The Girl on the Train

Apparently the film rights were acquired to Paula Hawkins’s ’The Girl on the Train’ before it was even published. Obviously they'd had a premonition that it would be a big hit and they’d have ‘Gone Girl 2’ on their hands. So before they’d realised that its very British setting would be a key reason why it was taken to its reader’s hearts they’d already exported it to America.

So out goes the grim commute through the London suburbs with terraces and semis backing on to the line and in comes upscale New York with its mansions and lush green gardens. Oddly Rachel even gets a seat for the whole journey. Everything is completely Americanised bar oddly our lead character Rachel, a professional drunk, played by the very British Emily Blunt.

Now we've all done the daily commute to work at some point. The same places, the same faces, the same overheard conversations, the same overheard music, day after day. It’s enough to drive you to drink. Well Rachel loses her job but still does her commute for reasons only she can rationalise. Perhaps rail season tickets are cheaper in New York than they are in London?

 

Every day she gazes into the homes that pass by her window, swigging her vodka from her drinks bottle as she goes, and becomes particularly obsessed with one couple Scott (Luke Evans) and Megan (Haley Bennett) who she sees groping each other on their balcony.

Ironically they live only a few doors down from her old house where her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux) is now shacked up with a newer blonder model in Anna (Rebecca Ferguson). Rachel imagines that both these women have it all or in Anna’s case both Rachel’s ex and the baby she couldn’t have. Rachel becomes a professional stalker.

The film, more so that the book, has come under fire for its portrayal of women and it’s true that all three women are hardly role models for female empowerment. They are all essentially victims of their own men, who are naturally deceitful and controlling, and perhaps (whisper it quietly) themselves. In fact the whole lot of them, the men as well, are messed up beautiful people with too much time on their hands. Only one of the three women works, part-time, sometimes.  So unable to get their collective acts together it’s perhaps not surprising that they have affairs with each other instead.

It’s certainly not a feminine drama even if there is a lot of talk about babies even from Megan, a borderline nymphomaniac who is so messed up that she starts seeing a therapist Dr Kamal Abdic (Edgar Ramirez). However once it dawns on Megan that her therapist is a man rather than just a therapist, she tries to seduce him as well, naturally.

Then Megan goes missing and Rachel finds herself embroiled in the police investigation as a potential witness too drunk to know what she’s witnessed.

So it’s a cocktail of real life. You know infidelity, alcoholism, chauvinism, voyeurism, lust, lies, manipulation, murder... it’s a checklist of all the things you'd perhaps like to get away with but can't and don't obviously and of course you're not even allowed to think any of these things out loud anymore. I thought it was wonderfully entertaining.

Throw in an absurd amount of sex scenes just for good measure, preferably involving trees, and it’ll be just about perfect. Oh, they did that as well.

The plot itself is fairly transparent even if you haven't read the book, well at least I thought it was, because the murderer looks like a murderer from the moment you first see them on screen.

The acting isn’t too shabby especially from Blunt. Rachel looks dreadful most of the time, half dead mostly, which is a credit to Blunt who can do this look in her sleep. I would recommend it but it’s probably best watched Rachel style with a drink in hand.

The Girl With All The Gifts

‘The Girl With All The Gifts’ is adapted from the 2014 best-selling novel by Mike Carey who also had a hand in the screenplay alongside director Colm McCarthy.

The film opens with children being strapped into their chairs and being wheeled under armed military guard to their school classroom. Clearly in the future all truancy problems have been solved.

Well, not quite. What we have here is a futuristic tale that is a slight variant on the currently fashionable zombie film genre. The zombies which inhabit this world have been created by a fungal infection but act pretty much like your stereotypical zombie. e.g. see a human, chase it down and eat it.

However these children appear to be different. They were infected while still in the womb and evolved into a next generation who think more like humans but still have the overpowering desire to eat human flesh. 

The remaining 'real' humans have managed to stay safe from them by using blocking gel to mask the tantalising smell of their own flesh and, of course, by locking the children up while they try and find a way forward.

For Dr Caroline Caldwell (Glenn Close) the way forward is to find a vaccine and that is how Melanie (Sennia Nanua), seemingly the most intelligent of the bunch, eventually ends up strapped to the Dr’s examination table about to be chopped up in the name of science.

The group’s teacher, Helen Justineau (Gemma Arterton) prefers a different approach. She sees enormous potential in working with these children and when the military base where they are housed is overrun by the undead, she is the one who rescues Melanie.

A group of them are now on the run under the command of Sergeant Eddie Parks (Paddy Considine) who would rather just obliterate them all. Melanie repays her teacher’s kindness by helping the group stay safe by distracting the hordes of zombies who lurk in the streets.

Along the way they find out that the fungal infection will eventually move onto a second even more disastrous stage.

The film has an interesting concept but it’s problem is it really struggles to get this across and it’s very difficult to see where they are trying to go with the story. Although clearly it is trying to ask who is being the more humane... the humans or the new breed of zombies?

It also has the usual horror film problem of people doing nonsensical things and getting themselves killed. In this case, a soldier laying down his arms, his armour and his radio. Oops.

It’s not a bad film but I think it could clearly have been better. It’s also best avoided by cat and dog lovers. 

Me Before You

'Me Before You' is an adaptation of the book by Jojo Moyes and it is good to see Moyes also wrote the screenplay. This is so not my type of film and therefore I probably saw things very differently to how its target audience probably did. However, it has to be said that it turned out to be nowhere near as bad as I feared it would be. In fact I quite liked it.

Louisa Clark (Emilia Clarke) lives in a village where nothing ever happens and nothing ever happens to her but she is very happy with that level of dullness. She works in the local cafe which somehow enables her whole family to stay afloat financially, so when she loses that job she desperately has to find a new one pronto.

This is when she takes up the offer of a six month contract as nursemaid to a quadriplegic grown up rich kid Will Traynor (Sam Claflin) where she works alongside his personal nurse and therapist Nathan (Stephen Peacocke).

 

Prior to his life changing accident Will was once a rugged action man (you know skiing off cliffs into fiery pits, that sort of thing) as well as a successful executive who had everything to live for. Now he feels has everything to die for and has become bitter and reclusive, turning away his girlfriend (blonde naturally) who then leaves him for his best friend.

We don’t immediately find out the reason it’s only a six month contract but it’s soon revealed that he’s promised to give his parents that much longer of him before he’s off to Dignitas. His accident has ended the all action life style that defined him and he has no wish to live the rest of his life as someone he isn't. Therefore his parents had not really been looking for a nursemaid more a bit of crumpet who might give him something to live for and change his mind. Enter Louisa.

Unfortunately Louisa, a perpetually silly, perpetually happy girlie girl with an eclectic wardrobe and eyebrows that never sit still is the last thing Will thinks he needs and he’s probably right.

Still, she does her best to put up with him mainly because she needs the job. Eventually though they make a connection, not by Louisa piercing his hard shell but by him piercing hers by getting her to watch a subtitled film, something that was previously several million miles outside her comfort zone. 

Soon they are forming a close bond and she convinces his very rich parents to fund various trips she plans to make him think life is worth living after all. Putting aside the fact she picks things which are not in keeping with the all action life style he craves, either because they both know she can’t recreate it or in the misguided belief that something else might be as good, I’m not sure.

Many will call this a romance, it isn't, or perhaps all that malarkey just went right over my head because a pragmatic male like me can’t really see how she would fall for him in the first place and anyhow, when she did, he was having none of it. As he tells her near the end, if he could have done to her all that he wanted to then it might have been different but he can’t, so it isn’t. This upsets Louisa but she is off message from the start and doesn't realise that while she’s trying to teach him to enjoy life again what is really happening is he is teaching her to be more adventurous with her own life and when he is gone, he hopes his adventurous spirit will live on through her. They may have started out a world apart but both gradually realize that what one once possessed, the other now needs. 

 

A few other things don't add up particularly Louisa's fitness freak boyfriend Patrick (Matthew Lewis), who is portrayed as a bit of an idiot for wanting her support as a runner/triathlete and wanting to take her off to Norway with him for an event. It sounds like the famous Norseman to me, which sounds like exactly the sort of thing a fully mobile Will would have done and the immobile Will would have urged her to go and experience surely but, hey ho. I did end up feeling sorry for the poor guy.

I liked the film mainly because I could relate to Will and totally understood his stance on where he now was. He opted to die and I admired the film (and Jojo Moyes' book of course) for sticking to that and not engineering any miraculous recoveries or an uncharacteristic change of heart on Will’s part.

To quote the film (and Will) ‘You only get one life. It is actually your duty to live it as fully as possible’.

Trust me, it’s not as bad as you might think.

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.