TOLKIEN

As both a huge fan of test match cricket and Tolkien, it was a rare week to watch both THE EDGE and this biopic.  If the former was frustratingly tame, the latter didn't disappoint. In fact, it rather impressed as a study of a young smart, kind boy, orphaned at an early age, shamed into being the scholarship boy at an academically strong school, finding lifelong friends along the way, and ultimately both loves of his life - philology and his wife. We meet young Tolkien as an orphan, at a smart school in Birmingham, running with a super smart group of boys who must restrict their fantasy life of writing poetry or imagining worlds to their second life - the first aim is a profession.  The film beautifully captures the delicate class balancing act of the scholarship boy, living in a boarding house, courting the lodger's daughter.  He seems to take intellectual conversation for granted, casually cutting her off from discussion of Wagner when she desperately needs the outlet. We are subtly aware that the options for her - a similarly bright and talented woman - are slight because of her class and sex. As the boys move to university - Tolkien to Oxford - we discover that he nearly flunked out but was rescued by a philology don who allowed him to transfer courses of study.  I hadn't realised that this was the case, but thank goodness! But all too soon, war breaks out and the friendships of youth are tragically curtailed - whether by death or the traumas that estrange because they are unutterable.

All of this is sensitively and handsomely told, with Nicholas Hoult capturing both Tolkien's earnestness and his sense of child-like fun.  Lily Collins is superb in her few pivotal scenes, and together, this as her performance in LES MISERABLES show that she has real talent when challenged with good material. But best of all for the fans, we see everything that makes Lord of the Rings so unusual in fantasy literature. For here is an author who has actually fought in battle - knows the terror and fear of the jobbing ordinary soldier - the importance of camaraderie - and can describe the fear on the eve of battle.  It's not for nothing that Aragorn tells his men, scared at venturing into Mordor for the final battle, that there is no shame in turning back, that he understands their concern.  It's not for nothing that Frodo never recovers from his injuries - mental or physical - that his fellow friends always feel separate and unappreciated. So much of fantasy literature focuses on great heroes and high colours and banners. Tolkien focuses on the ordinary man, and this film shows why. 

I also enjoyed the film for the nostalgia it created in me. I suppose it's somewhat shocking to see how little things change, but I was also a scholarship girl at a private school, painfully aware of class privilege and the need to maintain one's financial aid.  I sat the same exams as Tolkien to get into Oxford and went to the college next door to his. The nervousness around college exams, the getting into trouble for seemingly petty violations, the mentoring by inspiring, exacting but eccentric dons - it all rang so true. And so thankfully did the establishment of lifelong friendships. It truly is a place out of time. 

TOLKIEN has a running time of 113 minutes and is rated PG-13.  It is available to rent and own. 

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (2017)

Kenneth Branagh's new adaptation of Agatha Christie's iconic murder mystery is sumptuous, dynamic, faithful and great fun.  Set on the luxurious trans-European steam-train in the 1930s, the film is a locked-room mystery.  The train is derailed into snow and the renowned detective Hercule Poirot has to solve the murder on one of the passengers before the train is dug out and the police arrive.  The tension builds as the passengers realise that one of them must have done it - but how can Poirot sift the truth out of the conflicting clues - a woman running through the carriage in a red kimono - a second railway guard with a missing button - charred blackmail notes - and so many frenzied stab wounds.....

Branagh's film is firmly in the tradition of the absurdly over-cast ensemble films of the past - Sidney Lumet's 1974 version starring Albert Finney and Lauren Bacall - and the 2010 David Suchet version with Jessica Chastain and Toby Jones.  This version stars Branagh with a quite magnificent moustache as Poirot; Jonny Depp well cast as a nasty criminal called Ratchett; Dame Judi Dench as the Princess Dragimirov; Daisy Ridley Penelope Cruz; Josh Gad and many others.  For me the two actors who really stood out were Willem Dafoe and Michelle Pfeiffer - but I can't tell you why without ruining character reveals and plot twists!

CINDERELLA (2015)

A podcast review of this film is available below:

Kenneth Branagh's new live action version of the Disney's Cinderella is earnest and conventional and assertively traditional.  It hews so closely to the original in terms of plot, characterisation, costume and values that I can hardly believe they bothered to spend the money to remake it.  The resulting film is sumptuously designed and gorgeous to look at. The costumes are truly Oscar-worthy.  The acting is first-rate with Cate Blanchett's wicked stepmother and Helena Bonham-Carter's fairy godmother stealing the show.  But as much as I tried to look through the retrograde politics, I just couldn't.  That said, this movie has taken so much money, apparently people don't mind that.  Maybe Kenneth Branagh is right, and after all those post-modern fairytales there's an appetite for the traditional and unchallenging.  But I find it all rather sad.

GRACE OF MONACO

I wrote of Olivier Dahan's movie LA VIE EN ROSE, that is contained a stunning central performance but baffling direction. Well, his GRACE OF MONACO has neither a stunning central performance, nor an improvement in the direction, but has something, just something that I found intriguing. But first, the obviously bad.

The story should've been intriguing. It is one of an iconic American movie star - one of Hitchcock's famous blondes, who traded it all for an arranged marriage to an ageing lothario who also happened to be the monarch of a bankrupt French protectorate. She must've known full well of Monaco's precarious situation behind the glamorous facade of the casinos. So why did she do it? And did she really expect to be allowed to act after she did?  But sadly this movie joins the story after Grace Kelly's marriage. She already has two children and though rarely seeing her husband and cold-shouldered at court, seems to be in love with him. Alfred Hitchcock offers her the lead role in Marnie, but she turns it down, because she's going to support her husband and never act again.  

This should have been a moving and deeply relevant film about the conflicts that career women face and a sorry tale of delusion after a whirlwind marriage. But instead, what we have is a very cursory attempt to show conflict - essentially Nicole Kidman's Grace looking disturbed into the middle distance, or humiliated for having a short haircut at luncheon - but no real emotion or excitement.  Rather the message of the film is essentially a conservative one - that it is the job of a woman to stand by her man for the sake of her children and sacrifice her own concerns. And if she needs to have a PRINCESS DIARIES makeover at the hands of a highly camp French Count played by Derek Jacobi, why then, all the better!

This is a movie of surfaces - beautiful costumes, beautiful locations, but not NOT beautiful people. I'm sorry but I'm just going to have to say it. Nicole Kidman is simply too old to play Grace of Monaco.  The wigs are too obviously wigs.  The botox and fillers insufficiently obfuscated by the soft focus.  It's hard to hear the message of the film - about the grim artifice behind the fairtytale - when the grim artifice is all too visible.  Of course one could forgive all this - I was once moved to tears by Mark Rylance's Cleopatra - were the acting sufficiently good.  And if it isn't, from an actress as worthy as Nicole Kidman, should we perhaps blame the director, the clumsy Dahan, or first-time screen writer Arash Amel?  Or should we, per Dahan, blame producer and extreme-editor Harvey Weinstein who has all but disowned the film?

I'm not sure, but what's utterly frustrating is that there is something to this film - and that's in its politics.  After all, this was a fascinating period for Monaco and for Grace's husband Prince Rainier. He inherited a poor kingdom dependent on gambling and tried to limit the power of the monarchy, widen the economic base and redistribute wealth.   He did so in the teeth of an economic blockade from a France desperate for tax revenues to finance the Algerian war.  All of this intrigue - the sticky hands of Ari Onassis (a ludicrous hack-impression from Robert Lindsay) - the attempted coup by his sister - are true and bear further investigation.  But one can't take the attempt seriously when Dahan/Amel want us to believe that the best way to create a red-herring baddie is to dress her in Miss Haversham-black.  Or when they want us to believe that the diplomatic crisis was solved by the giving of a ball and a Don't Cry For Me, Monte Carlo speech.  Shame on them all for not tackling the gritty issues - is a tax haven really the poster child for democratic liberty? - and all their contradictions. 

GRACE OF MONACO played Cannes 2014 where it was excoriated by the press. It opened in May in France, Germany, Italy, Kuwait, Finland, Poland, Belgium, Denmark, Hungary, Macedonia, Portugal, Serbia, Singapore, Estonia, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Israel and Lithuania. It opened earlier this month in Australia, the Netherlands, the UK, Ireland, Taiwan, South Korea and China. It opens in Japan in October and in Brazil on January 1st 2015.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 15 - ANONYMOUS

The use of the interrogative tense in the poster for ANONYMOUS is misleading. Director Roland Emmerich and writer John Orloff aren't asking whether Shakespeare was a fraud. They are telling us, without doubt, with complete certainty, that he was. Their theory is that it is inconceivable that a poorly educated provincial dolt could have written plays of such genius and erudition. Rather, they posit that the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, a man of great wealth and learning, wrote the plays. But at a time when theatres were next to brothels, and plays seen as seditious, it would have been degrading for Oxford to be publicly acknowledged as an author.  He therefore allowed the boorish, illiterate actor, Will Shakespeare, to take the credit, and the cash, with Ben Jonson as the unwilling go-between.  If this weren't scandalous enough, the movie further raises the stakes by positing that Oxford was at the centre of a conspiracy by his enemy, the puritan Cecil family, that involved the line of succession, incest and bastards. 

Taken on its own terms, ANONYMOUS is a great success. Indeed, I was quite amazed that Roland Emmerich - director of such dubious, mainstream disaster movies as 2012; 10,000 BC; and THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW - could direct something with such elegance and beauty. Because, make no mistake, ANONYMOUS is a brilliantly directed film. The way in which Emmerich deftly handles the transitions between different periods in Oxford's life is elegant and never confuses.  The conspiracy is woven with great delicacy so that even in the final act, we are genuinely surprised and saddened by the turn of events.  In front of the camera, Emmerich coaxes a career best performance from Rhys Ifans as the older Oxford, and uses CGI to create a completely engrossing and compelling Tudor London.  I was absolutely delighted to see Southwark and the Tower recreated, complete with squalor and grandeur.  Kudos to cinematographer Anna Foerster, shooting with the Arri Alexa (the first feature to do so).  She manages to create a colour palette of warmth and depth, beautifully capturing candelit pageants, and snow-covered country mansions. Most importantly, I cared. I deeply cared about the battle between Oxford and the Cecils - I cared about the fate of young Essex, the Queen's bastard son and pretender to the throne - and I cared about the Queen herself, wonderfully portrayed by Vanessa Redgrave as frail and vulnerable and hounded on all sides. 

Of course, when I stand back from the film, the whole thing seems a bit pointless. I've always thought that these debates - who wrote Shakespeare; was Shakespeare a crypto-Catholic; was the Dark Lady really a boy - pretty pointless, as there simply isn't the documentary evidence to decide it either way. So you're just left with dogmatic people using thin supposition.  In particular, the idea that Shakespeare couldn't have written the plays because they required great education strikes me as peculiarly class-ist. Just because someone is provincial and working class doesn't mean they aren't capable of genius - I mean, isn't the whole point of genius that it's like a lightning bolt. And anyway, according to Rene Weis' superb book "Shakespeare Revealed", Shakespeare attended a local grammar school and was taught by a string of Oxbridge graduates in all the subjects and to the very same standard that the movie suggests Oxford was tutored in and to....

But as I said, there's no point quibbling about the truth. I am perfectly happy to believe Will Shakespeare was indeed Shakespeare.  That didn't stop me having a cracking good time watching ANONYMOUS.  To that end, this movie falls firmly in the same category as SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE - a pleasing fiction.

ANONYMOUS played Toronto and London 2011. It is currently on release in Portugal, Finland and Norway. It opens on October 28th in Canada, Ireland, the UK and the USA. It opens on November 3rd in Germany; in Spain on November 11th; in France, Russia and Singapore on November 17th; in the Netherlands, Mexico and India on December 1st; in Sweden on December 16th; in Hong Kong and Hungary on February 2nd.

THE KING'S SPEECH - wonderful pantomime

In the mid-1930s, Britain was still a proud Empire that ranged from the Caribbean territories in the West, via East Africa, to India, Australia and Hong Kong. But the home country was still reeling from the Great Depression and fearful of the second Great War in living memory. The Empire needed leadership, both from its politicians who had the real political power, and from its monarchy, whose job was to inspire loyalty and imperial unity in the face of adversity. But the politicians fell grip to appeasement, and bar Winston Churchill, utterly failed to anticipate Hitler's aggression. As for the monarchy King George V was dying; and his son, David. the short-lived King Edward VIII, abdicated so that he could marry the scandal-ridden divorcee Wallis Simpson. Thus, David's younger brother, Bertie, the Duke of York (father of the current Queen Elizabeth) was thrust onto the throne as King George VI, with the task of leading his country and his Empire into World War Two. Pity then, the man, courageous and dutiful, but hampered by a debilitating stammer induced, the movie argues, by a shockingly loveless and brutal childhood.

THE KING'S SPEECH is, then, the story of how Bertie (Colin Firth) persevered through humiliation and fear to become technically more accomplished at public speaking and emotionally able to take on the burden of monarchy. He did this, the film posits, through sheer courage; the love of a good woman (Helena Bonham-Carter); and through the advice and friendship of the radically informal, Antipodean speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). 

So here's the thing. THE KING'S SPEECH is basically a really well made and emotionally involving film. It comes to our screens dripping with critical praise and smothered with awards. Director Tom Hooper eschews the typical lavish costume drama production design and shooting style, instead trapping his King in fog-bound streets and narrow corridors. The cast give fine performances. The script is beautifully written. I was deeply caught up in the drama. But, as I write this review some days later, I am less impressed by the film. Because, essentially, I was in the realms of pantomime cinema.

Colin Firth is, after all, playing an essentially Good Man.  Firth's Bertie is understandably angry; occasionally very funny; a warm, loving father and a dutiful king. He is an under-dog hero without faults, played by an actor at the top of his game.His wife is also without fault in this film - determined to help her husband, utterly sympathetic to him, charming to commoners, but conscious of maintaining her regal authority. And even Lionel Logue is a man without fault and dripping with charm! He is wonderfully brash, believes in Bertie's essentially goodness, and constantly helps him, even when Bertie sounds off at him. Even the minor characters are basically charming and lovely.  Logue's wife (Jennifer Ehle) in a few short scenes is a picture of calm concern and wise advice.  The horribly politically wrong Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin (a marvelous cameo from Anthony Andrews) is noble and humble in his failure.  And even Chrurchill (Timothy Spall), the towering personality who seemed to win the War single-handedly through sheer bloody-mindedness and brilliance, is humanised by the admission of a youthful speech impediment. 

And what of the villains of the piece? They too are essentially mono-dimensional. David (Guy Pierce with a pitch-perfect voice impersonation) is basically a bullying, selfish cad, utterly beguiled by the domineering Wallis. The late King George V (Michael Gambon) and his wife are distant, uncaring, bullying parents. And Derek Jacobi's Archbishop of Canterbury is an obsequious passive-aggressive arse.

So there you have it:  THE KING'S SPEECH is the ne plus ultra of feel-good movies, with the added bonus of being about glamorous royals. It comes complete with palaces and princesses - evil villains, unimpeachable heroes, the love that conquers all, the buddy movie, the under-dog story. And the biggest signal that we are in the realms of blatant emotional manipulation? The lazy use of the adagio from Beethoven's 7th symphony and the adagio from Beethoven's 5th piano sonata as we hear the King give his final, triumphant speech and wave to his adoring public on the balcony of Buckingham Palace.

THE KING'S SPEECH played Telluride, Toronto, London and the AFI 2010. It was released last year in the USA, Canada, Greece, Spain, Australia and New Zealand. It is released on January 7th in the UK, on January 21st in Estonia and Finland, and on January 28th in Slovenia, Iceland and Italy. It will be released in France on February 2nd, in Hungary on February 3rd and in Brazil and Sweden on February 4th. It will be released in Portugal on February 10th and in Germany and the Netherlands on February 17th. It will be released in Russia on March 17th.

At the British Independent Film Awards, THE KING'S SPEECH won Best Film, Screenplay, Actor (Colin Firth), Supporting Actor (Geoffrey Rush), Actress (Helena Bonham Carter). It was nominated for Best Director, Supporting Actor (Guy Pierce) and Production Design (Eve Stewart). It has also been nominated for seven Golden Globes and four SAG awards.

A BUNCH OF AMATEURS - Imelda Staunton steals the show

A BUNCH OF AMATEURS is a British comedy directed by Andy Cadiff (CHASING LIBERTY) and co-written by the scabrously funny editor of PRIVATE EYE, Ian Hislop. It's a classic fish-out-of-water comedy in which an aging, insecure but insufferably arrogant Hollywood star is duped into starring in an amateur production of King Lear in the middle of the British countryside. He wants a suite in the Four Seasons and a personal trainer: he gets a room in a B&B, rehearsals in a barn and accusations of an affair with the sponsor's wife. He also gets to finally empathise with Lear as a man who has a ruinous relationship with his children.

As plots go, A BUNCH OF AMATEURS is pretty creaky, and the production values are pretty flaky too. Given that Hislop was involved in the script I was surprised that the movie wasn't more sharply satirical. Indeed, I was hoping for something along the line of David Mamet's incendiary STATE AND MAIN. Still, while the comedy may be more lukewarm, A BUNCH OF AMATEURS has its moments. Burt Reynolds is stealth funny as the insecure actor who builds himself up to a moment of existential angst on a rain-swept hill, but its Imelda Staunton who steals scenes as his adoring landlady. Her facility with physical comedy is captivating and makes up for the inadequacies in the script. Other than that, Samantha Bond and Derek Jacobi are rather wasted.

A BUNCH OF AMATEURS is on release in the UK.

THE GOLDEN COMPASS aka The Gutless Cop-Out

What does it say about the times we live in that writer-director Chris Weitz has no qualms in having Jason Biggs masturbate on-screen with a warm apple-pie, but doesn't have the balls to depict an atheist's response to Paradise Lost? I don't know what saddens me more: the anti-liberal tyrannical response of my own Church to this movie, or the self-censorship of a studio too timid to respect Philip Pullman's profound artistic achievement. The upshot is that THE GOLDEN COMPASS is a rather feeble film. It looks pretty enough but it lacks the intellectual bravery of the source material. As a result, the viewer has to jump through the hoops of the complicated narrative without the concommitant emotional pay-off. In fact, the bizarre decision to cut short this adaptation before we have reached the final harrowing scenes of the book makes this film a deeply unsatisfying, unengaging experience indeed.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In 1995, Philip Pullman published the first novel in a trilogy called His Dark Materials. It is that book - called Northern Lights in the UK and The Golden Compass in the US - that we now see brought to the screen. Pullman's trilogy is nominally a set of books for children, filled with fantasy adventure elements and set in a world that shares many characteristics with our own. A plucky young girl called Lyra Belaqua sets off for the North Pole to rescue her friend Roger from the mysterious Gobblers with the help of a truth-telling golden compass that once belonged to her guardian, an Oxford don called Lord Asriel. On the way, she escapes the clutches of the devestatingly charming Mrs Coulter and benefits from the help of a Gyptian king, a beautiful witch called Serafina Pekkala, an aeronaut called Lee Scoresby and an armoured bear called Iorek Byrnison.

The book works well as an adventure story. The "baddies" are suitably sinister, the good guys are wonderfully drawn, and we really believe in the strenth of the friendship between Lyra and Roger. But there is so much more to the story than that. In Pullman's version of the world, a tyrannical ideological Authority is stamping out free will and free thought. It is true that in the novel this Authority is explicitly religious and adopts some of the terminology of the Catholic Church. However I firmly believe that the Authority can be read as a symbol of all intellectual repression and anti-liberalism rather than any particular set of beliefs. Lyra and her guardian are thus battling for freedom and against tyranny - for truth against self- and imposed censorship.

It is, then, ironic, as well as tragic, to find this film refusing to speak plainly and to defend the intellectual freedom that Lord Asriel seeks to defend. Furthermore, having shorn the movie of its intellectual substance, Chris Weitz might at least have left us the searing emotional climax of the novel. But even here he chickens out - and leaves us with just another wishy-washy luke-warm Hollywood ending.

THE GOLDEN COMPASS is on release in the UK, Belgium, Finland, France, Israel, Norway, the Philippines and Spain. It opens tomorrow in Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia and Singapore. It opens on Friday 7th December in Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey and the US. It opens the following weekend in Serbia, Argentina, Hungary, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Estonia and Italy. THE GOLDEN COMPASS opens in Italy, South Korea, Greece, Hong Kong, Brazil and Australia later in December and in Egypt on January 16th 2008. It opens in Japan on March 1st.

UNDERWORLD: EVOLUTION & AEON FLUX - when hot chicks in PVC jump-suits aren't enough

There's not a whole lot I want to say about these two movies, both of which are derivative, feature ch*cks in rubber suits, have confused narratives, banal dialogue and zero characterisation.

If your taste runs to vampires, werewolves and British character actors camping it up, you should opt for UNDERWORLD: EVOLUTION. Bill Nighy does a hammy five minutes at the start; Derek Jacobi embarasses himself for five minutes near the end; the baddie is a Scottish actor called Tony Curran who was a minor character in the cult British TV drama, This Life; and these are the *good* points. Oh yes, and we get Brit Kate Beckinsale running around in a PVC suit, directed by her husband Len Wiseman, who obviously has a penchant for this sort of thing. He also directs one of the most cringe-inducing sex scenes since Shopgirl. But, hey, what do I know? This movie topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, and took more money than analysts expected. I guess that means we'll get Underworld 3 - at least I assume that is narratively possible because I was so freakin' bored I left ten minutes before the end. Still, I doubt narrative incoherence would prevent Wiseman for committing another crime against cinema if there were enough phat cash in it.

On the other hand, if your taste runs to science fiction flicks like THE MATRIX, you could submit yourself to AEON FLUX - a shameless Hollywood cash-in starring Charlize Theron in, oh yes, a PVC suit. In a distopian future, the last city on earth is Berlin and it is run by a nasty Big Brother type. Aeon Flux - ridiculous name, I know, but then what isn't in this movie? - is part of a highly trained, ruthless efficient, Spanish inquisition, sorry, insurgency. She runs around blowing shit up, doing cool stunts and uttering what are meant to be witty one liners. Clearly, the screenwriter thought "amateurs" was going to be the new "I'll be back". AEON FLUX suffers in comparison to UNDERWORLD 2 for the lack of overtly camp acting, although Frances McDormand does have a totally bizarre hair-do that elicits a few chuckles on first appearance. Still, that is scant reward for handing over your twelve squid on a Friday night. The only hope is that, as AEON FLUX lost money in the US, a sequel is not on the cards.

UNDERWOLRD EVOLUTION is on release in the UK, US and France and goes on release in Germany on the 2nd March 2006. AEON FLUX is already on release in the US. It goes on release in Austria on the 3rd February, in France on the 8th February, in Germany on the 16th February and in the UK on the 17th February.