BULLY FOR YOU, BADGER!
CENTRAL Intelligence is a three-parent baby: buddy-movie meets CIA thriller meets redemptive high-school fable, complete with a reunion scene. It’s a film with heart on sleeve, tongue in cheek and fists flying. And if that sounds anatomically impressive, be assured that nothing is impossible to Dwayne Johnson (aka The Rock), a 7ft tower of muscle with a shaven head and the face of a friendly, if slightly confused, angel.
his character, Bob, is either a CIA agent gone rogue, a psychopath, the saviour of the free world or, conceivably, the dastardly Black Badger, who is selling U.S. satellite codes to terrorists on eBay.
I am not usually too taken with shooty-bang, fisty-thump movie violence, but despite several firefights, a spectacular bar-room brawl and a great deal of random punching, its twists and multiple side-jokes on everything from race to Taylor Swift had me melting happily back in the seat, longing only for popcorn. We see a flashback to Bob as huge fat kid Robert being humiliated at high school, the only kind gesture coming from the ‘born to succeed’ top jock, sports captain, star student and drama star Calvin.
Twenty years on, Calvin (a nicely doleful Kevin hart) is a depressed accountant with a rocky marriage ... until Bob reappears, keen to get his help online.
Cue a CIA raid — and Calvin, diminutive and terrified, is sucked in to Bob’s spy world, right in the middle of marriage counselling (which doubles the jokes).
And bingo! We have possibly the most violent anti-bullying film of the year. Though nobody seems actually to die, unless possibly the Black Badger (whichever of them it is), who ends up in a Boston river.
But it’s such a benevolent film one suspects that even the wicked Badger escapes and learns that — hey, man! — it pays to be nice. Like Big Bob. With whom I may be in love.
IN THE early Eighties, a university theologian and young father, John Hull, learned that he was slowly going blind.
He made an audio diary of his progress: it became an award-winning documentary and is now a moving, shattering and inspiring feature film, Notes On Blindness.
Hull’s recordings are old and crackling now; so actors speak his words and his wife’s as we follow several years of one of life’s most dreaded ordeals. Dan Skinner plays Hull; Simone Kirby his wife: gentle, understated acting.
There are film techniques: blurring, blackouts, whiteouts, kaleidoscopic fragmentation as visual memories slowly fade (interestingly, he found it easier to remember photographs than living moving faces).
We see a hand feeling a bannister, a new baby’s face, a bookshelf: losing books was a terror to him as an academic, and in the early weeks he almost enjoyed his hurried efforts to get readers to record vital works for him.
But when the practicalities are done, a crashing wave of grief, terrifyingly evoked, overwhelms him. ‘Who has the right to do this to me?’
On Christmas Day, Hull’s sense of exile from the seen world shimmers with pain. He says he feels that the piece of brain which processes visual stimuli is starving, dying, mourning the loss of the visible.
But one day he stands outside, ‘lost in the beauty of rain’, and realises how the sound of it — on trees, roofs, gardens or bins — restores his sense of shape in the surroundings.
He wishes rain fell indoors, and then we see and hear surreal moments as it beats and patters on tables, armchairs, desk and tape recorder, each note different. His journey back to joy becomes gentle, glorious, almost holy.
I watched and was no longer afraid, not of anything.