Brand: A Second Coming (15)
Metrodome, £19.99
After his facile pronouncements ahead of May's General Election, are we “over” Russell Brand? Not if he's to be believed in this entertaining if unexacting film by American documentary-maker Ondi Timoner. Her previous credits include well-received films Dig!, a rock documentary, and We Live In Public, about a dotcom millionaire you've probably never heard of. She's used to zeitgeisty subjects, in other words, and well aware of the media context in which they operate.
Here, in a whirl of documentary footage, talking heads and face-to-face interviews, we run through Brand's life, from his early childhood to his various addictions – drugs, sex, fame and, later, any political or spiritual credo which can feed his pathological need for acclaim – and finally to America, where he makes films, marries a singer and becomes a Hollywood A-lister. For a while, anyway. The film also takes in his dalliance with politics, his call for revolution – and his 2014 book of that title.
What comes over strongly (and keeps the film fizzing) is Brand's omnipresent charisma and verbal dexterity, two facets of his personality which seem to make even normally sceptical interviewers – and Timoner is no such item – take at face value the frankly ridiculous stuff that pours out of his mouth. Honourable exceptions are Jeremy Paxman and Evan Davis, represented here in snippets from Brand's various Newsnight interviews. We also see Brand's poisonous spat with Peter Hitchens on the same programme as well as an interview with a perplexed Oliver Stone who tries to keep up with Brand as he lays out his plans for a new political world order. Or something. There's plenty to laugh about as well, mostly in the numerous clips from Brand's various stage shows but also from his American TV appearances. In the best of these, his disruptive genius eats through the composure of a trio of low-brow presenters like acid through toffee. Not for the first time, though, one of the best line comes from pomposity-pricking Noel Gallagher who says his friend's political theories are mostly rubbish though he'd back them if Brand promised to make him Duke of Manchester.
A more questioning and less US-centric approach would have made this an even more compelling study of the dynamo that is Russell Brand. But even so Timoner's film is well worth a watch.
A Traveller In Time (PG)
Simply Media, £19.99
Before playing Lydia in Four Weddings And A Funeral, and even longer before winning Celebrity Masterchef, Sophie Thompson was a 15-year-old newcomer making her first screen appearance in this 1978 adaptation of Alison Uttley's celebrated novel.
Although written in 1939, its teenage-girl-in-a-time-slip theme chimed perfectly with what seems to have been a preoccupation of children's TV from the late 1960s onwards. Prime examples include Alan Garner's novel The Owl Service, which was filmed in 1969, and the 1988 adaptation of Helen Cresswell's novel The Moondial (also reissued recently on DVD). It starred Siri Neil as a girl sent to the country who finds herself transported back to Victorian time.
Here, a young girl visiting her Derbyshire relatives to recuperate after a bout of pneumonia (Thompson) finds herself yo-yoing between the present day and 1584, where she becomes embroiled in a plot to free Mary Queen of Scots.
The transfer isn't great, the dialogue is clunky, there's a jarring disconnection between the harshly-lit studio scenes and the location shots, and the pace of the action would have most modern-day editors snorting into their takeaway Lattes. But Thompson, with her gamin cut and rosy cheeks, makes for an intense and oddly androgynous heroine and it's hard not to get swept along by the story. A Traveller In Time has a lot more going for it than just nostalgia, though it's a shame it's entirely bereft of extras.
Slow West (15)
Lionsgate Home Entertainment, £9.99
Much has been written, in these pages and elsewhere, about the feature debut from musician-turned-film-maker John Maclean, formerly of 1990s Scottish indie favourites Beta Band. A brief reprise, though, for those who missed it: young Scot Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) travels to America in search of his love, Rose Ross (Caren Pistorius). Along the way he falls in with hardbitten bounty hunter Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender), who says he'll guide wet-behind-the-ears Jay through the perilous west. Slowly, as the title suggests. Blending elements of Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, the Nick Cave-scripted Australian “Western” The Proposition and any of those slightly offbeat American westerns which were actually about Vietnam, Maclean presents an ever-rolling tableau of oddness and brutality. There's a great Absinthe-drinking scene but, unsurprisingly, the story ends in gunfire. As well as the pop of Colt 45s the soundtrack includes music from Maclean's former Beta Band compadre Gordon Anderson, appearing as Lone Pigeon, while the title track is by Django Django, the Mercury Prize-nominated band helmed by Maclean's younger brother, Dave.
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