A study of violence and redemption, Tyrannosaur is the expansion by actor turned writer-director Paddy Considine of his award-winning short, Dog Altogether. It is the story of Joseph (an electric Peter Mullan) an ageing self-loathing, violent drunk, who gravitates towards Hannah (Olivia Colman, magnetic), a God-fearing charity shop volunteer with her own dark back story. The early moments put you on edge. In a spate of drunken anger, Joseph kicks his own dog to death. In the sting of a hangover, he agitates staff at a local post office, receives a ban then smashes a window. Finally, brooding over a pint in a pub, he tells three boisterous youths to keep quiet. One lad confronts him and Joseph inflicts a blow. Walking hastily away, he slips into Hannah’s shop and hides behind a clothes rail. Hannah feels compassion and kneels by the rail to pray. You fear the dormant volcano on the other side, but Joseph simply weeps. The next day, Joseph returns to the shop and makes abusive comments about Hannah’s faith and her middle class background. It is her turn to cry.
Gradually, Joseph softens as he visits a dying friend and then invites Hannah to his bedside to say a prayer. However, just as he reveals details of his past, we meet an equally volatile force in the form of Hannah’s husband (Eddie Marsan), introduced memorably in a flash of headlights. For the remainder of the film, Joseph struggles with his anger in the knowledge of violence outside. When he is faced with a neighbour’s attack dog, he feels a sense of kinship. “It’s not your fault”, he tells the hound, as he hovers over him with a baseball bat.
You can’t describe Tyrannosaur as social realism. Scenes have a heightened quality and there is unsettling symbolism as Joseph sits outside his wrecked shed in the open air in an armchair. Above all, unlike most British films, Tyrannosaur is a profoundly visual, visceral experience. It doesn’t say anything about its themes that I hadn’t heard before and its main weakness is that Hannah is given less space than Joseph. Nevertheless, I left the cinema shaking. At last – a British film that recalls the best of French cinema.
A documentary about product placement funded entirely by the proceeds from product placement. That’s the conceit behind Pom Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, dreamed up by Super-Size Me director Morgan Spurlock.
Ever since he went looking for Osama Bin Laden, Spurlock has lost his way creatively. I had hopes that this film was going to tell us something shocking about the integration of branded products into the fabric of a dramatic motion picture. Why it is bad, for example, that certain cola drinks are always featured in films released by Columbia Pictures? And how can you criticise political parties in Hollywood but not multi-million dollar companies, unless, like Enron, they go bust? However, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold does not even stray into these areas.
What we get, for the first half of the film, is Spurlock pitching his film to various would-be sponsors. As the film’s name tells you, we know he is successful selling the above-the-title spot to a company that markets pomegranate juice. He interests other sponsors as well..
There is about 30 minutes of interesting footage here. This includes the mock adverts Spurlock films to showcase his key sponsor. The rest of it is like watching a DVD extra that has accidentally been released instead of the movie. A film that fails to live up to the two superlatives in the title, it left me feeling ripped off.
If you court controversy with your first two films, Hustle and Flow (“It’s hard out there for a pimp”) and Black Snake Moan (“It’s hard doing detox with Samuel L Jackson”), what do youdo for an encore? A by-the-numbers remake of the 1985 dance hit, Footloose? It was hard for me to believe it was the same Craig Brewer. But it is. Brewer preserves key set pieces and songs from the original. He also throws in a few new moves. We see the tragedy that inspires a small town to ban dancing and impose a curfew for the kids.
Crucially, the film boils down to the charisma of the leads. With Zac Efron having passed up the opportunity to follow in Kevin Bacon’s footsteps, Kenny Wormald gets his first big screen leading role as Renn McCormick, a Boston kid who nursed his single mom until her death and has come to Small Town USA to live with his uncle. He was a promising gymnast and keen to work in his uncle’s garage, but ends up shifting hay bales. Wormald isn’t bad, but very occasionally watching him move while his hair stayed in place, I thought I was watching an ad for grooming products. Julianne Hough has piercing blue eyes but an unsympathetic demeanour as the preacher’s daughter, who dates then rejects a racing driver, trading him in for Renn. I frankly didn’t care whether she and Renn got together, although I didn’t mind Renn holding a dance outside of town to show that kids can be responsible.
The plot is patently silly. In real Small Town USA, more kids are likely to die overseas in Iraq or Afghanistan than in a drunken auto accident. Yet no small town would stop its kids from signing up to the military. The town officials don’t acknowledge that vehicles rather than dancing caused loss of life and don’t do anything to stop organised racing. The film is well-intentioned, purposefully but unbelievably colour blind – the African American youngsters have to wait for a white kid to champion their cause – and finally a bit of an anti-climax.
