A Mike Leigh experience

I saw Mr Turner on Friday and enjoyed it very much. As ever, Mike Leigh gives you something to chew on. It's partly an examination of genius and how a fat grunting man could be one of the few world class painters that Britain ever produced and partly a celebration of the beauty and power of the natural world. I particularly enjoyed Turner's amusement at seeing work by the pre-Raphaelites for the first time.

The whole trip felt like an improvisation exercise with a film in the middle. Waiting on the stairs to go into the busy cinema, I got caught in the crossfire of some braying middle class people and their too-loud talk of holidays, retirement and what terrific culture vultures they were.  At the end of the film, one of the womem sitting along from me told everybody how overlong, tedious and pointless she thought the film was. I thought I had let the crowd clear before leaving, but again got stuck on the stairs. And who was behind me but my mouthy friends? I managed to shut out the matter of their discussion.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

I've still not been to the pictures much recently, but I did make an effort to see this, as I have a long and happy relationship with John Le Carre's work.

Basically: it's not at all bad, but falls down in some important ways. Firstly, I like the general look of the film: it's all a bit seedy and understated and the colours are unsaturated browns and greens. This does sometimes veer into a 70s pastiche perhaps (it looks more of its decade than the Alec Guinness version which was made in 1979). I also liked the portrayal of the Circus itself. Not sure where that huge building is that they filmed in but it has a great sense of place, of claustrophobia, and suspicion. It's a lot less cosy and more industrial than the cream-painted corridors in the old BBC version. There is more made of people listening in to phone calls, which sets the right atmosphere. The scene where Guillam has to steal a file from the library, and then gets hauled in front of the senior guys and roasted is very good. There are many other nice details, including the decision to make Percy Alleline Scottish (as he should be).

I feel one big error is the character of Ricky Tarr, who kicks the whole plot off. Ricky is a cocky little bastard who you wouldn't turn your back on, and was brilliantly played by Hywel Bennett in the 1979 version. The version here is all dewy-eyed sensitive boy who seems to have actually fallen for Irina the Russian trade delegate. As if Ricky would care, with all his other conquests.

A brief scene suggests to us that Peter Guillam is gay, which seems a pointless change to the book, in which we learn a bit about the nice female flautist he is currently seeing.

Many of Le Carre's lovely minor characters are gone: there is no Fawn, no Sam Collins (though Jerry Westerby seems to have inexplicably taken on some bits of his role), no Max ("I drive for you, shoot for you, what the hell?"). It must be hard compressing a complex novel like this into two hours of screen time, so maybe some loss is inevitable, but you can't help mourning your favourites.

And it's another film which doesn't know how to end: I was looking forward to the moment of unmasking, which is not actually shown, and to Colin Firth doing his big final number about why he did it, which is skated over very rapidly. And the end follows almost immediately. I think one of the last bits is meant to show Ann coming back to George, but I'm not sure.

Basically still worthy of your time, I think.

Meek's cutoff

Last night I managed to go and see my first film at the cinema in a long time. I used to be a fairly regular film-a-week man, but I'm struggling to think of something that I've seen since the New Year, and I'm not sure what's changed.

Still, I managed to see Meek's Cutoff, which is best described as a Western that isn't. Just as well really, as I've never much liked Westerns. The film concerns three families on the Oregon trail who hire their own guide and split off from the main train. The trouble is, the guide doesn't seem to know where he is. I liked the film's studied avoidance of everything that you might expect in such a work. There is no stirring music, and the landscapes are shot at a low angle, making things feel oddly claustrophobic for a film set entirely out of doors. If the screen briefly looks as pretty as a John Ford Western, nobody on screen is bothered, because they have been walking behind the wagon all day and are covered in dust. The film gives the women a lot of screen time, often observing the main action from their point of view. They rise before dawn to light fires and cook breakfast. They watch in a group from beneath their bonnets as the men folk debate what to do next. And one shows herself very handy with a flintlock. (Military history anoraks will enjoy the scene where she fires a shot, goes through the laborious process of reloading, and fires again. )

Cutoff suffers from a couple of the irritating ticks of current films: the dialogue is often mumbled and unclear, and the ending is sudden and unconclusive. But well worth your time, I would say.

Why not?

I'm quite a fan of RSS feeds these days. They are great for getting rid of some of the more "creative" (i.e. hideous and useless) features of web pages. I was just looking at some cinema sites to see what's on and none of them have an RRS feed for this. It seems such an obvious thing to do.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I don't normally do this, mind, but last night I went to see a film based on a comic book. The fact that the work in question is Watchmen made the decison much easier. It's pretty good. Zac Snyder (he of the visually interesting but silly 300) has put in a good effort and has managed to translate a lot of the long and complex original to the screen. In fact, over-faithfulness may be the main failing here. Many shots follow the original virtually frame by frame, which may please obsessive fan boys, but one suspects it may not get to the nub of what the whole piece is about. There is a lot to like though, including a brilliant opening montage sequence which covers forty or so years of alternative history, Kennedy assassination, moon landing and all. A small blow for male nudity on screen is struck by the inclusion of Dr Manhattan's cock (blue and glowing, of course). Perhaps inevitably, there are too many Hollywood conventions, including slow motion fight sequences, which tend to glamourise the protagonists too much. They are meant to be morally ambiguous misfits and losers, remember?

But don't listen to me. Check out what young Jimmy Critic says!

An obsession for the mentally deranged

I was very much hoping that NordWand would be good. The mountain film is a shy and rarely-met-with creature: you just don't get that many. So there is an extra intensity of hope. After waiting all that time since Touching the Void, would I be let down? Thankfully I was not.

The film tells the story of an attempt on the North Face of the Eiger in July 1936. The feeling of climbing is conveyed very well, with lots of detail of the (to today's eyes) crappy equipment of the time. Ropes are of hemp; clothing is woollen and dull in colour; ice axes are long and wooden. Natural materials ranged against ice and rock, I suppose.

The film starts in a fairly pedestrian manner, but the device of the ascent builds up interest, and the final third is stunning, tragic, fascinating, and oddly beautiful. One small criticism: I think the film misses the opportunity to show the danger from falling rocks as the face warms up.

Ridley can remember it for you

I was reflecting recently on my never actually liking any books by Philip K. Dick very much. He is tremendously popular, and this in itself is a disincentive (I'm a contrary soul). Let's see, I've read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, of course, and The Man in the High Castle. Both books that are better talked about than read, and whose contents I can barely recall - never a sign of high quality fiction. But after reading another glowing account of the man's oeuvre, I got Valis out of the library to see if I could settle the matter. Don't try this at home, folks. It's unreadable. No doubt some will claim that the confusing jumble of philosophical ramblings is a touching and witty account of a descent into mental illness (or something), but I don't buy it. It's drug-addled tosh, and I think we all know it. Dick's reputation has been falsely raised by the successful films that some of his books have become. But face it people, Bladerunner works because Ridley Scott took a promising idea and realised it more fully than PKD ever could have.

Gay Rumsfeldian surrealism

That's the opinion of one of Prospect's reviewers about 300. A neat summary, indeed.

The writer points out that basing a film on a graphic novel is to distance the work rather too much from reality. I wonder if this is why--other than some eye candy--I didn't much like Sin City either.

A poor effort

My reactions to Sunshine went through several phases. Firstly: Danny Boyle has made another film, isn't that great? Then I read some reviews and they were very mixed. I formed an opinion that I would hate it, as it was based on some pseudo-scientific bullshit. In the event, I didn't mind the bad science much, but it was a poor film. I couldn't get over how badly told the story was, with lots of trendy action shots that were so blurry you couldn't see what had happened. And here's a tip: if you set your film in an unfamiliar environment, try to put in some establishing shots that explain where the different scenes of the action are, rather than just confusing the hell out of the viewers. And yes, I'm thinking of that long model shot in 2001 that perfectly sets up the situation on the Discovery. There are lots of references to Alien, 2001, and Solaris, but nothing emerges that isn't done better in one of those films.

Some nice visual effects, but not enough to save the day.

Make sure you don't confuse this with the rather fine film of the same name that I discussed a wee while back.

Come and get them!

I rather enjoyed 300 last night. Some fantastic images, and some ridiculous distorted history. One aspect that I see some others have picked up on is the portrayal of Xerces the drag queen with his painted eyebrows and lots of bling. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but we do end up with Thermopylae being seen as a clash of two gay stereotypes. Given the film's avoidance of some of the other habits of Spartans, this seemed odd.

The Spartans were a bunch of asocial nutters who happened to do something useful in 480BC. This could have made an interesting film. Trying to cast them as saviours of freedom is a bit of a sick joke. The War Nerd says it better though.

Should be better known

Re-viewed the rather fine film Sunshine last night, having found it DVDic form in Fopp the other day. I had a lot of trouble remembering when I saw it first and eventually decided it must have been at the Ipswich Film Theatre. Nearly three hours of Hungarian history doesn't sound too interesting, but the nice conceit of having Ralph Fiennes play three members of the same family across fifty years helps tie things up nicely. More-or-less the same man gets three chances under empire, fascism and communism. None of the incarnations seems very happy, but that's twentieth century history for you.

HMQ

Saw the Queen last night. The film by Steven Frears, that is. It's enormously enjoyable, with well-observed performances from Helen Mirren and others. I wonder what Michael Sheen will do when he stops looking like a young Tony Blair? But he seems well supplied with other parts.

My own experience of Diana's death was quite odd. I was on holiday in Poland. At breakfast, Mrs Slawinska tried to explain the situation to myself and two other Brits. There was the word "Paris", the word "Diana", then she crossed herself. We weren't sure what to make of this, but managed to get an English language paper later, which confirmed what had happened. I missed all the "show us you care" stories in the press and flew back the day before the funeral, getting to Ipswich quite late at night. I was thus rather unprepared for the frenzy that greeted me next morning as I searched, hungrily for breakfast. Everything was closed, and a group of people were watching a big screen in the middle of town. Sometime after midday, I got fed.

So I'm afraid I can't quite forgive her for leaving me hungry that morning. But go and see the film, because its great.

Children of men

I had great hopes of this film, with its strong story from P.D. James and its equally strong cast. For once, I wasn't disappointed; this is a very good apocalypse film, albeit one in slow motion. The premise is that humanity loses its fertility, so that we all die out from the bottom of the age pyramid up, at one year per year. About twenty years on, our man Clive Owen gets dragged into some radical group run by his ex-girlfriend (the lovely Julianne Moore), and finds himself smuggling a pregnant girl through a Southern England that is more like Bosnia on a bad day. The tone is unremittingly dark. If the film poses the question "How would humanity react to this moral dilemma?", the answer is; badly. Clearly nobody cares any more. It's the sort of film Spielberg would make rather badly, but then there are no cute kids for him to languish over.

Da Vinci bollocks

I was in the mood for a film last night, but there was a lack of anything interesting to watch. So it was you-know-what, which I expected to be rubbish. And it was. My excuse to myself was that I enjoyed the locations, which is more or less true. I did some picture spotting during the scenes in the Louvre (did you catch Oath of the Horatii flitting past?). The London bits around Westminster Abbey were also well known to me (though our Tom appears not to need to pay to get in). And the Rosslyn chapel is familiar too, being just down the road a bit. Anorak that I am, I also recognized the bit of ruin that Tom and Audrey are standing in front of towards the end while mouthing some bland nonsense.

So, pretty locations then. Apart from a nice turn by Ian McKellern, there's no other reason to see it.

Not so beautiful

After reading Sylvia Nazar's A Beautiful Mind recently, I thought it would be good to catch up with the film version, which I missed at the cinema.

Oh dear. The film never really gets beneath the skin of its subject. There is no very convincing account of how brilliant he is or why it's important when he discovers something new in game theory, so that you don't know why anybody should care when he goes mad, or understand why he should get a Nobel prize. This is a pity, because I found the background about Princeton in that era to be one of the most interesting aspects of the book. Princeton in the late 40s was like Paris for artists in 1900. I was rather hoping the film might show the occasion when Nash met Einstein, the result being "You should learn more physics, young man". Somewhat peripheral perhaps, but it would have been a scene that told us a lot about the brashness of Nash, the milieu in which he found himself, and the fact that he was treated seriously.

I suppose the main idea of the film was to show Nash's delusions as real, and I think this aspect works somewhat better than the rest. Ultimately though, it's an excuse to insert some bits of a crappy espionage thriller into a film about a mathematician's struggle with mental illness. It distracts from the main point.

The ending is particularly unsatisfactory. The implication is that he just hung about the library being eccentric but basically likeable until one day he was offered the Nobel prize. In fact, his behaviour was probably a good deal more odd and hard to deal with, and he actually got better after about 1990-a controvertial statement, since you aren't supposed to recover from schizophrenia. The fact that his son also had schizophrenia was excised, as was his divorce from Alicia, and his other illegitimate child.

I wonder what the Mike Leigh version would have been like?

Transamerica

I very much enjoyed Transamerica last night. Felicity Huffman's portrayal of a transsexual is very well observed, and assisted, I imagine, by some very skilled make-up and costume. That bloke-trying-slightly-too-hard-to-look-feminine look is captured expertly. I particularly liked the drag queen lipstick and over-abundance of pink. So is it just a light veneer covering a very formulaic road movie? Perhaps, but, for me, the changing American landscape did add something. It's all to easy for us to forget the size of that continent and driving across it probably would change your outlook of a few things. I suspect the film exagerates how quickly you could do this (we get to Texas with suspicious speed), but there is some plot to get on with, and the deadline of Bree's approaching surgery means that the journey has to proceed briskly. Anyway, a nicely judged piece that doesn't try to force a message. And that's good.

Solaris

Watched Solaris on DVD a few nights ago. That's the recent Soderberg version, not the very long Tarkovsky one. Anyway, it came up very well on re-viewing. As on my first encounter, I found the music captivating and somewhat hypnotic. Maybe I should locate the soundtrack album. And Natasha Whatsit is a bit tasty.

Incidentally, I see this blog now has at least 2 readers.

Film

Saw Capote last night and liked it a lot. It's always a pleasure when a film appears from the publicity to have a certain message, but on viewing turns out to have rather more to it. To put it another way: it's good when trailers don't spoil films. Thus, I thought that Truman Capote's researches into a nasty murder in Kansas would simply gain him an insight into his own background and how he could have turned out. However, what gradually swims into focus is that Capote's book can only exist because of the deaths of the victims, and that it can only be finished with the death of the murderers. Since stays of execution are granted, this takes about five years, and leads to an excellent bit of cinema. A very fine performances too from Mr Hoffman, and some lovely shots of bleak midwestern landscapes.

Edward Scissorhands

Am just back from seeing Matthew Bourne's production of this at the Festival Theatre. Dance is not exactly a performing art that I follow, but you have to make some exceptions. I thought the show was excellent, with music nicely adapted from the film. The ensemble pieces had a lot of energy and humour, and the sets and staging were very impressive.

An interestingly mixed audience too. Initially the theatre seemed to be full of school parties, but on further study there were plenty of those older ladies that you always seem to find in theatres, plus some Goth presence. My neighbour sported leather trousers and a velvet frock coat. I felt underdressed.

Match Point

I saw this on Saturday night and wasn't going to post anything, but the number of reviews claiming it to be a masterpiece, leads me to state that it's not. It is very good, with some nice performances from a mainly British cast (how odd to see Penelope Wilton and John Fortune in a Woody Allen film), but for me it never gets much better than that. The ball-hitting-the-net motif is very nicely done and the final plot twist is effective, but there are a few glitches from the famous Manhattanite: I've never seen snow in London the likes of that seen in one scene (too much Dickens, perhaps); and the Royal Opera House seems unable to afford an orchestra (piano only).

And I am embarrassed how long it took me to see the Crime and Punishment reference.

Still, keep making the films, Woody.