Redbelt

Written at the time of the film's release. 

 

Redbelt (David Mamet, 2008) One considers carefully before accusing David Mamet of writing a fairy tale.* But, considering the genre in which he's working—the sports film, which is almost always a glucose-encrusted, tears-of-joy-stained fantasy (aren't they, basically, "Cinderella stories?")—one also must admit that he's taken as much of the slop out of the form as he can. And if it strains credulity a bit, well...."you gotta sell a story."

Michael Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is an ex-military, mixed martial arts/self-defense instructor with an emphasis on ju-jitsu, running a small not prosperous training center in the land of make-believe, L.A. He's a good man doing good deeds, cloistering himself, looking to achieve his own personal best (like so many Mamet men). That he believes in honor, and the proper way ("There's always an escape") would appear to be a weakness. But incidents happen to break the hermitic seal of Terry's life and he soon finds that good deeds do not go unpunished. Encounters with an attorney with coping issues (Emily Mortimer), one of his students (Max Martini), a past-his-prime action star (Tim Allen) and his producer (Joe Mantegna) convolute to seemingly improve his life...but at a cost.

Money and legal issues force him to cross a line he'd never thought to cross—and as a result, he becomes a participant in an exhibition match with all its gloss, hyperbole, myth-making and BS. That the match is based on an anecdote that he casually mentions at a swank party, but rigged to take the chance out of it, only compounds his anger and humiliation at the corruption that he's taking part in, and he must find his own way out of a trap of his own devising. A way of his own devising.

It must have been an interesting puzzle for Mamet: "How do I make my own version...my own version...of the most manipulative and phoney-baloney film genre out there and still make it 'Mametian?" And still make it "mean" something. The disciplines and the hierarchical nature of non-exhibition MMA that feed Terry are in direct contrast to the gladiator aspect of the money game, which in the Mamet tradition, is a rigged contest. Even rigged, both Golden Rules** are in play.

Mamet's films usually exhibit stillness, but here, action is used as exposition and Mamet the director fails to do anything but document the moves, and none too well, at that. Clarity is sacrificed for speed, and no matter how long Ejiofor has trained for those scenes—he's great in the role, by the way—his efforts are for naught due to Mamet's direction and cutting of them. The cast is uniformly excellent with Mamet stock company players Ricky Jay and Joe Mantegna breezing through their roles. and Ejiofor making a superb protagonist, aided and abutted by Alice Braga as his practical wife. Tim Allen drains the comedy out of himself and is a bit of a revelation in his well-observed role as an actor coasting. You always knew there was a good actor inside the goof-ball and it's interesting to see him come out. Mamet's story-telling, casting and working with actors has never been in question. It's his use of the camera, now, that needs perfecting if he intends to pursue more action oriented films.

* It's not like he hasn't done that before. You could make a case that The Untouchables is so far from the reality of the Elliot Ness-Al Capone story that it's a blood-soaked fairy tale of revenge. But how much that was Mamet, and how much was director Brian DePalma or the producers one can't say.

 

** 1. "Do Unto Others as They'd Do Unto You" 2. "The One With the Most Gold Makes the Rules"

The Rookie (2002)

I was going to post this next week—the start of the 2024 baseball season—but, according to PBS News Hour (and other confirming sources), the season actually starts today with a series going on in Korea. So...we'll bunt.

Written some seasons ago...

The Rookie (John Lee Hancock, 2002) With all the fuss being made over The Blind Side, attention must be paid to the director's previous sports-film that proved popular, like The Blind Side, also based on a actual story that's just this side of incredible and told with a clear-eyed lack of pretension.

John Lee Hancock's first film in the Majors,* The Rookie, is a double-header of a sports film that manages to tell its male-weepie "dreams do come true" stories, both of them essentially true, with a minimum of sentimentality—the principals are actually quite bitter throughout the film, weighed down by the burden of "what might've been," and to a certain extent paralyzed by it. Coach Jim Morris, a former Big League prospect makes a deal with the High School team he coaches he'll "re-up" if they win their division. It then moves on to top itself to tell the consequence of that first story to the coach who must fulfill a promise to his team...and himself...to try out—again—for the Majors at the age of 39, a time when most pitchers are eyeing retirement, not opposing pitchers.

And because it's situated in Texas (for the most part), there's not an awful lot of talking about it, but, instead, there is a lot of scowling and stewing and time spent in solitude beating themselves up by transference in the form of hurling a baseball in frustration as fast as can be at some woe-be-gone target.

It might have been that baseball abuse added a few feet per second to Jim Morris' pitch, or it might be an arm strengthened by scar-tissue that can top his fast-ball at two ticks shy of a hundred mph. Whatever the reason, the science teacher/baseball coach in the arid football town of Big Lake, Texas must put-up or shut-up to his high-school team after his exhortation to pursue their dreams (and some batting practice with his blazing fast-ball) sharpens them up to become division champions.

That's story one. Story two is Morris' old-man hoofing it through try-outs and the farm system at the off-chance of being called to "The Show." It is an unlikely scenario, but Morris manages to do it, the film ending on the fairy-tale night that he must pitch in his first Major League game in his home state in front of his team and friends and family.

The movie could have been a sob-fest, but instead Hancock hinges it on dark nights of the soul and doubts about responsibility. This isn't some up-beat Rudy story where "wishing makes it so," (despite being produced by Disney). Morris (Dennis Quaid) must make a personal journey of dealing with a lifetime of disappointment and what might-have-been to accept the result of his efforts. After a life of compromise and making-do (and blaming others), he has to learn the grace to accept the gifts he has been given and the opportunities he's been afforded. Whatever pain goes behind each pitch, he must also put behind him.
Grace? Sacrifice? Forgiveness? Where do you go to learn such traits? Such inspiration usually is found at the Cathedral, the Temple, or the Mosque, but in the sports-world the big stadium is the source of humility. Hancock stages Morris' first walk into the Texas Rangers stadium as if he was walking into the Vatican, the high-arched entryway with the sun streaming through that stretches to a vanishing point that evokes a long journey, but also the long history of a game that, more than any other sport, is a competition with the ghosts of the past as well as the Boys of that particular Summer. The arches reach to the sky to define the goal but also press down with the weight of tradition, dwarfing the new recruit, challenging him to fill the space. In the distance, his fellow rookie, half his age, looks on in amusement at the old duffer hanging back in awe, anxious to start his journey and not thinking he may be looking at a flash-forward to a future of regret. It is a poignant moment of film, that says volumes in a single image and no words.

It's a good story told well. The characters are not larger than life, merely as large as they need to be. And no decision is made with a self-serving speech and heraldic trumpets—decisions and their consequences are agonized and fretted over. It's a story of people who not only have a lot to lose—they know it—but take the chance anyway for whatever amount of time it may last. The Rookie manages to make it look not quixotic, but essential.

Jim Morris' baseball card
* After writing two quirky off-beat films for Clint Eastwood: A Perfect World (1993) and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997).

Invictus

Written at the time of the film's release...

"No One Plays 100%"

Rugby for the sake of rugby does not a movie make. John Huston's Victory, a soccer film about soccer, is a listless affair even with a cast that features Michael Caine, Sylvester Stallone and Pelé. But Clint Eastwood's Invictus,* about Nelson Mandela's uniting of an apartheid-torn South Africa though a burst of sports-fever, manages to tell a deeper story through the guise of a sports-film. It's a ruse that's perpetuated throughout the film as incident after incident of potential assassination or terrorism is exposed as something else; the fragile coalitions uniting the divided country are constantly in danger of exploding into violence, and the reminders are all around.

Reminders is exactly what Mandela is fighting against. His personal mandate is to keep the past in the past and move towards a united future. A former terrorist and prisoner, as president of a deposed Dutch government, he re-casts himself fresh to serve his country's interests, and finds the most difficult part of the job convincing others to do the same. By uniting former enemies under a common interest, the hope is the citizenry can at least start to look at each other without suspicion. 

Eastwood lays out the territory in his first elegant shot, panning from a neatly manicured grass-field filled with well-appointed white rugby players, up over a rigid fence to a city street and beyond it, to a ram-shackle wire fence holding back a vacant lot of towns-folk playing rugby as best they can. They have the one thing in common, but that's it. And that's the start.

A major criticism of the Eastwood style is a tendency to over-state the case, and that is in abundance in this film: through ham-fisted characters like a full-of-himself sports-announcer who provides story exposition in the most patronizing way; in the performance of Morgan Freeman, who, though stooped and halting, does not in any way project Mandela's fragility, making him more of a wax-work representation than a characterization; the occasional too-blunt dialogue.

The dialogue is where the movie fails; the direction is where the movie succeeds and surprises. One becomes more interested in the film's back-story of how Mandela's security detail—once on opposite sides of a political conflict—now must forge a bond to protect the president and each other (there is a situation in which they are clearly over their heads, and the empathy for them knows no boundary). The coming-together of the group stutters and evolves organically, far smoother than the soccer story.

But once, the soccer story kicks in—that's when things get very interesting. Field sports are tough to simulate and make authentic-looking (even The Damned United avoided it, for the most part, with archival footage), but Eastwood doesn't shy away from it, going in close, slowing the action down, amping up the stakes. The final game of the 1995 World Cup between South Africa's Springboks and the Māori-themed New Zealand All Blacks (there's some historical irony for you), where one should expect the film to start to drag, instead becomes a brutally intense struggle that more than serves as a metaphor for government struggling against itself and its own inertia to gain some ground in accomplishing some good. You can gripe all you want about stodginess and speechifying, but in subtle and surprising ways, Eastwood and crew bring you back to a thoughtful, invigorating re-appraisal of the themes through the action of the film, delivering a moving sub-text that elevates the film far beyond words. One goes into the film expecting one kind of film, and walks out amazed at how fulfilling, and skillfully presented, the film is.

* Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley (1849 - 1902)

Next Goal Wins (2023)

The Anti-Lasso ("We're Just Asking That You Not Embarrass This Nation Any Further")

or

FIFA Faux Fun

 

The story behind Next Goal Wins has been told before...in the 2014 documentary also titled Next Goal Wins. The facts are all there, too. You can look it up.*

 

It's just never been told by Taika Waititi before.

 

The story of the American Samoa soccer team attempting to invigorate (hell, "hot-wire" is the better term) their club after a record-book-breaking loss of 31-0 (to Australia) by hiring a coach who'd been fired from his last three coaching positions for anger-management issues is an absurdist nightmare of reaching for the dirt, and failing your way to greatness, the sort of story they don't cover in the sports channels except for a cruel laugh-getter before breaking to the next beer or ED commercial. It's hardly an inspirational story in the Lombardi** circles of "winning is the only thing" quippage. But, it IS a story about survival and dignity and overcoming log-odds humiliation. You know, the place where the other 98% of us live.

Now, I've been seeing a lot of grumbling about Waititi on the inter-webs in anticipation of this film. My general impression from it all is that the New Zealand director has somehow worn out his welcome or gone past his "Sell By" date. Oh, the gripers still like his TV shows—"Reservation Dogs" (on Hulu) and "Our Flag Means Death" (on HBO Max...or is it just "Max" these days?) and, of course, the "What We Do in the Shadows" series (on FX)—everybody likes those, but Waititi long-form seems to make me people cranky.

 

I don't get it (but I don't "get" a lot of things on the inter-webs). 

Maybe Waititi is too "twee"—that is (by Oxford) "

excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty, or sentimental"—for some folks, but I would argue that Waititi takes on some pretty strong stuff in his movies (Hell-oo, Jojo Rabbit!)—and, as he works in a comedic vein, the effectiveness of his work will, also, always be subjective. Some folks have an under-developed sense of humor while some folks laugh at the the most painful of accidents. Comedians take on the burden of failure just by telling a joke. Waititi may not please everybody (and he certainly doesn't from the comments I've read), but he's also adept at horror and tragedy, frequently mixing things up and finding the absurd in everything.

And a LOT of people...especially those espousing a religious, bed-rock view of their deities...do not like that at all (Hey, I didn't like Thor: Love and Thunder, either, but I'm not going to dismiss a director for a dud***). There were just too many good things about What You Do in the Shadows, The Hunt for the Wilderpeople, the afore-mentioned Jojo Rabbit, and Thor: Ragnarok, not least of which was a steadfast impudence to take the material and play with it, rather than merely pay homage.

Okay, okay. How's the film?

Funny, for the main part...despite it beginning "with incredible humiliation." The film starts—after an introduction by Waititi playing a community priest—with a recap of that terrible World Cup defeat, followed by coach Tom Rongen (Michael Fassbender) being brought before a FIFA board with the intent of doing two things: walking him through the five stages of grief, and giving him a "take-it-or-leave-it" offer—he either goes to Samoa to coach the worst team in the league...or they fire him. That two members of the board are his separated wife (Elisabeth Moss) and her current boyfriend (Will Arnett) does not help in any way, shape or form.

Reluctantly, he flies to American Samoa, where he is greeted by the President of the Football Federation American Saomoa, Tavita Taumua (Oscar Kightley), who is also a camera-man/restaurateur/manager of the hotel provided to Rongen. At this point, Rongen considers himself exiled to prison, so he is merely content to drink his troubles away. The first practice does not go well, Rongen resorting to basics, laps, sipping from his SOLO cup and stewing. Then, one of the better players, Jaiyah (Kaimana) shows up late, back from Hawaii and still after-glowing from a great trip.

Next Goal Wins has been called transphobic in some circles (a handful of reviews at the film's film festival premiere) because of this character. Put aside that this is based on a real player, Jaiyah Saelua, fa'afafine in the Samoan culture, an important figure in the sports trans community and is played by a trans actor. This smattering of reviews seem to think that the story is not about the team, but the one character. They play an important part, but are not the main focus of the story. The ultimate sin seems to be at one point, the drunken, frustrated and boorish head coach "deadnames" her to get her to focus. This is, of course, bad behavior. But, what this clutch of clutching reviewers seem to forget is that the coach—at this point in the story—is a bad guy. He's a white...Dutch (cue the colonizer music)...outsider who knows nothing about the culture and needs to be schooled. Call me cisgendered for taking that approach, but also call me a reviewer for looking at the bigger picture. I endeavor to go into a movie without preconceived notions and prejudices. I also try not to watch a movie myopically.

As it is, Jaiyah is the most winning part of the movie and is clearly more defined than the other team members, who, by this time of the movie aren't hoping to win a match...but merely to score a goal. She, to my mind, gains the audience's loyalty at that point and for the remainder of the movie. Not so, the coach. And as the token Aryan in the cast, Fassbender—not known for his comedic chops or his expressiveness—seemed to me to be channeling his inner Charlton Heston, all gritted teeth and furrowed forehead, a stranger in a strange land but determined to buffalo his way through it. And we all know what happened to the buffalo.

Look, it's good. It's funny. It does well by its subject and it will provoke a laugh or two...if you're not sensitive to being shocked into laughter now and again.**** But, then I like the New Zealander humor and brashness (Crikey!). And everybody improves their game.

Look. I'm not an apologist for Waititi. Taste is subjective as is humor. And he's doing more things right than he might be doing wrong.

 

But, here's the thing: there is a perfectly fine documentary of the story out there if you look around. It just won't be as entertaining.

Which is why we need "irritating" directors like Taika Waititi.

The actual 2014 American Samoa soccer club

* And you can watch highlights (or low-lights, depending on your POV) of it here:  

** Lombardi didn't come up with that "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing" line. He stole it. From UCLA Bruins coach "Red" Sanders who'd been using it since the 1930's. Evidently plagiarism isn't the only thing, either.

*** Yeah, this is mostly a dig at Marvel fans who don't like Waititi's disrespectful treatment of the Marvel Universe, but, if any of the MCU series needed some rejuvenating sass it was the moribund "Thor" series.

Waititi's on tap to do a Star Wars movie in the future.  You have to be a brave soul to walk into that fan-boy viper's nest.

**** One bit had me laughing for a solid 3 minutes after it occurred. Did not see that coming.

The Greatest Game Ever Played

Written at the time of the film's release...

The Greatest Game Ever Played (Bill Paxton, 2005)
Mark Twain said it best, "Golf is a good walk spoiled."

Director Bill Paxton compounds the error.

Despite the inherent drama of Mark Frost's* account of the David versus Goliath 1913 U.S. Open, Paxton takes the advice to "keep-your-eye-on-the-ball" a bit too literally in order to punch up the movie's visual fireworks. Though Frost has fashioned a good story of contrasts, pitting a renowned British pro--the greatest golfer of his day--against an unseasoned American amateur, Paxton keeps threatening to derail it with fancy camera moves and divot-POV's. It becomes a bit of a crutch; rather than solving the perpetual "make it interesting" challenge of filming golf, the director fashions every power-stroke with a new "fly-away" special effects shot. Once or twice, sure, it is fun. And it's all well and good to try and enliven the proceedings of one of the slowest-moving sports, but the swooshing, spinning flight paths he employs on so many shots become wearying and take away from the human drama, which is where the strength of the story lays.

Fortunately, Paxton's cast couldn't be finer. Shia LaBoeuf's Francis Ouimet is a constant revelation of emotions--he has one of those faces that the camera loves; every thought in his head etches something across his chinless features. By contrast, Stephen Dillane's Harry Vardon is all-laser-beam-intensity, betraying nothing but an iron will. One of Paxton's best moves is a shot of Vardon in the gallery, watching Ouimet play.The faces in the crowd turn their heads following the result of a powerful wood shot, except for the British golfer fixated on the kid's moves. Dillane has been doing more and more impressive work lately...in The Hours, and as Thomas Jefferson in HBO's "John Adams." If Thames wants to stop playing revolving doors with their Sherlock Holmes series on shorts (Richard Roxburgh, Rupert Everett) they could do worse than trying out Dillane as The Great Detective.

Yeah, yeah "He looks so young." 

It's a great story--a heart-warming story, made more so by the fact that it's true.** There was no need to go as overboard as Paxton does. One of the first things you learn in golf is that you do better if you don't try so hard. 

 

Grace wins over power.

* Frost more famously co-created "Twin Peaks" with David Lynch, and also co-wrote the screenplay for "The Fantastic Four" proving that no matter how well you've played before you can still occasionally be below par.

*** It's true a lot--but not completely. AND HERE, THERE BE SPOILERS. Highlight no further.
 

 

 

 

 

--the final score was actually Ouimet - 72, Vardon-77, and Troy-78. It didn't come down to the wire as depicted in the film.

The Blind Side

"98% Protective Instincts

The true story of All-American Michael Oher is the very stuff of feel-good uplifting movies. Impoverished son of a crack-addict mother and disappearing father gets a break by being so damned good at sports that a religious prep school is willing to look past his abysmal GPA (0.6 in the movie, 0.4 in real life). While attending, the homeless kid is given a place to flop for the night by Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohey, and, basically, stays on, becomes family, and with their tutorship and support, gets his grades up enough to join sports, and the opportunities fall from the sky like linebackers.

The ads and the poster make it look icky, like Oher is the stray dog who just needs love from the do-gooder white folk, or worse, one of those "reverse Oreo" movies where the compelling stories of minority struggles are overshadowed by the white stars playing earnest observers.*

Fortunately, the movie is written and directed by John Lee Hancock, who made one of the best sports movies a few years back—The Rookie—and managed to salvage a bit of the abandoned Alamo project. As screenwriter of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and A Perfect World (both for Clint Eastwood), he's shown himself to be a writer who embraced quirk, then moved on to write compelling characters rather than walking exploited stereotypes. You like his unsentimental people and root for them no matter their hurdles.

It comes in handy in The Blind Side. Once Oher (Quinton Aaron) sleeps over one night, that's it, he's a part of the Tuohey family, no if's, and's and but's, and the matriarch, Leigh Anne (played by Sandra Bullock like a Kathy Lee Gifford with sass and a laser-eyes—she's what y'all call a "spit-fire"), walks the talk of her Christian upbringing in providing a practical resource for his needs. No argument is broached, no catty remark is left unchallenged, and schmaltz avoided at all costs. Bullock's Leigh Anne Tuohey is a Mama Tiger, the like not seen since Susan Sarandon's "Michaela Odone" in Lorenzo's Oil, to the point where all Hancock has to do is keep her in frame when she walks up to her kid's coach from the background and one begins to feel genuine fear. A revelation of the extent of Oher's poverty elicits a polite "Excuse me," a walk down the hall to her room, shutting the door and an erect sitting posture to indicate that no amount of bad news is going to get to her or deter her. Bullock isn't afraid to make her character cold or a bitch. She just is, take it or leave it.

But it's Oher's story, his character has more screen-time than Bullock, though far less dialogue, and Hancock found a god-send in Aron, who has a face the camera loves. Since he has to carry a hefty amount of the drama silent, it serves him well, and is a nice fit with Bullock's all-talk, but reserved expression, counter-point.

At passing glance, it looks awful, but in its straight-forward, unpretentious and un-preachy style, The Blind Side wins over any cynicism.

* I'm sure you can name one—Mississippi Burning, Glory, Amistad, Come See the Paradise, Snow Falling on Cedars ... the list goes on, ad nauseum.

The Damned United

Written at the time of the film's release.

I wouldn't say I was the best manager in the business. But I was in the top one." — Brian Clough

There are apparently two major industries in Britain that have created rabid fans: football and Peter Morgan-Michael Sheen movies. Football we know all about. What we colonists call "soccer" is an obsession carried in the hearts and minds and livers throughout the entire rest of the world (as a matter of fact, you could probably make a connection between loving this injury-inducing sport and embracing universal health-care!).

The team of Morgan and Sheen, which started with "The Deal" and The Queen, continued with the play and film Frost/Nixon (and will continue with Sheen again playing Tony Blair in Clint Eastwood's forthcoming Hereafter*), here takes on the insular world of FC football and the storied career of Brian Clough, who took the second division Derby County Club into the first division and then the championship, and in a fit of hubris, took on the management of Leeds Utd, the club of his arch-rival Coach Don Rievie and was fired after 44 days. Here, though, the focus is not on the playing field, but the kicking and gouging going on in the mind of Clough.

The feats Clough accomplished were done with aplomb, ego, a big mouth and a vindictive drive to show up the other teams in the leagues, especially Leeds. But, that drive also gave him a tunnel vision when it came time to manage Leeds, which was done with a "new broom" approach, angering the players, the club's board and the fans who saw the team fall to its worst season in ten years after only six games. Consequently, he got the sack. As fast as his success was acquired, he fell ten times faster.

Morgan as screenwriter lets the mighty fall gently, depending on the grace that is shown, and whether the eyes are open during the trip. Idi Amin and Nixon, locked in their delusions, get no sympathy. Queen Elizabeth and Tony Blair are allowed insight as they're falling. Clough gets that insight after he hits rock-bottom, and Morgan's frequent collaborator Sheen registers every triumph in flashing teeth and every hurt in darkening bags under his eyes. Sheen, as a performer who's made a living playing performers, knows the degrees to which the face can display a false-front and genuine pain.

During an introductory press interview before taking over for Rievey, it's a cocky Clough who, with no prior knowledge, already thinks he has the team licked, with secret winks, flashing tongue and a smarmy way of laughing at his own jokes. After a dressing down from the Leeds captain, he'll maintain the same confident smirk on his face, but his eyes will dull with fear as soon as the player turns his back. If Sheen felt any disappointment in not playing the "Nixon" part of Frost/Nixon, he's compensated here for playing a personality of similar insecurities, but with an antic theatricality that the former President was never capable of. It's Sheen's show, but he's given ample opposition and support from Timothy Spall, Jim Broadbent, and Colm Meaney, who plays Coach Rievie with an irascible sense of entitlement.

Director Tom Hooper keeps things low-key in a BBC vid kind of way (thankfully dropping the peculiar framing that marked "John Adams"), but it isn't too long before one notices that, more and more, he's placing his Clough in ever tightening offices, hotel rooms, and locker-room corridors—an outsider trapped in his own prison of obsession and focus. One sequence is brilliantly twisted in its scope, or lack of it: as a much-needed match goes on outside, Clough stews and twitches inside his dennish office behind the stands, listening to the crowd reactions, not daring to emerge into the light to watch. Perversely, whenever a Derby goal is scored, the crowd leaps to its feet blocking out the only outside light to his office, casting him in darkness. You know that whatever Clough wins, he's lost.

* Although it would have been logical as one of the plot-points involved a London bombing, Sheen (and the character of Blair) subsequently did not appear in Hereafter.

 

**Tom Hooper has subsequently directed The King's Speech, The Danish Girl, Les Miserables and Cats. Evidently, he's still working!