Dad's Army

I haven't seen many films since leaving LA. In part that may be because I knew too much of how they were made and they were more transparent than I wanted them to be; in part it was frustration that basic film grammar, artful cinematography, and sophisticated writing seemed to have gone out of fashion. For the most part, those I have seen, I've seen more as a social occasion than because I was interested in the film on its own merits.

Since moving to the UK, fed up with some sense of obligation being my sole reason to see things, I've experimented with only going to the films I am genuinely interested in seeing. These have been ... remarkably few. Vanishingly few, by some standards. I did want to see Shaun the Sheep – more out of a desire to celebrate being somewhere where Aardman still had theatrical distribution – but didn't get to the cinema in time. When I found out there was going to be a film of Dad's Army, a famous BBC sitcom from the 70s about a bumbling division of the Home Guard during WWII, I made up my mind not to repeat the Shaun mistake and get to it while I could.

I am not familiar with the original show – or rather, I am, but in the sort of way you pick things up second-hand, because it's referenced in radio comedy in that 'everyone knows this reference' kind of way, so I knew the catch phrases, a couple of the characters, and the premise. It's my policy that when a book I'm interested in is being made into a film, I'll put off reading the book until after I've seen it, on the basis that a)the book is always better than the film so I may as well work my way up, and b)I don't want to spend the entire movie distracted by noticing what's been changed. So I didn't look up the original TV show, or the radio adaptation, wanting to give the movie the benefit of the doubt and appreciate it (or not) on its own merits.

And ... it's not a bad movie. ( Review )

While it wasn't quite the film I wanted it to be, I'm still glad I went to see it. Moviemaking is an expensive hobby and it's good that there are pockets of it around the world that are not controlled from the deep pockets in LA; like any other art form, local cinema tells us who we are and offers different perspectives on storytelling and the human experience. It seems odd to tie a goofy TV spinoff about old men in with something as lofty as 'the human experience,' but you wouldn't see a big American movie studio making a WWII film from their point of view, certainly not without a lot more Nazis, and probably less comfortable lived-in familiarity with a quaint seaside town and the sort of characters you get there.

So there you go – local films for local people, support niche productions that interest you and let's all make the movies we want to make.

And have fun.