For those of you fascinated by all things morbid and macabre, you'll love this bizarre little chamber of horrors neatly tucked away inside The Royal College of Surgeons in central London.
The Hunterian Museum, which is completely free and just spitting distance from Holborn station, boasts all kind of specimens and oddities, human and animal.
Founded by John Hunter, an eighteenth century surgeon, vet and dentist, this collection was the biggest of its kind in Europe during his lifetime.
It is refreshing to realise that in this era of desensitivity we can still occassionally find ourselves confronted by something that shocks us profoundly.
On two floors and containing over 14,000 specimens, including diseased organs and an extensive collection of human fetuses, as well as video displays of real life surgery, The Hunterian Museum is certainly not for the faint of heart.
Some particular highlights include a cockerel with a spur successfully transplanted to its comb, a prosthetic face worn by a man who had lost his own in a mining accident and a highly controversial addition; the skeleton of Charles "The Irish Giant" Bryne who had actually longed to be buried at sea. There is also a small section of paintings depicting seriously un-PC "human oddities" as their subject matter, such as a piebald slavegirl and several prominent dwarves, as well as Native Americans and other indigenous peoples.
Hunter had a thirst for knowledge and a passion for the beauty found in anatomy, both human and animal. Preserving most of the specimens himself, his goal first and foremost was to educate. He was one of the most distinguished scientists of his day and through him we have achieved a better understanding of many things including human teeth, bone growth and venereal diseases.
The Hunterian Museum is a unique experience because it is so raw, so real; we are confronted by the grizzly nature of our own mortality in such an uncompromising fashion that we are rendered speechless - a rare feat indeed.
It's not for the squeamish, but if you can handle it then forget Ripley's Believe It Or Not (at up to £27 per ticket!) with its waxwork dummies and cheap thrills; go and experience the real deal!
It still makes me angry just thinking about this so-called attraction. I visited back in 2011 so maybe, hopefully, much has changed with the passage of time. I would love to know if this is the case, it seems to have largely positive reviews on Trip Advisor. However, having had my fingers burnt, and wallet emptied the once, I am unwilling to go back for a second dose of this terrible farce! And judging by the fact I still see the same cheaply made-up faces in terrible costumes, on Tooley Street trying to drag unwitting tourists into this painful waste of time I doubt there has been much in the way of improvement.
Here is a slightly shortened version of the review (I did go on a bit, because of anger...) that I wrote for The London Bridge Experience on Trip Advisor in 2011;
Possibly
the worst value for money attraction I have ever paid for; £22 each to
experience this rubbish for less than an hour… I was really looking
forward to this attraction after finding them online, and I was bitterly
disappointed. Their website is just blatantly dishonest as to what you
will experience. I will break down the online description from their
official website; "You'll be taken on a journey through the history of
this exciting area of London, from the Roman invasion, right up to the
present day with the exciting development of the London Bridge Quarter
and the Shard…" There was never a single mention of either Romans or the
modern day developments. In fact there was next to no information told
about anything, and the little which was given was rushed pseudo-history
littered with bad jokes.
From entry you are greeted by one actor
after another who are dressed in terribly cheap looking costumes and
badly self-applied make up. They take you on a tour through awful sets
littered with props that look like they have come straight from joke
shops. Now, the sets themselves wouldn't be a
problem, but I was expecting an interesting and
informative commentary from the guides to take us on this journey into
the past. Wrong! What we got was about half an hour of complete drivel.
For the entire time the guides simply tried to get a cheap laugh with
Mighty Boosh-style nonsense talk. I simply cannot comprehend how an
attraction which describes itself as "a history lesson into the city's
grimey and haunting past…" contains material such as aliens, a drunk
chicken, a song about fruit soup, suggesting the bridge had been blown
up with TNT, and other pointless ramblings! There was simply no
historical information in the tour. I wanted it to end after about ten
minutes when I was forced to get up and dance in front of our
stony-silent and dumbstruck group, in a section which was meant to be an
explanation of Viking London. I played along and I laughed at the bad
jokes through sheer embarrassment all the while cringing inside.
I wouldn't recommend this to anyone but especially not to
foreign visitors; I could barely understand and English is my first language! The dialogue was
complete nonsense jumping from one tangent to another, and mostly
delivered in shouting and fake accents. There was a German couple
in our group who clearly had no idea what was going on throughout the
entire experience judging by their bewildered expressions and irritated
whispers.
Now the Tombs part was actually not that bad, and was to
its credit pretty scary in places. I was genuinely frightened at times,
but it was however nothing like the videos posted on the website with
less live actors and more cheap-looking animatronic zombies and
skeletons. The fact you have to walk along in a line holding someone's
shoulders limited the shocks, and parts of it were also health and
safety hazards; I tripped up a lot of times on the badly levelled
walkways. By about half way through I was starting to get a bit bored as
all of the frights were all just more of the same...
I
would have nothing to complain about if I had paid about £7 each for
just the Tombs part, and it was advertised as a horror house. However I
paid £22 per person and the London Bridge Experience was a
cringe-inducing pointless waste of time shamelessly described as a
"history lesson" on their website! I honestly think this attraction
should be closed down and something more worthwhile set up in its place,
it's such a great location and it's just an embarrassment it should be filled
with this utter tripe!
If you have visited The London Bridge Experience more recently I would love to hear from you and see how your experience differed from mine. If you haven't visited then I would strongly advise you to keep it that way! With way better, and many free, attractions all across the city don't be conned into this nonsense waste of time.
If you're looking to spend a querky few minutes in central London then make sure you check out Novelty Automation just around the corner from Holborn Station.
This tiny arcade is packed full of ingeniously home-crafted, coin operated machines which will delight and disturb!
The machines have been mostly built by English artist and engineer Tim Hunkin, who is best known as the creator of Channel Four's The Secret Life of Machines.
Hunkin's machines are imaginative and darkly humorous; there are such gems as two player bicycle-powered pong, Autofrisk and Pet or Meat in which the fate of a cuddly little lamb is decided.
Any description can't really do this concept justice so make sure you get along and find out for yourself. Do only set aside around 30 mins tops for this attraction as it's one small room with 17 machines to check out.
The machines run on tokens which cost £1 each, the price for each machine is about 2 tokens.
The best was certainly saved for last - here I review the beautiful Brooklyn (Crowley) as presented by the BFI London Film Festival 2015 on Tuesday 13th October.
Brooklyn (Crowley, 2015)
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Domhnall Gleeson, Michael Zegen, Julie Walters
Country: Ireland, UK, Canada
Language: English
Runtime: 111 mins
I guess you can say that this film was the one that I was least excited about seeing at this year's London Film Festival, mushy romance is not really my thing and the immigrant in New York narrative has been done to death. But how wrong I was! This was actually my favourite out of the three that I saw at the festival and I would highly recommend that you go and see it when it comes out later next month.
Again the ticket collection was fuss free, and the friendly staff allowed an easy refund for my adult ticket, accidently purchased in place of a student one. This time we arrived a little later and needed to queue out of the door and into Leicester Square. This was the most packed of the three galas that we attended (obviously they knew something that I didn't!) and so the screen staff seemed a little more stressed than previous occassions, but still professional none-the-less.
Once everyone was seated it went straight into the film with no bonus features or special appearances.
Set in the 1950s, Brooklyn follows Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) as she leaves the mundane saftey and routine of her life in small town Ireland for a fresh start in the Big Apple. A story that we all know, however the character development is so rich, the performances so strong and the writing so good that it will keep you entranced throughout.
Ronan, a relative newcomer who has been working her socks off since the mid 2000s appearing in films such as Atonement (Wright, 2007), The Lovely Bones (Jackson, 2009) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (Anderson, 2014), delivers incredibly in the lead role. Her screen presence is just mesmerising as she portrays a shy and awkward young woman who slowly finds her confidence in the big city.
In fact everyone is amazingly well cast and really make the characters their own; from screen veteran Julie Walters giving a hilarious yet heartfelt performance as prim and proper boardinghouse keeper Ms. Kehoe, to the mandatory appearance (in anything produced in anyway in the British Isles) of the very talented Jim Broadbent as kindly priest, Father Flood.
Emory Cohen is also really fun as Tony, a charming Italian-American with a penchant for Irish girls, and gives a really solid and emotive performance.
This film keeps you enthralled throughout and does so well to present us with the hard facts of what the Irish immigrant experience must have been like at this moment in history; the hope and dreams coupled with the reality of feeling misplaced and a longing home.
Without revealling too much about the plot, let's say that it comes to pass that Eilis must learn to take control of her own destiny in order to shape her future; she is presented with two major viable choices and we are kept guessing as to which will be the final outcome.
Highly recommended to catch at the cinema - the best film of the festival for me! Ronan and director John Crowley are certainly ones to follow.
I would definitely recommend the festival itself too, the staff and organisers did a great job, and it's a great chance to catch some interesting independent movies before they hit the cinema - make sure you get yourself along to the event in 2016 and grab tickets as soon as they go on sale as they sell out fast!
In this article I will review the second film in my BFI London Film Festival 2015 experience; Beeba Boys (Mehta) and give you an overview of the extras and ambiance of this exciting gala.
Beeba Boys (Mehta, 2015)
Starring: Randeep Hooda, Ali Momen, Sarah Allen, Waris Ahluwalia
Country: Canada
Language: English
Runtime: 103 mins
I was super pumped going into this one, maybe more so than any of the other films that I had planned to see during the festival. After watching the trailer as put out by the Toronto International Film Festival, where it debuted in September, I was really eager to get stuck in to what promised to be a really unique and vibrant experience; an Indo-Canadian gangster film.
Deepa Mehta, a female director (in keeping with the BFI's theme this year of women in cinema), is a big fan of the gangster genre. Her plan here was to present us with an Indo-Canadian narrative in a genre saturated by Italian-American stereotypes; a great idea!
Set in present-day Vancouver, Beeba Boys, literally meaning "good boys" (Goodfellas) a nod to Martin Scorsese's 1990 masterpiece,followsJeet Jahar, played by Randeep Hooda, loosely based on Indian-born gangster Bindy Johal who operated in British Colombia in the 1990s.
The gala kicked off with a special guest appearance by the "Bad Man" of Bollywood Gulshan Grover, here playing "kingpin" Robbie Grewal who faces off against younger rival Jeet. This was a really nice touch and it was awesome to get some insight from someone so heavily involved. He described how, as a female director, Mehta brought something quite unique to the gangster genre in as much as it was intended to be a much more emotional response; we were to see how every bullet and every killing directly affected the girlfriends and the families of the young men involved. He also explained that she directed him to play the role of the kingpin, first and foremost, as a familyman as grounded in punjabi culture.
After ten mins or so of questions posed to Grover, where he explained many aspects of production including how Mehta had drawn from the style of both Scorsese and Tarantino, as well as a Bollywood look for the costumes (all very clear in the movie), the film began.
I won't go into the intricacies of the plot too much out of respect for those of you who want to go and see it (it's out now I believe), however I will just give you an overview of my likes and dislikes.
First of all I will say that this film didn't deliver on all accounts, and for me, trying and failing to bring home any deeper meaning to a hyper-violent plot, it was a definite case of style over substance. Now this isn't to say that I didn't leave the cinema as excited as I went in; let's be clear, I really, really enjoyed this film and recommend that you go and see it!
Stylistically I loved it; the colours, the costumes, the music, all that it borrowed from Bollywood, and sikh tradition in general, was amazing. It offered something very different to those not used to Indian cinema and culture. Seriously, it looked and sounded incredible!
Another aspect I really liked was the interesting use of camera movement, whether this was drifting dreamily down the side of a building in order to establish a scene or framing a shot from underneath a staircase our characters were climbing. Some may have found these approaches a little distracting but I thought they were a really refreshing contrast to established filming techniques.
The film should also be commended for bringing an otherwise unknown issue to light; I, and I am sure many others, had no idea that young Indo-Canadian men have been caught up for many years in a cycle of gangland violence. If nothing else Beeba Boys has educated me on, although I'm sure also slightly glorified, a subject that I knew nothing about and that can never be a bad thing.
Beeba Boys largelyfalls down in regard to character development, which is a shame after all the big talk of allowing us a rare emotional approach to the gangster genre.
The problem is that most of the characters are interchangeable. At the start of the film we get some handles for each of the boys eg The Muscle, The Joker, Lovely etc. There are a few problems with this; to begin with it is like for Mehta this is enough for the audience to simply be told what type of characters they are watching rather than revealing aspects of them through nuanced development. This means that we are thinking about them in a rather cardboard cut-out type way from the get-go; simply as one-dimensional archetypes rather than complex characters. Once the audience has been told who each of the boys is meant to be the plot then moves forward with each of them acting in exactly the same manner anyway (safe in the knowledge that we understand that this guy is The Joker, the other is Lovely etc...). This is not really the idea behind visual storytelling.
The main character, Jeet, is seriously unlikable, in fact most of the characters are, this makes it difficult to engage with or invest in any of them. If you think of Scarface (De Palma, 1983), we understand that Tony Montana is an arsehole but we still like him and connect with him on some level through the brilliant character development, here it is almost impossible. This is a big problem.
We never really buy the romance between Jeet and his Polish girlfriend Katya (Sarah Allen) either; what is it they see in each other exactly other than sheer attraction? If that's all it is it's frustratingly cynical.
And although the little interjections of family life and issues in regards to Jeet's mother and son offer a fresh dimension they are just clumsily out of place in this kind of narrative, and just seem weird. It's seriously distracting when you are watching a gangster film and the main character's mum keeps asking about his washing...
Now after making these points I will say that I really enjoyed Waris Ahluwalia's portrayal of Manny the Joker. This was my favourite performance of the film, we still didn't manage to really establish a connection with him on any human level but at least it felt like he was really making the role his own and bringing something a little different in contrast to the other characters who, as I said, were largely interchangeable in my opinion. I have heard the script, which has had a very clear Tarantino influence, and in particular Manny's jokes criticised in other reviews. I took the fact that his jokes never quite land as being an essential aspect of his character rather than bad writing. He is clearly a weird guy with an odd sense of humour, even his crew seem to find his constant gags a little fatiguing, with them completely going over some of their heads. There were certainly areas of the script that could have done with revision, for example Jeet being compared to Megatron, but for me this wasn't one of them.
There is a relationship which develops between Nep (Ali Momen), a kind of double agent character, and Choti (Gia Sandhu), the daughter of Grewal the kingpin, which is actually really interesting and begins to develop into something of real emotive drama.
There is also a conversation that Jeet has with his father towards the end in regards to how he and other Indians were treated on arrival in Canada and again this starts to actually build some geniune layered storytelling. It's a shame that there weren't more of these real heartfelt moments throughout.
After all the criticism I did still really enjoy this movie, there were some absolutely classic gangster film moments that have to be witnessed! This film did really well in setting up expectations, slowly building the tension of a scene in a way that we can see exactly where it is heading and suddenly hitting us with something so much worse than we had imagined! I can think of at least three really hardhitting scenes where this was the case, and one occasion where I started to experience a mild panic attack due to the long drawn out anticipation!
I would definitely recommend catching Beeba Boys on the big screen for the cinematic experience, just know going in that you aren't going to get some real deep thought-provoking narrative no matter how hard it tries.
The 59th BFI London Film Festival happened between 7-18 October 2015, and I was super excited to get hold of tickets for three of the galas. The Festival had the theme this year of Women; either subject matter that focused on females or works by female directors, this was an interesting and worthwhile approach as women are often marginalised in the world of cinema.
My girlfriend and I went along to the Friday 9th October screening of He Named Me Malala (Guggenheim), Beeba Boys (Mehta) on Saturday 10th October and Brooklyn (Crowley) on Tuesday 13th October.
In this article I will review the first of those three films as well as let you in on the atmosphere of the festival itself, what went down and what to expect from future events.
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He Named Me Malala (Guggenheim, 2015)
Starring: Malala Yousafzai, Ziauddin Yousafzai
Country: UAE, USA
Language: English
Runtime: 88 mins
This screening was my introduction to the BFI London Film Festival on the Friday, early afternoon, and it was a good way to kick off. The gala was held at Odeon Leicester Square and was very well organised with a hassel free ticket collection, and friendly staff who allowed me to get a refund on the difference of an adult ticket that I had bought accidently in place of a student one.
There was no bonus or special features with this screening however having never been inside the huge and ornate OLS before this was good enough in itself; seriously the screen is awesome, more like a theatre than a cinema. Staff inside the screen were also very friendly and helpful; lots of smiles. Semi-annoyingly there were loads of seats left empty throughout the cinema even though I rushed madly to snatch up what were shown on the festival's site to be the very last of the good seats (middle back). In other words lots of people had bought tickets but hadn't bothered to turn up; depriving others of places! Not cool people!
Now on to the film; this is the story of Malala Yousafzai, who we follow in this charming and original documentary. If
you don't know who Malala is, which I didn't really going in, she is the
young Pakistani girl from Swat Valley who you may have seen featured on
the news worldwide; she survived a Taliban gunshot to the head for persisting with a banned education, schooling for girls having been outlawed in her part of Pakistan, and has since gone on to become an activist for global women's rights. Despite being in high demand at talks and human rights events across the world she continues with her secondary school education, and maintains the persona of a lovely, well grounded young woman.
It opens with some beautiful animation illustrating the backstory of Malala's namesake, Afghan folk hero Malalai of Maiwand, a young girl who died whilst rallying local Pashtun troops against the British in 1880. This opening sent a tingling sensation down my spine, it was so epic on the big screen, a great way to get stuck in!
The animation continues throughout, used to illustrate hardhitting and significant sequences from the life of Malala and her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai.
This film was really engaging although I felt at times it focused a little too much on presenting Malala, and her family, as very nice, normal people. I found this a tiny bit patronising both to her and the audience; why wouldn't she be nice and normal!
As a quick side note, one aspect I found a little abnormal was the amount of oil Malala's dad uses to fry an egg! Incredible! Watch it and you'll see what I mean! Irrelevant but something that stayed with me...
Anyway, I did still enjoy the inserts of family life, even though it was a little too heavily relied upon in my opinion; the back and forth banter with her brothers was fun, and the obvious love and support from her father was heartwarming.
One aspect I felt was a little problematic however was the fact that her mother was largely abscent from the story. I even remember wondering towards the begining of the film that perhaps her dad was a single father, and hence the insistence of the He in the title.
For a documentary so focused on spreading a message of gender equality and women's rights it is a little dissappointing that the mother was featured so little, we learn about her mostly through other people. This was explained however as the fact that she is very traditional and shy, this is fine, it is also her right not to appear in the documentary as well, I just felt it was a bit of a shame.
For its few flaws He Named Me Malala is a fascinating piece of work and does well in getting the overall message across; progress lies in gender equality and the education of women.
I would definitely recommend this film, I particularly enjoyed the sequences which depict Malala talking to children in countries around the world including African villagers and Syrian refugees, as well as her talks at global events. Here we really get to see what a phenomenal public speaker she is, on all levels. I loved seeing her connect with different people, and to see the warmth and understanding in her eyes. It is incredible to get such a sense of wisdom from someone so young.
Definitely go and see this film at the cinema to leave feeling pumped up and inspired.
