Your Man In The Stalls

Enjoying cinema since 1953

[yourmaninthestalls]

“My Donkey, My Lover & I″

At Sea in the Cevennes.

“My Donkey, My Lover and I” is a French comedy (“Antoinette dans les Cevennes”) set in the hilly Cevennes region of France along the trail made famous by Robert Louis Stevenson in “Travels with A Donkey in The Cevennes” (1879). It stars Laure Calamy, the prolific French actress recently a star of the hugely successful “Call My Agent”, where she plays ditsy and star-crossed Noemie LeClerc to great affect and acclaim. The attempt by director Caroline Vignal to reprise that character in this 97 minute feature is disastrous. The Noemie LeCerc character thrives surrounded by the formidable Call my Agent ensemble but here Calamy is left to talk to a donkey and all opportunities to introduce other characters are passed by. The premise of the film is that Antoinette (Calamy) is a school mistress who follows her married lover and his family when they go on the Stevenson trail over a long weekend.  This could have been a rollicking Canterbury Tales road movie with encounters with many characters, classic wife and lover encounters and maybe some farce, but despite meeting lots of potential characters also taking the trip during overnights along the route she never really engages with any of them. Her main conversational companion, Patrick the donkey, unsurprisingly never replies. The dialogue is sparse, the plot – what there is – is predictable. She reveals her entire story to the first group she meets hence removing any potential for later revelation, her lover comes across as someone you wouldn’t follow into the kitchen let alone to the Cevennes and the whole enterprise seems uncertain whether it is trying to be a Drama or a Comedy. It is not Ms Calamy’s fault that she cannot carry the entire film with monologues and shrieks. The two or three interesting characters we do meet – the two inn keepers and a passing motor cyclist, appear only briefly. This is director Vignal’s second feature and follows three shorts and two TV films. She also wrote the screenplay. Sadly she shoots it like cinema films used to be shot, so there are very few close ups, action plays out in meandering long shots, you could make tea in the pauses in the dialogue and the sound track and shot composition lack any imagination. When so many people now watch films on small screens and TVs these seem bizarre decisions, throwing away the chance to create and vary pace with editing. The camerawork is mundane and more a recording of events than a creative endeavour. For her many fans from “Call My Agent” this looks like a major mis-step for Laure Calamy. Such a waste of effort and money. Let’s at least hope someone calls her agent for another series of that excellent TV show.    

[yourmaninthestalls]

Bird Box (2018)

Undoubtedly Teenager Trump’s American Roulette by Tweet has sharpened our interest in dystopia and world war but this is very much not his kind of film. Firstly people help each other just because they are fellow humans, black and white people have relationships, Sandra Bullock has no “I just don’t care” jacket as her character quiet clearly does care and the two young children remain with their mother while fleeing violence. But sadly for all its intentions I can’t believe that even the people making this film thought it worked. I couldn’t suspend disbelief sufficiently to believe the plot. The story tells of a dystopian world in which seeing “the invaders” (sub Stranger Things presences) induces suicide, so those who want to survive cover their eyes. Presumably it was felt the audience might be at risk too, so we never see “the invaders” either. What we do see is Sandra Bullock, Trevante Rhodes, John Malkovich and our very own Tom Hollander doing their best to keep a cliched sci-fi vehicle on the road. We have the car pile ups and panic in the streets, refuge house full of odd characters, the intruder who is “not what he seems”, sinister shadows accompanied muffled noises flitting across the window, the hero who comes to the rescue and then perishes for his love of La Bullock, a river trip (blindfolded!) bad men in the woods and two young actors who also do their best as the children, Boy (Julian Edwards) and Girl (Vivien Lyra Blair). An interesting idea that is floated early on that maybe this is a brainwashing dark op by enemies of the state is never developed. There are no surprises. Sandra Bullock looks as if she was called untimely onto the set while wearing just foundation make up, though by the time we reach the hopeful pay off she seems to have acquired full slap. They all do their best with the lumpen narrative and Trevante Rhodes has great screen presence – when he and Bullock are together the film seems more promising. But overall it felt like watching a train wreck in slow motion with no power to intervene. The film had a limited cinema release (owing to Californian fires) and then streamed on Netflix garnering 45m views in seven days. Can 45m people be wrong or did Sandra Bullock draw the crowds? I think the latter.    

[yourmaninthestalls]

The Old Man and the Gun(2018)

John Wayne’s last film was The Shootist (1976) about an ageing gunfighter, which ends in a full-on western blood bath. Biographer Ronald Davis said, "John Wayne personified for millions the nation's frontier heritage. Eighty-three of his movies were Westerns, and in them he played cowboys, cavalrymen, and unconquerable loners extracted from the Republic's central creation myth."

Wayne was a staunch Republican who would, one suspects, have voted for Genghis Khan had the veteran trouble-maker ventured onto the West Coast ballot paper. He was at the heart of the Hollywood star system. His “The Searchers” (1956) is one of my favourite films but I lay that as much at the door of director John Ford as Wayne. Robert Redford, now 82, has declared The Old Man and The Gun to be his last film. It is about an elderly man who feels most fulfilled when robbing banks. I wonder why he chose this as his last film?  This is the man who gave us Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, All the Presidents Men, Ordinary People, Out Of Africa, All is Lost and many more. The film’s ensemble, which includes Danny Glover, Casey Aflek, Tom Wates is intimate and feels as if they have been working together in rep. for months. His chemistry in this film with Cissy Spaceck is masterly and thoroughly convincing on both sides and his acting ability a very moving delight. We perhaps take it for granted.

The whole thing is charmingly light at one level but at a Redford level a moving finale. He was also the man with whom Producer Richard Drewitt and I made a documentary about the destruction of the American West and the man who launched Sundance, which has been a launch pad for so many directors and writers. If Wayne was a man who blasted his way through life Redford has sought change, he cares about the environment and in his life preferred his Sundance festival for new talent and innovation, to the traditional Hollywood system. The Shootist is a fiction,The Old Man and the Gun is based on the life of real man Forrest Tucker. It may be an over simplification to see Wayne’s film and life as being about a macho America and Redford’s film and life about a more outward looking benign America. In the Trump era Fiction v. Truth is an ongoing struggle  As a Redford fan (you guessed) I noted the sound of a distant train whistle as Tucker looked out across the countryside which took me back to Butch Cassidy’s train robbery (I was lucky to visit the actual spot where it “happened”) and the closing shot seems a homage to Butch Cassidy where we see the Redford character heading smiling for another bank to rob, now with no Paul Newman at his side. You would most likely not go to this film for the story, the direction, or the script, though all are perfectly workmanlike. But you might get from is – as I did - the feeling of being in at the end of a fabulous journey. Ironically Wayne had no Boot Hill macho nonsense on his gravestone but altogether more thoughtful words. ”Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday.” Some of us have. God bless you Bobby - I am already missing you.

[yourmaninthestalls]

The Favourite (2018)

At last a break from Brexit! I have always enjoyed the high campery of the series Versailles but I imagine the writers were held back from creating many a tempting excess by the historic fact that running France – and staying alive in the process - was ultimately a pretty serious business. No such problem with our own Queen Anne (1702 -1707) whose Wiki entry reads like the synopsis for a film which would stretch credibility to breaking point.  Opinion remains divided on how effective she was and how much she was dominated by advisers and lovers of both genders but this was a time when the power of the monarch was on the wane and it is fascinating to watch this parade of intrigue in and out of the royal bedchamber. Opinions are also divided on the extent of her lesbian adventures but here they are pretty front and central.   I was put off Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer by the trailers alone, but shall now watch them. This film is a delight. Sometimes you just have to let go and allow yourself to be led to joys by the director. Anchored by four great performances from Olivia Coleman as Queen Anne, Rachel Weisz as her favourite, Lady Sarah, Emma Stone (I loved her in La La Land) as the potential usurper Abigail and Nicholas Hoult as the much powdered opposition leader Harley. He puts in a star turn as he did in both About The Boy and A Single Man. From child actor to adult actor and excellent as both. The casting is perfect. We spend our two hours at the court of Queen Anne, who is at once alarming, eccentric and agreeably dotty. The film is full of great set pieces and surprises – there are some great one liners, of which Nicholas Hoult seems to have more than his fair share. He also has the most excessive wig. Yorgos Lanthimos directs with gusto and I was delighted to see does not resist a very wide almost distorting lens when it does the job. The whole gives a giddying insight into the way a c. absolute monarch ruled and is a great argument for radically curtailing their power. It is very funny, with sequences including duck racing, the Queen’s 17 pet rabbits, (compensation for her 17 miscarriages)  much treachery, gluttony, fawning sycophancy at a whole new level and all this in a community where uninhibited sex is just another tool in the courtiers arsenal. This is one version of Anne, the bitchy treatment she got in Lady Sarah’s autobiography has been countered since by historians such as Edward Gregg who wrote in 1980 of “a period of significant progress for the country: Britain became a major military power on land, the union of England and Scotland created a united kingdom of Great Britain, and the economic and political base for the golden age of the 18th century was established. However, the Queen herself has received little credit for these achievements and has long been depicted as a weak and ineffectual monarch, dominated by her advisers.”We shall never know which is the real Queen Anne but this one is certainly the most entertaining – if tragically so. To crown it all (no pun intended) the end credits play under that great song Skyline Pigeon, sung by its composer Elton John, which tells of a pigeon seeking freedom from its cage. Your correspondent sat through the whole roller. As a break from the woes of the world The Favourite is a helter skelter of fighting, scheming, lying, corruption, surviving, triumphing and going under. Just like Brexit – whoops!

[yourmaninthestalls]

Roma (2018)

I’ve really struggled with Roma.It has been hailed as a masterpiece from Alfonso Cuaron. His previous films include the excellent Children of Men, Gravity, Y Tu Mama Tambienand Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azbahan. But I found Roma terribly slow and indulgent. Ninety minutes in it finally takes off but who will still be watching it by then? My suspicion is that Alfonso has reached the point in his career where after so much success he is allowed to do exactly what he wants. Here he is writer, director and also has an editing credit. The lead producer, Nicolas Celis, has only produced two films before. Did he have any say in the running time or potential box office appeal?  The opening shot of floor tiles runs a worrisome 4.33 and there is extensive use of wide shots which pan slowly to follow any (or no) action. I found the absence of close ups made us mere observers rather than involving us in the lives of the central characters, a Mexican family living in a sector fo the city called Roma,. They have servants and our film covers the years 1970 and 1971 during a time of political turmoil in the country. It is in black and white and this seems irrelevant – the recent colourisation of World War 1 footage surely gave it more impact – is there a reason for this decision other than passing fashion? Beds are changed, dogs leap in the air, our maid stares out of the kitchen window, the maids go the cinema but end up in bed with two blokes, more washing is hung to dry, cars arrive home, children scamper hither and yon, tea is made, a husband leaves home, the maid falls pregnant, her lover rejects her, paint dries. And then after 90 minutes (luckily it is on Netflix so I was able to pause it and watch it over two days) suddenly the students revolt, the maid and her mistress’s mother are involved in riots, the family goes to the seaside – the film has my full attention - and all are brought together by a near tragedy. They all return to the city and some semblance of their old lives, but so much has changed. It has some good moments and the potentially dystopian world we have seen so effectively in Children Of Men is well observed. But I return to an old theme – if the only way to convey boredom and monotony is to bore the cinema audience this is not film making – this is recording events. Cinema shorthand is not a crime – close ups, camera movement, sequence shooting and music are popular with film makers because they work!  I note that Cuaron was given a film camera at the age of eight and “started filming everything he saw” Old habits die hard. It could have been great at 90 minutes, but at 135 it is too long – presuming that the purpose of making films is to get people to watch them and be affected by them. If only the students had revolted an hour earlier…  

[yourmaninthestalls]

FREE SOLO (2018)

Did you see Man on Wire? If you did you may share with me the worry that although we KNOW he is not going to fall off, something inside you tells you that this time he just might! So it is with Free Solo. After Evelyn and Three Identical Strangers this was the third really good documentary I have seen recently. Alex Honnold is obsessed by free climbing (i.e. no ropes) and determined to climb El Capo in Yosemite National Park. The rock face looks like the side of a particularly impressive lost continent – when he is on it he is a speck. It’s an impressive film. The cameramen led by Jimmy Chin hang near him as he climbs – happily they have ropes, even if this does not make them look any less at risk. It is simply a rattling good yarn. Alex is unselfconscious and his relationship with his recently acquired and spectacularly beautiful girlfriend, Sanni McCandless, is weird to behold. They seem very fond of each other and enjoy being together and presumably “much more” as the Lonely Hearts say as they are living a deux in a smallish camper van. However while Sanni is falling into the warm glow of burgeoning love Alex is more concerned that since they met he seems to be having more accidents and hey, if he falls to his death so be it. Call her an incurable romantic if you like but Sanni the old softee is actually keen to see him again and for him to stay alive – this seems to puzzle Alex at best or not interest him at worst. She however is a godsend to the film makers as she adds some human warmth related tension. This is a well paced, well constructed and spectacularly shot film with a very enigmatic character at its centre.  Enjoy - and I just hope he doesn’t fall of the time you come to watch it. You have been warned.

[yourmaninthestalls]

COLD WAR

The Poles, who have been invaded by both Russia and German in the last century and lost six million dead in World War - as I witnessed recently at the cemetery at Monti Casino in Italy - really do have something to tell us about the fragility of our peace and our lives. This beautiful, entertaining poignant and thought-provoking film is shot in black and white and tells of a love affair that starts in 1950s Communist Poland and moves to Yugoslavia, Berlin and Paris. Our heroes are played by Joanna Kulig (born 1982) and Tomasz Kot (born 1977) so they were 7 and 12 when Poland regained its independence.   Director Pavel Pawlikowski (b 1957) was 32. The direction is always confident, thorough and thoughtful, the lighting at times breath-taking and the central performances excellent. There is an edgy almost awkward but passionate chemistry between Zula (Kulig) and Wiktor (Kot) They each need the other to help them find their way.

The film is so relevant today with its cinematic sideways glances and perfect pauses that set us pondering its themes of past and present trauma, nationhood, state propaganda, belonging, love, the search for freedom, whatever that may mean to each of us, and those exciting and frightening decisions we make between instinctive self-preservation and the hazardous but thrilling following of our hearts. A Polish friend tells me that its portrayal of clumsy state interference in the arts rings true and that there was a folk performance academy exactly like the one we see here in Poland in the 50s.  

To film buffs who complain that “They don’t make those B&W classics anymore” I would say “Well the Poles do”. I note that Pavel Pawlikowski’s favourite film is “Ashes and Diamonds” in which the Communists and the Polish resistance turn on each other and fight over control of the post war country. In COLD WAR, which he also wrote, Pavel tells us of two people who turn to each other to establish their place in the polarised Europe they find themselves in. The Poles know the importance of always working for a continued peace in Europe. In these Brexit days they have a lot to teach us. We should listen - and watch this film, while there is still time.    

[yourmaninthestalls]

EVELYN (2018)

You are probably familiar with “the talking cure”. Meet “the walking cure”. In this extraordinary and yet in many ways ordinary film, Academy Award winning director Orlando von Einsiedel (Virunga. (2014) White Helmets(2016)) leads his siblings Gwennie and Robin on a long camping walk through the places in Britain which have a resonance for them with their brother Evelyn, who took his own life 13 years ago. His name has barely been mentioned by any of them since it happened. The whole painful and tragic incident has been locked away inside the family.

The film proves the eventual catharsis of having the courage to let down guards and search for common ground. Evelyn’s parents Beta and Andreas (long divorced) join them for sections of the walk which takes them from the Scottish Highlands and the Lake District to the Sussex downs. They are also joined for a day or two by some of his friends. Along the way as they painfully but determinedly examine Evelyn’s life and death and their role and experience of both, the family comes slowly and at times achingly together. The film is dramatic to watch with its vistas and compositions of figures in a landscape and intoxicating in its emotional power and scope. Good to see the sparing but 100% effective use of a drone. Apparently a special camera gyro back pack was also built so that we, the audience, are just in front of the walkers looking back at them the whole time as they progress through sunshine and rain. They despair, they cry, they argue and make up, they are silent, incidentally they meet others who have lost those near to them to suicide, but like a chrysalis motivated by the need to grow, adapt and survive they go on walking, and talking and trying to understand each other until they reach solid ground and clear air.  

Why can’t more films actually tell us something useful, encourage us to loosen up our English reserve and give us the knowledge and confidence to do so? In the candid Q&A at the screening I went to Orlando and his sister Gwennie, who still seemed slightly shell shocked by the whole experience, shared the platform with producer Joanna Natesegara and a volunteer in a new suicide awareness and help line, which encourages society to look suicide straight in the eye and talk about the fear and often hopelessness it produces and the impact it has. The film left me silent but optimistic. In these often foul times it was quite literally a breath of fresh air. If we embrace our humanity there is hope – maybe far more than we allow ourselves to imagine. Imagine.

[yourmaninthestalls]

The Darkest Hour

I admire Churchill – indeed my mother took me to the vigil at his house in Hyde Park Gate when he was dying and to his lying in state in the Houses of Parliament. We could not have won the Second World War without him: but this is filming by numbers. There is nothing here that we have not seen before. New technologies allow new ways of shooting and this film has its fair share of fashionable directly overhead shots and oddly slo mo tracking POV shots from Churchill’s car, which come hot foot out of that excellent 1970 something ELO video “When I was A Boy I had A Dream”. But this is 99% old hat -- order papers falling like confetti in Parliament, shouting in the underground HQ, amusing misunderstandings about his “V” sign, encounters with plucky “ordinary” citizens, sudden “surprising” intimacy with the unbelievably thin and ever-elegant Clemi. The “wily old warhorse” recites poetry to common people (did that pound shop wannabe Churchill, Boris Johnson, see a rough cut?) and the “loveable old rogue” drinks too much.  There is the young secretary who grows to love the old growler, scheming ministers in corners, the tragedy of Dunkirk and at the heart of it all Gary Oldman – doing his first class best but buried like an Egyptian Mummy somewhere is a papier mache mountain of face. You can hear him but can you see him?

There is something so cynical about the whole exercise. In 2002 Albert Finney starred in “The Gathering Storm”, 1972 saw Simon Ward in “Young Winston”, 2017 gave us Brian Cox in “Churchill”, 2004 brought Christian Slater in “Churchill – The Hollywood Years”. In 2014 we were treated to Brendan Gleeson in “Into The Storm”. This new film is well made, but tells us nothing we did not know before, prompts us to be no wiser about our lives, country or history. With so many pressing issues and stories that deserve telling it seems a depressing judgement on our film industry that this was seen as a worthwhile project. Or am I being unduly romantic? Maybe it will make money and that is enough. As part of my prep for this film I visited the Cabinet War Rooms last week. It was interesting and full of tourists and felt like a museum – which is what it is. This film felt like a throw back to those very necessary propaganda films of the war years and the years just afterwards when we were “getting back on our feet, In Which We Serve, The Cockleshell Heroes, We Dive at Dawn, Above Us The Waves, The Cruel Sea, The Damn Busters, Bridge on the River Kwai. But what is remotely necessary here? What did those visitors to Churchill’s bunker, which features so up front in The Darkest Hour, make of GB 2018? Is Churchill the last Great Britain? This film deals with a period when we were on our own and the French (here portrayed as surrender monkeys – good for the American market no doubt) had been routed. But it again stokes the myth that we won the war alone. The message of “Darkest Hour” is ostensibly that we must fight tyranny but it is in fact a cynical mining of the Brexit notion that we Brits are somehow better on our own in a dark world.   I look forward with a heavy heart to producer Working Title’s remaining 2018 slate. Having given us “Victoria and Abdul” in 2017 and this film in 2018, coming up are “Entebbe” and “Mary Queen of Scotts”. I saw “The Post” last week (reviewed below) which had a powerful message for its 2018 audience: beware government suppression of the press. This message is timely – Darkest Hour is dangerous delusional nostalgia, as was Dunkirk and I fear “Journeys End” will be. American critic Matthew Lincona describes Darkest Hour as “a cup of weak tea from Director Joe Wright”… featuring “(…oh the hilarity), his (Churchill’s) plucky public”. Has our seemingly unstoppable obsession with past glories finally succeeded in making us a laughing stock?    

[yourmaninthestalls]

THE POST

 Sadly (for me) I only share two things with Steven Spielberg. We were born within a few hours of each other and we both love BIG close ups. My idea of BIG is when you don’t know what it is when you first see it ‘cos it is so big and well – close. This film tells the story of the leaked documents known as the Pentagon Papers, which revealed that four successive Presidents had lied to Congress about the conduct of the Vietnam War and that they had sent thousands to their deaths knowing it was a war that could not be won, but they wanted above all to avoid the shame of an American defeat. Nixon tries to suppress the publication. Tom Hanks plays Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep plays the paper’s owner, Kay Graham. The leaker in chief, Daniel Ellsberg, is played by Matthew Rhys, who is a very convincing American, though born in Cardiff and with Welsh as his first language! Bruce Greenwood plays Robert McNamara, who has a too cosy relationship with paper owner Kay Graham, a relationship which she has to question in a great scene between them. I hope as many British MPs as possible see it – and not during a relaxing country weekend as guests of Murdoch or other paper owners! One of the things I love about Spielberg is that he does not to me have a particular style of directing, you can’t say “Oh this must be a Spielberg Film”. He doesn’t need to do that – his “simple” trademark is that his films are exceptionally well made. 10/10 all the way on this one. The whole process of newspaper publishing is so well observed here, up to the climatic sequence of the actual presses running, it is beautiful to see the copies snaking down the screen from one floor to another. Spielberg made the film in a year as he felt “it is so important to get it out there” as a reminder of the importance of the press, as a character observes (no spoiler) “The press serves the governed – not the governors”. How sad that is seldom true in 2018 UK. As Kate Graham quotes “Journalism is the first rough draft of History” – a remark attributed to her father. The sharp and pacey script is by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer. She was born 12 years after the war ended so this was already History to her and he comes from The West wing and Spotlight, so is on comparatively familiar territory. It is so wonderful to watch first class actors working with a first class script for a first class director. Thank goodness (literally) for Ellsberg, Graham, Bradlee, Caxton and Spielberg. It was amazingly not until 2011 that all the Pentagon Papers were finally made public. And the big BIG close up count? Happily high, and the ultimate gem was a screenfull of a red light blinking on a telephone. Nice one Stephen. (note to self: I must remember his card this year.)      

[yourmaninthestalls]

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri

I was disappointed by this film. An interesting idea for a story, a great cast but I found the script uneven and the film full of clichéd characters. The performance of Frances McDormand was very good, given the material she had and Woody Harrelson was enjoyable, but I felt neither of them surprised or moved out of the ordinary. The storyline, which did not really bear much examination, tells of a mother (McDormand) who puts ads on three billboards to try and prod the local police chief (Harrelson) into finding the man or men who raped and murdered her daughter. She is feisty, determined and ruthless in her pursuit of the perpetrator but I found the whole very uneven and underwhelming. Peter Dinklage – who plays the dwarf hero in Game of Thrones and Clarke Peters of Wire fame also appear. It was unsettling (not in a good way) and endlessly gloomy, there is very little good in Ebbing and what there is was hardly believable. It seems to peter out rather than resolve itself. All sorts of c. pantomime characters live in Ebbing. Nothing much gave one real pause for thought because it all seemed unreal and unlikely. Torturing and abusing black people, an amusing dwarf, teased ‘cos he is a dwarf, impossibly mad mums and instant redemption and mean and moody McDormand. Certainly entertaining but for me unconvincing throughout. Maybe it got me on a bad day?     

[yourmaninthestalls]

Hostiles

 This is a spectacular western and on a par with The Searchers for me.  Not in a big skies, big scenes way but in that it encompasses so many themes and stories and the bloody history of a long period condensed into its 2 hours 14 minutes. In fact the New Mexico and Montana landscapes seems to cradle the characters rather than overawe them. It tells of a battle worn US Cavalry Officer, Capt Joseph J Blocker, played by Welsh-born Christian Bale, who is tasked with taking dying Cheyenne Indian Chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) back to die in his home lands in Montana. His family accompany him. Along the way they meet a widow whose family has been killed by Comanches, Rosalie Quaid, played by London–born Rosamund Pike. I remembered her from Made in Dagenham (2010) and Gone Girl (2014) but did not recall Christian Bale from Batman! Blocker also takes on responsibility for delivering a young solider who has massacred Indians to trial, a trial which will almost certainly result in his execution. I loved this film from its early momentary homage to The Searchers with a door opening onto the parade ground as our hero moves through it, to the sensational ending, which was handled consummately by all concerned. The direction is calm and confident; the pace allows time for reflection on the part of actors and audience. I found it thoughtful, beautiful and profound. Confident and powerful. All the cast shine though the three leads are exceptional. Hat’s off to director Scott Cooper. As Capt Blocker observes “You have no idea what war does to a man” but we find out, and we also find out what indestructible humanity may lie beneath. There is much killing and death, redemption and change. I found this film a chronicle of hope in an increasingly black and white world. How many of us would or could learn and apply so much change of view and prejudice in such a short space of time. Take your stoutest handkerchief for the end scene! Thoroughly recommended.  

[yourmaninthestalls]

Molly’s Game

There are two great leads in this film, plus a sharp witty script and delightful on-the-edge editing and narrative juxtaposition. Based on a true story it tells how injured skiing pro Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain) bins her skiing career and takes a job in Los Angeles where she runs her boss’ weekly poker game with the stars. When he tries to cut her salary and effectively rip her off, her apparent powerlessness angers her and she takes over the game, and makes it bigger, brasher and more popular. In the end she is investigated by the tax authorities and FBI for illegal gaming and possible links with Russian organized crime.  To fight her corner she teams up with lawyer Charlie Jaffey (Idris Eba) The pairing of the two of them is a delight to behold and they are both excellent at changing mood on a sixpence and handling drama and humour almost simultaneously. The script by Aaron Sorkin of West Wing fame is compelling and always emotionally charged. As another lawyer comments to her “You don’t want to break the law while you’re breaking the law” but is she breaking the law and will she swap her starry address book for freedom? Go and find out! This is a film about a woman who fights her corner and is totally believable. This is also Aaron Sorkin’s directing debut and he does a thoroughly good job. I read a review which complained that he has yet to develop a “distinctive style” Long may it last! Storytelling beats “look at me” direction in my book. What I really like in this increasingly value-less Trump age is that a sort of natural justice plays out – I won’t spoil it for you. By the way if your card playing skills stalled at Pontoon as mine did, don’t panic, there is little poker played and it is clear what is at stake when it is (no pun intended) An appearance by Kevin Costner as Molly’s therapist Dad Larry is a joy, as he sits with her in Central park giving her a three minute psychological assessment – and he does that thing we have all wished our therapist would do – he tells her the answer! Can I get on the waiting list?    

[yourmaninthestalls]

Happy End

 Happy when it ended.

 I was beguiled by the publicity photo of an amusing/amused group round a seaside dining table including the excellent Toby Jones and Isabelle Huppert. The Curzon ad, also promised a good “cinema experience”.  As follows. Two-time Palme d’Or winner and agent provocateur of European cinema Michael Haneke returns to France after Amour for a new collaboration with Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant. Happy End is a dark satire wrapped around a tragicomic family saga whose gripping bite leaves no one unscathed.

The film lasts two hours and tells the story of a family who run a building firm and have problems. Daughter is traumatised, Dad can’t cope, grandad is bored, son is a bolshie revolutionary, Mum is patient, Toby Jones, her fiancée, appears briefly. I found the style hard to take. It reminded me of discussions I had about co-producing a “Brits in France” series with French TV (sorry to lower the tone here!) I explained that the new settler’s back stories would be told in the first episode. viz, how and why they came to be settling in France. “That would not work for us” my potential French co-producer made clear “We like the viewer to work out the back story for themselves, to really guess the back story”. So it is with Mr Haneke, whereas I think it would be hard to guess that Brit settler Trevor came from Birmingham after a messy divorce from Russian circus trapeze artist Ramone and losing his foundry job and loved trout fishing and collected rare supermarket trolleys, I was unable to guess what the hell was going on in Happy End at all. Certainly for the first 20 minutes. Shots were either lengthy lock offs in which events took place or hand held follows, close ups seem to have been outlawed, (guess what they are feeling) some of the dialogue was deliberately inaudible (guess what they are saying) and everything took ages to happen (guess why you are still in the cinema) To add insult to injury the long lock offs were held even after all activity had ceased – poignant moment for reflection or crew late back from lunch? But maybe I am just a Philistine in search of car chases and sensation. My companion in the Hospital Club screening room enjoyed the film and thought for instance that the long sequences told us how tedious the lives of certain characters were which led to their attempted suicides. But I still believe that if the only way you can communicate boredom is to bore the audience then you should not be making films. Why turn your movie into an endurance test? There is some good news. The last ten minutes are actually entertaining. You may love it – I found it dull, super-indulgent and overlong. To re-visit the Curzon blurb This viewer was not usefully provoked by this agent provacatuer and its ‘gripping bite’ left me totally unscathed.      

[yourmaninthestalls]

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool

The unique power of love

 I have to be careful getting sentimental about Liverpool as I was brought up “over the water” in the Wirral, but I did definitely identify with the family at the centre of this story. It tells of the romance between Hollywood star Gloria Grahame (Annette Bening) and Peter Turner (Jamie Bell). They meet and fall in love – the deeply beautiful Hollywood wisecracker and the confident and disarming Liverpool lad. There is a disparity in their ages but why should that matter? I won’t spoil it for you, but suffice to say they meet again when she is in the UK touring and now seen as more the ex-star than the star. The screenplay plays with the then and now very skillfully but the majestic heart of the film is the Turner family. Mum, played by an excellent Julie Walters as Bella, Dad, (Kenneth Cranham) and brother Jo Junior (Stephen Graham). This love is strong, determined, uncompromising, heart-breaking, rewarding, final, devouring and redemptive. The counterpoint of Annette Bening’s Gloria with her young smile and sassiness intact and the wonderstruck Jamie Bells’ Peter Turner is endlessly fascinating and joyous. Their affection almost tangible. They have amazing screen chemistry and we are rooting for them from the first frame. Do they realize they are being filmed? Director Paul McGuigan has lots of recent TV credits (as well as earlier features) and maybe this is why he confidently allows the family dynamic to hold the story tight together – we need no sweeping vistas or big set ups – the whole is intimate. Jamie Bell won the part of Billy Elliot in an audition of 2000 boys – I am not surprised. He has amazing on screen sincerity and power. Vanessa Redgrave makes an amusing cameo appearance as Gloria’s theatrical mother, unable to remember Shakespeare lines  (what would Sir Michael have to say about that?) – in a great California scene. As in “Call me by Your Name” sexual definitions are ultimately unimportant, as we discover in the same Californian sequence.  The film also features Frances Barber as bitchy sister Joy. (Personally I am still in therapy trying to recover from her appearance in a basque in My Beautiful Launderette – I still can’t go near a washing machine without getting palpitations. Honest. That’s my story and I am sticking to it!) If you have any doubts about the power and transcendence of our love for each other or the innate goodness of humans (sadly often hard to locate) you will love this every bit as much as I did. Even if you are a posho from the Wirral!        

[yourmaninthestalls]

Call Me By Your Name

Dreams of endless summer.

 I loved this film, but why wouldn’t I since the director, Luca Gaudagnino, also directed “A Bigger Splash” and “I Am Love”. The story is set in Northern Italy in 1983 where confident Redford lookalike Oliver (Arnie Hammer) comes to stay with the family of his Professor and enters a relationship with the son of the house Elio (Timothee Chalamet). The events and emotions are powerful but so so far from the simplistic tabloid dissection of sex and our sexuality.  Elio admires and maybe hero worships Oliver but is also his own guy and determined to establish his own identity as he stumbles onwards through his teens. Oliver is cautious with Elio’s emotions. Is he gay or heterosexual? Neither, he is just human. All the peripheral action is perfectly balanced, here is “less is more” writ large. The film evokes those endless summers of our youth that ended too sharply, and to which we would so love to return. There is an innocence and lightness of touch about the sexual awakening of Elio – will he go on to be heterosexual or gay? The question remains irrelevant. The unfolding of the story in a summer holiday full of night swims, family meals, pubescent local girls and happy cycling days, is bright and beautiful – the old house showcasing it all. The screenplay from a book is by James Ivory, who far from losing his touch in any way never puts a word wrong. For me the most powerful scene is between Elio and his father (Michael Stuhlbarg), when his father explains how he understands what has happened between Oliver and Elio and lovingly helps him come to terms with it and learn from it. This exchange is no lecture, it is a scene of total harmony and understanding – how lucky we would be to have or be parents like these. A delight from start to finish.    

[yourmaninthestalls]

FOLLIES live relay.

Curtain calls at the Curzon!

 I attempted to misspend my youth in the Kings Road in the late 60s so it seemed wholly appropriate to go to the Curzon there for the live relay of Follies from the National Theatre. This is the third relay I have been to and I would thoroughly recommend the format. It is all a little camp, mimicking in many way a posher “night at the Opera” or Theatre. People seem to dress up and the chatter level in the lobby is much higher than for a movie. Refreshments are more Chardonnay than Magnum. In the cinema the lights fade when the house lights do in the theatre, which increases the feel of being there. Perhaps best of all, after a few numbers the cinema audience, inspired by the live clapping they hear on the theatre feed, start clapping the artists too, although they are miles away and can’t hear them. I also felt that after “the curtain” we did not merely leave the theatre to find the No 11 bus but “spilled out” onto the Kings Road to find our carriages. What you see is an interesting hybrid of cinema and theatre and takes a few minutes to adjust to. It’s not a film where every shot is planned and the cast directed accordingly, nor is it merely a locked off picture of the proscenium arch, but there are many cameras and angles which allow the narrative to be stimulating and well covered – obviously you see much more than you ever would in the theatre. As for the show! I saw A Little Night Music at the National years ago and was disappointed by the famous and revered Stephen Sondheim.  Wasn’t this meant to be a musical? Where were the catchy tunes, were was the Surrey with the fringe on top (possibly waiting for us in the Kings Road post show?) the tear jerking romance, the swishing skirts of the cowboys/seamen/nuns/gangsters? Now I am older and realise “it’s the lyrics stupid!”. On that count this show is terrific and is about – well, everything really. Being young, being old, being honest, being theatrical, what we really mean by what we say, what is possible and impossible in life. Imelda Staunton was a revelation and it felt like a real meal for the mind. I have seen ballet relayed and also theatre. Opera next  – and it’s only c.£19 for the best seats, which they all are. Curtain up!