On the surface, Pin Cushion is a whimsical British indie, packed with imagination and charm. But debuting director Deborah Haywood builds this on a foundation of bullying and prejudice, creating a surprisingly bleak yet effective film.
As the Brighton Festival 2018 draws towards its closing weekend, its Guest Director, the artist David Shrigley, has committed to an illustrated talk about his work that “will contain numerous rambling anecdotes but not be in the slightest bit boring”. In the programme, he claims to have promised this signed in his own blood. Such drastic assurance proves unnecessary.
Lisa Halliday’s striking debut novel consists of three parts. The first follows the blooming relationship between Alice and Ezra (respectively an Assistant Editor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer) in New York; the middle section comprises a series of reflections narrated by Amar, an American-Iraqi while he is held in detention at Heathrow en route to see his brother in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Word wizard. Grammar bully. Sentence shark. AA Gill didn’t play fair by syntax: he pounced on it, surprising it into splendid shapes. And who cared when he wooed readers with anarchy and aplomb? Hardly uncontroversial, let alone inoffensive (he suggested Mary Beard should be kept away from TV cameras on account of her looks, and shot a baboon), he was consistently brilliant. Wherever he went, he brought his readers with him.
In a voice of distinctive, high-pitched nasal whimsy, comic essayist and memoirist David Sedaris finds humour with the precision of a mosquito after blood. British readers will likely have first encountered him through his Radio 4 series Introducing David Sedaris, and may know the voice, and the author’s ability to extract comedy from the everyday. This collection of diaries gives us the first draft of his experiences, before they are crafted into the exquisitely timed and phrased pieces that made his name.
It says a great deal about how very bad this film is that the pre-title montage of viral cat videos clawed from the internet is the most amusing sequence in it. This is one of the most cynical "family entertainment" movies to come out of the Hollywood machine in a long time. It has all the charm of smelling an atrophied mouse left behind the sofa by a vindictive moggy.
Kevin Spacey plays a Trump-esque mogul, Tom Brand, who is determined to build the tallest skyscraper in New York. He plasters his face all over his business in various heroic poses, but is loathed by all his investors and staff for being an egocentric monster. Wife number two (Jennifer Garner) frets that Brand doesn’t spend enough quality time with their daughter (a princessy Malina Weissman, main picture) and insists that he buys her a cat for her birthday. Cue a visit to a mysterious pet shop owned by Christopher Walken (pictured below), who takes a dislike to the arrogant Brand and magically transforms him into a cat (Mr Fuzzy Pants). The human promptly gets run over and ends up in a coma in hospital, while the cat goes home to Brand's luxury penthouse and causes havoc trying to communicate his true identity. Meanwhile Brand's business partners plot his downfall.
There's nothing fresh here: the pet shop sequence echoes the first Gremlins movie and makes one long for Joe Dante's inventiveness. The trope of adults undergoing magical body transformations in order to appreciate their life was better done in Freaky Friday and Big. Any of those comedies would make you happier than Nine Lives. The special effects are grim – the animatronic/CGI cat is lumpy and moves in a wholly unconvincing way, especially in scenes cut with footage of a real cat.
Extras include some cat training behind-the-scenes footage and dull bloopers. Barry Sonnenfeld, the once frisky director of Get Shorty, as well as the Addams Family and Men in Black franchises, should have known better. One can only hope that Spacey and Walken were so appalled with what they had to work with that they donated their fees to remedial comedy lessons for the five scriptwriters credited. Unlike cats, humans only have one life; don't waste it on this movie.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Nine Lives
Once they’ve died nine times, Lynne Truss’s evil talking cats become immortal. Whether Truss has such ambitions for the literary lifespan of her curiously addictive feline thrillers, this second outing, after 2014’s Cat Out of Hell, suggests a robust life-expectancy for an idea apparently sprung from a tiresomely persistent internet meme.
If the Trocks didn't exist, we would have to invent them. Every genre needs its loving parodists, treading the fine line between homage and dommage, and an art form as stylised and convention-governed as classical dance is riper for it than most - as evidenced by the continuing worldwide success of this all-male comedy troupe after more than 40 years.
The appeal for commissioners of turning Rob Temple’s superb Very British Problems Twitter feed into a TV show is easy to see. The account has more than a million followers and the planning discussions will, no doubt, have included the words, “brand”, “awareness” and “maximise”. Probably “leverage” as well, but used wrongly, and by an idiot. Presented here as an extended collection of talking heads, it’s also cheap.