LOST LIVES - BFI London Film Festival 2019

Dermot Lavery and Michael Hewitt have, in LOST LIVES, created a film of such simplicity but no less power for that. It is based on a book crafted by a handful of journalists listing all the lives lost in the Northern Ireland Troubles, whether from the IRA, the Unionists or journalists and bystanders caught in the crossfire.  Each entry lists who that person was, how they died, and how it affected their loved ones.  In this film, Lavery and Hewitt select a representative sample of lives and have famous actors from either side of that contentious border read out those tragic stories.  The actors include Kenneth Branagh, Ciaran Hinds, Liam Neeson, Stephen Rea and James Nesbitt.    These narrations are set against archive footage of the people who were killed, newsreel footage, interviews with their family from the time - a collage effect that essays quickly the impact that death had on their family and community.  The cumulative impact is intense, provocative, and so much more devastating when we realise that lives are continuing to be lost into 2019. It focuses the mind, and personalises the horror.  This is a beautifully curated, vital, and important film - especially at the current political juncture. 

LOST LIVES has a running time of 93 minutes. It does not yet have a commercial release date.

THE RIVER QUEEN - costume epic catatastrophe

THE RIVER QUEEN wants to be a lavish historic adventure. It wants to have the mesmerising visuals, lyrical beautiy and epic scope of a Terrence Mallick flick. It wants to tell us something profound about conflicting loyalties and the search for identity. Director Vincent Ward and DP Alun Bollinger certainly succeed in shooting some wonderful footage of New Zealand, and the production designers certainly envelope the frontier garrisons and interior villages of the nineteenth century in sufficient mist and grime. Even Kiefer Sutherland convinces with a broad Irish accent as a soldier working for the British. He complements a cast rich with talent - not least Stephen Rea as an ex-pat surgeon and Samantha Morton as his daughter Sarah.

THE RIVER QUEEN is fundamentally Sarah's story. She throws off convention as one might take off a coat. She falls for a Maori man and bears him a child, who is then abducted by his grandfather. In love with a Maori, mother to a Maori son, but serving the British despite herself being an oppressed Irishwoman, Sarah must struggle with her own identity and loyalties. Moreover, her son has been raised a Maori and sees no need to return "upstream".

This could have been a great picture, but the movie is incoherent. The editing is jarring, the story meanders and character motivations are unclear. This is particularly true of Sarah. She seems to flit between her Maori lover (Cliff Curtis) and Kiefer Sutherland's Irish captain with little reason.

Presumably someone decided to throw a heavy layer of voice-over onto the movie to give the audience a hope of keeping up. Sadly, the narration doesn't help our understanding but adds to the frustration and irritation. The whole thing is basically a straight-to-DVD write-off. Presumably the only reason it's even getting a UK release it to cash in Samantha Morton's domestic popularity and Kiefer Sutherland's residual popularity for 24. Certainly, the marketing campaign is very misleading. Fans of 24 should be aware that he has only a small role.

THE RIVER QUEEN played Toronto back in 2005. It was released in New Zealand and Australia in 2006 and in Kuwait and Spain in 2007. It is currently on release in the UK.

SIXTY SIX - definitely one for the domestic market

Should you watch the new British film, SIXTY SIX? Take a look at the picture on the right: does it give you a shiver of excitement? If so, buy your ticket and take a hankie with you. If not, stay well away. For SIXTY SIX is a movie that cashes in heavily on English nostalgia for the great day in 1966 when we won the World Cup. Full of fantastic period costumes, hairstyles and set design - pumped up with a sound-track of pop hits - and interspersed with heart-lifting footage of England's progress to glory - I am not ashamed to say that I actually had tears in my eyes in the final frames when we see the heroic team bounding up the stairs to pick up the trophy from Her Maj.

In fairness, the movie is a brilliantly acted drama, with a little humour, a lot of pathos and not a small dollop of schmaltz. A geeky kid called Bernie Rubens is obsessing over his Bar Mitzvah. Finally, he'll have a day when he's the centre of attention. But he's not going to get the big day he dreamed of thanks to his family's financial difficulties and the fact that it coincides with the World Cup final. It's a brilliantly observed drama - evidently a semi-autobiography from director Paul Weiland. The movie hangs on three lovely, subtle performances from young Gregg Sulkin as Bernie Rubens, Eddie Marsan as his father and Helena Bonham Carter as his mother. And it is indicative of the depth of talent in the cast that actors like Catherine Tate (bothered?!) and Stephen Rea are "wasted" on essentially cameo roles.

Still, for all the universally relevant stuff about how growing up means loving your parents despite their flaws, I am not sure how a non-English audience would react to this movie, let alone an audience of, say, Scots. Indeed, the movie cheekily acknowledges this fact by having a miserable Scottish policeman as a fleeting baddie! This is an unashamedly sentimental film and I suspect that to get 100 per cent out of it you have to be sentimental about 1966. The only bizarre thing, then, is that the producers didn't try to get the movie into English cinemas before this summer's World Cup finals when they would have undoubtedly cashed in.....

SIXTY SIX is on release in the UK and opens in Australia on March 1st 2007.

V for VERY SILLY but still some good whistles and bangs

Reactions to V for VENDETTA seem poles apart: in general, the respected critics hated it but movie-goers are loving it. I guess I fall somewhere between the two poles. My first reaction was huge disappointment. In an Orwellian future, the UK is controlled by a fascist government, headed up a Big Brother-like Chancellor played by the marvellous British actor John Hurt.* Hugo Weaving plays "V", a terrorist who blows up Government buildings. V saves a young girl called Evey, played by Natalie Portman, (the stripper in CLOSER and Queen Amidala in Star Wars I thru III) and she eventually joins his cause. So far, so fantastically interesting. You have to love any movie that sends up an authoritarian "Chancellor", and attacks a fascist government that infringes upon our civil liberties. I never thought that a Hollywood that cannot quite bring itself to give a gay movie the Best Picture Oscar would make a movie that portrays terrorists as heroes! I'm loving the controversy and the honest exploration of the duties that fall on a citizen in the face of a repressive society.

However, the depression kicks in when you realise that the convoluted plot has more holes in it than Rab C Nesbitt's string vest. In addition, the film is populated by a bunch of high-class British character actors. Now, this is, of course, a good thing for international audiences. But for us Brits it can jar when we are expected to accept establishment boffin Stephen Fry as an instrument of sedition. He hosts the BAFTAs!

Anyways, I watched this movie again yesterday with altered expectations and realised that I had been way too harsh. If you just want a large dollop of popcorn-style trashy entertainment, you could do worse than see V. It has all the requisite whistles and bangs, as you would expect from a movie written by the guys who gave us The Matrix and the directed by the First AD on The Matrix and Star Wars II. In addition, the whole thing is wonderfully camp, and teeters on the brink of BATMAN AND ROBIN kitsch-tastic status. I can't take it remotely seriously, but then I do not think I am meant to. (Unlike Syriana, which wanted to be taken seriously but was still hillariously twee in its rendering of the Middle-East conflict.)

V for VENDETTA was shown at Berlin 2005 and is now on release in the US, UK, Germany and Austria. It hits France on April 19th 2006. *Amusing that Winston Smith has been resurrected as Big Brother. Kind of like when the People's Republic of Sheffield's David Blunkett turned up twenty years later as the most repressive Home Secretary in post-war British history.