City of Life and Death, directed by Lu Chuan, is a remarkable and powerful piece of film-making. It deals with what is perhaps one of the most emotive subjects in Chinese history – the Rape of Nanking.
In December 1937 Nanking, then capital of China, fell to the Japanese, following the outbreak earlier that year of the Sino-Japanese war. In the following weeks the Japanese murdered thousands of prisoners of war and civilians, as well as raping thousands of women, sometimes to death.
The exact number of people caught up in this atrocity has never been established with any precision, though the Chinese authorities estimate it at 300,000, not that much greater than the 260,000 given by the International Military Tribunal of the Far East. In Japan, where the episode is bound up in issues of national pride, the figures have been revised sharply downwards.
Clearly numbers are important, though just as important, if not more so, is an understanding that something dreadful happened in this city not excused by quibbling over figures. The only logical position would to reject the history altogether, as indeed have some on Japan's nationalist fringes, their version of Holocaust denial.
In part the movie offers a kind of perspective on the events, that of Kadokawa, a young sergeant in the Imperial Japanese Army, who is both caught up in the violence and bewildered by it, an altogether admirable performance by Hideo Naikaizumi. It does not in any sense detract from the horror; if anything it heightens it, that these crimes are our crimes, not those of monsters or aliens.
But it’s on this point that the movie has proved most controversial. Shortly after it was released in China in April of last year many were shocked enough by the humanised depiction of a Japanese soldier that calls went out to have it deleted from the history of Chinese cinema. Lu even received a number of death threats on his official blog.
Although City of Life and Death continued to have the support of the authorities, it was not included in the official list of films celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, or the Chinese version of the British Academy Awards. Even so this stark and honest movie has been praised outside China, recently winning the prize for best movie at the Asian Film Awards. Whether it is ever screened in Japan remains open to question.
Longford, made for Channel 4 in England in 2006, is a television drama directed by Tom Hooper based on a script by Peter Morgan. It stars Jim Broadbent as Lord Longford, amongst other things a prison visitor and campaigner for liberal causes, and Samantha Morton as Myra Hindley, the infamous serial killer whom he befriends, campaigning for her release from prison.
Having recently finished a biography of Hindley I was immediately drawn to this movie. I’m so glad I saw it. Jim Broadbent is truly excellent as the campaigning peer, a performance for which he won a BAFTA award. He plays Longford very much as I imagine he was in life: a naïve, well-meaning but rather child-like individual, willing to take people at face value; willing to believe, following the tenets of his Catholic faith, that people are ultimately good.
Samantha Morton was also superb as Hindley, a manipulative and calculating woman, one who used Longford, as she used religion, towards her own cynical and self-serving ends. I thought that Andy Serkis was also excellent as a truly malevolent Ian Brady, with whom Hindley carried out the Moors murders in the 1960s, confronting Longford with truths that he clearly was not able to face.
I confess my reading of One of Your Own; the Life and Death of Myra Hindley left me with nothing more than a dislike, a mild contempt for the figure of Lord Longford as a silly, shallow and somewhat stupid old man; a man who collected killers as if he was collecting puppy dogs; a man who could not recognise Hindley for what she was.
But Broadbent’s portrayal gave deeper dimension to the man, to the importance religion played in forming his ideas and attitudes; it made me understand him just a little more, sympathise just a little more. It also showed just how vulnerable he was. Despite his age he really had no proper understanding of life and the traps it lays.
He was deceived by Hindley for many years, a deception finally made clear to him when she, under pressure from Brady, finally confesses her part in the murder of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. In perhaps the most telling scene of all we see Longford listen to a tape, sent to him anonymously, of the torture of Lesley Anne Downie, in which Hindley’s voice can be clearly heard, only her voice; the real tape is still too horrifying to broadcast. He listens with a look of despair. Still, in the end, his faith was only deepened by the test he had faced.
Longford is an excellent movie, one of the best TV productions I have seen.
I’m a huge admirer of the film work of Leni Riefenstahl. I think Triumph of the Will and Olympia two of the most impressive documentaries ever made. People always look at me slightly askance when I make this admission, as if I was identifying with the political message being conveyed. I do not, not for a moment. I also admire D W Griffith's Birth of a Nation, a great milestone in movie-making, though one that conveyed an unpleasant and racist message. So, yes, there are instances where the medium can be separated from the message.
Triumph of the Will is just so good in Riefenstahl’s mastery of direction, the innovative way she makes use of the camera, breaking boundaries never attempted by others. But there is another reason for my admiration which goes beyond her capacity as a film-maker. Quite simply she was able to make here own way in one of the most chauvinist, anti-feminist political systems ever devised by man, and I really do mean man.
To come to the attention of Hitler by virtue of her skills alone was a real achievement. To be accorded the right to make Triumph of the Will and thus get the better of Josef Goebbels, who by 1934 controlled just about all Germany media through the Propaganda Ministry, was an even greater achievement. So, despite the criticisms, despite her associations, she will remain as one of my heroines and avatars.
The Green Zone is the second movie I’ve seen this year set against the Iraq War, coming not long after The Hurt Locker. The latter was accomplished; the former breathless. It’s not bad in its attempts to make sense of the whole Iraq mess, turning a conspiracy theory into roller-coaster thriller!
It has a Bourne-like quality, hardly surprising with Matt Damon in the lead! Sorry, I’m being disingenuous; it has a Bourne-like quality because it follows the same formula, a formula that those familiar with the Bourne movies will recognise - a maverick agent working against malevolent forces on his own side, except this time Bourne/Damon is in uniform.
The Green Zone, directed by Paul Greengrass stars Damon as Roy Millar, a warrant officer in the US Army Special Forces whose unit is charged with the search for those legendary and mythical weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Yes, indeed, mythical WMDs, because that’s the whole point of the movie: Millar’s search is continually fruitless. His unit takes casualties, though, in their empty task. In his frustration Millar questions the intelligence on which his quest is based. But he is told to keep quiet by his superiors, who insist that it is all good.
Behaving in a way that no officer would; behaving, though, in the way that Jason Bourne would, Millar sets off on his own quest to unravel the truth, a quest that leads to conflict with one Clark Poundhouse, played by Greg Kinnear, of Pentagon Special Intelligence. Puoundhouse, it seems to me, is clearly based on the character of Paul Bremer, the American diplomat who effectively ruled Iraq as a kind of viceroy after the invasion, a man who found chaos and created catastrophe!
Bit by bit the story becomes clear, especially after Millar makes contact with one General Al-Rawi, played by Yigal Naor, a senior officer in the old Iraqi army and an informant who goes by the code-name of ‘Magellan.’ Well, it turns out there were no WMDs, there hadn’t been since the First Gulf War, information that had been given to Poundstone, who hid it from his superiors to allow the invasion to go ahead anyway.
So, there you have it: the invasion of Iraq was based not on miscalculation but manipulation! The Green Zone is a reasonably competent war movie come political thriller with all sorts of adrenalin rushes scattered along the way. Just don’t take the message too seriously.
Picnic at Hanging Rock, based on the novel of the same name by Joan Lindsay, is another of my favourite movies. It has a magical and dreamlike quality that I absolutely adore. And that pipe music, it’s almost as if the Great God Pan himself was calling. Add to that a wonderful opening sequence –“What we are and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream.” The book and the movie also created a kind of modern myth, that they were based on real events, which added to the overall charm and mystery. I also attended a girls' boarding school and entertained the same romantic notions as Miranda and her friends.
Oh, I so want to visit Hanging Rock, I so want to walk hand in hand forever with the beautiful Miranda, who is indeed like a Botticelli Venus.
If there is a modern period in history that excites me in the way that no other does it has to be Weimar Germany, lodged between the stuffy Kaiserreich and the sadomasochistic Nazi state. It was a vibrant time, a creative time, an exciting time to be young, free and alive. Some of my favourite movies come from that period, dark, moody, expressionist; movies like Nosferatu and the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.
It’s for some of these reasons and more than I have a particular fondness for Cabaret, the movie made in the early 1970s, which manages to recapture at least a little of the Weimar spirit, though in its decadent phase. Directed by Bob Fosse and based on Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, novels by Christopher Isherwood, and I am a Camera, a play based on these stories by John van Druten, it stars Liza Minnelli as the divinely decadent Sally Bowles, one of my absolute favourite characters, an uninhibited, delightful free spirit. Joel Grey is also really good as the master of ceremonies in the cabaret itself, the place Sally works. There are all sorts of wonderful allusions to the time, including the depiction of characters in the early scenes that may very well have come straight out of the paintings of Otto Dix. I don't normally like musicals, the old Hollywood song and dance routines; but this is different, not only are the songs wonderful, but they are mostly presented within context, in the cabaret itself, not intruding into the unfolding drama outside. There is only one that is not, the Nazi song in the Biergarten, also perfectly within context. The story itself is really about a world tottering on the edge of destruction, with the Nazis, though never centre stage, making an increasingly intrusive appearance, brilliantly caught in the closing scenes, with more and more swastika armbands appearing in the cabaret itself, clearly no longer a place to leave one's troubles outside.
Martin Scorsese is one of the great American film makers with some real classics to his credit; movies like Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas and The Aviator-a personal favourite of mine. So, given these impressive achievements, and given the director's obvious love of the medium, I really had to go and see Shutter Island, a psychological thriller set in Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane, located on a remote and forbidding island, with all the appearance of Alcatraz for the mad.
The movie's long-possibly a tad too long- and full of all sorts of gothic horror and film noir cliches of one kind or other, from plagues of rats to thunder storms. But I loved it, I loved the multi-layered approach, the twists and turns of the plot. Most of all, I loved the re-creation of a particular period in American history, the early 1950s- 1954 to be exact-, when the country was gripped with a collective mood of fear and paranoia; domestic political with-hunts set against a greater terror of nuclear Armageddon.
This collective paranoia harmonises so well with the personal paranoia of US Marshall Teddy Daniels, played by the brilliant Leonardo DiCaprio, who comes to the island in the company of his partner, US Marshall Chuck Aulle, played by Mark Rufallo. There are there supposedly to investigate the disappearance of a patient by the name of Rachel Solando, played by Emily Mortimer, who has been incarcerated in Ashecliffe for drowning her three children.
This is one of those movies almost impossible to review without retelling the story, something I really dislike doing, because I think it's best to hint at the highs- and the lows- without spoiling things for those who really do wish to discover the key for themselves. Suffice to say that there is a huge plot twist here which is only fully revealed as we move towards the end, though, at the risk of being thought a complete smart arse, I worked out the denouement, oh, about half way through. :-))
Let me just say this is a world, the world into which Daniels is propelled, that moves in ever more claustrophobic circles. This is a world where the boundaries between his own personal traumas- which included being present at the liberation of Dachau Concentration Camp- and the more widely-based traumas of Ashecliffe breaks down altogether. This is a world, in short, where it is impossible to tell what is real and what is delusion. Is Daniels deluded; are we deluded; is the world deluded?
There are some great performances, including that of the unfailingly impressive Ben Kingsley as Dr John Crawley, the head psychiatrist, avuncular and slightly sinister by turns, and Max von Sydow, who plays Dr. Jeremiah Naehring, ironic and provocative, a character allowed to carry hints of something even more sinister, of human experimentation and Nazi camps. He certainly fills Daniels with suspicion, as does everyone in this increasingly bizarre island of the damned, where nothing is quite what it seems, where the missing patient proves as illusive as a will-of-the-wisp, where a greater truth seems to be even more elusive, symbolised by the island's disused lighthouse.
Yes, the whole thing is a kind of pastiche of a particular genre movie, a kind of Hitchcock extravaganza. There are even elements of sardonic humour, though I can't be sure if this was intentional on Scorcese's part or not. Shutter Island may not be a great movie by the high standards the director has set himself; but it's a great movie by the standards of those less prolifically gifted. As a mystery thriller I found it hugely enjoyable, and as a piece of Sturm und Drag horror even more so, especially with all those reassuring boom and bash cliches and prop devices. After The Hurt Locker I have no hesitation in saying that this is the best movie I have seen so far this year.
Lewis Carroll’s Alice books were among my favourites when I was growing up. Tim Burton has long been one of my favourite movie directors. I simply love his visual style, his playful gothic imagination, peppered with touches of dark humour, fully demonstrated in movies like Edward Scissorhands- which made me cry -, the early Batman, The Nightmare before Christmas, Sleepy Hollow and the Corpse Bride. Now add to the mixture two of my favourite actors- Johnny Depp, a long-time collaborator with Burton, and Helena Bonham-Carter, his wife, and we have Alice in Wonderland, his new fantasy adventure in 3D. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, quite a lot actually. This is not a bad movie; it’s just not a very good one. Even the 3D effects are paradoxically 2D, both there and somehow not there. I don’t want to downplay it too much; it’s certainly visually lavish at points. Depp is the maddest Hatter one is ever likely to see, and Bonham-Carter the most grotesque looking Red Queen, but the movie itself hops, skips never quite managing to jump.
What it suffers from principally is a rather flat, two-dimensional script, which at the end left me wondering if I was in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth or C. S. Lewis’ Narnia. Perhaps worst of all Burton has been tamed. In a word, he has been Disneyfied. There was even a rather crass piece of product placement: the castle of the White Queen, played by Anne Hathaway, is a reproduction of the Disney logo. Alice herself was played by Mia Wasikowska, not a bad performance, again just not a very good one. The story itself is quickly told. Alice, now nineteen years old, is being manoeuvred into a marriage with one Hamish Ascot, the son of a lord, a kind of caricature of the foppish and chinless English aristocrat that I feel sure plays well to American audiences. In the middle of a garden party, watched by the guests, he proposes. Alice, unable to make up her mind, runs off, in pursuit of a large white Rabbit, which only she can see. At the base of a tree she falls down a large hole. There she is, in Underland, not Wonderland, as she wrongly thought of it all those years before. No matter; for she perceives of both places through the medium of a dream, refusing for a long time even to believe in as many as one impossible thing before breakfast!
This was the part of the movie that I enjoyed the most, the point where I was reintroduced to all of those magical characters that so haunted my imagination when I was no older than the original Alice: besides Depp’s psychedelic Mad Hatter there is the White Rabbit, voiced by Michael Sheen, the March Hare, voiced by Paul Whitehouse, the hookah-smoking Caterpillar, with the voice of Alan Rickman, Stephen Fry, as the grinning and vanishing Cheshire Cat, and Tweedledee and Tweedledum sharing the voice of Matt Lucas. They are the good. As for the bad Crispin Glover is a convincingly sinister Knave of Hearts and Bonham-Carter, with a huge head and tiny body, plays the Red Queen wonderfully as a kind of petulant two-year-old, forever demanding the removal of heads! But once adjusted to the spectacle a certain tedium sets in; the script kicks in as a predictable and tiresome quest story. Wonderland, perhaps in keeping with the mood of our times, has lost its sparkle, becoming a kind of post-apocalyptic world, dominated by the tyrannical Red Queen, in the way that the White Witch dominated Narnia.
The Hatter’s Tea Party is still underway, but in a devastated landscape, with the man himself presiding over a table of ruinous crockery that might have been appreciated by Dickens’ Miss Hathaway! Alice, still refusing to believe, is told that the only way to restore the old order, the rule of the White Queen, is for her to find the Vorpal Sword and kill the monstrous Jabberwocky- voiced by Christopher Lee -, which serves the Red Queen in the fashion of a weapon of mass destruction. If you’ve reached this point I’m sure you have already guessed the outcome: she finds the sword, dons the armour and slays the Jabberwocky, all against a background of a Middle-Earth-style battle between the armies of the Red and White Queens. Not only has good triumphed over bad but Alice has earned the right not to marry the chinless wonder!
What more is there to be said? It’s a predictable movie shaped around an unimaginative script. Though not entirely without magic and a degree of charm, it’s all packaged in a rather bloodless and etiolated form, not what I expect from Burton, not what I expect from Wonderland, some smoke but no mirrors.
There is something else; some places truly are closed forever. Alice, the grown up Alice, was right; the inhabitants of Wonderland are such stuff as dreams are made on. She could never have returned as an adult; Carroll would never have imagined such a thing. His world was a world of eternal childhood. The one perfect moment for me in Alice in Wonderland, all too brief, is when we see a flashback to little Alice in the original Wonderland. Thus it should have remained.
A few weeks ago I saw Mrs Mandela, a TV biopic about the wife of the former president of South Africa, an altogether impressive performance by Sophie Okonedo in the title role.
In some ways Winnie Mandela was the greater victim of the old apartheid state than Nelson, her husband. Although she was only imprisoned for a relatively brief period, she was subject to systematic persecution by the authorities, even being dumped in an area where local people were warned to boycott her, and under constant police surveillance. She had to rise above this, to fight off her persecutors, who did not stop short of attempted murder. She did, but not in the same way as her husband; he might be said to have been ennobled by his experience; she was brutalised and corrupted by hers.
There is one tremendously effective scene in the movie where she is shown interrogating Stompie Moeketsi, the boy who was eventually murdered by her thuggish bodyguard, intercut with scenes of her own earlier brutal interrogation by Major Theunis Swanepoel, played by David Morrissey. We look from one angry face to the other and all difference disappears; sex, race, circumstances; only hatred and anger remain, only venality. Winnie Mandela is still a major figure in the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and I rather think more typical of the political class of the ‘rainbow nation’ than her husband, the closest thing South Africa comes to possessing a secular saint. But the new South Africa is not a country of saints; it’s a country of sinners; the country of people like Winnie Mandela, and the country of people like President Jacob Zuma, who came to England on a state visit last week. The new South Africa is a country where, as Archbishop Tutu once said, the gravy train only stopped long enough for the ANC to get on.
Mr Zuma, the face of the new nation, came to town, not at all flattered by the depiction of him in the British press; not at all flattered by references to his polygamy, his adultery and his talent for fathering children, lots of children. Our attitude, he retorted, is born of cultural imperialism and our colonial past. I do begin to detect slight traces here of a condition that might be termed Mugabeitis. Is South Africa itself, I have to ask, in danger of infection, in danger of the condition spreading south from Harare? Well, let’s have a look.
There is the ANC, to begin with, now far more Winnie than Nelson, and beginning, ever so slightly, to take on the appearance of Mugabe’s Zanu-PF. The youth wing is headed by Julius Malema, a firebrand impatient with Zuma’s pragmatic capitalism, urging a more inclusive ‘African socialist model’. One only has to look to the north to see how that pans out.
Socialism or capitalism, it really makes no difference, because the principal beneficiaries will always be the ANC nomenklatura. Helen Zille, leader of the Democratic Alliance, the official opposition, has accused Zuma and the ANC of corruption and the abuse of power. It’s easy to see why when some seventy million rand has been spent on perks; on grace-and-favour homes for cabinet ministers wives and families, and of course cars and more cars, the kind of gas-guzzling toys African leaders love.
Zille, the conscience of the nation, has faced death threats, been called a “filthy whore” and “an exponent of a new apartheid” for here outspokenness. But look beyond the villas of the ANC cadres, look beyond the houses and the cars, and one might easily conclude that there is no need for a new apartheid, for the simple reason that the old apartheid is still very much in place; that the new bosses look very much like the old bosses, except for the colour of their skin; that oppression and poverty feel like oppression and poverty no matter if the ruler is white or black. In many places people still live in squalid townships where the government fails to deliver on the most basic services, including clean water, sanitation and power. Protesters have been dispersed by riot squads using rubber bullets.
Symptoms of Mugabeitis can also be seen in the countryside. According to official estimates some 2000 white farmers have been murdered in the more remote parts of the country, though unofficially the figure has been estimated as high as 3000. People are talking about a white exodus, easy to see why when some 750,000 out of a total population of four million have left since 1994 and settled abroad. With them have gone many skills essential to a developing country, and here is now a shortage of engineers and medical practitioners.
In his report in The Telegraph commenting on Zuma’s visit, Graham Boynton says that he met one African aid official who told him that “We could well look back on British colonialism as the golden age of Africa.” This reminded him, on hearing Zuma’s complaints, of the Monty Python sketch that begins with “What have the Romans ever done for us?” I had a look on You Tube and it seems to be the most apt – and comic- observation ever on the benefits of imperialism. Yes, the Africans may have cause to regret the passing of the Pax Britannica as Mugabeitis enters into the terminal stage.
I simply had to see The Hurt Locker after its triumph at this year’s Oscars. If it had not been for this I might have missed it altogether, which would have been rather a pity, because its one of the best war movies I think I’ve ever watched.
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, with a screenplay by Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker stars Jeremy Renner as Sergeant William James, Anthony Mackie as Sergeant J. T. Sanborn, and Brain Geraghty as Specialist Owen Eldridge, members of a three-man bomb disposal team in Iraq during the early stages of the insurgency following the occupation of 2003.
One review I read described the movie as ‘anti-war.’ It’s nothing of the sort; it’s just an unremitting and impressive slice of ‘war realism.’ It offers no judgements; it just shows things as they are; it shows an uncompromising cross-section of the realities of Iraq, where the enemy is everywhere and nowhere, where there is no frontline, where it is impossible to tell foes from friends.
There is a bizarre unreality to the whole thing, where the conflict itself almost transforms into a larger movie setting, a movie within a movie, with participants and bystanders, actors and spectators, joined together by the unwritten script. One scene I thought particularly telling was when an IED is being defused by Sergeant James as the other two provide security cover, being watched over by Iraqi civilians, one filming the proceedings, getting ready, as the soldiers say, for his YouTube moment.
James, the team leader, joins after his predecessor is killed. Soon his reckless and unconventional methods unsettle Sanborn and Eldridge, just as his courage impresses his superiors. The performances are all good, Boal’s particularly so, for it’s never quite possible to work out exactly what motivates him. Is he mad, has he been so desensitised that he simply does not care; or is he excited, does war excite him, does the adrenalin rush excite him?
Whatever the answer to these questions it is not just his own life he puts at risk but also those of his colleagues, to the point where they even consider, if half in jest, arranging his ‘accidental’ death. In the end it becomes a race to see if the men will all complete their tour of duty and get back to reality, to normality. In the end we see that for James Iraq is normality.
It is an exciting movie and it’s impossible to watch without feeling the tension, without sharing the adrenalin rush. The whole thing is thoughtful, intelligent and well-paced. I imagine it is the kind of depiction of war, and the conflicting emotions of war, that soldiers will understand. It’s the kind of film that goes a long way to helping those who have never experienced the tensions and the fear of war to understand also. More than that, it’s as a clever a piece of controlled and precise movie direction as I have ever seen.
Is Hollywood running short of ideas, I have to ask? Having recently seen The Wolfman, a remake of an earlier movie by the same name, along comes The Crazies, opening the vaults on George Romero’s 1973 extravaganza. If it looks like a zombie movie, if it feels like a zombie movie and if it sounds like a zombie movie, well, then it is a zombie movie! Yes, we’ve been here before; I’ve been here before.
Is it good; did I enjoy it? Up to a point, yes, I did. Unfortunately I haven’t seen the original so I can make no direct comparison, though I understand that was made on a far leaner budget. But, given the theme, that of loonies on the rampage, there really is only so much one can do with money. It’s a reasonably good story with some nice twists, though there is nothing either new or unexpected. .
Directed by Breck Eisner, The Crazies tells of a small farming town whose water supply has been contaminated by an unknown toxin which has the effect, you guessed it, of turning people crazy, murderously so. In the midst of the mess is Sheriff David Dutton, played by Timothy Olyphant, and his wife, Doctor Judy Dutton, played by Radha Mitchell, are the only two to remain completely sane amongst the neighbour eat neighbour mayhem. I’m not quite sure how, though, unless they refused to touch the local water! Perhaps they only drink the bottled stuff. :-)
It turns out that the toxin is a kind of biological weapon, a virus released by accident when a plane crashed in the nearby lake. But it is so lethally contagious that the military seals off the town, intending, as it turns out, to stop the spread of the infection by exterminating everyone, infected or not.
The Duttons, accompanied by Deputy Sheriff Russell Clank, played by Joe Anderson, who himself starts to get the crazies, attempt an escape through the perimeter erected around the town. Sheriff and wife make it, but the movie concludes on a fairly bleak note. As they approach the city of Cedar Rapids a satellite view of the Earth is shown and the words “initiate contamination protocol”. The whole horror, one surmises, is about to start again, though on a larger scale, with the subliminal message that the real enemy is the state itself; that this is indeed how governments would behave in the face of doomsday.
There are few surprises here but if you like knock-about horror, thrills, spills and gore then this is your movie. There is also a decent amount of black humour, something I particularly enjoy. So, yes, go and see it; just don’t go crazy. :-))
Are you tired of sexy vampires and mindless zombies? Well, don’t despair; the werewolf is back! The Wolfman, directed by Joe Johnston and starring Benico del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Hopkins and Hugo Weaving is a good old-fashioned gothic horror. It looks and feels very much like a tribute movie, a close remake of the 1941 movie classic of the same name starring Lon Chaney Junior.
I quite like tribute movies, attempts to recapture something of the feel of the atmosphere of the original. I liked King Kong, the 2005 remake of the 1933 original. The Wolfman was also quite enjoyable but somehow it seemed to be lacking in something, lacking in any real spark. It plodded along for the most part quite nicely but in an altogether pedestrian fashion.
There are some good performances, particularly that of Sir Anthony Hopkins as Sir John Talbot, and the tension between him and Benico del Toro, playing Lawrence Talbot, his son, works very well at points. But the love story, the growing relationship between Lawrence and Gwen Conliffe, played by Emily Blunt, is weak and unconvincing. More than that, it’s ever so slightly distasteful in that Gwen is supposed to be getting over the gruesome killing of Ben, Lawrence’s brother and her fiancée. It may not have mattered that much but this relationship has a key part to play in the movie’s final resolution.
Although there are some good moments and the werewolf transformations are good, if a little primitive by the standards of movies like The Howling or An American Werewolf in London, the whole thing seems disjointed. I understand there were some serious problems during production and the first director left under a cloud. Well, it shows. Yes, it’s a tribute movie and thus has a rather old fashioned feel to it, but old fashioned very much in the B class: quite enjoyable but instantly forgettable.
When I was growing up there were so many books that I enjoyed, so many authors. I think I’ve read everything by Anne Fine and Roald Dahl, Matilda being a particular favourite. But the novels I liked best of all go back further, novels supposedly for children that I can still read today; novels like The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
If pressed I would have to say that Lewis Carroll was my favourite writer and Alice my favourite character. Wonderland still amazes me, that crazy, topsy-turvy universe that built around a hard frame of logic; a world, surreal before surrealism, which possibly could only have been created a mathematician and an imaginative genius. Carroll was indeed an imaginative genius, the author of some of my all-time favourite quotes;
'But I don’t want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked. 'Oh, you can’t help that,' said the Cat. 'We’re all mad here
Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”
“Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop."
How doth the little crocodile Improve his shining tail, And pour the waters of the Nile On every golden scale!
"'Speak English!' said the Eaglet. 'I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and I don't believe you do either!'"
`Contrariwise,' continued Tweedledee, `if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.'
Well, now that we HAVE seen each other,' said the Unicorn, `if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a bargain?'
And I still know the lyrics of the Walrus and the Carpenter after all this time! The sun was shining on the sea, Shining with all his might: He did his very best to make The billows smooth and bright-- And this was odd, because it was The middle of the night.
The moon was shining sulkily, Because she thought the sun Had got no business to be there After the day was done-- "It's very rude of him," she said, "To come and spoil the fun!"
The sea was wet as wet could be, The sands were dry as dry. You could not see a cloud, because No cloud was in the sky: No birds were flying overhead-- There were no birds to fly.
The Walrus and the Carpenter Were walking close at hand; They wept like anything to see Such quantities of sand: "If this were only cleared away," They said, "it would be grand!"
"If seven maids with seven mops Swept it for half a year. Do you suppose," the Walrus said, "That they could get it clear?" "I doubt it," said the Carpenter, And shed a bitter tear.
"O Oysters, come and walk with us!" The Walrus did beseech. "A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk, Along the briny beach: We cannot do with more than four, To give a hand to each."
The eldest Oyster looked at him, But never a word he said: The eldest Oyster winked his eye, And shook his heavy head-- Meaning to say he did not choose To leave the oyster-bed.
But four young Oysters hurried up, All eager for the treat: Their coats were brushed, their faces washed, Their shoes were clean and neat-- And this was odd, because, you know, They hadn't any feet.
Four other Oysters followed them, And yet another four; And thick and fast they came at last, And more, and more, and more-- All hopping through the frothy waves, And scrambling to the shore.
The Walrus and the Carpenter Walked on a mile or so, And then they rested on a rock Conveniently low: And all the little Oysters stood And waited in a row.
"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax-- Of cabbages--and kings-- And why the sea is boiling hot-- And whether pigs have wings."
"But wait a bit," the Oysters cried, "Before we have our chat; For some of us are out of breath, And all of us are fat!" "No hurry!" said the Carpenter. They thanked him much for that.
"A loaf of bread," the Walrus said, "Is what we chiefly need: Pepper and vinegar besides Are very good indeed-- Now if you're ready, Oysters dear, We can begin to feed."
"But not on us!" the Oysters cried, Turning a little blue. "After such kindness, that would be A dismal thing to do!" "The night is fine," the Walrus said. "Do you admire the view?
"It was so kind of you to come! And you are very nice!" The Carpenter said nothing but "Cut us another slice: I wish you were not quite so deaf-- I've had to ask you twice!"
"It seems a shame," the Walrus said, "To play them such a trick, After we've brought them out so far, And made them trot so quick!" The Carpenter said nothing but "The butter's spread too thick!"
"I weep for you," the Walrus said: "I deeply sympathize." With sobs and tears he sorted out Those of the largest size, Holding his pocket-handkerchief Before his streaming eyes.
"O Oysters," said the Carpenter, "You've had a pleasant run! Shall we be trotting home again?' But answer came there none-- And this was scarcely odd, because They'd eaten every one.
Tim Burton’s new movie Alice in Wonderland premiers here on Friday. I’m so looking forward to it not just because Alice is such a favourite but because I think he is a super director, one with a playful gothic imagination; an imagination just like my own. :-)
The Last Station, directed by Michael Hoffman, is a period drama telling of the final stages in the life of Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace. Starring Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy and Helen Mirren as Countess Sofya Andreyevna, his wife, and based on the biographical novel of the same name by Jay Parini, the movie itself is a kind of war and peace in the context of a marriage
There are some terrific performances. Plummer is utterly convincing as Tolstoy, loving and yet rigid in principle, but Dame Helen really steals the show as Countess Sofya. If anything her performance is at points a little overripe, and I’ve never before seen her hamming it up with such exuberance. But don’t let that put you off; there is a comic intensity to her Countess Sofya, but there is also an underlying vulnerability; a sadness over a loss of power and influence which she also brings to the fore.
I have to say that while I admire Tolstoy so much as a writer - second only to Dostoevsky in the pantheon of Russian literature in my estimation - I’m far less keen on Tolstoy the man, or the man he became in the final stages of his life. Ghandi before Ghandi, he was an advocate of pacifism, celibacy, neo-anarchism and vegetarianism, while at the same time full of self-will and egoism; a man who was prepared to put vacuous abstractions before living people; a man who was prepared to preach but not always practice. He is the original bleeding heart and limousine liberal, as one review I read rightly says
My sympathies in the movie- and in life- were all with Countess Sofya. She was Tolstoy’s amanuensis and muse. Only she could decipher his handwriting. She copied War and Peace no fewer than six times. More than that, she also made suggestions along the way on the book’s characters, on what was credible and what was not. So she had as much right to the book, it might be thought, as her husband.
Tolstoy thinks otherwise. He is proposing to give away the copyright to all mankind in the shape of the Tolstoy Foundation, headed by Vladimir Chertkov, played by Paul Giamatti, Sofya Andrevena’s principal opponent. The Countess, you see, is a material girl living in an idealist world!
It’s this mix, this tug of love and legacy, comes Valentin Bulgakov, a credible performance by James McAvoy, a naïve and doe-eyed idealist. Employed by Chertkov essentially as a secretary for the author and as a spy against the scheming Countess, he is able to watch the war of the Tolstoys at first hand.
Living in a nearby Tolstoyan commune, dedicated to bloodless ideals, he matures under the guidance, and the love, of Masha, played by Kerry Condon, a free-spirit in every sense. I could not quite work out what she was doing among the self-deniers, the celibates and the abstainers - oh, the looks of disapproval she incurred when doing something as innocent as killing a troublesome mosquito! Anyway, with her advent the movie then takes the shape of a double love story; of Tolstoy and the secretary; of first love and last love; of young lust and old empathy, one nicely played off against the other. Ah, yes, the Countess does love the man; she just hates those like Chertkov, who would turn him into an icon, a prophet and an ideal. She did not marry Jesus; she married Lev Tolstoy. In the end Tolstoy, unable to live in the cross-fire, and surrendering real life for chimerical ideals, leaves home, going by train and ending in Astapovo, his last station, where he dies. I’m delighted to say that the Countess, and not Chertkov, got the copyright in the end, awarded to her by the Russian Senate in 1914, four years after her husband’s death.
I confess I thought the script a little thin at points, never really getting below the surface. But even so it bubbles along quite nicely. The cinematography is gorgeous, the rural settings beautiful, a touch of life in the old Russia, the Russia of counts and peasants, of authors and icons, destroyed for ever by the communists.
Weimar Germany ranks high among my favourite periods in all of history, a time of innovation and excitement; a great, divinely decadent theatre of experiences on which the Nazis closed the curtain forever. Cabaret is one of my favourite movies and I’ve read Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, the Christopher Isherwood novels upon which it was based. Oh, how I would love to have been Sally Bowles! It’s lovely to know that one of the cinematic epics of the age, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, a silent thriller made in 1927, the great classic of expressionist film-making, returned home last week in a director’s cut. A gala screening was held in Berlin’s Friedrichstadtpalast, a revue theatre that recalls classic 1930s-style cabaret. Now restored to a full version unseen in over eighty years it was the centre-point of this year’s Berlin Film Festival.
Metropolis tells the story of a future dystopia, set in the year 2000, (our past; Lang’s future!) where a privileged ruling elite enjoy a pampered life all built upon the labour of slaves living in a subterranean world. The most expensive film of its time, it was both a commercial and a critical failure. H. G. Wells, never much of a prophet, said that it gave “almost every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude and muddlement about mechanical progress…served up in a sauce of sentimentality that is all its own.”
As so often in these cases the movie had an afterlife of growing influence, a later inspiration to such film-makers as George Lucas and Ridley Scott. But at the time it was butchered by Paramount for the American market, with key scenes thought to be lost forever, until Fernando Martin Pena, an Argentinean film historian, managed to track down a pre-Paramount version in a Buenos Aires film archive in 2008. I hope to be able to see it at an early stage.
The title I have given this says it all: The Book of Eli is The Road by any other name. Here we are once again in a post-apocalyptic world; here we are in another bleak landscape populated by cannibals and other oddities, as the one ‘just man’ makes another pointless journey. Quite frankly I for one have had enough of this unremittingly bleak vision, entertainment for the age of global warming. But while The Road at least attempted to make a novel point in a novel way The Book of Eli is both predictable and unbelievably obvious.
Once again I’m shooting ahead. The Book of Eli is a movie directed by the Hughes brothers, staring Denzel Washington as Eli, the good, and Gary Oldman as Carnegie, who manages an effective combination of the bad and the ugly.
The good, the bad and the ugly may give you a clue. What we have here is a post-apocalyptic western with overtones of Mad Max. Eli is the man with no name for the modern age, who manages an air of justice while cutting down people in a rapid and wholesale manner.
But that’s not Eli’s secret, no; his secret is a book, ‘the Book’, which he is carrying. Carnegie has a secret too; he is looking for ‘the Book’; his illiterate henchmen are scouring the land looking for ‘the Book’ on his behalf, throwing all sorts of rubbish at his feet, including the Da Vinci Code! Why, is he looking for ‘the Book’; does it contain magic spells; is it a source of power, a plumber’s manual, perhaps? Well, it depends on your point of view, but ‘the Book’ turns out to be the Bible, the last copy left in this desolate world. Now here we enter the territory of Indian Jones, of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where a holy object simply invests power on its possessor, no matter the character and intentions of the said possessor!
This is a silly, rambling, portentous movie with a more than usually unbelievable plot. The only thing that kept me watching, the only thing that kept me in the theatre, was the forlorn hope that if must get better - surely it must?-, that and the performance of Denzel Washington, who never fails to impress, no matter how bad the script. And it is bad, as bad as they get. I just found the messianic and religious overtones repellent. If there was a message it was one that I did not warm to, could not warm to.
In the end Carnegie gets a hold of ‘the Book’. He will use it to build up a following, to build up a new state based on the Word, his Word. Ah, but he can’t, you see, and I’m not going to tell you why he can’t. Go and see for yourself. If I can sit through this tripe so can you. :-))
Yes, Carnegie gets ‘the Book’ while Eli, mortally wounded, goes further west in the company of a girl named Solaris, played by Mila Kunis, his new disciple. They make it to a civilized and literate community based on Alcatraz, of all places. Here Eli dictates the contents of ‘the Book’, which he has memorised, to Lombardi, a scribe played by Malcolm McDowell, looking as old as Methuselah. Now another secret is revealed about Eli, which I also refuse to divulge. But the biggest secret has to be what kept him alive long enough to dictate the whole Bible before shuffling off this mortal coil. The power of the Word, perhaps?
If you like rubbish served in a wholly egregious, self-righteous and preachy fashion this is your movie; it’s not mine. I’m sure it will be a big hit with the evangelicals, though. :-)
Amelia Earhart really is one of my icons, a formidable role model. She broke so many boundaries, so many records, always striving to move beyond, never to rest. Her sudden and tragic disappearance in July 1937 on a round the world trip has lent an enduring fascination to her story. It’s almost as if she had been transfigured, from a mortal to an immortal aviatrix. She is and will remain forever the vagabond of the air, to use her own words. I saw Amelia recently, the biopic with Hilary Swank in the title role. The first thing that struck me was the uncanny resemblance between Swank and Amelia, and I don’t just mean the hairstyle! It’s almost as if she was born to play this part.
The reviews this movie has received, the assessment of Swank’s performance, have been less than generous to say the very least. I could not care less what the critics think; I loved this movie, and I thought Swank was superlative in the role of the tragic heroine. I think she captured not just the general deportment and the general attitude of Earhart but something more, something of her spirit. The other performances I would like to highlight are Richard Gere as George P Putnam, the publishing tycoon and Amelia’s eventual husband, and Christopher Eccleston as Fred Noonan, the navigator also lost with Amelia on the final flight of her Lockheed Electra.
I love bio movies and this one really carried me along. I now feel sufficiently inspired that I’m considering taking flying lessons; yes, indeed I am. :-)
The Craft, directed by Andrew Fleming, starring Robin Tunney, Fairuza Balk, Neve Campbell and Rachel True as a group of teenage witches, is one of my all-time favourite movies. I first saw it when I was about twelve and have watched it several times since. I was already interested in witchcraft at that stage of my life – as well as full of my own vengeful teenage thoughts! – but the movie gave direction and focus to my thinking; it began to give it a coherent shape, if you like.
It’s not a great movie by any means but the message, that of self-empowerment, excited me, made me begin to look into witchcraft as a serious magical practice. Yes, I too, was carried along by the fashion, as the movie achieved a kind of cult-status among other girls of my age; but as most of them dropped away I remained, absorbed and as preoccupied as ever.
It’s the kind of movie that tends to unsettle tree-hugging Wiccans, who see it as ‘untrue’ to witchcraft, as if they alone understood what witchcraft was or should be. There is no real message here; it’s simple entertainment. Or if there is a massage it centres on the dangers of misusing magick and on the dangers of hubris.
The girls in the coven are shown using witchcraft for healing purposes and protection but they also use it to get back at enemies in a way that I personally found highly gratifying. In the end the coven is destroyed when Nancy, wonderfully played by Fairuza Balk, assumes too much power to herself, forcing Sarah, the ‘good’ witch, played by Robin Tunney, to leave. The break-up was the part that upset me most. I so wanted them to stay together, to magnify their power still further. Did I identify with any of the girls? I suppose Fleming’s intention was to get us all to identify with Sarah, both good and powerful, who only really becomes a witch because of, well, boyfriend troubles, but it was Nancy who excited me most, dark, dangerous and gothic Nancy. As far as I am concerned power is just that, power. It is neither good nor bad; it’s thrilling, exciting and transforming.
Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble. :-)
We live in an age of dread, the age of the coming apocalypse. We live in the age of global warming, of the banking crisis, of the coming end to the Mayan calendar, of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister and Barak Obama as President. :-))
At least some of these fears are reflected in popular culture, in the growing popularity of chaos and apocalypse movies. The zombie genre thrives. The modish obsession with the supposed Mayan end of days was reflected in the madly exuberant 2012, which I personally found overstated to the point of self-parody.
Now we have The Road, a bleak post-apocalypse movie set in a dying world. It’s a dog eat dog world; well, actually, no, it’s a human eat human world, because in the absence of agriculture, wild animals and even birds, human flesh is the only obvious source of protein. Not for everyone, though: the ‘bad guys’ gather in gangs and hunt down other people for sustenance. And the ‘good guys, what do they eat? I’m actually not sure other than scraps gained from some rather dubious foraging, of things in tins that must be well past their use-by date!
I’m getting ahead of myself. Directed by John Hillcoat and based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name, The Road focuses on the ‘journey south’ of an unnamed father, played by Viggo Mortensen, and his son, played by Kodi Smit-MacPhee, through a devastated landscape and ruined settlements all against a background of unremittingly grey weather. The only real colour or sunlight is supplied by the occasional dream-like flashbacks to the pre-apocalyptic world. Just why they are on a ‘journey south’ I’m not exactly sure because the world is no better there than it was ‘in the north.’
This is a morality tale of a kind, a journey of self-discovery, an attempt to represent standards of goodness in a world where good and bad, morality of any kind, really has no meaning at all. But if the Man represents ‘good’ the Boy represents ‘do-gooder’; and my, oh, my, how he irritates, insisting on sharing their meagre food supply with every indigent they meet on the way, including one who for a time robs them of all they have. There were points, I have to confess, that I actively wanted the tiresome sprog to fall into the hands of the roving cannibals!
There is no real rapport between the two actors, no real chemistry. There is a story of a kind here but it is thin, as thin as the inhabitants of this bleak world. In the end the Man dies, of tuberculosis, I think, leaving the boy alone on a barren coastline after the ‘journey south.’
Now, while the message here, the bleak and unremitting message, is far from the usual Hollywood fare the movie has the usual unbelievable Hollywood ending! After all how could one possibly close with the Boy facing certain death, from starvation, from exposure, or being killed by cannibals? No, instead he is suddenly ‘gifted’ a new family, coming from goodness knows where. There they are: dad and mom and brother and sister. There is even a dog. If the humans have barely enough to eat one has to wonder where on the barren earth the dog’s food supply comes from!
So, that’s it; a hair-shirt movie for the age of trepidation. It’s worthy, it’s ponderous and it’s ultimately contrived and rather pointless; the perfect ‘feel bad’ movie.
It was sad to learn of the death of the actor Edward Woodward. I never knew his TV work, the work which won him his Golden Globe. For me he will always be Sergeant Neil Howie, the virginal Scottish policeman from The Wicker Man, the 1973 horror classic directed by Robin Hardie, one of my all-time favourite movies.
It’s a movie full of pagan magic and mystery, a wonderful evocative fantasy of ritual and song. Howie, who comes in search of a missing girl, is increasingly horrified by the practices he witnesses, a challenge to his conventional views on religion and morality. But the real horror, the meaning of his presence on Summerisle, is revealed only at the very end. Woodward was brilliant in the part, the perfect counterpart to the equally brilliant Christopher Lee as Lord Summerisle.
Woodward was later to say that he was enormously proud of his role in the movie. He had every right to be proud, for he truly was, in the most complete sense, king for a day.
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