PLOT: Twelve-year-old Bailey comes of age among a family of social outcasts, feeling like an outsider until she finds hope in her acquaintance with an enigmatic boy named Bird.
COMMENTS: British cinema has always had a fondness towards the marginalized. Since the late fifties and sixties, kitchen sink realism has put the working class on the foreground. Contemporary movies have portrayed social outcasts, too: in Marxist terms, the sub-proletarians (the poorest of the working class) and lumpenproletarians (a group without class consciousness—criminals, the chronically unemployed—a distinct class below the workers). Andrea Arnold’s most recent feature film tackles the subject of coming-of-age in such an environment while maintaining a lighthearted tone, in a similar vein to Charlotte Regan’s Scrapper (2023). Both films combine the harshest aspects of reality with a healthy dose of fairy tale magical realism, a merging of styles that seems to be a tendency in contemporary British cinema.
Bird‘s plot revolves around a twelve-year-old Bailey. It is clear from the beginning that she feels like an outsider even in her own family, who are already a band of misfits. Her father plans a wedding with his latest girlfriend, ignoring Bailey’s wants, and her brother is preoccupied with his criminal gang and refuses to include her because she is too young. Feeling lonely and angry with the world, Bailey finds comfort and inspiration in animals. That is, until she meets Bird, an enigmatic young man looking for his own parents.
Bird is a mysterious person with an even more obscure past. He is an angelic figure, always willing to help. He is also a bird trapped in a human body. The way he finds comfort by standing still on top of buildings or walls is uncanny. Every now and then his expressions and movements imitate those of a bird, especially when, in a late choreography of desperation, he turns around like a fowl with broken wings. He is more than he seems, although his origin and true nature remain open to interpretation.
Bird drives the plot, but Bailey is the main character. The camera follows her around in her wandering misadventures, while short flashbacks offer windows into her inner thoughts. Bird is essentially her coming-of-age tale, showcasing landmarks of her physical transformation into a woman—her first period—as well as her mental maturation. Birds and the eponymous boy will play a major role in the latter. Birds are not only symbols of freedom, but become agents of a change; the film has an animistic worldview.
In the end, Bailey finds her place. A joyous conclusion pays respects to family, however unconventional they seem at first glance. Bird stands out as a unique combination of social and magical realism, but it won’t appeal to hardcore fans of the weird and the bizarre. For those that love their social realism with a touch of poetry, though, it merits a recommendation.
DIRECTED BY: Becky Sloan, Joseph Pelling, Baker Terry
PLOT: Red Guy, Yellow Guy, and Duck find their days consistently interrupted by anthropomorphized objects in their home and uninvited guests who insist on teaching them lessons about life via song, dance, and increasingly unsettling interactions.
COMMENTS: There’s a reason that children’s television is, on the whole, weird. After all, there are two competing, even contradictory goals at work: these shows often want to teach young people some valuable life lesson (the alphabet, how the mail is delivered, treating your friends with decency and respect), but hold the audience’s notoriously wandering attention while doing so. All those talking aardvarks and talking Blue Heelers and talking magical unicorns are handwaving determined to steal a child’s focus with any degree of strangeness necessary. Landmarks of the genre going back decades—“Captain Kangaroo,” “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” —have all danced along the line where oddness tips over from charming to off-putting. Even the grand poobah of them all, “Sesame Street,” had to overcome initial concerns that its central conceit—humans and puppets living side-by-side—would be incomprehensible to children. Obviously, the kids figured it out.
Any success inspires parody, satire, and critique. Children’s TV has certainly earned its fair share, as can be seen in the stressful adulthood of the characters in Avenue Q, the aggressive surrealism of “Wonder Showzen,” and the oppressive nightmare of today’s subject, “Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared.” This British web-series-turned-TV-show is perfectly captures the way that just living in the world can feel like unavoidable oppression. The machinations of people who are venal, stupid, or both conspire against “Don’t Hug Me”‘s characters, through the lens of two puppets and a guy with a crimson mop for a head who just want to get through the day. For anyone who remembers childhood as an endless series of grownups trying to kill your fun with their wondrous tales of adulthood and education, this is a show that sees you clear as day.
“Don’t Hug Me” began as a web series, and it establishes its theme—the world is fundamentally cruel—right away. In the very first short, a singing sketchpad shows up to share the wonders of thinking with boundless imagination, and after engaging the trio, she immediately proceeds to shut down their creative efforts with helpful corrections like “Green is not a creative color.” And there’s always room for things to get worse. A collection of creatures trying to describe love pile on more and more parameters and qualifiers, culminating in the revelation that they worship a giant idol and feed it gravel. An interest in food spurs on a storm of questionable nutrition advice, recommending aspic and referring to vegetables as “soil food.” These Continue reading CHANNEL 366: DON’T HUG ME I’M SCARED (2011-2016, 2022)→
FEATURING:Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Julia Foster, John Bluthal, Victor Spinetti, Valentine Dyall, Julian Chagrin, Clifton Jones
PLOT: William Topaz McGonagall, renowned by history as one of the worst-ever practitioners of the art of poetry, recounts his eventful life and demonstrates his inability to distinguish fact from both faulty perception and flights of imagination.
COMMENTS: Scotsman William McGonagall, poet and self-declared “Knight of the White Elephant of Burmah,” has a sterling reputation as a butcher of words without peer. Works such as his bathetic salute to “The Tay Bridge Disaster” have survived over the decades because of their fierce dedication to repetitiveness, disdain for meter, and tendency toward rambling distraction. He is an avatar for the so-bad-it’s-wonderful crowd, on the shelf alongside Florence Foster Jenkins and Plan 9 From Outer Space.
Spike Milligan is also a British hero, although more intentionally, known as a destroyer of comedic conventions. (His spontaneous takedown of an intended tribute from Prince Charles brought down the house in a room full of Britain’s leading comic lights.) His work on “The Goon Show” is deeply influential, with professed fans ranging from the members of Monty Python to Eddie Izzard to all four Beatles. Despite this, Milligan was never a bona fide star on the level of his old pal Peter Sellers, and his ingrained outsider status (born in India to an Irish father) ensured that he could never attain his country’s highest honors. So perhaps it’s not surprising that this serial puncturer of British pomposity would find some affinity with an artist who made the very upper echelons he hoped to enter look foolish .
And that right there is me putting approximately the same amount of effort into researching this review as Spike Milligan did into prepping for the film. It’s not as though anyone would think Milligan was attempting to perpetrate a proper biography on the public; the goal is obviously jokes and nothing but. Nevertheless, The Great McGonagall is a notably slapdash affair, feeling more like someone gave the improv suggestion “William McGonagall” to a troupe at the Edinburgh Fringe, rather than any real attempt to mine the man’s life for material. Most of the acting company takes on multiple roles throughout the film, and Milligan frequently literalizes the staginess of the production like scenes from a music hall revue, complete with an easel advertising the next act. One has to marvel at the laziness of the enterprise, given that this is an actual motion picture featuring two authentic British comedy legends. They could, you know, try a little.
Milligan offers two modes of joke-telling: non sequiturs, and extensive riffs on the trope of the penny-pinching Scotsman. The former gives the film some of its air of oddness; whenever logic dares to show up, it is quickly stomped out. For example, Prince Albert is notably German, but in Milligan’s hands, he becomes a flat-out pastiche of Adolf Hitler, and so naturally a dance scene is accompanied by an orchestra made up entirely of Hitlers. Or consider the curious case of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who first appears after McGonagall haughtily compares himself to the acclaimed poet; Tennyson pops in to say that he really can’t be bothered right now, as he’s in the middle of a vigorous session of lovemaking. He’ll show up later (initially alongside five Tennyson impostors) to extol the virtues of McGonagall’s poetry while simultaneously stripping down and climbing into the dying Scotsman’s bed alongside a Zulu chieftain. It is unequivocally strange. It’s not especially funny.
Milligan and McGrath’s wandering tale goes furthest off the reservation when appealing to the softcore porn producer who pumped some conditional cash into the film’s budget. Why else would a totally nude dancing woman pop up in McGonagall’s cell in debtors prison? Why intercut McGonagall’s imagined courting of Victoria as a benefactor with a naughty threesome? Of course it doesn’t make sense. The disconnect is the joke. By that standard, it’s a great success, but not an especially edifying viewing experience.
The film has a laudable and unwavering dedication to deadpan performances. Sellers plays it completely straight as Queen Victoria, quietly assuring all who don’t recognize her that “I’m very big in England.” As McGonagall’s long-suffering wife Foster hits all the notes for a sweet, silent, and supportive spouse, even while her husband’s deathbed doctor keeps propositioning her. Perhaps the surest sign of the cast’s commitment is the uproarious mocking laughter that greets McGonagall’s poetry recitals. The sheer cruelty of the response produces the last thing one would expect, and the most dangerous to this kind of comedy: pity for Milligan and his otherwise blissfully ignorant hero.
That points to what gets horribly lost in this ersatz biopic of William McGonagall: McGonagall himself. Milligan uses some of the man’s actual poetry, but it’s so scattered and mixed in with all his other pretensions that you never get a sense of why anyone, McGonagall included, thought he could write, other than blinkered delusion. The most interesting joke–the poetry—was handed to the filmmakers on a silver platter, and they divest themselves of it whenever possible, depriving Milligan of a guaranteed platform for extended silliness. Instead, he’s just a master of ceremonies overseeing a parade of weirdos who are weird for weirdness’ sake. It’s a real waste. No McGonagall. No Milligan. Just a mess.
Socioeconomics journalist Tim Harford examines the life and career of the real William McGonagall on his Cautionary Tales podcast, floating the theory that the poet was in on the bit, and that the terrible poetry was actually an elaborate ruse to keep his career afloat.
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“Don’t Hug Me” began as a web series, and it establishes its theme—the world is fundamentally cruel—right away. In 
