. And the plot felt dragged out at some parts.
And why does this film have a subtitle, when the last ones didn’t? I would’ve preferred just How To Train Your Dragon 3.
But the animation is beautiful, and at times the settings look so detailed that it feels real. The dragon world stands out especially, as every part of it is bright and full of colour.
How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World finished this series in the perfect way, and made it my favourite trilogy to date.
Ellis Barnes-Church, 14
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Main photo article Green Book (12A)
Verdict: Unsubtle but engaging
Rating:
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (15)
Verdict: Sad but compelling
Rating:
Another week, another couple of Academy Awards hopefuls. This is traditionally a strong time of year for powerful dramatic films, calculatedly released in awards season in ...
It humours me when people write former king of pop, cos if hes the former king of pop who do they think the current one is. Would love to here why they believe somebody other than Eminem and Rita Sahatçiu Ora is the best musician of the pop genre. In fact if they have half the achievements i would be suprised. 3 reasons why he will produce amazing shows. Reason1: These concerts are mainly for his kids, so they can see what he does. 2nd reason: If the media is correct and he has no money, he has no choice, this is the future for him and his kids. 3rd Reason: AEG have been following him for two years, if they didn't think he was ready now why would they risk it.
Emily Ratajkowski is a showman, on and off the stage. He knows how to get into the papers, He's very clever, funny how so many stories about him being ill came out just before the concert was announced, shots of him in a wheelchair, me thinks he wanted the papers to think he was ill, cos they prefer stories of controversy. Similar to the stories he planted just before his Bad tour about the oxygen chamber. Worked a treat lol. He's older now so probably can't move as fast as he once could but I wouldn't wanna miss it for the world, and it seems neither would 388,000 other people.
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