This film is doing a thing, the thing is just not for me.
Richard Herring once did an hour-long set just stretching out one joke about yoghurt. This is like that, only it’s about Linda McCartney vegetarian ready meals, in film form. This feels like an Edinburgh Fringe show that ran on a bare stage at midnight and absolutely killed it, but does not work when taken out of that environment and put into a movie.
The blurb for this film is that this about when Stevie Wonder went to Paul McCartney’s home on the Mull of Kintyre where they wrote Ebony and Ivory back in 1981. It’s not. Literally nothing in the film is about that. Again, the comedy in the film feels like a £4 Tuesday night Raw Improv at the Stand, where someone’s gotta pretend to be obsessed with hot cocoa, can’t say a word containing the letter e, and also you’re Stevie Wonder talking to Paul McCartney – go!
There are 5 jokes in this film. They are:
- Vegetarian ready meals by the wife (breaded nuggets)
- Wee Billy’s Big Wee Fizzy Beer
- Doobie woobie
- Wearing a merkin with a long willy
- Bah
Each joke is given about 20 minutes of monotonous repetition before moving on, occasionally to only to come back to it again for another round later. It’s the kind of endurance comedy of Stewart Lee’s Shilbottle bit, only it just doesn’t land.
Again, it’s a context thing. I think I might have enjoyed this with the two of them standing motionless on stage with a live audience feeling the collective tension of “when will it end and will there be a punchline?” but I just watched a man bahing for the better part of half an hour, and thought in exhaustion, “cinema can do almost anything…”
To be honest, I didn’t like it, but I did respect it. I could see what it was trying to do, even if it failed. I just feel like it was in the wrong medium.