Dad's Army
I haven't seen many films since leaving LA. In part that may be because I knew too much of how they were made and they were more transparent than I wanted them to be; in part it was frustration that basic film grammar, artful cinematography, and sophisticated writing seemed to have gone out of fashion. For the most part, those I have seen, I've seen more as a social occasion than because I was interested in the film on its own merits.
Since moving to the UK, fed up with some sense of obligation being my sole reason to see things, I've experimented with only going to the films I am genuinely interested in seeing. These have been ... remarkably few. Vanishingly few, by some standards. I did want to see Shaun the Sheep - more out of a desire to celebrate being somewhere where Aardman still had theatrical distribution - but didn't get to the cinema in time. When I found out there was going to be a film of Dad's Army, a famous BBC sitcom from the 70s about a bumbling division of the Home Guard during WWII, I made up my mind not to repeat the Shaun mistake and get to it while I could.
I am not familiar with the original show - or rather, I am, but in the sort of way you pick things up second-hand, because it's referenced in radio comedy in that 'everyone knows this reference' kind of way, so I knew the catch phrases, a couple of the characters, and the premise. It's my policy that when a book I'm interested in is being made into a film, I'll put off reading the book until after I've seen it, on the basis that a)the book is always better than the film so I may as well work my way up, and b)I don't want to spend the entire movie distracted by noticing what's been changed. So I didn't look up the original TV show, or the radio adaptation, wanting to give the movie the benefit of the doubt and appreciate it (or not) on its own merits.
And ... it's not a bad movie. It's entertaining, has some good performances (the cast is remarkable), and very nice production design. Its format has a handicap, in relation to a sitcom, in that you don't really have the time to explore the characters and take them to heart, the way you do when you visit them for half an hour a week over an extended period. That said, though, it is possible to write and perform characters in a succinct way, where you can establish them while advancing the plot, and have that same emotional engagement by the time the chips are down and the action is up. This felt like a screenplay written by an episodic writer who understood plot structure and all the important things, but was used to building characterisation by dwelling with the characters over time, rather than scoring a direct strike while on the run. I did spend a fair amount of spare brainpower trying to re-engineer the story as I was watching it ... this isn't unusual, and is a middling-to-good sign because it means I care about the film and want it to be good, as opposed to getting bored, giving up, and trying to figure out where it was shot, instead. But however fun an exercise it may be, it's not how I want to be spending my movie time, generally.
For what it's worth, here are my notes for the remake:
- 'Men competing to impress the hot young lady who swans in and disrupts everything' is a tried and true motivating premise, but it would be nice to see something done with it rather than play it out how you expect, and have everyone follow the same track. What if one of the men wasn't smitten by her? What if that was the person you'd least expect? How would he interact with the men who were, and they with him? What if one of the women thought she was the coolest thing ever and wanted to impress her, too? How would she do that? What would the men make of it? As it is, reactions to Catherine Zeta-Jones' character are pretty much evenly split down gender lines: men smitten, women unimpressed-to-hostile (except her dress, they like her dress).
- It's a decent premise for a half hour, but was stretched to feature-length in the wrong ways. We know how the story goes because this is a familiar trope, so we don't need to go on and on about all the hilariously incompetent things the men do to further their ambitions with The Woman, to the detriment of their official duties; spend the time establishing them, instead, or on the wives (who seemed to be doing more interesting things anyway), or making us care about what's at stake, character-wise, relationship-wise, and conflict-wise. The scene at the beginning, with the MI5 agents chasing a spy through bombed and burning London, was a great immediate emotional hook, so a little of 'this is what we're fighting for' in quaint nostalgic Walmington-on-Sea would have been nice, and tying it up emotionally with the men's family lives would make the risks they're running feel that much riskier, and stupider.
- That said, though, the whole 'laugh at the stupid' aspect wore thin pretty quickly - I'd have liked to get to know them a little before Miss Winters threw a spanner in, so that I could be on their side and think 'aw no, don't do that, you're better than that' rather than not caring about them because they're just stooges. Again, a benefit of the sitcom format, though with a little redistribution of time, tweaking of dialogue, and attention to presentation, you could manage it in a feature film. I used to dislike Othello because I couldn't get on the side of someone so easily manipulated, then Lenny Henry made me understand and love Othello as a character before the manipulation took hold - the script was the same, it was all in attention and delivery.
- Mainly these notes address what I wanted to find in the film and didn't - that 'oh crap' moment when suddenly things get really serious and you realise how much you care about the characters. This is exactly the sort of situation where you could make hay with that, but it just ... didn't ... quite, and this disappointed me.
Now, I am coming at this as a Dad's Army gentile, so perhaps some of my suggestions are hangable offences - I wouldn't know! I would argue that if a film doesn't work (or doesn't work well) for the uninitiated, that you may be doing it wrong (or less well than you could). But one thing that transcends the established paradigm was that it lacked a certain sense of fun - I don't know if it was in the writing, the acting, the filmmaking, or all three, but I was expecting to see a movie where whatever misgivings I had about it professionally would be overridden by the sense that the people making it were having a lot of fun, and I was surprised not to see that. They didn't look miserable by any stretch, but it didn't have that spark ...
Of course, it's tempting to nitpick things you didn't like and forget the things you did, so lest I leave you with a bad impression of the film, here are some things that made me happy:
- Mrs Manwaring
- Rose Winters, who was very much playing to type but did it with verve and came across as genuinely clever
- All those dark and cluttered interiors
- Some of the trickier plot machinations
- All the ATS
- Mark Gatiss in riding dress
- The sense of place and time (I argue that they could have bound it up with the plot more, but it was there, just existing on another plane)
- Toby Jones' physical comedy
- that scene with the tanks
While it wasn't quite the film I wanted it to be, I'm still glad I went to see it. Moviemaking is an expensive hobby and it's good that there are pockets of it around the world that are not controlled from the deep pockets in LA; like any other art form, local cinema tells us who we are and offers different perspectives on storytelling and the human experience. It seems odd to tie a goofy TV spinoff about old men in with something as lofty as 'the human experience,' but you wouldn't see a big American movie studio making a WWII film from their point of view, certainly not without a lot more Nazis, and probably less comfortable lived-in familiarity with a quaint seaside town and the sort of characters you get there.
So there you go - local films for local people, support niche productions that interest you and let's all make the movies we want to make.
And have fun.
Since moving to the UK, fed up with some sense of obligation being my sole reason to see things, I've experimented with only going to the films I am genuinely interested in seeing. These have been ... remarkably few. Vanishingly few, by some standards. I did want to see Shaun the Sheep - more out of a desire to celebrate being somewhere where Aardman still had theatrical distribution - but didn't get to the cinema in time. When I found out there was going to be a film of Dad's Army, a famous BBC sitcom from the 70s about a bumbling division of the Home Guard during WWII, I made up my mind not to repeat the Shaun mistake and get to it while I could.
I am not familiar with the original show - or rather, I am, but in the sort of way you pick things up second-hand, because it's referenced in radio comedy in that 'everyone knows this reference' kind of way, so I knew the catch phrases, a couple of the characters, and the premise. It's my policy that when a book I'm interested in is being made into a film, I'll put off reading the book until after I've seen it, on the basis that a)the book is always better than the film so I may as well work my way up, and b)I don't want to spend the entire movie distracted by noticing what's been changed. So I didn't look up the original TV show, or the radio adaptation, wanting to give the movie the benefit of the doubt and appreciate it (or not) on its own merits.
And ... it's not a bad movie. It's entertaining, has some good performances (the cast is remarkable), and very nice production design. Its format has a handicap, in relation to a sitcom, in that you don't really have the time to explore the characters and take them to heart, the way you do when you visit them for half an hour a week over an extended period. That said, though, it is possible to write and perform characters in a succinct way, where you can establish them while advancing the plot, and have that same emotional engagement by the time the chips are down and the action is up. This felt like a screenplay written by an episodic writer who understood plot structure and all the important things, but was used to building characterisation by dwelling with the characters over time, rather than scoring a direct strike while on the run. I did spend a fair amount of spare brainpower trying to re-engineer the story as I was watching it ... this isn't unusual, and is a middling-to-good sign because it means I care about the film and want it to be good, as opposed to getting bored, giving up, and trying to figure out where it was shot, instead. But however fun an exercise it may be, it's not how I want to be spending my movie time, generally.
For what it's worth, here are my notes for the remake:
- 'Men competing to impress the hot young lady who swans in and disrupts everything' is a tried and true motivating premise, but it would be nice to see something done with it rather than play it out how you expect, and have everyone follow the same track. What if one of the men wasn't smitten by her? What if that was the person you'd least expect? How would he interact with the men who were, and they with him? What if one of the women thought she was the coolest thing ever and wanted to impress her, too? How would she do that? What would the men make of it? As it is, reactions to Catherine Zeta-Jones' character are pretty much evenly split down gender lines: men smitten, women unimpressed-to-hostile (except her dress, they like her dress).
- It's a decent premise for a half hour, but was stretched to feature-length in the wrong ways. We know how the story goes because this is a familiar trope, so we don't need to go on and on about all the hilariously incompetent things the men do to further their ambitions with The Woman, to the detriment of their official duties; spend the time establishing them, instead, or on the wives (who seemed to be doing more interesting things anyway), or making us care about what's at stake, character-wise, relationship-wise, and conflict-wise. The scene at the beginning, with the MI5 agents chasing a spy through bombed and burning London, was a great immediate emotional hook, so a little of 'this is what we're fighting for' in quaint nostalgic Walmington-on-Sea would have been nice, and tying it up emotionally with the men's family lives would make the risks they're running feel that much riskier, and stupider.
- That said, though, the whole 'laugh at the stupid' aspect wore thin pretty quickly - I'd have liked to get to know them a little before Miss Winters threw a spanner in, so that I could be on their side and think 'aw no, don't do that, you're better than that' rather than not caring about them because they're just stooges. Again, a benefit of the sitcom format, though with a little redistribution of time, tweaking of dialogue, and attention to presentation, you could manage it in a feature film. I used to dislike Othello because I couldn't get on the side of someone so easily manipulated, then Lenny Henry made me understand and love Othello as a character before the manipulation took hold - the script was the same, it was all in attention and delivery.
- Mainly these notes address what I wanted to find in the film and didn't - that 'oh crap' moment when suddenly things get really serious and you realise how much you care about the characters. This is exactly the sort of situation where you could make hay with that, but it just ... didn't ... quite, and this disappointed me.
Now, I am coming at this as a Dad's Army gentile, so perhaps some of my suggestions are hangable offences - I wouldn't know! I would argue that if a film doesn't work (or doesn't work well) for the uninitiated, that you may be doing it wrong (or less well than you could). But one thing that transcends the established paradigm was that it lacked a certain sense of fun - I don't know if it was in the writing, the acting, the filmmaking, or all three, but I was expecting to see a movie where whatever misgivings I had about it professionally would be overridden by the sense that the people making it were having a lot of fun, and I was surprised not to see that. They didn't look miserable by any stretch, but it didn't have that spark ...
Of course, it's tempting to nitpick things you didn't like and forget the things you did, so lest I leave you with a bad impression of the film, here are some things that made me happy:
- Mrs Manwaring
- Rose Winters, who was very much playing to type but did it with verve and came across as genuinely clever
- All those dark and cluttered interiors
- Some of the trickier plot machinations
- All the ATS
- Mark Gatiss in riding dress
- The sense of place and time (I argue that they could have bound it up with the plot more, but it was there, just existing on another plane)
- Toby Jones' physical comedy
- that scene with the tanks
While it wasn't quite the film I wanted it to be, I'm still glad I went to see it. Moviemaking is an expensive hobby and it's good that there are pockets of it around the world that are not controlled from the deep pockets in LA; like any other art form, local cinema tells us who we are and offers different perspectives on storytelling and the human experience. It seems odd to tie a goofy TV spinoff about old men in with something as lofty as 'the human experience,' but you wouldn't see a big American movie studio making a WWII film from their point of view, certainly not without a lot more Nazis, and probably less comfortable lived-in familiarity with a quaint seaside town and the sort of characters you get there.
So there you go - local films for local people, support niche productions that interest you and let's all make the movies we want to make.
And have fun.