Tuesday 6 February 2018

Last Flag Flying / Early Man / Roman J Israel, Esq

Some days I hit the cinema running. Three different cinema locations, three different films and reliance on the London Underground to get me to my destinations.

Last Flag Flying was showing at the Curzon Bloomsbury. Located in The Brunswick Centre, a retail  arcade just north of Russell Square Tube Station, the cinema includes the sizeable 'Renoir' screen (the name inherited from the cinema's previous branding); the Bertha DocHouse, a screen devoted to documentaries; and several other small screens (Lumiere, Plaza, Phoenix and Minema (where the film was being shown)).

The film wins Brownie points with me for having a substantial sequence playing out on a train journey. Aside from that, it's an often amusing, intelligent piece of drama. It's a film where the most substantial female character is deceased and only seen on screen in photographs, so it's not exactly balanced in gender allocation for its roles, but for all its abundant masculine presence, it isn't overdosing on testosterone. It's a film about men and in this case it's wholly appropriate.

Made in partnership with Amazon Studios, so this will probably hit the streaming service in about a year (unlike Netflix where it would be day-and-date release).

From the Curzon Bloomsbury, I had about 40-50 minutes to make it to the Curzon Aldgate for the screening of Early Man. It's a reasonably easy trip - a 5-10 minute walk to King's Cross and then take the Metropolitan or Circle Line to either Aldgate or Aldgate East (about 10 minutes) - from either station it's little more than 5 minutes to the cinema.

So plenty of time to buy popcorn.

Only, thanks to London Underground's never-ending engineering works, no Metropolitan or Circle Line trains.

At this point I have to go by instinct and head for the Northern Line, figuring that it will take me somewhere closer to the cinema than King's Cross.

Fortunately, it turns out that I picked the right choice, as I can change for the Circle Line at Moorgate (the site of London Underground's worst peacetime accident for the trivia-philes).

I made it to the cinema in time for the adverts, and even have time for popcorn.

Aldgate Curzon is one of the newer Curzon cinemas and apparently one of the lesser-used ones, based on the size of its audiences (although perhaps it picks up in the evening). The four screens are all of a decent size (in the spirit of the Bloomsbury cinema, they've been imaginatively named 1,2,3 and 4). The seats aren't up to Curzon's best, but better than 1970s fleapit style chairs of the Soho branch.

The film, Early Man, is the latest from Aardman Studios. Going back to Aardman's roots with Plasticine animation, it's a film that couldn't be more British if it had the Union Jack stamped on every frame.

The story can be summed up as the Stone Age versus the Bronze Age at football. It's a brilliantly inventive film that is frequently amusing, but seldom laugh-out-loud funny. It probably bears repeat viewing, if only to catch all the details that were missed on the first watch.

My final film for the day was being shown at the Curzon Victoria (about 30 minutes away on the District Line from Aldgate East), but as the film wasn't showing until late in the evening, I took the long way around.

Curzon Victoria used to be the new cinema in town, until the Aldgate branch opened. The screens alternate between the premiere screens (odd numbers), which have arguably the best seats in any London Curzon (although I haven't tried out Wimbledon's yet), although some of them are getting a bit squeaky when reclined; and the cheap(er) seats in the evenly numbered screens, which don't recline, don't have a lot of legroom, and don't have drinks trays (meaning that anyone bringing in a glass of wine from the cinema's bar has to perform contortionist manoeuvres when trying to take off their coat.

For some reason, Curzon hasn't really put much effort behind showing Roman J Israel, Esq . Screened in only one of its cinemas, once per day, late in the evening, it's not the most accessible film, which seems a little odd, given all of Denzel Washington's award nominations. It's certainly a lot worse treatment than they gave Fences last year (which for my money was a less interesting film).

Roman J Israel, Esq is an odd sort of film. It's a character piece dressed up in the trappings of a legal drama. It plays about the idea of seesawing redemption (one character rises as another falls), and almost plays out as a tragedy, but sort of drops the ball on that towards the end of the film. It's both satisfying and unsatisfying at the same time. It's watchable, but I don't think it's entirely successful.

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