Born To Run... around Luton’s mean streets
★★★✩✩
(12A, 117mins)
Gurinder Chadha Viveik Kalra, Kulvinder Ghir, Nell Williams, Hayley Atwell
★★★✩✩
(U, 99 mins)
Lino Disalvo
Anya Taylor-joy, Gabriel Bateman, Daniel Radcliffe, Adam Lambert
GAZA
★★★★✩
(15, 92 mins)
Directors: Garry Keane and Andrew Mcconnell
Bis
the latest movie to be marketed as “the feel-good film of the year”.as with most films released with this tagline (the last was Danny Boyle’s Yesterday), this 1980s-set coming-of-age story made my toes curl as much as it made my heart flutter.
But Bend It Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha definitely knows how to blend social commentary with uplifting family drama.
After a brief prologue, we head to 1987 Luton where a nervous Asian teenager is being chased to his front door by a National Front skinhead.
British Pakistani Javed (a very likeableviveik Kalra) is about to start his first day of sixth form college and he’s still very uncomfortable in his own skin.
He spends his first lunch break fretting over which “tribe” he belongs to – thewham! kids, the goths or the ones sporting Flock Of Seagulls hairdos and wafting through the canteen in slow-motion.
Then he starts a conversation with the only other person who doesn’t look as if he’s spent hours with an over-enthusiastic costume designer.
Sikh student Roops (Aaron Phagura) hands him two albums by “The Boss”.
“Whose boss?” Javed asks. “The Boss of us all,” he replies.
Javed pops the cassettes into his Walkman during 1987’s Storm Michael (Fish).as winds tear through his cul-de-sac, Chadha projects Springsteen’s lyrics on to the suburban semis.
“I ain’t a boy, no, I’m a man, and I believe in a promised land” scrolls across a rooftop and Javed has his epiphany.
It turns out The Boss wasn’t singing to the dispossessed of New Jersey but to a shy Muslim teenager who is trying to make it as a writer and to steal his first kiss.
Now Javed has found his mojo. He cuts the arms off his lumberjack shirt, shows his over-wrought poetry to Hayley Atwell’s Inspirational Teacher, stands up to the racists and woos the girl he fancies (Nell Williams).
But he still needs to stand up to his over-bearing father Malik (Kulvinder Ghir). For me, the father-and-son drama provides necessary uplift to this loose adaptation of journalist Sarfraz Manzoor’s memoir.
Ghir, whom you may remember from sketch show Goodness Gracious Me, shows his acting chops with a touching and hilarious performance.
When the dignified car plant worker becomes the most smartly dressed man in the dole queue, he becomes even more determined for his son to drop his literary ambitions for a more financially secure future.
We feel his heartbreak after he falls out with his son but at least their separation means he’s spared the sight of him singing and dancing through the streets of Luton.
I’m not sure what Chadha was trying to do with Springsteen. The semi-musical sequences are caught in a weird hinterland between realism and fantasy. And at times, Javed expresses his deep love for The Boss by quoting his lyrics at wholly inappropriate moments.
Springsteen may be a great songsmith but Born To Run was never meant to be read out loud, especially by a earnest teenage poet rocking double denim.
After the original Lego Movie made tills ring at cinemas and toy shops, it was perhaps inevitable that Playmobil would get in on the act.a&e departments have been removing the plastic people from tiny orifices since the mid-70s so this toy-flogging adventure should delight small children while bathing their adult companions in a warm fug of nostalgia.
But this bright and breezy animated musical suggests that the German toymakers aren’t quite as witty as their Danish rivals. Director Lino Disalvo, who was head animator on Frozen, doesn’t attempt the surreal flights of fancy or double-edged comedy of the Lego films.
Two bickering orphans, 18-year-old Marla (Anya Taylor-joy) and 10-year-old Charlie (Gabriel Bateman), have to settle their differences when they are sucked into a fantasy world based on Charlie’s favourite toys.when Charlie (who has turned into a beefy Viking) is captured by pirates, Marla (who just looks like a plastic version of herself) must master her unbendable legs to stage a rescue. Her adventure takes her through different worlds
featuring cowboys, dinosaurs, aliens and a suave English spy voiced by Daniel Radcliffe. The most entertaining character is an evil Roman emperor played by Queen collaborator Adam Lambert who gets the best lines and the catchiest song. I’d forgotten the plot by the time I’d got home but I was humming his rocky showtune for days.
Gaza puts a human face to the tragedy unfolding on what one inhabitant calls “a big, open prison”.
This 25-mile long and seven-mile wide strip of land is home to two million impoverished inhabitants who are shut off from the world by an Israeli blockade.
Documentary makers Garry Keane and Andrew Mcconnell put politics to one side to introduce us to some of the people trying to live ordinary lives in extraordinary circumstances.
This is very different picture from the one we see on news reports.
These people have known more than their fair share of misery but there’s humanity, vibrancy, and beauty to be found here too.