The Chernobyl Diaries review

You have a choice. You can either take a trip to historic Moscow to see the Kremlin, the Bolshoi, heck, even Gorky Park, or you can go to Chernobyl to see a bunch of 1970s highrise towers that will give you cancer… Surely the answer to this can be found in the dictionary under “no brainer.” Sadly for the characters in The Chernobyl Diaries, they chose poorly.

Here’s the low down (stop me if any of this sounds familiar) a group of American kids are travelling across Europe having the time of their lives. They’re good looking, young and carefree. Chris (Jesse McCartney), his girlfriend Natalie (Olivia Dudley) and Amanda (Devin Kelley) are set to continue their adventure from Kiev where they are visiting Chris’s reckless brother Paul (Jonathan Sadowski), to Moscow. However Paul decides it would be like…really cool, to go on an extreme tourism excursion to the abandoned city of Pripyat instead, where in 1986 the Chernobyl nuclear disaster took place. Ultimately they decide to go and together with two other extreme backpacking bozos, and Uri (the worst tour guide in history) sneak into the ruined town. After spending the day looking at tower blocks, rusty bits of metal and mutant fish (yep,) the group discover that something has destroyed the wires in their van and they are stuck with no way out in the not-so-deserted-town.

Except that there is a way out. There are ways out all over the place in this film and you keep wondering why they never just, you know, walk out? Ok so there are a few things in the way, mutant fish being one of them, mutant dogs another and more worryingly, mutant thalidomide babies (once again, yep) but the film slows down to what can only be described as a tedious pace whilst the hapless characters run about giving the script time to bump people off.

It must be said that I began baying for the blood of all of the characters involved apart from the remarkable Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko) whose dialogue kept me in stitches, whether it was meant to or not (“This is a well organized tour…I have beef jerky.”) The rest are a bunch of self-indulgent idiots who should all be nominated for The Darwin Awards. The script makes some lukewarm attempts at character development but ultimately they are more lifeless than the mutant creatures attacking them and the central emotions of the film can be boiled down to “Oh, my brother! Oh my God! Oh, my eyes!”

Ultimately this film just leaves you feeling remarkably disappointed and not remotely scared. After the success of Paranormal Activity it seemed that the world of horror had a great new talent in the form of Oren Peli but you have to wonder how talented someone is after going so spectacularly wrong with this venture. The shots of the abandoned Pripyat are fantastically eerie and visually impressive and for a moment I actually thought that the film might be able to pick itself up and rise from the ashes (no Chernobyl pun intended.) It is such a shame to see a wonderful location go to waste and for no one to notice the horror potential that the long corridors, rusty Ferris wheels and forests could muster. Instead they took the easy way out and went with Creature Feature 101.

I suppose everyone really will be wondering if this film is offensive to the hundreds of people who have eventually died due to the nuclear fallout from the disaster. In my honest opinion, I don’t really think that it is. You can actually go and visit Chernobyl now and if this film drives tourism to an area that is in financial difficulties then quite frankly that is a good thing.

Still there are a few things I have learnt from this film: don’t listen to survival advice from annoying, Kiwi backpackers, the smell of Uri’s beef jerky will probably attract any mutant dog for 20 miles towards you, and if anyone invites you to go to the radioactive version of Tower Hamlets, just say no. The poster declares that “they said nothing survived” but something did. It’s called a terrible script. 

Spinach review

I must admit it was with certain trepidation that I went to see Spinach at The King’s Head Theatre. “Thrills, abductions, pills, attraction, laughs and prescriptions…and it’s all sung,” declares the blurb on the poster. My cynical heart sank. Why be out on a Friday night seeing a musical comedy when you can stay in and watch Have I Got News For You? (I lead an exciting life…) These feelings were all soon forgotten though as Spinach proved to be an absolute delight.

The play is about Tom (Ben Gerrard – of Hollyoaks fame) and Kate (Cassandra Compton – of X Factor fame) who wake up and find themselves tied back to back with no idea of who each other is or how they both got there. Their memories play out before us as flashbacks and gradually piece by piece the story begins to emerge and develop as Tom and Kate begin to figure out who their captors are and just what a sticky situation they are in.

The creators of the show have been very adamant that this is not a musical or an opera, just a play where everything happens to be sung…which in my books kind of makes it an opera, or at least an operetta. In fact there is something Gilbert and Sullivan about the show. The plot is light, funny and ridiculous and you wonder how it ever will all work out in the end. However the humour is mixed in with a nice undercurrent of danger and a sinister twist that makes you care more about the fate of all of the characters involved. The show has a moral message at its heart, which thankfully is not shoved in your face but is there to add a weight to the piece and stop it from being all fluff.

For one awful moment at the start I thought it was just going to be two people tied back to back for the whole eighty minutes (luckily this is not the case) and towards the end some of the movements getting into the flashback scenes seemed a bit clunky. Also some of the laughs in the show are fairly obvious and there is not a great deal of subtlety to the piece as a whole (you can pretty much guess the ending half way through) but the chemistry between the cast really gets you involved in the story and whilst I didn’t laugh out loud at everything, I was constantly engaged and amused throughout.

The most wonderful thing about the show though is the skill of the four cast members. The performance was flawless which considering the difficultly of the piece is mightily impressive. Not only do all the cast sing, they play instruments too giving us interludes on guitar, ukulele and a wonderfully comic saxophone accompaniment to one song by Claire Whittaker. Vocally however it is Cassandra Compton who steals the show whilst Gerrard proves himself too as a very good comic actor doing a great turn as the geeky, girlfriendless male lead.

Spinach is a bit of a pub performance, fringe theatre romp. If you are expecting high art and operatics then you may be disappointed, but if you are looking for a bit of fun then it really does hit the right notes.

Where Do We Go Now review

“Put a veil on and be done with it,” one of the Islamic women says to a Christian in Nadine Labaki’s latest Lebanese film. Trying to accurately present a balanced and well thought out argument about the problems between Islam and Christianity is a tough thing to do. Heck, not even the rest of the world seems to be able to do it! So trying to tackle the issue in just over ninety minutes is always bound to be a little bit messy. Sadly for Where Do We Go Now, a little bit messy would have better off than what they were left with.

The film is about an unspecified village in the Middle East where a group of women are trying to prevent more of their men from fighting with each other over their religious differences. Both Muslims and Christians inhabit the village, with their places of worship sitting side by side in the dusty, barren landscape. The women all seem to be able to get along with each other but, boys being boys, there is nothing the men like more than a bit of rough and tumble. As more and more fighting encroaches towards the peaceful village and after some escaped goats break into the Mosque, tensions mount and violence flairs up. The women find various ways to keep the peace, including hiring in a troop of Ukrainian dancing women to distract them and more hash cookies than you could shake a hippy at.

It is a film made with the greatest of intentions, just not with the greatest skill and it gets lost along the way a hundred times, at one point even becoming a Mills and Boon esq musical comedy. It bounces across genres erratically and never takes the time to develop most of the central female characters. There are just so many of them! It is only half way through, when Amale (Labaki - Caramel) gives a rousing speech to the men inside the local cafe to stop all of their nonsense do you realise that she is in fact supposed to be the main character.

There are some touching moments in the film and images that really upset too like when an angry Christian attacks a crippled Islamic child. However it is hard to feel too emotionally involved with any of it as the poignant moments feel like forced devices to make you feel something and the comedy is so rambling that the scenes drag on and never reach any sort of climax.

Where Do We Go Now has charming moments in it, particularly the relationships between all of the women in the village. This is a skill Nadine Labaki has as a writer/director but sadly the heavy political messages get in the way of these moments and prevent the film from being as good as her debut Caramel, which focused only on the individual plights of the women involved.

It is another modern day Lysistrata story about women, Islam and pesky men up to their usual tomfoolery all mixed together with a hit of comedy and a sad, dark centre. This seems to be a very popular theme at the moment and sadly for this film Radu Mihaileanu’s film The Source does it better. Where Do We Go Now simply tries too hard to be loveable and leaves you feeling cold. 

The Source review

Sisters are doing it for themselves!

Watching Radu Mihaileanu’s beautiful new film, The Source is an experience similar to eating a piece of baklava. It is rich, indulgent, layered and a little bit saccharine. I love baklava. I can eat the equivalent of my body weight in the stuff so watching this was no real torment. If you don’t have a sweet tooth however you might not be in for such a treat.

The story is based on the Greek tale of Lysistrata and also A Thousand and One Nights, only moved to a modern day, rural North African village. Here the women have been collecting water from a spring miles up in the hills since the beginning of time. After a fatal accident on one of the trips, the women lead by Leila (Bekhti – A Prophet) decide to go on a love strike, withholding sex from their husbands until they build a pipeline to the village.

It is a gloriously beautiful film and the cinematography makes you drool (although maybe I was just thinking about baklava too much.) The dialogue at times is rather heavy handed and overly metaphorical with women referring to their…ahem…parts, as ovens and tunnels and the like which screams “this was written by a man,” but essentially it is a portrait of the bonds between women and how strong some of them need to be in order to make their lives bearable.

The film seems like a comedy and there are numerous laugh out loud moments in this film, particularly from the superbly acted Old Mother Rifle (Biyouna) a widow who urges the women with Leila not to stray from their mission. However each moment of humour is followed by one of savage cruelty from the sex starved men, and we see first hand just how much these women are risking by embarking on this journey. Rapes, beatings, and even death are threats that loom over their heads and with each second of the film the tension rises and our empathy mounts. I found it very hard not to shout: “you go, sister!” at the screen most of the time especially at the kick butt, final scenes.

What is particularily refreshing though is that although the men are the antagonists they are merely protecting what they believe is right. This is not a film about women vs. Islam, although it really does feel like that at first.

There are times where you feel like you are reading one page of The Daily Mail followed by a page from The Guardian and all of the swaying about does make you feel a bit queasy (perhaps the sugar overload doesn’t help.) But to tell you the truth it really did not bother me. It is a film about education and finding a way to free all people trapped in a world where fundamentalism rules. Mihaileanu reminds us that sadly this is not as easy to do as the film makes out and that this story is all just a fairytale, with Leila as a modern day Scheherazade. Does this detract from it being a powerful story? Hell no! If anything the sugary sweetness emphasises the sour and makes the plight of real women all the more tragic.

Not everyone will like this film as there are faults lying in between its layers. But I was taught that it is our faults that make us beautiful, and this is one heck of a pretty film. Now, pass me the baklava.