tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78484464554808232852023-11-15T08:37:14.305-08:00Zmkc Sees FilmsReviews of films I seezmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.comBlogger56125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-9413384069642652572023-01-23T05:17:00.002-08:002023-01-23T05:17:54.726-08:00Vengeance<p>This film reminded me of Calvary, in its strange indecision about whether it was satire or horror. Overall I am glad that I saw it - the first scene a5 a party on a New York rooftop is one of the funniest send-ups of self-obsessed ambitious bubble dwelling urban youth that I've ever seen. Hundred per cent as the characters in it would say.</p><p>The Texan characters meanwhile recalled the family in the Australian film The Castle. The New Yorkers' attitude to them is that of 19th century travellers to exotic locations on encountering strange local fauna. There is a lot of comedy wrought from the contrast between cityfolk and countryfolk.</p><p>And then kerboom, just like Calvary, the film turns unimaginably dark.</p><p>And then it ends.</p><p>Hmm. Something of a jolt of discontinuity there - possibly intended, but it seemed clumsy to me.</p><p>Never mind - in addition to the funny opening scene, the film is worth seeing for Ashton Kuchner's performance. I've never seen him before but in this movie he is wonderful.</p><p><br /></p>zmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-88259788149885229262023-01-23T05:04:00.004-08:002023-01-23T05:04:59.189-08:00Last Looks<p>This film is a highly enjoyable caper movie. It has no agenda other than to entertain, and I found it very entertaining. A rare thing these days. I recommend it, if you want to have a little fun.</p>zmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-28193890922082165072018-10-28T04:00:00.002-07:002018-10-28T04:00:32.734-07:00Sunset (Napszállta)Having seen Laszlo Nemes's first feature film, <i>Son of Saul,</i> which was superb, I was excited to see <i>Sunset, </i>his new release. Unfortunately, my excitement was misplaced.<br />
<br />
<i>Sunset</i> is set in 1913 in Budapest. A young woman, Irisz, turns up at a prosperous hat emporium to ask for a job, revealing that she trained in hat making in Trieste and is the daughter of the original owners of the Budapest hat business, who, we eventually discover, died in a fire.<br />
<br />
The new owner first tells her she cannot have a job, then puts her up in the business's hostel for milliners, where she is disturbed in the night, not by bed bugs as the man who runs the place warns her she will be, but by a maniac called Gaspar, who then leaps out the window, setting the curtains on fire as he goes.<br />
<br />
Irisz then discovers that she has a brother who is some kind of brigand. She sets off to find out more, after an encounter with a drug-addled countess, whose husband was murdered by said brother.<br />
<br />
Irisz witnesses the countess's rape by a dastardly Austrian, and then is almost raped herself by her brother's colleagues. There is a great deal of rattling about in carriages drawn by wild horses and hordes of people running through streets carrying flaming torches. There is frantic rowing across rivers and general mayhem, all intercut with the contrasting calm of the hat salon itself - although it is actually the centre of corruption, where young milliners are sold off each year to barefooted and depraved Austrian princelings.<br />
<br />
In <i>Son of Saul,</i> Nemes filmed with an intensely close focus on the protagonist, leaving everything not actually immediately around that character a dreadful blur. This made sense in a death camp and seemed to me to be a way of expressing the impossibility of surviving such a hell without screening out as much as possible from your mind. However, it turns out that this is just how Nemes films, regardless of whether his subject is the greatest crime ever committed by humanity or just a melodrama about a hat business. In <i>Sunset, t</i>he cameraman runs after Irisz, keeping her - or the back of her neck - almost constantly in tight focus, while turn of the century Budapest rushes by in a blur. To discover that the blurring in <i>Son of Saul</i> was not a deliberate choice, intended to indicate horror, but just a stylistic tick rather undermines my admiration for that film.<br />
<br />
Nemes attempts to link his ridiculous story to the decline - or "sunset" - of the Habsburg empire and turn of the century European civilisation. In the final scene, we see Irisz, now a boy (??!?), alone in the trenches of World War One. She stares at the camera with exactly the same expression she has worn throughout the film. I stared back, furious at being tricked into watching such a piece of twaddle.<br />
<br />
As a positive, the hats are nice - but so are the hats in <i>My Fair Lady</i>, and that film is much more fun. And if you want to see a really enjoyable Hungarian melodrama, I would suggest <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IPDy0_IS-g">Kincsem</a>, </i>rather than <i>Sunset.</i> The great joy of <i>Kincsem</i>, is that it has absolutely no pretensions. It is entertaining rubbish, whereas <i>Sunset</i> thinks it is significant and ends up being unentertaining and total rubbish to boot.zmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-43774947532447743232018-01-24T19:21:00.000-08:002018-01-24T19:21:08.100-08:00Three Billboards outside Ebbing, MissouriThere are some very good things about this film. One is that someone pedantic was in charge of the titles and as a result the rule that prepositions are not capitalised is observed in the film's name onscreen. Another - the one that carries the film almost entirely - is Frances McDormand's performance. She excels as a tough woman who has had enough and takes on authority and anyone else who stands in her way.<br />
<br />
What I didn't like about the film though was its uneven tone. Was it a black comedy? Was it a whodunnit? Was it a tearjerker? In the end, it was more of a cartoon, with the characters all drawn very, very broad.<br />
<br />
There was Woody Harrelson, the good father and family man, with the emetically honey-lit wife and two ickle-pickle daughters - there was nothing believable about anything in this peculiarly luxurious - given the guy was on a policeman's salary - set-up, including the fact that Harrelson looked fatter and more glowing than I've ever seen him before, yet was supposed to be wasting very swiftly away. There was the idiot police officer who we were supposed to believe had a heart of gold, despite being a very violent thug. There was the dwarf who definitely had a heart of gold, and the attractive black woman and attractive black man, who, as soon as they saw each other ,understood that unwritten segregation laws meant that they must end up together and never consider the possibility of any kind of mixed race relationship.<br />
<br />
Worst of all, from my point of view as a female, while there was a strong lead female character - McDormand - the rest of the female characters were excruciating. The writer of this film appears to think that the majority of womankind are laughable air heads - viz the girl at the agency that rents out billboards, McDormand's ex-husband's new girlfriend, and Woody Harrelson's wife, who, while not totally ditzy is essentially a cypher, (and also played pretty embarrassingly badly by Abby Cornish, but what could she do with that part, to be fair?) - or alcoholic son-castrators. Even the main character rather loses the moral high ground, when she decides to throw half a dozen Molotov cocktails at the town's police station without making absolutely sure that no one is still inside.<br />
<br />
But it may be that the world of the film is one that has no morality. This would certainly help explain the ending, when Frances McDormand sets off with the idiot police officer, (who we are also encouraged to see as not that bad, even though we have been told he beats up black people and we have watched him kick and punch one character, throw him out of a second storey window and then dash downstairs, socking a receptionist in the jaw on the way, and continue kicking his victim in the middle of the town's main street) on what may or may not be a journey of possibly misplaced vengeance. <br />
<br />
I suspect the film's mingling of jocularity and violence may be something that has been borrowed from Tarantino. I've never been able to bring myself to watch one of Tarantino's films, because I can't look at violence. Therefore, I'm totally unqualified to comment on their virtues or the lack of them. I can only say that, while I never got bored during <i>Three Billboards</i>, I did have to look away a lot. Afterwards I found it hard to work out how its mix of violence and grief and cartoon narrative, (with a tiny dose of possibly tongue-in -cheek schmaltz in the scenes involving Harrelson's family) really ended up knitting into a coherent whole. But, as someone who could never watch Tom and Jerry, because those awful moments when something heavy got smashed down on a cartoon creature's head made me wince too much, I think I may be way out of step with the great majority of cinemagoers. Despite being riveted by Frances McDormand's astonishing tour de force, I actually think this film is a load of old rubbish that doesn't amount to a hill of beans.zmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-88327290717086019922017-12-25T19:04:00.002-08:002017-12-25T20:02:04.514-08:00On Body and SoulAs I do not want to give away the truly original plot element that is at the centre of<i> On Body and Sou</i>l, I cannot go into a huge amount of detail about this engaging film. The main thing is that I would not hesitate in recommending it, although, as a lifelong shudderer at the sight of blood, I should point out that there are a couple of blood replete scenes - forewarned, however, one can always look away.<br />
<br />
The action of the film is split mainly between an abattoir in Hungary, the apartments of two of its employees - the finance manager and the maternity-leave-replacement hygiene inspector - and a quiet forest snowscape. Believe it or not, it is a romantic comedy, admittedly of a most unusual kind. There are many moments of humour, not least the attempt at a lunch date in a restaurant where a waiter feels his mobile telephone takes priority over his customers and the scene in the CD-shop.<br />
<br />
I should point out that the setting and dullness of the main actors' professional lives are not the only unusual rom-com elements. Among others, the way that the film suggests that affection and love are the ideal precursors for sex, that drunkenness, intense sociability and being a laugh and a good sport are not compulsory human attributes - indeed might even be signs of vulgarity - strikes me as not exactly run of the mill.<br />
<br />
The two main actors are very good - the female of the pair, I read, just won a prize in Berlin for her performance, deservedly so, I think. Actually, the whole cast are good, with perhaps a special nod to the psychiatrist and to Sandor, whose facial expressions in his interview on his first day at work were wonderfully nuanced.<br />
<br />
While an abattoir seems a truly unlikely setting for any kind of story, let alone a romance, the scenes showing cattle waiting meekly, or plodding obligingly toward their deaths provide a poignant and oddly comforting counterpoint to those in which the film's human characters stumble as blindly through their own brief lives. It may be worth noting that it is a full three minutes into the film before we even see a human face.<br />
<br />
<i>On Body and Soul </i>creates a resonant quietness that I found lingered with me after it had finished, lending a pleasant strangeness to everything around me. The film conveys wonderfully the mystery of reality, showing how that mystery exists in every part of the living world, if we care to notice. You could also argue that it is a simple story about meeting the man or woman of your dreams. Whatever else it may be - and I think it has many subtle layers of allusion - it is above all a very beautiful film.zmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-13588355428579873482017-11-26T08:32:00.000-08:002017-11-26T08:33:09.206-08:00Murder on the Orient ExpressThe latest iteration of Agatha Christie's Poirot story seemed a good idea after we had visited Bohinj, where Agatha Christie spent at least one holiday. In this new film, Kenneth Branagh does justice to Christie's description of Poirot's moustache (enormous), but for reasons best known to himself also decides to add a tear drop shaped bit of hair below his lower lip, which so distracted one member of our party that she was quite unable to concentrate on the film itself.<br />
<br />
I didn't mind that, nor the fact that the Orient Express appears to take a detour through the Himalayas in order to reach Slavonsky Brod, which so far as I know lies in a fairly flat bit of Croatia. I quite liked the hint of deep melancholy with which Kenneth Branagh endows Poirot, although his repeated mooning over the framed photograph of some lost love seemed to me to be a bit clumsy. I would have preferred things less well spelt out, the possibility that it was more a general existential despair that Poirot suffered from, rather than just the memory of some ditzy young woman. I also loved the scenery, especially at the beginning.<br />
<br />
However, what I did object to was the propaganda aspect of the film, plus the lack of morality. By propaganda, I mean the little story tacked on at the beginning, in which a Muslim priest, a Rabbi and a Christian priest fall under suspicion of having pinched something in Jerusalem. Of course, it turns out that the white figure of authority, the British policeman, is the culprit. I had the suspicion that, if they could have pinned it on both the policeman and the Christian, the makers of the movie would have been truly content, and I couldn't help wondering if this kind of anti-ourselves, anti-authority, anti-our-own-culture, self-hatred won't strike people in fifty years time as being just as heavy handed and unsophisticated as wartime films featuring clipped voices talking about 'the plucky British' et cetera et cetera do today. I suppose it is okay to add in a story strand about racism and the difficulty a black Englishman faced in advancing through society and becoming a doctor in the 1930s, as Branagh does, but the decision to cast as a member of the Croatian police force in Slavonsky Brod a person of African origin did seem absurd. But I acknowledge that this is probably a sign of my racism, because I ought not to have noticed at all.<br />
<br />
As to morality, the wild violent viciousness of the murder as portrayed in the film was disturbing and the idea that the culprits could be exonerated for taking justice into their own hands bothered me quite a lot. To be honest, the whole film descends into melodrama once Poirot has resolved the mystery, with Branagh flouncing about far more than seemed characteristic of the Poirot imagined by Christie.<br />
<br />
But never mind, if you can cope with the hair below the lip and the increasingly histrionic air of the whole thing, it is sumptuous to look at and the time passes quickly. Branagh has his own private joke, by the way, which is to have Poirot reading <i>A Tale of Two Cities</i> at regular intervals, each time overcome by laughter at what he presumably sees as the comic aspects of the novel. Hilarious or just weird? Anyway, overall an enjoyable hour or two at the cinema, despite my quibbles.zmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-23482002709349507092017-07-27T03:45:00.001-07:002017-07-27T03:57:39.385-07:00DunkirkDunkirk is a film that tries to depict the events leading up to the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk in 1940. It is told from the perspective of the soldiers, the seamen and the airmen who were involved.<br />
<br />
I enjoyed it very much, despite three main criticisms:<br />
<br />
1. A great deal of the time the film's colour has the vivid look of an over enthusiastically edited Instagram photograph. The blues in particular are strangely bright. The effect is very pretty but gives the slight impression of a fairy tale rather than a fairly desperate, grimy actual event.<br />
<br />
2. The crowd scenes - soldiers getting up after a bombing raid on the beach, soldiers moving en masse towards trains - seemed to me to be inauthentic. How the hell I would know I cannot say - all I can say is that in these moments I abruptly was reminded that I was watching a film, I had a sudden awareness that there was a film crew just out of view, recording a large number of would-be actors, all of whom had been told to get up shakily or to trudge wearily or whatever and were obeying - or trying to do so.<br />
<br />
3. The opening frames, in which a sentence is put up on a blank screen and then the same sentence is joined by a second and then those two by a third and then all three by a fourth was, I thought, an uninspired solution to the problem of getting some information across to the audience. Worse still was the dedication written across the screen after the movie was over - it announced that <i>Dunkirk</i> was dedicated to the people whose lives were "impacted by" the events of Dunkirk. What the hell is wrong with "affected by"?<br />
<br />
But the film has many qualities. It is, first and foremost, well-cast and acted. It has Kenneth Branagh in it, which is always a big plus for me. Harry Styles, a young pop star, is in there too, and this is quite clever, because, if you know who he is, the knowledge provides a sort of counterpoint between the life of the young man he is playing - and the lives of young men in general at that time - and the life of a young man today.<br />
<br />
Apart from a troubling thread involving a young French soldier, the film's story is told entirely from the British point of view. What results is very entertaining. Whether one should be entertained by the depiction of an event that left Europe in the control of the Nazis and resulted in many deaths is debatable, but <i>Dunkirk</i> is less historical examination and more celebration of a moment in which ordinary people rose to a challenge. As such, it does give the slight impression that it could have been put together by a propaganda unit during the Second World War, (although technically, of course, it is immensely more sophisticated than anything from that time). Were one so inclined, it also might be interpreted as a bit of a Brexit supporting work of art.<br />
<br />
One element of the film that did make me wonder about its propaganda-esque tendencies is its surprising cleanliness - or at least its lack of torn limbs and spilt guts. Although bombs go off right beside soldiers, the only casualties we see are completely intact - as the woman I overheard talking to her friends about the film after the screening said, it wasn't bloody. I'm not complaining, as I hate gore, but it was an interesting decision, which led me to wonder what exactly the director's intention was in choosing this subject to make a feature film.<br />
<br />
But if it's a question of whether going to the film will provide a good night out, then I suppose the answer to my speculations is: Who cares, (and yes, it will provide a good night out)? What the film does manage to do is to convey the astonishing bravery of so many men, especially the airmen, and to deliver some sense of how truly terrifying being bombarded is. It also reminds you what a superb moment for Britain the evacuation was, in spite of its being a defeat. I would also add, if I weren't afraid of being shouted at for racism, that it raised the question in my mind of whether such an effort would succeed today - whether there is still enough cohesion in British society now, enough of a sense of belonging to one family of people in a nation, to allow an almost spontaneous mobilisation by a huge number of people, who risked their own lives to rescue their fellow countrymen. I won't mention that though, as I hate being shouted at - and anyway similar circumstances are, I hope, very unlikely to arise.zmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-40876539531768279912017-02-17T03:53:00.000-08:002017-02-17T03:53:53.111-08:00La La LandThe opening scene of <i>La La Land</i> presents a "spontaneous" outbreak of dancing in a traffic jam on a freeway in Los Angeles. I think it, like the whole film, is supposed to subvert the romance of the original Hollywood musicals, by placing song-and-dance sequences in the midst of grim contemporary reality - in this case a tailback. It succeeds in a way. That is, it does subvert the romance of the original Hollywood musicals, but only by placing a lousy, jerky, wooden, witless song-and-dance routine in the spot that would once have been occupied by a radiant, witty, delightful song-and-dance routine.<br />
<br />
Witnessing it sent my spirits plummeting and, although that was two days ago, they haven't recovered.<br />
<br />
I suppose the opening scene does perform one important function - it introduces the main characters. It does quite a good job too, in the sense that it doesn't try to trick anyone - it presents them as pretty charmless right from the get go.<br />
<br />
But this brings up another problem with the film, and it is a big problem: namely that it is not much fun spending two hours or more following the story of two individuals who are not charming or witty or even very interesting.<br />
<br />
Sure both characters have quests - the female's is to become a movie star, (cue failed audition after failed audition, accompanied by all the usual misery and tears); the male's is to reopen a Los Angeles jazz bar that has fallen on hard times - well, good for him, I'm glad he has a "passion", but why precisely should I care? Neither of these quests have any obvious implications for the lives of others - there is no family of Cratchits dependent on the success or failure of either, nothing beyond the individual ambition of each. Perhaps this wouldn't matter so much except that the director demonstrates a rare and not, I imagine, particularly bankable talent - he eradicates every vestige and trace of the charisma these two normally reasonably charismatic stars bring to the screen.<br />
<br />
Things do look up very briefly when Gosling's character 'sells out'. For one scene, the screen comes alive with dancing and singing that is full of energy. Stupidly, I got quite excited at this moment; I thought the film might actually take off at last. As an argument reveals that Gosling has chained himself legally to this outfit for years and years, I thought, "Goodie, goodie, now we are getting somewhere. We will get a lot more of this riotous, lively band." Mysteriously though, in the very next scene all the fun guys vanish, never to be seen again. They join a long line of unexplained disappearances - the female lead's flatmates, her boyfriend, her parents and the male lead's sister (who does eventually bob up again at her own wedding, which I think must have been inserted for diversity reasons, as she marries a "person of colour" and there is absolutely no other indication of why this event is levered into the film.)<br />
<br />
<i>La La Land</i> is supposedly modelled on <i>Singing in the Rain</i>, but I think this must only be in the sense that it wants to demonstrate its disapproval of the essential frivolity of the earlier movie. In <i>La La Land </i>there is no such thing as a fairy tale ending - or indeed, any kind of fairy tale. That is just Hollywood baloney, says the film about Hollywood. To make absolutely certain we get this point, the film doesn't even create sexual tension between the two main characters. Instead of feeling thrilled or frustrated watching them progress through the various stages of their relationship, all I felt was a dull longing to be allowed to go home.<br />
<br />
Oh lord it was horrible. Should I point out that Ryan Gosling plays a piece of music over and over again that is supposed to be jazz but isn't? Or that when the female lead stands in a pale blue jumper, hands hanging down by her side and sings about her aunt who jumped in the Seine, it is one of the most intolerably mawkish moments in the history of cinema? Or that the whole scene inside the planetarium at night, (and, like so much else, no explanation was offered of how they could get in there other than "It's a musical, so magic"), was an unspeakable embarrassment?<br />
<br />
No, I will confine myself to the absolute clincher, which is that this is a musical without a single memorable song. I defy anyone who has seen <i>La La Land</i> to hum a single melody from it, let alone remember a whole number. That is not a musical; that is a failure.<br />
<br />
<br />zmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-71771683160674142152017-02-09T05:31:00.000-08:002017-02-09T05:31:48.211-08:00Toni ErdmannI haven't been to Bucharest since 1987 so I was interested to see Toni Erdmann purely for the chance to catch a glimpse of the city under new management. The new management, in a way, is one of the things the film turns out to be about - that is, the corporate world, the culture of western big business and whether it is healthy or endurable. In addition, the film is about the relationship between a father and his daughter, (like the last film I saw, <a href="http://zmkcseesfilms.blogspot.be/2017/01/baccalaureategraduation.html">Baccalaureat/Graduation</a> - is this coincidence or a new cinematic preoccupation?) and the meaning of life. So pretty straightforward really. Nothing complex at all.<br />
<br />
Ha.<br />
<br />
The very first scene of the film, before we go any further, is worth noting, simply because it is so daringly mundane. It is a shot of two rubbish bins and a wall with some garden equipment stored up against it and a front door, at which a delivery man arrives and proceeds to ring the bell. The door is answered, and so the story, such as it is, begins. I say such as it is because the plot of the film is not the kind that has great urgency, although the film is eventful, (and I'm not implying it is boring, far from it - it is just not focussed on a particular outcome).<br />
<br />
These first few minutes are designed mainly to introduce us to the man that answers the door. His name is Winifried Conradi and he turns out to be a primary school music teacher who likes slightly mistimed, misjudged practical jokes, is shocked by the celebration of birthdays on days that are more convenient than the actual birthday and is a sort of ageing, lumbering innocent, (but a very shrewd innocent). He is the kind of person, (that is, in my experience, a rather rare, unselfish and empathetic one), who is prepared to spend the night lying on the ground in the garden beside his dog during the last hours of its life. There are people I know and love like him - they are the ones who aren't shiny go-getters, they enjoy taking their time, discussing interesting topics and ideas, rather than showing off to each other; no-one dislikes them but they are probably often deep down fairly lonely, as most people are too busy elbowing their way ahead to notice them as they knock them out of the way.<br />
<br />
It is after his dog's death that Winifried decides to visit his daughter, who is working as a management consultant in Bucharest.<br />
<br />
The daughter, Ines, appears to be leading a life of emotional impoverishment but, in case we start to feel sorry for her, we witness moments when she throws her weight around unpleasantly and displays very little warmth toward those under her control. Her reaction to her father's arrival is - not entirely surprisingly given he gave her no warning that he was coming - not exactly overjoyed.<br />
<br />
Ines's behaviour is erratic, making her a very difficult character to read. What are her real feelings about her life and choices? Possibly she knows perfectly well how hollow and empty the work she is engaged in is in the wider scheme of things, but she has no opportunity to choose an alternative - or possibly she recognises this intermittently, or possibly she doesn't consciously recognise it at all. When her father tries, in his clumsy way, to ask whether she is happy and to question her way of life, she throws his questions back at him. And why not? Her father may not like what he sees but his generation has passed on to the next this world in which Ines has to find her way and make her own living. No alternatives appear to be on offer. Feminism has empowered the modern woman to sell her soul along with the men and if she doesn't join in what is she to do instead? How does he suggest she support herself, if she quits her consultancy job?<br />
<br />
Besides, much of the time she appears to be committed to the role she is playing. There is no indication that she recognises the absurdity of her behaviour when, after giving a presentation, she conducts an earnest Skype conversation with a coach about how to improve her body language in such situations. In her discussions with her colleagues - (largely conducted in the strange no-man's-land English spoken by people for whom the language is not their mother tongue) - about strategies and outsourcing, she seems engaged and committed. Impressing - or at least appeasing - a senior corporate figure called Henneberg, an ice-cold passive aggressive whose demeanour is worryingly reminiscent of the Nazi officer movie villains of my childhood, seems to be the most pressing thing on her agenda.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, given any opportunity during the working day - during car trips from appointment to appointment - she appears to always grab the opportunity to blank out reality through sleep, and, as the film proceeds, random cracks in her equanimity do start to appear. Whether her father's arrival is the catalyst or whether they just emerge naturally, is not explained, but it becomes clear that she is from time to time prone to something that looks like existential despair. Thus, while she farewells her father coldly, distantly, once he is gone, tears begin to roll down her face. Again, in a night club one evening, surrounded by gaiety, unnoticed she begins to cry. On several other occasions, although always only fleetingly, she is clearly on the verge of tears.<br />
<br />
I am making the film seem very solemn but, mainly thanks to Winifried's alter ego, Toni Erdmann, the film is exceptionally comic as well, (although it did occur to me that Erdmann had certain similarities to Trump, in the sense that he is a disruptor). Surprisingly, Ines's attitude towards this antic prankster alter ego of her father's is less negative than one at first assumes. This strange clownish element is clearly a major aspect of her father's personality, (and one, although she represses it, that she, we soon learn, shares - however reluctantly). After an initial reaction of embarassment and/or shock, she actually begins to provide further opportunities for Toni's activities. She ensures that he is invited to a party that is related to her work and then co-opts him into joining her in a business meeting, after he has forced her, through a ridiculous mistake, to take him along on a trip outside Bucharest.<br />
<br />
Her motives on this latter occasion are particularly hard to read. When her father's light-hearted flippant warmth is revealed to have dangerous consequences for others, there is a moment when a faint expression of triumph seems to cross Ines's face, as if her purpose had been precisely to teach him this lesson, to demonstrate that the world is not as benign as he would like to believe and he needs to be more careful. What happens is that, thanks to her father's naive, well-intentioned friendliness, someone loses their job; she watches wordlessly and, when he expresses his aghast remorse, she tells him, unsmilingly, that it was going to happen anyway since she will be in charge of recommending downsizing and that therefore he has done her a favour by removing from her the responsibility of robbing at least one worker of their livelihood.<br />
<br />
This incident also highlights another uncomfortable strand of the film. Ines, (and, by association, her father) - and the frightful Mr Henneberg - are all part of a new class of masters to whom the locals must kowtow. This is evident in the desperation of Ines's assistant's desire to please, in the eager "Thank you for choosing Darius" gratitude of the representative of the catering firm Ines employs for her hilariously dotty birthday brunch, even in the willingness of Ines's lover to take her orders (and I should warn you there is a ghastly sex scene, which I at first resented until I decided it was a good way of dispalying Ines's dilemma in finding herself not just a German boss but an empowered woman negotiating sexual politics; I thought she might actually have been hoping that the man in question would be provoked to rebel and overturn the power relationship between them, taking matters into his own hands - something that, in fact, he does in a way, but sadly not in quite the way I mean.)<br />
<br />
In the end, it seems to me that this puzzling but very entertaining film is a bit like a Giovanni Verga story, (except funny; I cannot remember Verga ever being remotely amusing). It is not made with the intention of making a point; it is simply a cinematic snapshot of a slice of messy, sad, absurd human existence in the West in the early twenty-first century. It is a portrait, rather than a lesson. Its blend of laughter and melancholy appeals a good deal to me. The scene where Winifried manoeuvres Ines into singing a Whitney Huston song, (whose lyrics, incidentally, make a mockery of her existence), in front of a room of puzzled Romanians, who are under the impression that he is the Ambassador of Germany to Romania and she is Frau Schnuck, his secretary, is absolutely wonderful. While I wasn't one hundred per cent convinced by Ines's party, I will always treasure the line, "Oh yes, it is good for the team" and also the moment when Winifried arrives, which is alone worth the price of the ticket. I also like the running gag of the cheese grater, which I haven't even mentioned yet.<br />
<br />
It is not giving anything away to reveal that there is in the end a touching moment of true reconciliation between father and daughter. Ines embraces him wholeheartedly, with all the warmth and affection of a small girl. The fact that she is willing to do this only when he is transformed by a highly traditional outfit may indicate a longing on her part to embrace a more traditional role for herself and to cling onto it for grim death. Or it may not. And, while Winifried throughout the film acts as a maverick spirit that has somehow survived despite the sterility of much that is modern, he finally reveals himself to be as beguiled as the rest of us by the new. Having counselled his daughter to savour the good moments of life, to make sure she is there in them, present, he lumbers off to fetch his camera so that he can take a picture of her when a particular mood takes her, as if, after all he believes that he can hold on to what is already gone.<br />
<br />
<br />zmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-49555787974539825422017-01-08T10:33:00.003-08:002017-02-07T11:57:13.320-08:00Baccalaureate/GraduationBaccalaureate<br />
<br />
It is impossible to tell from the opening shot of Baccalaureate - a street level view of a group of low-level, poor quality apartment buildings - whether we are in pre- or post-1989 Romania. It is a scene we return to again and again and it becomes clear as the film progresses that the physical lack of change it displays so clearly is paralleled in many less visible areas of Romanian life as well.<br />
<br />
The action of the film begins inside a ground floor apartment in one of the buildings, where the main character, a surgeon, lives with his wife, an enigmatic semi-invalid who smokes constantly & with whom he no longer shares a bed, & his daughter, who has been offered a scholarship to Cambridge, provided she scores a very high mark in her final school exams.<br />
<br />
It is the morning of the girl's Romanian exam. The father & daughter are preparing to leave when a stone flies through the sitting room window. The father goes out in search of the person responsible but finds no one. He then takes the daughter to school but drops her round the back rather than right outside the building , as he is in a hurry. The next scene reveals that he is in a hurry to see his lover. While he kisses her, his telephone rings. His daughter has been attacked on her way to school.<br />
<br />
A chain of events spools out from this disaster, revealing to the audience that the corrupt old habits of favours and influence still hold sway in Romania. The father, whose desperate passion is for his child to get out of Romania, is, in his efforts to free her, ensnared in the mesh he wants her to escape - and quite possibly drags her down with him.<br />
<br />
As well as being a portrayal of a society still profoundly damaged by the years it was subjected to misrule, the film also raises questions about parental ambition. The lead character only has his child's best interests at heart but he never stops to think about whether she will actually be happy if she does fulfil his dream of leaving Romania and studying at Cambridge. She has friends and a boyfriend and, left to her own devices, it is fairly clear that she would prefer to go to Kolodsvar to study.<br />
<br />
We know that the boyfriend in whom the daughter seems to be investing rather a lot, emotionally, is utterly worthless. Nevertheless, can parents live their children's lives for them or undo their own mistakes through them - the father came back to Romania, post-1989, and now regrets it and this is fuelling the intensity of his desire that his daughter escape. Surely, it is she who will have to conceive her own desperation to leave, she who will have to make what she will of the life she has been given. In the father's overbearing drive to direct his daughter's existence, could there be a parallel with the paternalistic attitude of the old regime?<br />
<br />
<br />
The film is intriguing, with several surreal or, for want of a better word, faintly dreamlike elements. The line-up scene at the police station, comes to mind, along with the scene in which the daughter suddenly asks her father a question about his driving, and that in which he weeps in the dark beside the road - not to mention the recurring mystery of the stone thrower, (who continues to harass the father throughout the film, a persistent reminder that unexpected events have a habit of erupting into the calm of the everyday, derailing order and careful plans).<br />
<br />
Although the characters of the mother and the lover are not entirely satisfactory, the film is wonderfully haunting and thought provoking. I like the very immediate way Mungiu shoots his films; you are always right there beside the character or just behind his shoulder. When indoors, you can somehow feel the walls of the room around you, rather than having a sense of being a distant viewer. When a character is hurrying down alleys and round the corners of buildings, you have the impression of clattering along the broken pavement too, right on their heels. I would like to have seen quite a lot more of the lover's little boy who was a most intriguing figure but, apart from that, I did not feel anything was missing. Baccalaureate is worth a look.<br />
<br />zmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-69800996770774161602016-12-31T08:08:00.001-08:002016-12-31T08:09:41.063-08:00ArrivalI don't know about you but I have always wanted to know why it is that the spoken form of Portuguese, while a member of the family of Romance languages, sounds nothing at all like any of its relatives and is virtually impossible to pick so much as one word from that might be familiar if you already have an understanding of Spanish, Italian or French.<br />
<br />
Tantalisingly, the opening scenes of Arrival promise to unlock this mystery at last. A university lecturer enters a lecture hall and launches into a lesson in which she says she will explain precisely what it is that makes Portuguese sound the way it does sound. But abruptly the lecture is interrupted. Twelve mysterious black objects have appeared in the skies above twelve countries, evacuation sirens sound across the campus and the whole world is put into a state of emergency.<br />
<br />
Leaving aside my disappointment about being thwarted just when I'd got my hopes up about understanding the mysterious evolution of Portuguese pronunciation, (not that I can really - the film makers really got my hopes up), I was also somewhat surprised at a public policy level by this turn of events. If I ruled the world and twelve strange objects appeared in the sky, I would do everything in my power to ensure things continued to run normally and that no cause for panic was supplied to the populace by anything my government did. "Steady as she goes" would be my motto. I would play down the whole situation, avoiding any suggestion that mankind might be under any sort of threat.<br />
<br />
But no, in Arrival the decision is taken to close everything and frighten everybody and call on that well-known Bond sub-genre, the hotshot professor of linguistics, to deal with the conundrum the strange airborne objects pose. When it transpires that there are two hotshot linguistics professors in the running, each almost equally qualified to take on aliens, a sudden death play-off about the meaning of the word "war" in Sanskrit settles things, (???!?), and a woman is helicoptered down to Montana for a crash course in alien-speak.<br />
<br />
Around this point - or possibly right from the start of the film - someone gets the blue filter stuck so firmly on the camera lens that the director gives up and as a result the audience has to put up with an indigo bathed world for almost two hours. The plot is lagubrious and the all round gloomy colouring just adds to the sensation that one is not being whisked along but instead wading through water.<br />
<br />
Maybe it would have been all right if the film had been genuinely clever rather than just thinking itself clever. But the lack of depth to the ideas was breathtaking - leaving me wondering whether that early scene on Portuguese pronunciation was cut short mainly because none of the researchers could be bothered to find out enough about the subject to actually supply the information needed to extend it.<br />
<br />
There were times, in fact, when you wondered how the script could have got through what we are always led to believe is the excoriatingly rigorous process Hollywood subjects everything too. Which did I hate the most: the pompous parsing of a sentence for Forrest Whittaker's benefit; the enormous great hole in the plot which leads a phsycist to leave his wife because she decides to have a baby, even though her understanding of time means she knows it will not survive - as a physicist surely he above all understands that, with the definition of time that the two of them both accept, she cannot decide to do anything but what has already been done; the fact that the person who translates a word into English as "weapon", helpfully points out, after the damage has been done, that it could also be translated as "tool" - so why didn't she to start with?; the failure to make the effort to understand international diplomacy enough to know that the head of China's army is not the individual who singlehanded decides whether that nation goes to war; the dig at rightwing shock jocks, and therefore at their listeners, a symptom of why we have ended up where we are today (that is, the film chooses to sneer at those kinds of people and their audiences, rather than either ignoring them for the purposes of the story - or including them and trying to understand);the cardboard characterisation; the mystery of why anyone would be swayed from doing anything by having his wife's dying words whispered into his ears by a stranger.<br />
<br />
In short this film does not look very nice, it has almost no plot impulsion and, while it has a romance developing at its centre, it chooses not to pay any attention to that. It also makes no sense whatsoever and is intellectualy incoherent.<br />
<br />
On the plus side, the aliens are cute, part-octopus, part-elephant leg umbrella stand, part Henry Moore figure -<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-iWGhr7wz9_8/WGfTIfuWxqI/AAAAAAAAbj0/-oyNZonPC9ov4IVtnswTjRwgsC6bUbk0gCPcB/s1600/2016_12_31_16_46_22.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-iWGhr7wz9_8/WGfTIfuWxqI/AAAAAAAAbj0/-oyNZonPC9ov4IVtnswTjRwgsC6bUbk0gCPcB/s320/2016_12_31_16_46_22.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
<br />
- and Australia comes out of things rather well.zmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-47835475036189502192016-11-30T04:10:00.000-08:002016-11-30T04:10:11.931-08:00Fragment 53I watched this on Mubi in the hope of understanding better what had gone on in Liberia. Fortunately, I now realise, I was distracted by a telephone call during an early part of the film. I later realised that, as a result, I had only caught very brief glimpses of what is essentially a snuff movie - a chilling piece of footage in which a Liberian politician is murdered in a room full of people, none of whom appear particularly disturbed by what is going on.<br />
<br />
The film, the bulk of which consists of footage of various veterans talking about their participation in the civil war, intercut with shots of landscapes seemingly untouched by man, left me more baffled than I had been to start with - and certain that Liberia is a dangerous place while people who have experienced such depravity remain walking its streets. Or what remain of its streets - as well as stripping all trace of civilised behaviour, the conflict resulted in what appears to be the total dismantlement of Liberia's infrastructure.<br />
<br />
What happened? How did this society descend into such astonishing violence? The narrative of cultural destruction as the result of Western exploitation doesn't fit the Liberian experience at all, yet the murderous blood letting was, if not unparalleled, certainly as terrible there as anywhere else.<br />
<br />
Taking a wider perspective, the film demonstrated what just at present the news seems to be teaching us every day - and indeed what most of history seems to imply - that is, man's capacity for wild destruction and murder is much larger than we would like to believe and possibly lurking only a millimetre beneath the surface of even the apparently most ordered, tranquil societies.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />zmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-71115538568338721652016-04-13T07:21:00.002-07:002016-04-14T08:13:38.828-07:00A Bigger Splash<i>A Bigger Splash</i> is said to be based on or inspired by or derived from a film called <i>La Piscine</i>. If <i>La</i> <i>Piscine</i> is half as good as <i>A Bigger Splash,</i> I want to see it. Which is surprising as, if you saw<i> I Am</i> <i>Love</i>, the last outing with Tilda Swinton by the film's director, Luca Guadagnino, you might be forgiven for expecting the worst - or indeed for not going to<i> A Bigger Splash</i> at all.<br />
<br />
You see, <i>I Am Love </i>is one of the worst - eg most sentimental and tedious - films ever made; a sort of <i>Lady Chatterley's Lover</i> without the laughs (and yes, I do know that there are no laughs, at least not intentional ones, in <i>Lady Chatterley's Lover </i>and that DH Lawrence did not possess anything that anyone would recognise as a sense of humour, but believe me <i>I Am Love</i> made him look like a potential Edinburgh Comedy Award candidate by comparison).<br />
<br />
Anyway that was 2010. Guadagnino has changed. <i>A Bigger Splash</i> is not tedious or sentimental for even a fraction of a moment. Better still, it is not merely intriguing while you watch it but goes on being so after you have left the cinema.<br />
<br />
Among the main characters, the performance that is absolutely extraordinary and outstanding is that of Ralph Fiennes, who plays Harry, a record producer. We've all got a Harry somewhere in our lives, God help us, an infuriatingly restless person who cannot resist saying what shouldn't be said, asking what shouldn't be asked, who has no understanding of calm pleasures like, for example, reading or writing and is permanently interrupting the peace of those unlucky enough to be in his vicinity with incessant demands for new excitements and thrills and an immature desire to shake things up.<br />
<br />
Fiennes is wonderfully hilarious in this role and astonishingly full of energy. The sequence where he dances to an old record is worth the price of entrance alone. I don't understand how someone who appears in this movie to be a genius could also be responsible for the worst production of The <a href="http://zmkcseesplays.blogspot.be/2013/07/october-2011-riverline-tempest-playboy.html">Tempest I have ever seen at the theatre</a> - perhaps the lesson is that he is an exceptionally brilliant performer but not a good director.<br />
<br />
Anyway, for what he does in this film, Fiennes really deserves a prize. Matthias Schoenaerts is also very good - and demonstrates, as he did in <i>Far From the Madding Crowd,</i> how much the camera loves his face. Dakota Johnson is wonderfully difficult to understand and happy to be fairly dislikeable, which is something I always admire in an actor. The supporting cast are also excellent, especially Lily McMenamy.<br />
<br />
If there is a weak link it is Tilda Swinton who never convinces me that her character might ever have been a rock star, (the recording session we glimpse in the film doesn't help in this regard). Swinton is possibly better in comic roles. As in <i>I Am Love</i>, in this film she gives a quite dull, self-satisfied performance, despite her character being central to the plot. In all the performances I have seen by her, the surface is everything. This is not a problem when she takes on broad comic roles where depth is not required. Perhaps in <i>A Bigger Splash</i> she feels she has already done more than enough by allowing herself right at the start of the movie to be filmed naked for a tediously long time from an unusually revealing angle. All the same, I could have done with fewer of her crevices and a bit more of her character's motivation<br />
<br />
Not that this ultimately matters. The film is beautiful, puzzling and entertaining. I'm really glad I went.<br />
<br />zmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-32834007421709063222016-04-02T04:13:00.004-07:002016-04-02T04:14:49.456-07:00Son of SaulI have been putting off writing about <i>Son of Saul </i>for weeks now, mainly because I was not keen to think about the film much, once it was done. Which is very far from being the same thing as saying it is a bad film. It is an astonishing film and it did such a horribly effective job of creating the impression that you were witnessing what really happened inside Auschwitz that, once released, if you are cowardly, as I am, you wanted as much as possible to push the experience from your mind.<br />
<br />
Oddly, the technique chosen to conjure the experience so vividly is the maintenance of almost constant blurriness in the back of the shots, where unspeakable things are going on all the time. You can see that hundreds of people are being driven through dank corridors into changing rooms and then shower rooms and that heaps of corpses - or "Stücke" as the German overlords of the camp blithely call them - are all that remains some minutes later. But you can't see the individuals. I suspect this was precisely how those picked out to work as members of zonder commandoes dealt with what they had to witness. The technique heightens the horror somehow.<br />
<br />
I suppose one could object to the rather obvious quest plot that gives the film its narrative. You could argue that the film could simply have been about the real event that was the uprising in Auschwitz. However, that would have been less ambiguous than this tale, which leaves the viewer confused and horrified, rather than supporting one side as the goodies and the other as the baddies. The film makes clear that after the Holocaust, we live in a ruined world where there are no goodies and baddies, only an expanded knowledge of the potential humanity has to be wicked.<br />
<br />
Not that the Germans are let off, mind you - the scene in which an officer murders a child with his bare hands, observed by his colleagues, is made all the more chilling by being shot as if it were a Vermeer painting. The weird interlude in which a group of German doctors are entertained by the crazed antics of a young officer who mocks the protagonist is equally vile. And then there is the endless ash. And the frenzied night scenes when the camp is overwhelmed by deliveries.<br />
<br />
Horrible, horrible. The film reminds us just how horrible, and that cannot be anything but a good thing for a film to do.<br />
<br />
<br />zmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-78306302127687133192016-03-05T03:06:00.000-08:002016-03-05T03:23:34.880-08:00The Big ShortIf, like me, you plod along thinking that the Western world is not too bad really, mistakes are made but our leaders try their best, <i>The Big Short</i> is a film you need to see. Adapted from the non-fiction book of the same name by Michael Lewis, it tells the story of the so-called Great Financial Crisis, mainly from the point of view of the few people astute enough to recognise that the prosperity that preceded the crisis was based on nothing more substantial than hope and rampant greed.<br />
<br />
The film makers do make the assumption that all viewers will already know what a bond is - embarrassingly, I didn't, and still don't quite grasp it. Apart from that one instance though, all specialist financial terminology - CDOs, sub-prime et cetera - is explained with such clarity that even dummies like me can faintly grasp what the hell these phrases mean. I wasn't particularly keen on the use of a blonde in a bubble bath to tell us about 'sub-prime' but Anthony Bourdain managed, with some old fish as props, to make CDOs troublingly clear.<br />
<br />
What makes the film so terrific though is the performances. There is Christian Bale being brilliant. There is Steve Carell being brilliant. There is Brad Pitt being brilliant. There is Ryan Gosling being brilliant. And there are numerous other names unknown to me being equally brilliant. If there is one good thing that the film reminds you of it is that we are living in an absolute golden age of American male movie actors.<br />
<br />
<i>The Big Short</i> manages to take an apparently rather dry subject and make it both entertaining and elucidating. The only problem is that it also makes you - well me at least - absolutely furious. Not only was no-one prosecuted for the dangerous banking habits they got into due to extreme greed; not only were the ratings agencies never driven to the wall because of their essential fraudulence; not only was no person in a position of responsibility made to atone for their incompetence or to return, so far as I could tell, a cent of the absurdly enormous salaries they received - which were justified purely on the grounds that they reflected the onerous nature of the responsibility those paid them had taken on, overseeing and steering a ship of finance of immense magnitude, so that it did not land on the rocks; not only did all these things not happen but - far more appalling - governments handed over taxpayers' money to those decadent individuals and institutions who'd created the crisis, bailing them out and then demanding that the people who provided the bail-out money through their own hard work accept drastic cuts in every service you can think of to pay off the great big rich bastards' party bill.<br />
<br />
This is one of the best films I've seen in ages. I recommend that anyone and everyone should go. Stay for the credits, in which it is explained that CDOs, renamed, are once more being hawked around on Wall Street and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the cleverest man in the film is concentrating his investing entirely on investments related to water. Make of that what you will.zmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-55932405392967941152016-01-17T23:20:00.001-08:002016-05-15T09:48:36.372-07:00Christmas MedleyI saw a few movies over the Christmas New Year time. I've been meaning to do justice to them but in the end have failed. I don't want to forget about them entirely though, so here are some bare notes, to jog my memory one day:<br />
<br />
The Dressmaker - To start with I was entranced by an impression that the film captured a mood that was rural Australia and could not be anywhere else. Then I became interested in the garments being made andirons also became reasonably absorbed or amused by the grotesque characters. Unfortunately, about halfway through there is a peculiar gear shift and the film stops being a sort of sub-Baz Luhrman vividly coloured entertaining pantomime and takes on a Grand Guignol tone that I couldn't get used to, particularly as there seemed to be a shift in how we were supposed to regard certain characters, without any explanation about how they had transformed from fairly sympathetic to hostile. Kate Winslett is good. I thought Judy Davis over played her hand and sort of played someone self-consciously playing slapstick rather than really inhabiting the role. If I'd walked out before the silo came into the picture, I'd have liked the thing better. Anyone who remembers Charlie Cousins in Bellbird will know that no good can come from the appearance of a silo in an Australian work of fiction, but the plot twist this one brought was more than I could bear.<br />
<br />
Joy - many very funny moments, (I especially loved Isabella Rosellini) but far too long<br />
<br />
The Gift - lots of points in the plot you could pick apart but quite a nice little thriller. Rebecca Hall better than I've ever seen her. Worrying treatment of the female as vulnerable object, I thought<br />
<br />
The Visit - not bad if you like M Night Shyamalan's particular way of building up a mystery, which I do even when his plots are s weak you ca see what's going on within ten minutes of the film's start. In that respect, this is better than the last couple of his that I've seen and a fairly terrifying oncept tht resonates laer.. I particularly like the child actor who played the little boy who likes doing rather bad rap<br />
<br />
Youth - intriguing but the character who was a director who couldn't think of an ending for his film may have been too close to the character of the director himself, as the film fizzles out quite badly. Also not sure a practitioner of one art form should include someone supposedly successful in another art form if he doesn't know about that other art form - the music Michael Caine'a composer character composes sounded pretty second rate to me and yet he is supposedly splendidly successful. All the same, lots of wonderful images. Intriguing that this is another film set in an old Austro Hungarian hotel now rather faded in its splendour. Must watch 8&1/2 Weeks again as supposedly this film is some kind of homage to it. Certainly it had the attractive dream quality of a Fellini film and lots of nice images, but it rambled and didn't leave me entranced. On the other hand, I wouldn't mind seeing it again - or I wouldn't if I could cut off about the last half hour.<br />
<br />
Also noted - Cold Souls, which unfortunately expired on Mubi before I finished it - but what a funny and strange film. I must try to find a copy somewhere else. It is very intriguing<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />zmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-30159749733884503352015-08-31T08:50:00.000-07:002015-08-31T08:50:28.873-07:00Disco and Atomic War<i>Disco and Atomic War </i>is an Estonian documentary - with some amusing later renactments, (so I suppose it is a documentary-drama, but a comic drama, if that). <br />
<br />
In the film, Jaak Klimi, who is the director, tells of how his childhood in Tallinn - and that of most of his playmates, and their parents - was greatly enhanced by being able to watch Finnish television. The authorities try to stop them, but ingenuity wins out, so that each time some new jamming method is introduced, the citizens work out a way to get around it. The scenes showing the various subterfuges that are thought up and how they are put into practice are very funny. <br />
<br />
Similarly amusing is the plot line that runs through the film about Klimi's relatives from the south of the country, where Finnish television is not accessible. One holiday they come to stay with Klimi's family in Talliin and join them in their weekly viewing of <i>Dallas.</i> After their return to the south, he has to write weekly letters to keep them up to date with developments on the programme. These are read out to ever larger groups of country people, the <i>Dallas </i>addiction spreading like wildfire, even without access to the moving screen<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, the Soviet goverment and its proxy in Talliin tries to mitigate the influence of Finnish television, unsuccessfully. In an interview towards the end of the film, the former Soviet puppet leader of the government, who now lives in Moscow and has not set foot in Estonia since his downfall, blames Finnish television more than anything else for the end of Communist rule in the country. The illogic of this argument does not seem to strike him - or any of the other stooges we see, in clips taken from footage filmed down the years, blaming the West for its propaganda, rather than noticing that the state of affairs they have created is the problem, the existence of a better life in the West merely the perceived solution to that problem for many of their citizens.<br />
<br />
The film is wonderfully wry and very charming. It made me feel old, seeing footage of events during the Cold War and realising that it all looks a very long time ago. I don't feel anything like nostalgia for those days, but I do wish things had turned out better since everything changed.zmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-11296264127049821262015-08-11T08:35:00.001-07:002022-06-12T10:04:37.745-07:00Le Petit Amour/Kung Fu MasterI watched this film because I'd seen Agnes Varda speak at the Frieze Art Fair in London some years ago, and her talk had made me interested to see her films - clearly not desperately interested since the time that elapsed between seeing her and watching one of her films was quite lengthy, but nevertheless interested enough when the opportunity arose.<br />
<br />
In all honesty, I was momentarily disappointed when I realised Jane Birkin was the lead actress in the film but, once I got over an initial mild nausea provoked by her fey way of speaking,I realised she wasn't actually too bad.<br />
<br />
She plays a woman who lives alone with two children - a fifteen-year-old daughter and another of about three. The woman falls in love with a friend of her daughter's - a rather small adolescent boy, also fourteen or fifteen, whose parents have gone away and left him with his grandparents. The boy's main interest is an arcade game called Kung Fu Fighter, in which the player must rise through various levels to free a maiden trapped at the top of a house.<br />
<br />
The film wasn't made so terribly long ago - 1988 - but I doubt a film about an adult falling for a child would be made at all these days. We have become unable to look at relationships between the generations without fear. In Varda's movie, morality scarcely enters into the story, which in any case is about a love that is barely sexual, (possibly that is not the best choice of adjective I have ever made, in the context - I should point out that there is absolutely no nudity in the film). Our judgment is not invited and Varda provides none of her own.<br />
<br />
This did not surprise me since at her Frieze talk the director came across as gently tolerant of the oddness of humanity, and this film plays out in a similar tone. There is a sad charm to the whole affair. The film seems to be less interested in portraying a transgressive relationship than in providing a glimpse of the bumbling nature of human loneliness and the clumsy attempts to find and give love that sometimes result.<br />
<br />
Clearly, the viewer knows from the start that no good will come from Birkin's character's odd attraction, but, so far as one can tell, apart from to herself, no real harm results either. Perhaps this is a wicked impression to create in a film - today, I suspect that might be the general opinion. However, watching the movie, I was persuaded that connections that are out of the ordinary need not be depraved or profoundly damaging, provided they spring from love and kindness and a wish to make a connection between two unhappy souls, rather than from a purely physical desire to corrupt young flesh. As I write these words, I feel I am pushing against a sea of horrified reaction. I doubt if anything I say will persuade anyone that there can be nuance in this sphere. I'm not even sure if there can be. All I can say is that the story is somehow innocent and the film is not without charm.<br />
<br />
Looking back afterwards, I also realise that the opening sequence, which is my favourite in the whole film - you can look at it <a href="http://zmkc.blogspot.be/2015/08/someone-to-love.html">here</a> - pretty much sums up the entire film. For both characters, the episode in their lives that brings them together is really just a time when they are finding someone to love. Oddly, even in this uneven relationship, it is the woman who is somehow the weaker party.zmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-32224093345239615642015-07-28T04:52:00.001-07:002015-07-28T04:52:24.034-07:00Far From the Madding CrowdI had doubts about this film before I went, but I loved it, I should point out though that all my opinions of it are coloured by comparison with the original, so I am not exactly judging it as a freestanding entity.<br />
<br />
The casting was what worried me most before going. I thought the actress taking the Bathsheba part might be a bit wispy for the role - although, looking back at the 1967 version, I now see that Julie Christie was pretty peculiar in the role and Carey Mulligan actually makes a better fist of it. Even better was Michael Sheen as her rich, unrequited suitor, a more poignant performance than Peter Finch's in the earlier film, I thought. The landscape was gorgeous, the character of Troy was allowed more complexity than in the original. In a way, Matthias Schoenarts as Gabriel might be seen as a bit of a mistake, in that it is hard to imagine anyone would actually turn him down at any stage, whereas Alan Bates somehow managed to be the right man in the end without straining the audience's belief when Bathsheba rejects him at the start.<br />
<br />
I wondered about some of Bathsheba's costumes in the current version. Her work dress appears to be made out of denim, which I had imagined was a recent import to the English speaking world as clothing. I presume though that this is a sign of my ignorance and research proves that denim was the fabric used for work clothes for women at the time the novel is set. <br />
<br />
The film is entertaining and beautiful to look at, the landscape shots are lovely and several sequences involving characters galloping about on horses almost inspired me to start riding again.zmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-57545016166308595702015-07-27T07:35:00.000-07:002015-07-28T01:44:43.553-07:00Woman in GoldYesterday we went to see the film called <i>Woman in Gold. </i>It is about Maria Altmann, a woman whose family thought that they were Austrians but discovered that, as far as the majority of Austrians were concerned, they were Jews. As a result of this terrible misunderstanding, they were robbed, driven from their home and deprived of all rights and property.<br />
<br />
Maria Altmann is not a fictional character but a real person. When she discovered, following her sister's death, that the Nazis had stolen a portrait of her beloved aunt, painted by Klimt, which ever since had hung in the Belvedere Art Gallery in Vienna, she decided to ask for it back. The film tells the story of what happened next.<br />
<br />
The Austrian arts ministry and the authorities supposedly in charge of restitution of property stolen by the Nazis obstructed Altmann at every turn. They are portrayed as pantomime villains, particularly at a certain point when they are sitting in a row in a courtroom and the camera pans on their absurdly wicked expressions. This is a bit laughable, but it is hard to see how else they could have been presented, given the way they actually behaved throughout the case - and, sad to say, s<a href="http://zmkc.blogspot.be/2015/07/never-having-to-say-youre-sorry.html">ome Viennese do have a disturbing way of presenting themselves as caricatures - of selfishness, at the very least.</a><br />
<br />
The case is balanced in the film by the fact that Altmann is helped by other Austrians, who are all too well aware that their country carried out terrible injustices and wish to make amends. The contemporary story is intercut with scenes that recreate the life of Altmann's family before the Nazis took over. These reminded me very much of the writings of George Clare in a book called <i><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/13/books/books-of-the-times-books-of-the-times.html">Last Waltz in Vienna</a></i>, which I recommend to anyone interested in trying to understand what happened to Jewish families in Vienna at the time of the Anschluss. The Altmann family scenes are very affecting, and the shots of Vienna during the first days of the Anschluss bring that time all too vividly to life.<br />
<br />
The script is occasionally a tiny bit clunky, but the acting is very good - Helen Mirren seems to be channelling Peggy Ashcroft's wonderful performance in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkAoMfhjxJc">Caught on a Train</a> in the opening scenes. She is excellent - even in the first scene, at her sister's funeral, she brilliantly conveys fine emotional adjustments with facial expression alone. The rest of the cast are also very good, especially the man who plays the young Maria's father. The backdrop of Vienna is, as always, beautiful, although I did wonder, at one point, whether it was likely that, while filling in the time during a short adjournment in a court case in the centre of town, the characters would really have decided to go all the way out to the Prater, or whether their presence there might have been staged more for cinematic than authentic reasons.<br />
<br />
Interestingly, there seems to be a wide divergence between the view of audiences, of whom, according to the Rotten Tomatoes site, 82% liked the film and the critics, of whom only 34 % did. The critic of the UK <i>Telegraph </i>said of the film:<br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: AustinNewsText, Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 35px;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">"...opportunities are missed here to explore the conundrum, controversy and morality of the art restitution struggle"</span></span><br />
and many of his colleagues seem to agree that the film doesn't provide enough debate about issues to do with Austria's past wrongs and what is meant by ownership when it comes to art. One critic even tries to argue that it is doubtful whether anyone can actually "own" a painting.<br />
<br />
This stuff strikes me as fairly decadent relativism, which all too easily leads to arguments about how we can't really condemn Hitler because he had an unhappy childhood and how Nazi treatment of Jews has to be understood in the context of the time - or something.<br />
<br />
Such arguments are rubbish. Nuance has its place but, when humans have behaved with systematic and widespread cruelty against other humans, it is important that their wrongdoing is acknowledged, without excuses. These things should not be forgotten or explained away. They need to be remembered, because humanity is often capable of being completely depraved, and we all need to be vigilant, if we are to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.<br />
<br />
Anyway, we really enjoyed the film. It is a good yarn, with interesting central characters. It is about an art work, but it is not an 'arthouse' movie. Since it never aspired to be that, it seems extremely unfair to attack it for its failings as one.<br />
<br />
SPOILER ALERT<br />
<br />
Surprisingly, after many twists and turns the painting was returned to Altmann. Although the movie does not tell us this in its main story arc, in the credits it explains that she subsequently sold it, with a stipulation that it be always on display and available to the public in a New York gallery. Some people attacked her for that, arguing her fight for restitution had been all about money. These critics entirely and utterly miss the point, I reckon. At a time when freedom was taken away from her and her family, their belongings were stolen. Mrs Altmann had no duty to the belongings. They were things that her family had bought, to do with as they chose. The case was not about who was the best custodian of a valuable piece of art; the case was about returning things that had been stolen. The painting always belonged to Altmann and her family. Indeed, had they not commissioned it and paid for it, it would not exist today. The ultimate justice was not merely to let her have it back, conditional on her understanding how lucky she was to have it; the ultimate justice lay in acknowledging that the thing was hers all along and thattherefore she had a right to do with it whatever she liked.<br />
<br />zmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-12317850863527289142015-04-17T01:08:00.002-07:002015-04-17T01:08:15.163-07:00PaddingtonI have only one thing to say about this. Or rather I have only one question.<br />
<br />
Why the toothbrush scene? Who thought that was funny? I'm still shuddering.<br />
<br />
This film should have a horror rating, because of that scene.<br />
<br />
It was, of course, far more schmaltzy than the books, and the temptation to draw an analogy between the bear and other, less cuddly unauthorised immigrants proved irresistible - but at least a faintly plausible explanation for the presence of Mrs Bird in the household was provided, which it never was in the books.zmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-42555213555122520792014-10-14T07:59:00.000-07:002015-02-22T22:14:13.179-08:00IdaSet in early 1960s Poland and filmed, (appropriately? - behind the Iron Curtain things always did seem pretty monochrome), almost entirely in black and white, Ida tells the story of a young novitiate who is instructed to meet her only relative before being allowed to take her final vows. Without much enthusiasm, she sets off in driving snow from a huge, once beautiful, hopelessly delapidated building. In an unnamed city, she finds her aunt who tells her the true story of her family. Together they set off to find her parents' unmarked graves.<br />
<br />
I don't want to spoil the story by explaining what happens. The important thing is that the film conveys better than anything I've ever come across the devastation - psychological as much as physical - of post-war Communist Europe. The characters live among the wreckage of the recent past. <br />
<br />
The performance of Agata Kulesza as Wanda, the aunt, is particularly outstanding, but no-one in the film is weak, (except perhaps the Dusty Springfieldesque singer, who doesn't seem to quite inhabit the period). The composition of the shots - if that's the correct way to put it; I need a course in cinema - is extremely beautiful. Despite the sombre subject matter there are even moments of humour. My favourite was when Wanda asks in a village pub whether the barman remembers the Lebensteins. 'Jews?' he asks. 'No, Eskimoes', she replies.<br />
<br />
The film is fairly enigmatic. The first scene, in which Ida repaints the face of an old statue of Jesus and then helps her fellow novitiates raise it falteringly onto a pedestal in the grounds of the nunnery, may represent the reemergence, however precariously, of goodness as a force, in which case the final scene might be seen to reinforce this. All the same, rather than including an interlude where things appear to be on the point of resolving into a happy ending, I think I might have stopped the camera before an open window in the aunt's flat and left things at that.<br />
<br />
Never mind. This is a minor quibble and I may have actually completely missed the point. The main thing is, if you've been searching all your life for a <i>Sound of Music </i>without sentimentality, schmaltz or cuteness, <i>Ida</i> could just fit the billzmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-58309013555887288342014-10-11T05:22:00.002-07:002014-10-11T05:30:26.218-07:00Gone GirlThe opening sequence of <i>Gone Girl</i> shows the America of recession, with shots of failed small businesses, reduced-price real estate and a deserted main street. Subsequently, tiny glimpses of this grubby world are allowed in occasionally - the main character's father's house, mainly; his twin sister's house, to a degree, (it is hardly horrid, just not aggressively glossy); a place that I think might be a trailer park, (but not a gritty one, or, if that is considered gritty, I dread to think what the film's director would make of Australian country town motels [for whose dagginess I have a peculiar fondness, but that is another story]). <br />
<br />
Apart from those brief moments, the movie's subsequent action takes place almost exclusively in the honey-lit world of media fantasy - that golden, skipping-through-flowery-pastures, having-breakfast-with-shiny-kids-in-sparkling-white-kitchens environment that we have all had poured into our retinas for decades now. It is a world created in order to sell us stuff - insurance, breakfast cereal, pointless disinfecting kitchen-top 'wipes', lavatory paper, fast food. It is what has made many of us neurotic, barely able to convince ourselves that interiors are never really that perfect, that newness is neither a quality nor something that endures.<br />
<br />
And if you want a true neurotic, Amy, (Rosamund Pike), the main female character of <i>Gone Girl</i>, fits the bill. Exploited by her parents, (David Clennan and Lisa Banes), for profit from her earliest childhood - their <i>Amazing Amy</i> books sell to an adoring public the story of a girl just like their own real daughter, but minus any of her failures - she acquires a husband, (Ben Affleck), who dazzles her with a projection of himself that he cannot maintain in the long run. The story of the film is the story of what happens when Amy realises she's been sold a dud.<br />
<br />
The plot is thick with twists and turns of increasing unbelievability. The characters are flimsily drawn and scarcely credible, (Collings [Neil Patrick Harris] is nothing but a plot device masquerading in a person's clothing, surely), there is no explanation of how no criminal charges are brought for what must at least constitute manslaughter or why Go, [Carrie Coon], the main male character's sister, appears to have no life of her own at all. The two people I most wanted to see more of were the policewoman, (Kim Dickens), who pops up from time to time but remains undeveloped, while her deputy, (Patrick Fugit) is so clownishly blinkered in his judgments he makes Dr Watson look like a towering genius, and Tanner Bolt, (Tyler Perry), who injects the film with energy every time he appears on the screen.<br />
<br />
I don't understand why this film has been acclaimed so widely. It's entertaining, but a bit long. It's very gory. It hints at something interesting about the dysjunction between what we are led to believe existence might be like if we buy enough of the right products and what existence is actually like, but it's not in the business of being deep and serious. It is as glossy as an advertisement - and, while it's possible to argue that's because it's making a critique of that kind of image-making, it ends up being too silly and unbelievable to do a good job of that. The real problem for me is that all the characters are so flimsy - without engagement I find it very hard to be seduced into suspending my disbelief.zmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-30029608074690872842014-07-03T19:07:00.003-07:002014-07-03T19:07:59.214-07:00Living Is Easy with Eyes ClosedThis is a charming film that seems to do a pretty good job of bringing to life Franco's Spain. It certainly made me glad I didn't live there, and not only because I can't speak Spanish. Some of the characters are a bit too good to be true - most particularly the bar owner - but the central figure, a school teacher who wants to meet John Lennon, is beautifully written and played. It's amazing to see at the end that the film is based on fact, as it comes across as a highly satisfactory fairy tale. All in all, it is what Sandy Stone would call 'a really nice night's entertainment', although, of course he would probably never dream of going to a Spanish filmzmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7848446455480823285.post-32170904899270038792014-07-03T17:05:00.000-07:002014-07-03T22:24:18.679-07:00CalvaryThere is a moment in <i>Calvary</i> where one character yells at another, 'You have no integrity' and, despite its great cast and beautiful scenery, I think the same could be said about the film. Having chosen one of the most disturbing and painful themes possible, the film-makers dodge it, taking refuge in comedy - or an attempt at comedy - for the greater part of the film, gilding the lily further with a dad and self-harming daughter reconciliation story that seems to be from a different, more naturalistic style of movie altogether, and adding, for good measure, an enigmatic French widow, whose accent is, I think, supposed to make the not enormously insightful things she says sound like the pronouncements of a latter day saint. Only in the closing moments does anyone summon up the courage to confront the horror they've been tiptoeing around for the last hour or so. Two of the characters, almost all of whom have been portrayed up until then as grotesques, caricatures, (role-players, as the creepy doctor puts it), are abruptly transformed - or at least there is an attempt to transform them - into more rounded characters with emotional lives of genuine depth.<br />
<br />
The effect of this ultimate shift is jolting. Jolting, of course, can be good. However, it is not good if it ends up destroying coherence and, in <i>Calvary, </i>this is exactly what it does. As a result, <i>Calvary </i>ends up, like <i>Saving Private Ryan</i>, being two films sold as one - both films contain a beach sequence, which is one separate entity, and another longer, apparently discrete segment, which is the other. <i>Calvary</i>'s beach sequence ends the film whereas <i>Saving Private Ryan</i>'s comes at the beginning, (which means in the latter case that you at least have the opportunity to slip out and avoid the schmaltzy main feature, a possibility <i>Calvary </i>does not provide).<br />
<br />
Even though the actors were all good and Sligo looked beautiful, I wouldn't advise anyone to go to see <i>Calvary. </i>The shift at the very end from <i>a Ballykissangel</i>-on-acid narrative, (including a sequence in which Dylan Moran pees on Holbein's <i>The Ambassadors),</i> to something quite else, a deeply serious and horrible scenario, seemed above all tasteless to me - especially as even in the final scene the writer cannot resist a faint return to flippancy in an exchange regarding a dog, plus a discussion about <i>Moby Dick</i>. I know a defence could be made that the whole effect is deliberate - an attempt to portray the way that people spend their time behaving as if there is nothing lurking beneath the merry surface of life, until something cracks and it all leaks out. The trouble is that for most of its length <i>Calvary </i>is not portraying anything that is lifelike; it is being some kind of caricature, presenting a world that is in no way real. Therefore, it cannot ask to be judged on the basis of being like reality. On the other hand, it can be judged on its merits as a work of art and, as such, it fails, in my view - its unconvincing lurch from light to dark makes it a flawed - and for the bulk of the film cowardly - piece of work.zmkchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.com0