All the royals wanted was a brood mare crossed with a clothes horse.

Unlawful Killing

(2011)

This Mohamed Al Fayed-financed documentary, fronted by the one and only – mercifully – Keith Allen, boasts the honour of being unshown in the UK owing to 87 changes, requested for legal reasons, that the producers refused to make. It’s readily viewable on YouTube, however, where it can be considered for what it does or doesn’t add to the conspiracy conversation surrounding Princess Diana’s death. While it presents examining the inquest as its remit (“It is the inquest of the inquest” as Allen puts it) its net is cast wider than that, and it’s in that capacity that it ultimately ends up undermining itself.

Written by Victor Lewis-Smith and Paul Sparks (of TV Offal, and Gay Daleks fame), presumably with some input from the man holding the purse strings, Keith gets his point across in his patented rough-around-the-edges manner, although any deficiencies on his part are thrown into sharp relief when Piers Morgan is invited to ooze across the screen (“As she used to say to me” he comments of Princess Di at one point). Allen and co are strong on the inquest being pretty hopeless and the evidentiary blackholes of cleaning the crime scene, lack of operating surveillance cameras, the embalming of the body, the error-ridden medical reports, the disparities between repeated police searches, no royals being called to give evidence (despite Di’s note concerning the manner in which she suspected she’d be bumped off by them) and the amount of time it took for the world’s slowest ambulance to reach a nearby hospital (37 minutes to get her into the ambulance, 81 minutes to set off to the hospital, 1 hr 43 minutes before it arrived at the hospital). Most of all, on the commonly held error that the jury put the blame on the paparazzi, which was certainly the way most of the media reported it: in fact, they declared her death an unlawful killing (so murder or manslaughter) by vehicles following (being the white Fiat Uno and motorcycles seen by eye witnesses, which it seems there was no subsequent urgency to trace).

I’m less convinced of the need to obsess about Nicholas Witchall falling asleep in the press room, in order to underline that the BBC, and the press generally, had decided how they were going to report the case before it started. Not because it may not have been true, but because it’s judicious to pick your targets. Likewise Princess Philip and his Nazi connections; yeah, I know Al-Fayed views them as a “bloody racist royal family” and the Duke of Edinburgh self-admittedly is, but if you’re going to make a case for their offing her and Dodi on race grounds you probably ought to go the whole hog and get deep into the bloodline purity angle David Icke is so fond of; as presented here, it feels a little desperate, as does the landmines argument (which is the Di equivalent of JFK wanting to pull out of Nam, but it’s debatable if it’s actually equally so).

At the end of the YouTube documentary, the poster included an excerpt from an Icke talk, clearly as a counterpoint, in which David puts forward his theory that Mohamed Al-Fayed was also in on her murder (it was clearly the old double bluff to bring the court case), based on his allegedly attending satanic rituals with the Queen at the Chateau des Amerois (Castle of Darkness) in Belgium and persuading Dodi to call off the security detail on the day of the killings (Al-Fayed claims to have issued no such instruction, not in response to Icke, I should stress, although it’s notable that this aspect isn’t broached at all by Allen). Now, sure, it’s feasible Al-Fayed was involved, thought his son would come out unscathed and sought vengeance through the courts when he didn’t, but it requires an additionally elaborate and tenuous set of arguments, irrespective of the royals being lizards or the driver being mind-controlled to hit the thirteenth pillar (once David starts connecting those dots, he just can’t stop). I note he makes no mention of Al-Fayed’s alleged involvement in his summaries of her death in his most recent couple of books. For brevity’s sake?

An interesting doc, then, but not the curtain lifter its legal status might suggest.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Comments

I just hope my death makes more cents than my life.

Joker (2019)
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Poor Easy Breezy.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
(SPOILERS) My initial reaction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was mild disbelief that Tarantino managed to hoodwink studios into coming begging to make it, so wilfully perverse is it in disregarding any standard expectations of narrative or plotting. Then I remembered that studios, or studios that aren’t Disney, are desperate for product, and more especially, product that might guarantee them a hit. Quentin’s latest appears to be that, but whether it’s a sufficient one to justify the expense of his absurd vanity project remains to be seen.

So you want me to be half-monk, half-hitman.

Casino Royale (2006)
(SPOILERS) Despite the doubts and trepidation from devotees (too blonde, uncouth etc.) that greeted Daniel Craig’s casting as Bond, and the highly cynical and low-inspiration route taken by Eon in looking to Jason Bourne's example to reboot a series that had reached a nadir with Die Another Day, Casino Royale ends up getting an enormous amount right. If anything, its failure is that it doesn’t push far enough, so successful is it in disarming itself of the overblown set pieces and perfunctory plotting that characterise the series (even at its best), elements that would resurge with unabated gusto in subsequent Craig excursions.

For the majority of its first two hours, Casino Royale is top-flight entertainment, with returning director Martin Campbell managing to exceed his excellent work reformatting Bond for the ‘90s. That the weakest sequence (still good, mind) prior to the finale is a traditional “big” (but not too big) action set piece involving an attempt to…

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It’s like an angry white man’s basement in here.

Bad Boys for Life (2020)
(SPOILERS) The reviews for Bad Boys for Life have, perhaps surprisingly, skewed positive, given that it seemed exactly the kind of beleaguered sequel to get slaughtered by critics. Particularly so since, while it’s a pleasure to see Will Smith and Martin Lawrence back together as Mike and Marcus, the attempts to validate this third outing as a more mature, reflective take on their buddy cops is somewhat overstated. Indeed, those moments of reflection or taking stock arguably tend to make the movie as a whole that much glibber, swiftly succeeded as they are by lashings of gleeful ultra-violence or humorous shtick. Under Michael Bay, who didn’t know the definition of a lull, these pictures scorned any opportunity to pause long enough to assess the damage, and were healthier, so to speak, for that. Without him, Bad Boys for Life’s beats often skew closer to standard 90s action fare.

She writes Twilight fan fiction.

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I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

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The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010)
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Michael Apted does a competent job directing (certainly compared to his Bond film - maybe he talked to his second unit this time), Dante Spinotti's cinematography is stunning and the CGI mostly well-integrated with the action.

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***

How many galoshes died to make that little number?

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Dante commented of Larry Doyle’s screenplay (as interviewed in Joe Dante, edited by Nil Baskar and G…

Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

I think World War II was my favourite war.

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An off-peak Joe Dante movie is still one chock-a-block full of satirical nuggets and comic inspiration, far beyond the facility of most filmmakers. Small Soldiers finds him back after a six-year big screen absence, taking delirious swipes at the veneration of the military, war movies, the toy industry, conglomerates and privatised defence forces. Dante’s take is so gleefully skewed, he even has big business win! The only problem with the picture (aside from an indistinct lead, surprising from a director with a strong track record for casting juveniles) is that this is all very familiar.

Dante acknowledged Small Soldiers was basically a riff on Gremlins, and it is. Something innocuous and playful turns mad, bad and dangerous. On one level it has something in common with Gremlins 2: The New Batch, in that the asides carry the picture. But Gremlins 2 was all about the asides, happy to wander off in any direction that suited it oblivious to whether the audience was on …

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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