No.280 : War Horse (2011)

War Horse at the IMDb

It’s not often we get a tent pole release on the W movie blog but I had the Blu-Ray of this sitting on the shelf for ages, so let’s have a look.

Directed by Steven Spielberg, I would normally have looked this up before but the wife saw it at the cinema and had such a tearful experience that she didn’t want to watch it again. Still that’s what man caves and lock downs are for.

The film opens with a horse being born. Can’t fault them for missing bits out. The horse is sold to a pissed up Peter Mullan at market who has no business buying a thoroughbred at market, apart from noising up his landlord, David Thewlis. Thewlis is made out to be a bit of a dick for wanting his rent off the permanently pissed Mullan, but you can hardly blame him. Mullan’s son Albert takes charge of the horse which he calls Joey.

Joey manages to plough a rocky field against all odds giving the locals their best entertainment in years. ‘Love Island’ was still a madman’s dream. Despite its great work with plough, Mullen sells the nag to Loki when his turnip crop fails. Loki is the nicest man in the army who needs horses for the recently started first world war. He promises to keep in touch with Albert but that plan fizzles out when his and Dr Strange’s battle plan turns out to be a load of dated bollocks.

Joey then falls into the hands of the Hun but luckily it’s the nice Germans that we rarely see on film. After a short period of ownership the German owners get shot as deserters and the horse takes up boarding with an old French man and his granddaughter. After a two minute ride the horse gets captured again by the Germans and is tasked with pulling artillery. With its luck it must have done a dump on a leprechaun.

Meanwhile Albert has enlisted in the army and has a date at the Somme. Can the man and horse be reunited to live happily ever after?

This is a quality film with some cracking sequences and star names popping up at every turn. The scenes on the Somme were fantastic, especially when Joey loses a fight with some barbed wire. Once again the Germans turn out to be nice and that’s the pervading feel of the film. Everyone is decent really - surprised that they managed to start a war!

The horse itself doesn’t have much in the way of character but it’s used as a cipher to show the various theatres of war and the consequences of it. There was plenty of gruesome deaths and the trenches were well realised. The various vignettes showing the horse’s different owners were a good device for speeding the plot along and to keep us engaged. I don’t think I was ever that taken with the horse, which looked largely disinterested throughout, but the human interest angles were well done and it would be a man of stone who wouldn’t shed a tear at the sepia toned, sunset finale.

It is a bit long at 140 minutes but there is a lot packed in and practically every British character actor you can think of - I liked Eddie Marsan’s tough as nails but nice really sergeant and Davos Seaworth’s kill ‘em no cure ‘em doctor.

Overall this is an impressive and emotional ride on an old nag that they couldn’t put down.

Best Bit : The Major put in £10 - sob!  ‘W’ Rating 19/23

No.97 : Wah-Wah (2005)

Wah-Wah at the IMDb

Richard E. Grant writes and directs this film, partly based on his own life, about a young boy growing up in 1960s colonial Swaziland. The subject matter may sound as dry as the Serengeti and although it’s no ‘White Mischief’ it is still an enjoyable film with some decent performances.

The film opens with our young hero, Ralph, seemingly asleep on the back seat of a car but he is actually awake and witnessing his mother getting it on with a neighbour. Infidelity is seemingly a way of life in the colonies with heavy drinking filling up the rest of the day. Ralph’s Dad, played by Gabriel Byrne, is a career army man now charged with arranging schools, a task that sees him away from home a lot, a situation that doesn’t help his chronic alcoholism.



His Mum, played by Miranda Richardson has grown tired of the life and when Dad takes on a new commission she decides to leave the family for her lover leaving the boy with only a lip stick smeared glass to remember her by. Dad finds solace in the arms of local busybody Julie Walters and finding his son something of a handful sends him off to boarding school. He returns a few years later, now played by the kid out of ‘About a Boy’ to find his Dad has married feisty American Emily Watson who upsets the stuffy social balance of the community.

Watson’s ballsy and brash character inspires the boy to come out of his shell and rebel against the ‘wah-wah’ double talk of their ‘superiors. He gets a part in a local production of ‘Camelot’ and despite some rebellion involving ‘A Clockwork Orange’ things look good for opening night, especially as Princess Margaret is coming. With the show on track, only Dad’s nagging head ache can put a spanner in the works and thwart a potential happy ending.

I quite enjoyed this film which beats a similar path as ‘White Mischief in showing that Brits behaving bad abroad is nothing new. It does however lack the intensity of that film as well as the violence and nudity. As a memoir I’m sure it’s pretty interesting for Grant and his family but for an outsider looking in, not an awful lot happens.

Nicholas Hoult does well as the 14 year old Ralph although playing an awkward teenager with a love for drama presumably wasn’t much of a stretch. His parents were less good with Byrne especially unconvincing as the drunk gun toting father. Richardson is OK as the Mum but I never though she was as bad as the script seemed to want to suggest. Further down the line you get most of the cast from ‘Acorn Antiques’ with Julie Walters and Celia Imrie doing their Mrs Overall and Toffee nosed snob lady respectively. Watson was a bit jarring as the free spirited American and her casting didn’t seem believable against the stuffy colonial officer Byrne.

The predictable scenes of rebelling against the establishment were clear and present and while being a lot of fun for the participants, came across to this viewer as a bit ill mannered and rude. As a bio-pic the film would have been better if Grant has used his experiences wholesale because once you go down the ‘inspired by’ route you start wondering if all the interesting stuff is made up and the dull stuff real.

It’s not a particularly bad film but as a rites of passage piece it doesn’t really inspire, and towards the end I couldn’t care less if a rhino charged through the lot of them. Now that would have liven things up a bit!

Best Bit : Ducking into ‘A Clockwork Orange’

‘W’ Score 14/23