Jackboots on Whitehall: Plastic Nazis Just Aren't Funny

The trailer makes this look better than it is.

Okay, so I’d heard some good things about this British World War 2 puppet movie.

Sadly they were almost all lies.

Oh dear…

Jackboots on Whitehall is a low budget British 'satire' about the fight-back after a successful Nazi invasion of Great Britain in 1940. The movie is filmed in Panzervision (just one of many such ‘hilarious’ wordplays to follow) and features barely articulated dolls of the Action Man and Barbie style filmed on miniature sets. Bizarrely this film boasts a top-notch voice cast featuring Ewan McGregor, Alan Cumming, Dominic West, Timothy Spall, Tom Wilkinson, Rosamund Pike, Steven Merchant, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Richard Griffiths and Richard O’Brien amongst others. And how the hell did THAT happen?

The basic plot sees big-handed foundling farmboy Chris (McGregor) set off for London with a rag tag bunch of Kent yokels to save Winston Churchill (Spall) from a Nazi force which has just tunnelled its way up in to London. Saving the PM in the nick of time, Chris, his hoped-for girlfriend Daisy (Pike) along with brash and gung-ho American pilot Fisk (West), brave Rupee (Bhaskar) and his bunch of Indian soldiers (don’t ask) make a dash for Scotland for a last stand at Hadrian’s Wall. In this universe Scotland is a ghostly land of unknown terrors where people fear to go – even Nazis – and is home to a mythical and bloodthirsty army of warriors. Arriving in Scotland, the small band prepare a defence at Hadrian’s Wall, while Chris is sent off in to the misty wilderness to find the mythical Scots army to try and get their help in defeating the coming Nazis. Can Chris find and convince the bloodthirsty Scots to help in time to save Churchill and his rag tag army at Hadrian’s Wall? Will Chris find out the truth about his origins and why he has such big hands? Will he get to be with his true love Daisy over the opposition of her bigoted vicar father? Will I laugh more than twice when watching this silly, amateurish mess? That would be yes, yes, yes and no.

Look, I can cope with the crappy doll design and the cheap production values - it adds a certain ‘made in your bedroom’ charm to it all. Kinda like the old Adam and Joe show. The voice cast too is bizarrely impressive. But the two big problems here are: 1) the script is shit, and 2) the directors (Edward and Rory McHenry who are also the writers) clearly have no real idea what they are doing. The film feels like a mishmash of daft ideas that were put together as they were going along – like a couple of young kids just arsing around with their toys and a camera over many a weekend. Unlike the vastly superior Team America (an obvious inspiration) the satire here is not in anyway sharp, focussed or meaningful. So without any decent satire what we get left with is loads of silly wordplay and unfunny homages to/spoofs of movies like The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Zulu, Independence Day and Braveheart with pot shots at Mel Gibson about fifteen years out of date (there are much better ones to be had nowadays). Plus we get plenty of witless and deeply unfunny playground stereotypes (the Nazi’s arrive in London and the first thing they do is reorganise the London Underground to make it more efficient; King George protests to the Germans that he’s actually one of them; the Frenchman shags every woman in sight). There’s also loads of swearing and plenty of over the top violence on show, which, give ‘em their dues, are the two things that work best in the film. They constituted the only two moments I actually remember laughing while watching it. Sad but true.

Basically Jackboots on Whitehall is a poorly made and messy melding of the likes of Team America, Dad’s Army, Alo Alo, Carry On films, and those godawful Date Movie/Meet the Spartans type spoofs. Although, to be fair, it never ever gets as bad as those vile abortions as the sheer childish amateurish enthusiasm of the writers/directors does come through, providing a certain shoddy charm to it all. Oh, and it also has the sight of Hitler in a dress – Queen Elizabeth the First’s dress no less. Not funny, but odd enough to make a small mark on my brain. But the following two burning questions still remain to be answered: 1) how the hell did this ever get funding, and 2) how on earth did they ever get the voice cast that they got? Was there a major drought of acting work in Britain that week?
(1.5/out of 5)

Going postal in 60’s L.A.

Based on the recommendation of a friend I’ve just finished reading the novel Post Office by American author and poet Charles Bukowski.

This was an interesting book for me as it was well out of my comfort zone and not the sort of thing I’d usually go for. For a start, there’s no real story, just a collection of fairly random events covering over a decade in the life of Bukowski’s close-to-home alter ego Henry Chinaski. Chinaski is an alcoholic, womanising, gambling low life who aimlessly lurches from one menial job to another before ending up working for the US Postal Service where he remains for eleven years stuck in the soul destroying limbo of brain dead and degrading work. According to Chinaski the Post Office is a place populated by all kinds of annoying, repulsive loudmouths, dictatorial jobs worth managers and other assorted broken and downtrodden characters. Chinaski survives the place and his years spent there through copious amounts of booze, women, and his extremely cynical view of the world. To note: the term going postal comes from the fact that in the past quite a few US postal workers have snapped and done the whole workplace murder spree thing. Reading this you can see how that could happen.

After a slow and wary start, and after putting it down for a few weeks due to not really feeling the vibe of the thing, I persisted and picked the book back up a couple of days ago. And for some reason I got in to it a lot more this time and finished off the remaining hundred or so pages pretty quickly (it’s only one hundred and sixty pages in total so is more of a novelette than a novel). And I gotta say...I enjoyed it a fair bit. It’s still not really my cup of tea but it is an interesting look in to a life totally alien and in to the world of sixties America - specifically Los Angeles when many of the riots were kicking off. But even though Chinaski’s sort of life is alien to me, I could still kind of identify with some aspects of it such as the sheer drudgery and boredom of menial work and the attitudes of some of those little Hitler types who when they get the slightest whiff of power just love to make others life hell. Luckily I haven’t had too much experience of that, but I have had some, just as many surely have. So you can’t help but smile and give a silent cheer when Chinaski, through his cynical wit, or a small act of defiance, gets one up on em and on the system.

Stylewise, Bukowski’s writing is refreshingly basic, unfussy and to the point. Description is brief and limited and mostly focuses around the size and shape of women or the things he particularly dislikes about a person or a place. Sentences are short and dialogue dominates. And that dialogue is usually dry, cynical and bleakly humorous. And it does make you laugh. Bukowski constructs short, punchy, (oft dark) comic set pieces throughout. The one about the two birds Chinaski’s wife keeps in a cage that keep him awake with their incessant chatter and then what he decides to do with them is particularly funny.

Post Office was Bukowski’s first novel. It was released in 1971 and is said to be an autobiographical account of the writers own experience working on and off for the US Postal Service. Bukowski was quite a fascinating character. He became a willing alcoholic from his early teens saying that it helped him overcome his chronic social ineptness and withdrawn nature. Arguably it also helped fuel his writing ability giving him that extra dimension through which to tell his low life tales and to impart his poetry. The alcohol did harm to him for sure (bleeding ulcers and other complaints) as well as hindering him socially as much as he thought it helped him. But the argument that says how drugs and booze have helped form some of the greatest art, literature and music through the ages could be applied. For without the booze, Bukowski would probably not have become the renowned and influential writer he did. He died in 1994 from Leukaemia aged 74.

I may go on and read some more of his stuff, the continuing saga of Henry Chinaski in the likes of Ham on Rye, Factotum and Women. But the relentless low life, cynical (though amusing) gloom might be too much to take in extended doses. So I think I’ll leave it for a while. As a total antithesis to Bukowski I’m currently reading the official 2009 sequel to the wonderful A Little Princess entitled Wishing for Tomorrow by Hilary McKay. Then it’ll be Stephen King’s Cell, all being interspersed by the odd Edgar Allan Poe poem and short story. Some nicely eclectic reading over the Christmas period.