Yesterday

We go to the cinema on Sunday afternoon. Yes, afternoon. So it must be a Rom Com? Indeed. So why am I here? Perhaps it’s because there’s a great plot idea that comes with it. Yesterday is a collaboration between Richard Curtis and Danny Boyle.

Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) is a wannabe rock star from Lowestoft, who works in a warehouse and plays the occasional gig in local pubs. Although he did once play on a minor stage at Latitude to about half a dozen passer-bys.

At the start of the film he is hit by a bus while the world is experiencing some sort of cosmic blackout... He comes to in a parallel universe where the Beatles never existed. Other things have been erased too but sadly there are very few diversions into this territory.

He finds out about the Beatles-less universe when he plays ‘Yesterday’ to his mates, who are stunned at his brilliance, having never heard the song before. It appears that he is the only one who remembers their music.

Being the only person to have the entire Beatles back catalogue in their head is only the second greatest thing that has ever happened to him. The first being that his best mate and manager by default is Ellie Appleton (Lily James) and she is totally in love with him.

Of course, as this is a Rom Com, he is oblivious to this fact and, as this is a Rom Com, he’s in love with her too but, as this is a Rom Com, neither of them are able to articulate their feelings for each other. Therefore they have apparently been stuck in this platonic stasis for the many many years since they met at school. Notwithstanding of course that a girl like Ellie would have been getting multiple alternative offers every week. Anyhow... did I mention it’s a Rom Com?

Jack now starts to painstakingly recreate as many Beatles songs as he can from memory, as Google is no help whatsoever. While Ellie, who also organised his Latitude gig, sets him up with Gavin (Alexander Arnold), a local music producer, who records a demo of his new songs.

This gets him onto local TV where he is talented spotted by none other than Ed Sheeran, who asks him to open for him in Russia. Sheeran ably demonstrates why he is a musician and not an actor but gets huge kudos for being game enough to make such a cameo performance even if he does attempt to sabotage ‘Hey Jude’.

So off Jack goes to Russia with his unreliable roadie Rocky (Joel Fry) but not Ellie who has to return to her day job as a teacher.

So far so good and so entertaining but it starts to go off the rails when the film sells its soul to the get rich quick style of the modern music industry with Jack allowing himself to be cynically packaged by Sheeran’s LA based manager Debra Hammer (Kate McKinnon). Oh to have allowed his fame to grow organically in this country.

Jack does come home to launch his debut album in Norfolk with a rooftop concert in Gorleston-on-Sea. It is there that he is approached by two other people who also remember the Beatles and who thank him for saving the band’s music. They also give him the address of John Lennon (Robert Carlyle) who Jack goes to visit. It’s not really clear why this is included or what his association with the non-existent Beatles would have been. Clearly Lennon has not had a career in music and he persuades Jack not to have one either. Instead he advises him to get his woman back, who has by now run off with Gavin, the music producer.

If this is ridiculous, the ending is worse with a mortifying public declaration of love during a hastily arranged concert at Wembley Stadium where Jack also admits he stole the songs from people who don’t exist.

In reality this creates more questions than it answers. Like... so Jack can you remember any more? etc. He did also have the whole of Oasis’s catalogue to work through.

I know, I should accept it as it is.

Himesh Patel is a total star, not only with his acting but with his singing and guitar playing. As for Jack, recreating the Beatles songs musically is a massive achievement and arguably more difficult than writing them in the first place. So clearly Ed Sheeran was right, he is a better musician than him and he really had no need whatsoever to become a music teacher.

Exasperatingly enjoyable.

War Horse

‘War Horse’ is a children's book by Michael Morpurgo that I wasn’t really aware of until recently. I’m assured it’s a cracking book and that there’s also a rather good stage production of it using life-sized horse puppets. That’s perhaps where it should have stayed.

It appears to be a fanciful tale that perhaps works in those formats, perhaps a cartoon would have worked also but here, where Steven Spielberg tries to tell it as a real story on film, it fails spectacularly.

Yeah it’s got great, well actually overdone, cinematography, loads of dramatic music and an able cast. Sadly they are all asked to play clichéd stereotypes and to work with a script that asks you to suspend belief at the cinema door. Welcome to the equine offspring of a one night stand between ‘Lassie Come Home’ and ‘Saving Private Ryan’.

Now I've never trained a horse, but I've trained dogs and simply whispering in their ears what you want them to do doesn’t work. I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that it doesn't work with horses either but I suppose I could be wrong.

Then the way the bone hard rock strewn field suddenly becomes ploughable to a foot depth after five minutes of rain was hilarious, almost as hilarious as the plough itself splitting a large rock in two. Again I’m no expert but surely it would be basic farming practice to remove as many of the rocks as possible before you attempt to plough the field? Therefore not making it as hard as possible for your horse, even if that horse does happen to be Joey the wonder horse? The story doesn’t get any less ridiculous from there onwards, very little of it made any sense at all.

Sorry I’m skipping the actual plot here. Farmer Narracott (Peter Mullan), a Boer war veteran (he doesn’t talk about it), buys a thoroughbred horse at a Devon cattle market rather than the usual type of nag you’d use to plough a field with and he uses the family’s rent money to do so. Oops. Commonsense bypass. His missus, Emily Watson, with her brow permanently furrowed (unlike their field) isn’t happy. Cue yet more furrowing of brow. No matter, their teenage son Albert (Jeremy Irvine), occasionally called Albie, trains him, hence the whispering. He names our hero Joey.

Well the field gets ploughed and the crops get sown but then they all destroyed by another freak storm, not unlike the one that got the field ploughed in the first place. Joey gets sold to a captain in the British cavalry (Tom Hiddleston) for use in a suicidal WWI military manoeuvre, so that the rent can be paid.

Once the cavalry have all been slaughtered, Joey ends up in the hands of the Germans where he is cared for by two young brothers, one of whom is only 14 but then presumably after having lied about his age to get in the German army, the pair of them inexplicably decide to desert using the horses to escape. They are captured and shot. Good riddance.

Joey and another horse are now in the hands of a sickly young French girl called Emilie. We only know she’s French because she calls her grandfather ‘grand père’ in a terrible French accent. Joey is only briefly in these pseudo-French hands because soon a group of soldiers with equally bad German accents snatch the horses back. A bit of real foreign language dialogue here would have added a much needed touch of reality and clarity to the proceedings because it’s anybody’s guess what language the ensuing German-French conversation takes place in.

Now Joey the wonder horse visits the Somme circa 1918, where he escapes from the retreating Germans and goes for a gallop across no man’s land, running straight through at least two barbed wire fences... er, no, terribly unlikely. Finally entangled in the wire we get the one great scene of the film as a British and German soldier team up to cut him free from the barbed wire.

Back in the hands of the Brits, Joey is about to be shot because he’s too damaged to save when Albert, himself now fighting and subsequently wounded in the war, recognises his beloved Joey. Quickly the armistice is declared, yet Albert and Joey, suddenly in perfect health again, are set to be parted once more because all the horses are to be auctioned off.

Grand père turns up out of the blue and outbids everyone for the horse, wanting Joey in memory of his granddaughter who has since died. Blimey, ten minutes ago she looked as strong as, well, a horse. Still, it’s a relief of sorts because my partner suspected that she'd resurface later as romantic interest for our Albie. Phew.

I don’t feel guilty spoiling the plot and saying that it all turns out ok in the end because you’d know that from the off. It’s all so inevitable. The more interesting back story was whether Albert's father’s Boer war pennant, which accompanied Joey the whole time, would make it home safely. Thankfully it did.

In the book Joey actually narrates the story (it probably worked better that way around) and it would have been nice for the horse to have said something like ‘That’s All Folks’ at the end to complete the charade but sadly it didn't.

It is, I think, supposed to be a tear jerker and my partner may have shed a few at some point but then she cries in most things and it’s hard not to cry for the horse for putting up with the corny script. Surprisingly the usually able Richard Curtis worked on it. He does reuse what he can from ‘Black Adder Goes Forth’ but even that doesn’t save the film.

I was originally going to say it’s an ok but not great film but the more I think about it, the more terrible it seems. Frankly it was awful, apart from the horse that is, who to be fair, was great, nay, terrific and acts everyone else off the screen. Give that stallion an Oscar and send the rest of them back to the trenches.