Film: A Bunch of Amateurs, Weird, Draughtsman's Contract

****

Week in, week out; month after month, I castigate movies for their failings, for their awfulness.

But the truth is that I never get to cover a genuinely terrible film. Even in the worst film you've seen this year, there are thousands of things it gets right, all those technical tasks completed competently.

They far outnumber whatever issues have rubbed you up the wrong way. This is a wonderful film about genuinely bad films, and the glory of the people that make them.

For nearly ninety years, the Bradford Movie Makers club has been a gathering place for amateur filmmakers to socialise and help each other put together short films. It used to be a thriving community asset, but now membership struggles to reach double figures and is mostly ageing.

The clubhouse is dilapidated, a primary attraction for graffiti artists and fly-tippers. Hopkins’ film is extraordinary for the way it can flip you, within a few seconds, from uproarious joyous laughter to wanting to jump in front of a train. There is something hilarious about watching the group help portly pensioner Harry film himself in a recreation of the opening scene of Oklahoma, playing Gordon MacRae sitting on horseback singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.”

In theory, these are the plucky eccentrics beloved of British cinema, but they are drawn to this community by desperation. The members come from different backgrounds: they are caregivers, widowers, retired. They are either ill or looking after someone who is. The one unifying factor is poverty.

You are reading this review because Disney hasn't bothered to screen Black Panther 2 in time for our print deadline. Comic book escapism is the lifeblood of 21st century cinema, but here you see the reality of escapism, the harshness of the lives people are getting away from. In its own way, Hopkins' observational documentary is a much more insightful film about the process and purpose of cinema than classic films-about-films like Day For Night or Eight and a Half.

Even at this level, there are tantrums and ego clashes. It painfully illustrates the impossibility of realising an individual vision in a medium that is so collaborative and needs so many diverse technical requirements. Even a half-decent film is a minor miracle.

Directed by Kim Hopkins Featuring Colin Egglestone, Harry Nicholls, Joe Ogden, Marie McCahery and Philip Wainman. In cinemas. Running time: 95 mins.

Daniel Radcliffe stars in Weird the Weird Al Yankovic Story (Image: Courtesy Raku Channel)

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.

****

At last, Daniel Radcliffe has found the role he was born to play: American music parodist Al Yankovic. (Note, Yankovic singular, not Yankovics plural: four decades I've been getting that wrong.)

It seems to me the purveyors of witty ditties occupy a particularly wretched rung on the showbiz ladder, even those as acclaimed as Tom Lehrer or Victoria Wood or Bill Bailey. Weird Al, primarily known in this country for his 80s Michael Jackson send-up Eat It, is basically the US equivalent of the Barron Knights.

Yet, this overblown, self-aggrandising, cameo-packed made-up life story is an improbable delight. There's a splendid that-bloke-you-saw-in-that-thing studded cast, and a marvellous turn by Evan Rachel Wood as an evil Madonna.

It isn't doing anything clever, just sending up the cliches of the biopic, but it's the kind of laugh-out-loud, crowd-rousing comedy that the cinemas have been starved of for years. And they will remain starved because it is bypassing the big screen for a release on the Roku channel. Streaming services, does anyone not have one? What next? Greggs+?

Directed by Eric Appel. Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Evan Rachel Wood, Toby Huss, Julianne Nicholson and Rainn Wilson. Running time: 108 mins. Streaming now on the Raku channel.

The Draughtsman's Contract by Peter Greenaway (1982) (Image: Courtesy of the BFI)

The Draughtsman's Contract (15)

*****

Not before time, the BFI has got around to doing a full retrospective of the films of Britain's greatest living filmmaker, Peter Greenaway.

Granted, his work is cold, difficult, priggish, precious, snobbish, maddeningly contrary, dry to the point of parched and not-for-the-likes-of-you elitist, but no more so than Jean-Luc Godard and the world of cinema went into a tizzy when he died in September.

Both are/were capable of subjecting the audience to the most unutterable tedium, but when they hit on something, when they are on it, they thrill like few others.

In percentage terms, Greenaway's films are way less boring than JLG's and fanfaring the season is his first - inadvertently - commercial project, a country house murder mystery which has all the attributes of a typical British film: a costume drama with wordplay and innuendo-packed dialogue.

Greenaway though views the past as more than a place where they wore pretty clothes. In 1982, the static energy of his symmetrical compositions mixed with Michael Nyman’s strident reworkings of Purcell made for an arthouse sensation and forty years on, it retains all its chaste eroticism and formal excitement.

Directed by Peter Greenaway. 1982. Starring Anthony Higgins, Janet Suzman, Anne Louise Lambert, Neil Cunningham and Hugh Fraser. In cinemas. Part of the BFI’s Frames of Mind: The Films of Peter Greenaway season throughout November and December. Running time 107 mins.