Green Room

Green Room is the tale of an amateur punk band called the 'Ain’t Rights' on tour in Oregon without enough money for fuel to get back home. A problem they generally solve by syphoning it from the tanks of other vehicles. After one gig is cancelled, a journalist gets them a show at what turns out to be a neo-Nazi skinhead club in the middle of nowhere.

They make the best of it and show their bravado by opening with a cover of the Dead Kennedy's 'Nazi Punks Fuck Off' which does a pretty good job of winding up the locals. Despite that, the show goes well enough and they're just about to get the hell out of there when their bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin) accidentally stumbles upon the body of a girl has just been murdered in the club's green room.

This results in Pat and his bandmates Sam (Alia Shawkat), Tiger (Callum Turner) and Reece (Joe Coe) being locked inside them green room by the management, in the form of Darcy (Patrick Stewart), the rather aloof owner, and his lead henchman Gabe (Macon Blair). They are affectively held hostage in the green room along with a girl called Amber (Imogen Poots) who was a friend of the deceased.

Darcy’s solution to the problem is to leave no witnesses to the murder and to frame the band for everything. So from being locked in, the band now barricaded themselves in but it soon becomes clear that that is not a good long term plan and escaping, preferably alive, is the only way out. What follows is a deadly cat and mouse game between the band members and the skinheads who now have the club has now been surrounded, one which rapidly spirals out of control.

The film does then become an almost relentless bloodbath but quite a cultured one as it does at least manage to get us quite well acquainted with the main characters, which means you feel for them more, before they are slaughtered. It also makes a good job of conveying the claustrophobic sense of hopeless inescapability that they face.

In a cast that is mainly young and largely absent of big names, you can’t really second guess who will survive, which adds a rare touch of suspense. Overall, quite a tense experience.

Eye In The Sky

‘Eye in the Sky’ is a thorough examination of modern military warfare and the complex decision making that goes on behind the scenes. The title refers to the satellite and drone technology that enables everyone involved in these types of operations to see the mission unfold in glorious detail.

The film deals us a complex scenario which sees UK based Colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) in charge of an operation to capture terrorists in Kenya. The operation is almost entirely conducted via remote surveillance but for some local intelligence provided by Jama Farah (Barkhad Abdi) who is on the ground and even he has his own highly impressive mini-drone which he skilfully pilots.

The objective of the mission soon changes when things don't go as planned and the terrorists end up in a house in a highly defended suburb of Nairobi, where they appear to be planning a suicide bombing. The mission is now eliminating everyone involved with a Hellfire missile with the added political ramifications from the fact that two of the terrorists are British and one is American.

Throughout Powell in touch with her Lieutenant General Frank Benson (Alan Rickman) who is handling the politics of the operation in Whitehall. Lawyers stand by on all sides. Meanwhile in the US drone pilots Steve Watts (Aaron Paul) and Carrie Gershon (Phoebe Fox) are preparing to launch the missile from the relative comfort of their military base. 

That is until they spot a young girl (Aisha Takow) selling bread in the vicinity who will be killed if they go ahead. This reignites communications between the various parties as the consequences are once more kicked about and sent higher up for decisions to be made and/or avoided. Never has the sale of bread been so riveting.

Who knows if this is exactly how everything really works or not, and I wouldn’t really expect them to give us the full story in any case but it’s an impressive bit of film making and a superbly engaging film.

It is also a film which will be remembered as the last one to feature the great Alan Rickman who died in January.

Eddie The Eagle

Generally I like biopics because it is a great way of finding out about the life of someone you probably didn't know that much about. The problem is of course that filmmakers are prone to re-writing history or in fact making the whole thing up in the name of entertainment.

'Eddie The Eagle' is very loosely based on the true story of British Ski Jumper Eddie Edwards. Personally, I think the true story of Edwards' quest would have been even more interesting but that's just me I guess.

The film starts with Edwards’ (Taron Egerton) childhood where he is casting off his leg braces to try to pursue his dream of going to the Olympics in any sport that he can. His mother (Jo Hartley) is highly supportive of his ambition but his sceptical father Terry (Keith Allen) isn't. His father wants him to instead follow in the family plastering tradition. Which in real life he does, as a necessity to finance his Olympic dream, but not here.

After exhausting all possible summer sports Edwards turns to the winter events where he has more success and in a very short time becomes a world class downhill skier. Sadly he is cut from the British team by the stuffy Olympic selector Dustin Target (Tim McInnerny) just before the 1984 Olympics.

So he turned to ski jumping even though he didn't know much about it and headed off to a ski jumping hill in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. It is there that he meets one of the employees at the hill, Bronson Peary (Hugh Jackman). Peary is a former ski jumper who apparently squandered his career and now drowns himself in alcohol. Which isn't true obviously.

Edwards attempts to learn to jump by trial and error while Peary repeatedly tells him to quit before he kills himself. Eventually he persuades Peary to coach him and then exploits the ancient qualification rules to qualify for the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary, something no one from Britain has done since the 1920's.

Although there has been a lot of license taken with the story it is still a pretty decent film and a total crowd pleaser. It helps that the filmmakers chose a decent actor in Taron Egerton, who clearly took the time to master the mannerisms of the real Edwards. 

With everything being played for laughs it takes some of the gloss off what a steely determined athlete Edwards really was but not all of it. His perseverance, dedication and hard work ethic still manages to shine through. For pedants like me a documentary about his life is being planned.

Edwards came last in Calgary but jumped a personal best of 71 metres, a mere 47 metres behind the Matti Nykanen who won gold. Of course Pierre de Coubertin, the foundering father of the modern Games said that the most important thing in the Olympic Games was ‘not to win but to take part’. Which, obviously, also isn’t true. Winning is everything.