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.

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She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
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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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Forrest Gump (1994)
(SPOILERS) There was a time when I’d have made a case for, if not greatness, then Forrest Gump’s unjust dismissal from conversations regarding its merits. To an extent, I still would. Just not nearly so fervently. There’s simply too much going on in the picture to conclude that the manner in which it has generally been received is the end of the story. Tarantino, magnanimous in the face of Oscar defeat, wasn’t entirely wrong when he suggested to Robert Zemeckis that his was a, effectively, subversive movie. Its problem, however, is that it wants to have its cake and eat it.

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Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
(SPOILERS) There can be a cumulative effect from revisiting a movie where one glaring element does not fit, however well-judged or integrated everything else is; the error is only magnified, and seems even more of a miscalculation. With Groundhog Day, there’s a workaround to the romance not working, which is that the central conceit of reliving your day works like a charm and the love story is ultimately inessential to the picture’s success. In the case of Four Weddings and a Funeral, if the romance doesn’t work… Well, you’ve still got three other weddings, and you’ve got a funeral. But our hero’s entire purpose is to find that perfect match, and what he winds up with is Andie McDowell. One can’t help thinking he’d have been better off with Duck Face (Anna Chancellor).

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(SPOILERS) M Night Shyamalan went from the toast of twist-based filmmaking to a one-trick pony to the object of abject ridicule in the space of only a couple of pictures: quite a feat. Along the way, I’ve managed to miss several of his pictures, including his last, The Visit, regarded as something of a re-locating of his footing in the low budget horror arena. Split continues that genre readjustment, another Blumhouse production, one that also manages to bridge the gap with the fare that made him famous. But it’s a thematically uneasy film, marrying shlock and serious subject matter in ways that don’t always quite gel.

Shyamalan has seized on a horror staple – nubile teenage girls in peril, prey to a psychotic antagonist – and, no doubt with the best intentions, attempted to warp it. But, in so doing, he has dragged in themes and threads from other, more meritable fare, with the consequence that, in the end, the conflicting positions rather subvert his attempts at subversion…

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Glass (2019)
(SPOILERS) If nothing else, one has to admire M Night Shyamalan’s willingness to plough ahead regardless with his straight-faced storytelling, taking him into areas that encourage outright rejection or merciless ridicule, with all the concomitant charges of hubris. Reactions to Glass have been mixed at best, but mostly more characteristic of the period he plummeted from his must-see, twist-master pedestal (during the period of The Village and The Happening), which is to say quite scornful. And yet, this is very clearly the story he wanted to tell, so if he undercuts audience expectations and leaves them dissatisfied, it’s most definitely not a result of miscalculation on his part. For my part, while I’d been prepared for a disappointment on the basis of the critical response, I came away very much enjoying the movie, by and large.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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