“Love is the Sweetest Thing” – Heartstopper (TV series review)

It doesn’t seem nearly a decade ago since I was writing Breaking Point, a novel about gay friends being pulled apart by the bullying that they were subjected to. The story switched from telling it from the point of view of the two friends to the bully to the teacher who felt helpless to do something about it. There were sequences in Breaking Point (and the sequel, Breaking Down) that showed some of the joy of teenage love, but the emphasis was on the bullying that they went through, and trying to shed light on the forms it could take.

Netflix’s new teen drama, Heartstopper, dropped on Friday, and I confess I’m utterly jealous of writer Alice Oseman’s ability to tell a not dissimilar story to Breaking Point, but concentrating on the sweet love story rather than the homophobia and bullying that threatens the relationships at the heart of the series. Joe Locke and Kit Connor play Charlie and Nick, who become unlikely friends after being thrown together following changes to form groups at their all-boys high school. Charlie is an out gay teen who, the previous year, had suffered a lengthy period of school bullying, while Nick (a year older than Charlie) is the school’s star rugby player. When their friendship surprisingly turns into something more, their relationship is threatened by their respective friendship groups – and their friendship groups are threatened by their relationship. There are depictions of homophobia and bullying here but, while unpleasant, they are handled in such a way to gain the show a recommendation of viewers of twelve years and over – although, if I was a parent, I would find little here to worry about a younger child seeing. There’s no four-letter words, no sex, no nudity. Just teenagers falling in love.

Despite the bullying and the tensions between friends and the pair at the heart of the story, there’s never a sense of impending doom, or any real feeling of threat to the core relationship. And creating something of that nature is far more difficult than it sounds. It’s far easier to create a serious drama with lots of emotionally explosive scenes than coming up with four hours of television that leaves the viewer with a warm glow for the majority of its running time. Indeed, perhaps “Heartwarming” would be a more apt title than “heartstopper.”

The series has had almost unanimously positive reviews, and is currently at 100% approval on Rotten Tomatoes. Perhaps, after years of political divisions in the UK, where neighbour was almost actively encouraged to fall out with neighbour, and after two years of Coronavirus, there is a yearning for a television series like this, which is largely happy and joyful, and where most of the characters are kind and caring and looking out for each other. Some might find the offering just a bit too nice, and there are times when watching it feels like you are plunging your face into a gateau – but it’s the nicest gateau that you have ever tasted and, no matter how much you consume, you never feel remotely sick or overfull.

I admit I’m not aware of the work of the main cast prior to this series, but it’s so good to see teenagers actually being played by teenagers rather than people approaching thirty. And, even better than that, the cast actually look like real schoolkids rather than models, and none of them sport a six pack. And that’s a great thing considering other shows on Netflix (Elite, Riverdale) which would make you think that four days of the school week is spent in a gym. But the cast is great for the most part, and Olivia Colman unexpectedly pops up in a small role as Nick’s mother, while Stephen Fry says about five lines off-screen as the school’s headmaster. There is also fine writing and performances with regards to the supporting cast, with this inclusive series charting their own relationships, too.

In short, Heartstopper is a delight (and an unexpected one for me, who’d never heard of the web comic it’s based on), and a second series seems inevitable. Going by the reviews so far, and the welcome the series has received on social media, Netflix might well be suffering a substantial boycott if they don’t commission one.

I am so glad that LGBTQ teens today have a series like this available to them, and I know how much difference a series like Heartstopper would have made to my own life had it been around when I was that age. In 1992, we had Section 28. In 2022, teens have Heartstopper. And I’m so pleased for them.

Review: Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (Britbox, 2022)

It is fair to say that the new three-part adaptation of Why Didn’t They Ask Evans may well be the most successful TV version of an Agatha Christie novel since 2003, when the Agatha Christie’s Poirot series starring David Suchet reached its peak with its version of Five Little Pigs.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise. Nearly every Agatha Christie novel has been adapted for either television or film at some point – only Destination Unknown, Death Comes at the End, Passenger to Frankfurt, and Postern of Fate have escaped (for those asking about They Came to Baghdad, it was adapted for US TV back in the 1950s). But that doesn’t mean that all of the novels that have been adapted were suitable for the screen.

It’s no coincidence that the first major television adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel was a near-three hour version of, yes, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans back in 1980. Sure, there had been TV versions of various stories before (including of Three Blind Mice, the short story on which The Mousetrap is based), but they had been in the early years of television. It was only with the 1980 Evans that Christie was shown to really work on the small screen, and dozens (maybe even hundreds) of Christie adaptations have followed since. And it’s worth adding here that Evans even survived the bludgeoning it received as part of ITV’s Marple series in 2009. It didn’t come out unscathed (what story in that nightmare of a series did?), but it certainly it had less injuries than many others.

So, what is it that makes Why Didn’t They Ask Evans so suitable for the small screen? Well, no doubt much of the reason is that it is a book that relies on action and events far more than most Christies. The book, published in 1934, was the last of Christie’s classic adventure novels that crossed her traditional detective stories with elements more associated with P. G Wodehouse and Dornford Yates. Despite it’s publication date, it really belongs with the 1920s novels in the same vein such as The Secret Adversary, The Man in the Brown Suit, and The Seven Dials Mystery – and the last of these was chosen as the follow-up to the 1980 Evans, it should be added.

It takes a rather skilled – or, indeed, brave – hand to take the chattier Christie books and make them work for a modern television audience. But Evans with it’s arresting opening, car crash, fights, etc is far more visual a story than most of the Poirot or Miss Marple novels, for example (The Big Four excepted, which is also basically adventure rather than detection). It’s also worth remembering that the second Agatha Christie cinema adaptation (back in 1929) was a silent film treatment of The Secret Adversary, another indication that these particular stories can be told visually rather than with endless dialogue. And that’s why the Poirot and Miss Marple adaptations for cinema have relied on novels set in exotic locations (or that could be relocated into one) – not much action takes place, but at least it happens in the presence of nice scenery. The Mirror Crack’d (1981) is the exception in the modern cinematic era, but that, instead, had the benefit of a cast of characters populated by Hollywood stars who are making a film just down the road from Miss Marple. No exotic locations, but exotic characters instead.

Writers have tried their best over the years to shoehorn the less-filmable Agatha Christies on to the screen. Sarah Phelps tried hard on Ordeal by Innocence, a very dour novel, and succeeded to some degree, but fans didn’t like the changes made. She failed badly on The Pale Horse, though, and it brought her series of adaptations to a halt. As already mentioned, the ITV Marple series was an utter disaster, with low production values, often idiotic choices of material, and scripts that a first year undergraduate creative writing student might be ashamed of. But no matter how much effort is put into a series, it’s still difficult to adapt the less-adaptable novels: just take a look at Appointment with Death in the Poirot series, for example. And, when it came to The Big Four and Elephants can Remember in the same series, they were virtually Christie in name only, with the amount of changes to the plots on par with the Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple films in the 1960s.

But Why Didn’t They Ask Evans has none of these problems. There’s never a dull moment in the book, and the latest adaptation, tucked away on Britbox where relatively few will see it, fills its three-hour running time with ease. It’s helped along by a fine cast. Will Poulter and Lucy Boynton are superb as the bright young things swept up in the mystery of a dying man’s last words – and they would almost certainly be welcomed as the next TV Tommy & Tuppence, should such a series be on the cards. And they are aided and abetted by the likes of Emma Thompson, Paul Whitehouse, Jim Broadbent, and Hugh Laurie. Laurie, who also wrote and directed the series, doesn’t appear until the end of episode two, but the series has his stamp all over it. He was the perfect choice to adapt and direct this type of material, especially with his past links with Jeeves and Wooster.

Christie fans will no doubt praise Laurie, and hope that he will adapt more in the future. And the praise is undoubtedly deserved, but we shouldn’t forget that much of the success of this latest Christie venture is due to the chosen book. It was chosen back in 1980 because it was seen to be one of the novels that lent itself to be adapted for the screen, and it was chosen forty years on for the same reason. If there have been many disappointing Christies in-between, then that is partly due to virtually every Christie novel having been tackled – even the final episodes in the Joan Hickson BBC series of Miss Marple stories saw the quality tail off as the less-adaptable stories were finally approached. You can’t take a book that is two hundred pages of people talking and expect it to be riveting TV – or that it can be adapted without significant changes.

It will be interesting to see what happens next. Kenneth Branagh’s recent film of Death on the Nile received decidedly mediocre reviews for the most part, although a third film is apparently in the works. But most Christie fans are likely to be more excited about another Britbox/Laurie adaptation, should one occur. However, lessons need to be learned from the past: the choice of material is absolutely essential.

Review. Spider-man: No Way Home’s return to the theme of loss and mourning.

I wrote the following on my blog in 2014:

All too often, grief and mourning is dismissed in a film or a book or a play as something very temporary.  Someone dies, people cry, the funeral takes place, everything returns to normal. In a space of two weeks life is back on track.  That, of course, is bullshit.   It’s not the way it works.  Things never really go back to how they were.  We get back into a routine, for sure.  But it’s not the same routine, because there’s always someone missing from it. Film, at least popular, commercial film, very rarely acknowledges this.  And neither does popular TV or fiction.  When was the last time you watched Midsomer Murders and saw someone really grieving?  It’s hard to tell why such basic human emotions are missing.  After all, most of us like to be able to “identify” ourselves with the character on the screen.  Of course there are arthouse films that are all about grief and mourning and loss.  But there are certain subjects that are avoided in more commercial ventures, it seems, simply because the makers don’t really know how to deal with them.

…

Is it wrong that these emotions are absent on our cinema and TV screens?  I’m not sure about that, but it certainly seems to be an easy option – and something we don’t necessarily notice until we’re suddenly, and unexpectedly, confronted with these scenes in the most unlikely film.  And Spiderman 2 is, certainly, the most unlikely film to deal honestly with the fact that we miss those no longer with us for the rest of our lives and not just until the funeral is over.

The comments were made about the second Tobey Maguire Spiderman movie, that I had just watched on TV, and written during a tough time that I was having in dealing with the death of my own father two years earlier.

Tonight, I watched the latest Spiderman movie, starring Tom Holland, and, strangely enough, had similar thoughts about THIS film. Now, in the case of No Way Home, the narrative takes place over a short period of time, thus not allowing a look at the act of grieving over the period of weeks or months. But that doesn’t stop it from tackling the issue in a remarkably serious way for the most mainstream of films. There is a touching and important scene (and I don’t mean important in the context of the film, but for everyone who sees it) in which the three spidermen from different universes (seeing the return of Andrew Garfield and Toby Maguire) discuss their own experiences of grief, what it meant, and how they dealt with it – or didn’t deal with it. How many times do we get to see action heroes cry about someone who died more than a decade before?

Now, someone like Scorcese can come along and spout his nonsense about how the Marvel films are “not cinema,” and I confess that I’ve only really seen the Spiderman movies in the franchise. But just read what he has to say:

For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.

It’s quite clear that all of those things are present in No Way Home. There are complexities in the film; no rights and wrongs, just grey areas. And that lull in the action during the middle of the film, in which it explores grief is remarkably unusual for mainstream cinema. In fact I cannot think of another action film where everything stops for the heroes to take time out and explore loss. That this is done between three young men on screen is even more unusual. Whether such moments occur in the other Marvel films, I don’t know. I don’t fancy watching 27 of them to find out, but such scenes help gives a rather lighthearted film emotional clout. And there is yet another look at loss at the end of the film, albeit in a very different setting which I can’t talk about here because it would require spoilers.

Elsewhere, I don’t think this is the best in the trilogy, although I would say it’s better than the second instalment, Far From Home – but it is still excellent, and the 148 minute runtime just, well, flies past. Tom Holland has turned out to be not only a charismatic lead in these films – and he has as much charisma as any actor from the classic age of Hollywood – but also a fine actor in his own right, and we see that talent growing with each successive film he makes. The writing is also excellent. The jokes never seem forced, and even the potentially complex plot is explained well. The inclusion of the previous spidermen was a great idea, and worked out much, much better than anyone could probably have hoped. And, while the presence of Andrew Garfield (with gravity-defying hair) is great, it’s worth mentioning here that it’s wonderful to see Tobey Maguire back on screen after a gap of seven years. His return is most welcome, and it’s good to see he has already finished another film, set in silent or early talkie Hollywood.

Presumably, there will be more Tom Holland Spiderman movies to come, although that’s not confirmed. But I doubt he’s ready to give up the role yet, and he clearly is doing everything right in the minds of the execs. That said, it would be a mistake to run the series into the ground so that they lose their sparkle and their willingness to explore emotional depths within the superhero format.

Closet Monster, and the scarcity of gay-themed movies on blu-ray

It is undeniable that, more than a decade into the blu-ray era, queer cinema of the past is woefully under-represented on the “new” medium.

Through the DVD era of the late 1990s and up to about ten years ago, queer cinema blossomed on home video. The new, cheaper-produced, more easily accessible DVD allowed for more content for niche audiences. I remember having a handful of gay-themed films on VHS, but I would have been lucky here in the UK to have found more than two or three such films on the shelf in even the biggest of stores. DVD – and the era of the internet – changed that considerably. Through labels such as Water Bearer, TLA and Strand Releasing in the US and Peccadillo, Millivres and TLA in the UK, dozens upon dozens of queer films became easily accessible. True, some were good, some were bad, and some were downright ugly – but they were there, nonetheless.

But precious few of those titles have made it to a blu-ray upgrade. We are still waiting for blu rays of the films of Andre Techine and Gael Morel, for example. Also much of Ozon’s earlier work, too. There is no blu ray release of what many would view as gay classics such as Beautiful Thing, Get Real, Trick, Were the World Mine, etc. (NB. I confess I stick to gay-themed films in my comments here – there are others out there far more knowledgeable than me of films featuring lesbian, trans characters etc, and I would love to hear from you).

The sad thing is that this situation isn’t likely to change in the future. While Strand have released coming-out classic Edge of Seventeen on blu ray, it is the exception and not the rule. While some of the titles I have mentioned above can be streamed on various services and channels, streaming is not a way of owning a film, and movies can be removed quickly and without warning. As the DVD becomes used less and less, we are in a worrying position where some key, historically important films are simply going to be forgotten and not seen by future generations unless the current situation changes rapidly. While the BFI, Eureka, Kino etc occasionally release a queer film, it is not where we should be at this stage. And it’s worrying.

Thankfully, the situation is somewhat rosier for films made and released within the blu-ray era itself. While many were/are still only released on DVD, others have had a blu-ray release as well, although not enough. One of those lucky films (and lucky for us) is Closet Monster, one of the best coming out/coming-of-age movies made during the last decade. Strand released this on blu-ray, although there is no such release in Europe. This tells the story of a young man who witnessed a traumatic incident when a child, and then suffered the breaking up of his parents while trying to come to terms with that incident. Now, around a decade on, he also has to come to terms with his sexuality – a sexuality inextricably connected with the incident he witnessed years earlier.

The film manages to thoroughly explore the themes of coming-of-age, coming out, and PTSD so well partly because it concentrates on a surprisingly small amount of characters. Oscar Madly (what a suitable name for a character in a film watched this week!) is at high school, but we don’t really get any view of his high school experience, thus removing peripheral characters that would otherwise take up precious moments within a ninety minute movie. The most important member of the supporting cast is Oscar’s pet hamster, which Oscar converses with a great deal as a way of trying to process the difficulties that he is going through. This relationship between teen and hamster could have turned into sentimental mush, but it’s never allowed to, and the final line from the hamster at the end of the film is just utterly perfect in this regard. Just as the viewer is blinking away those tears, they are snapped out of it in a wonderful way.

Connor Jessup, as Oscar, is stunning here. If ever an actor and character were made for each other, it’s here. Jessup (now most famous for Locke & Key) is a natural screen presence at any time, but this probably still ranks as his best performance to date. Isabella Rossellini provides the voice for the hamster and, again, this is brilliantly judged. Cute and charming, but more when the script calls for something else. Writer/director Stephen Dunn has managed to create a film that has fantasy elements but which also remains rooted in a hard-hitting reality even during those sequences. It is such a shame that, despite numerous awards for the film at festivals (including Best Canadian Feature Film at the Toronto festival), Dunn hasn’t followed this up with another feature-length movie. Perhaps Covid simply got in the way of that happening, but I’m guessing the reasons are probably more to do with the difficulties and (lack of) funding of indie filmmaking.

Closet Monster very much deserves its place on the still-slim roster of gay-themed films that have made it to blu-ray (and certainly deserves a space on your blu-ray shelves) but many others deserve a place, too – and one feels that, if those titles from the 1990s and 2000s don’t make it in the next couple of years, then they will be forgotten for the coming generations, and to deprive queer teenagers of seeing some of the best coming out movies ever made would be a tragedy – but rest assured that Closet Monster is every bit as good as the movies that it follows.