Hopkins and Mirren/ Hitch and Alma

Hitchcock – Sacha Gervasi

I’ve always thought of Alfred Hitchcock as the master craftsman of cinema: meticulous in preparation, rigorous in execution and always controlled. His films seldom strayed outside the generic corridor of thriller, suspense or mystery. All demonstrate a respect for and careful control of story, character and plot. The delicious paradox at the heart of films made by the master of suspense is that they always have a wickedly playful quality – expressed well in his mischievous momentary appearances in many of them. Control appears to lie at the heart of his often carefully cultivated enigmatic personality: control of the story, characters, actors, set – and in the end, the audience. The best of Hitchcock movies orchestrates our emotions: we willingly and knowingly submit ourselves to his careful manipulation; suspending our wariness to allow him to surprise and shock us; accepting like a secret shared joke, the fact that we know he will intentionally mislead us. Because it’s all part of the fun – we like to be safely scared – and he does it so well.

Hitchcock’s closest cinematic heir currently is perhaps Tarantino: not just in mastery of technique and manipulated effect; but also in that in neither case do their films resonate outside the screen, the cinema, into what we are pleased to call real life. Different in many ways Tarantino and Hitch are content with the reality of movies – their emotional and artistic playground. Both unashamedly relish and cherish the inescapable voyeurism that is of the essence of cinema. Indeed in one of his greatest films, Rear Window, Hitchcock referentially directs his voyeuristic camera on a voyeuristic narrative.

In his mastery of cinematic crafts especially cinematography, editing, sound, one can see why the young French Directors of the New Wave so admired him: he contributed much to the ‘grammar’ of film, the visual syntax that infused images with sensation and meaning through their angle, rhythm and context.

His reputation as a film-maker now long-established, recent pre-occupation has been with Hitchcock the man. Complex, volatile, private and genuinely at times enigmatic, Sacha Gervasi’s film explores some of these aspects of Hitch the man at a particular point in his career – after the enormous success of North By Northwest when he was looking for something different with which to surprise, indeed shock his audiences. Thus Hitchock is set during the preparation, production and release of his now infamously famous shocking thriller – Psycho. John McLaughlin’s screenplay is based on Stephen Rebello’s book ‘Alfred Hitchcock and the making of Psycho’.

Driving Gervasi’s film is the life-long, deep relationship between Hitch and his exceptionally capable wife Alma Reville – generally acknowledged, not least by Hitch himself, as a deeply influential, hands-on collaborator in his greatest achievements in cinema. Here Gervasi could not be better served, for with an excellent Anthony Hopkins submerged in the latex of Hitchock impersonation it is the almost incomparable Helen Mirren who lets us in to the relationship as Reville.

Alma Reville, a fellow Brit was just one day younger than her life-long partner and already a successful film editor when they met. She survived him by just two years after his death at the age of 80 in 1980. Hitchcock is therefore in many ways a love story, personal and professional – dry-eyed, unsentimental and none the worse for that. When Paramount refused funding for the darkly conceived Psycho Alma and Hitch risked all in putting up their house to finane it themselves. One of the film industry’s better gambles.

Hitchcock’s pre-occupation with the beautiful, usually ice-cool blondes (Grace Kelly, Janet Leigh, Tippi Hedren etc) is referenced in McLaughlin’s script and the ambiguities of the Hitchcock marital relationship further explored through Alma’s relationship with screenwriter Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston). His cold, even bullying way with actors, especially women comes through in his on set direction of Janet Leigh (a surprisingly good Scarlett Johansson) and Vera Miles (Jessica Biel). His jealousy at Alma’s apparent attraction to ‘Whit’ is shot by Gervasi with a few technical Hitchockian flourishes to evoke a slight sense of tension even threat.

The battle to get Psycho made and distributed with all the clever marketing hype Hitchcock orchestrated, is pretty standard Hollywood fare but interesting none-the-less: he bought up all the copies he could of the original book about the real life serial killer on whom he based Norman Bates; no one was admitted to cinemas after the film began; police were stationed in cinemas in case of problems in audience response etc etc.

There is here no real hint of the latter-day pre-occupation with the darker side of Hitchcock’s obsessional attitude to his leading ladies, especially we understand Tippi Hedren in The Birds. I didn’t see the recent TV movie The Girl but it seems clear that Hitchcock’s obsession was sexual though rebuffed. It is also implied in Hitchcock that his marital relationship is no longer sexually fulfilling.

I’m not sure we miss much by the angle Gervasi takes. It seems to me it is Hitchcock’s mastery and development of the art of cinema that have given us at least half a dozen of the best films, certainly thrillers, ever made that matters. Of the rest I suspect like the rest of the world from Presidents and Kings to Politicians and Business tycoons, Alfred Hitchcock simply wanted to be desired – for himself. That he was to say the least, a physically unattractive man surrounded by, and with power over, some of the most beautiful women in the world, was a kind of self-imposed masochistic tragedy.

If we want to try to understand these darker recesses of the Hitchcock personality my hunch is that the best and most legitimate route is through the films themselves. And here the first port of call must be his most enigmatic, emotionally layered exploration of identity and obsession – Vertigo. By most critical judgements this is his ‘best’ film: and perhaps the one where the darker recesses of the Hitchcock unconscious escapes his rigorous, conscious, devoutly Catholic control and emerges, unsettlingly of its own accord.

In the end perhaps the deepest passion Alma and Alfred shared was their love of movies.

Filed under: Sacha Gervasi | No Comments »

Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln – Steven Spielberg

“The past is another country. They do things differently there.” L P Hartley’s now almost proverbial opening lines of The Go-Between constantly resonated in the back of my mind throughout this powerful, accomplished, superbly acted film.

With typical authority and characteristically meticulous attention to detail, Spielberg assembles to great effect, the several arts of verisimilitude modern cinema offers: costume, set, Art direction, cinematography etc. I am persuaded without reservation that what we see on screen in Lincoln at any moment is what such a scene 150 years ago would have looked like.

Equally, I find no difficulty or dissonance with the sequence of verifiable, factual events shown. We all accept, of necessity, that any depiction of events, post hoc or even current, must be selective, chosen for artistic, dramatic effect. Spielberg has decided to construct a selective narrative around a small part of Abraham Lincoln’s life: a focused perspective on the man and a critical part of his 4-year Presidency which precipitated and was dominated by the American Civil War.

I can also see why Spielberg has chosen the focus he has: for it is rich in the irreducible contradictions and dilemmas of practical politics: the choice between principle and pragmatism; being right and being effective. But neither Spielberg nor screenplay writer Tony Kushner, despite the authenticity of period and persuasiveness of performance, ever reaches deep enough into the conflict of ideas and beliefs the implacable opposition of which left over 1 million dead or wounded. The passion and passions of hostility and hatred are convincingly shown but seem tied to a slogan – pro and anti-slavery; rather than rooted in the fundamentally different view of the world, morality and politics represented by the North and the Confederacy and within which the institution of slavery was tragically embedded.

Lincoln, typically expressed this perfectly:

“Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the Nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.”

One of the greatest strengths of Aaron Sorkin’s sustained brilliance in writing for the West Wing was his ability to understand and effectively express both sides of disputes. The tone of the series was largely liberal and Democratic – but he regularly created credible, likeable characters though whom he expressed a rational, credible perspective on the opposing conservative, Republican philosophy.

To our modern liberal sensibility it is hard to even hear, let alone countenance the visceral, racist implacability of those opposed to abolition as portrayed in Lincoln. And this is where the essence of my opening paragraph bites deep. Whatever may happen in practice, there is today a widespread, virtually world-wide consensus that recognizes the absurdity, let alone the obscenity not just of slavery but the racist beliefs that justified and sustained it. As such, watching the railing, ranting, hypocritical, arrogance and hubris of the politicians as shown in Lincoln – all of course clothed in the language of principle, never challenged or argued for – looks as trivial, meaningless, ill-mannered, as a pointless spat at Prime Minister’s Question Time. That this brawling, pompous, bunch of self-serving bigots were making decisions that sent a million young men and women to their deaths beggars belief – in the film as well as the history. One feels there had to be more to the hostility, the hatred, the conflict, than this. It is for me the fundamental weakness of Spielberg’s otherwise excellent film, not that he doesn’t succeed in exploring and illuminating this profound and disturbing question – but that he really doesn’t try. He takes the pro- and anti-abolition positions as given and concentrates on the political mechanics.

A consequence of this is that Spielberg’s Lincoln is politically and personally more Lyndon Johnson than Jack Kennedy: cynical pragmatism over inspirational, idealistic leadership. For all the finely observed detail and conviction of Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal his Lincoln is not the charismatic leader history records. This impression is reinforced by another disappointment of Lincoln for me: for a man rightly renowned for his inspirational rhetoric and speeches; endlessly quotable, none of the speeches shown – including an oddly downbeat final scene – takes flight, lifts the heads and hearts and minds in the way that both Lincoln’s and indeed Kennedy’s later, do – simply in reading, let alone hearing as recorded or performed. It’s almost as if Kushner and Spielberg were afraid of the inspirational and idealistic and felt the need, perhaps to meet modern so-called ‘realistic’ sensibilities to make their Lincoln more of an effective Political operator than a great leader.

That said the political pragmatism is persuasive: and perhaps rightly plays into one’s modern cynicism about politics and politicians. You do need to concentrate on these sections of the narrative as they are certainly as challenging as one of Sorkin’s more dense West Wing scripts. With clear contemporary resonance it is clear that under the exigencies of war Lincoln behaved extra-legally (suspension of Habeas Corpus) and beyond his Constitutional powers in issuing the Emancipation Declaration regarding slaves. Much of the film turns on his realization that the unconstitutionality of the Emancipation had to be remedied if it was to survive the War. Hence the driving force of Lincoln is his determination to embed the end of slavery firmly and for perpetuity in the Constitution through the 13th Amendment. Much of the film’s tension lies in the wheeler-dealing, pork-barrel bribes, political blackmail and unashamed use of patronage required to win the Congressional vote on this amendment – for which initially they were more than 20 votes short.

Like any buzzy episode of the West Wing this is fascinating, at times tense and dramatic stuff within which we see all the flaws and imperfections to which men in general and politicians in particular are only too prone. A superb Tommy Lee Jones as Congressman Thaddeus Stephens, secretly sharing his bed with his black housekeeper, exemplifies the central moral conflict in the film when he dilutes his belief in the fundamental equality of black people as we might say before God, to the pragmatic demand that they should be accorded equality before the law. This again for the political expediency of so framing the Amendment that it can appeal widely enough to be passed. It is the position of Spielberg’s film, probably historically accurate, that a large number of Congressmen who voted for the abolition of slavery would neither then, or ever have been willing to countenance that freed slaves should be given the vote: a horrifying prospect for the time on a par with the enfranchisement of women. Another country indeed.

Lincoln is a powerful, accomplished film with a central performance from Day-Lewis mercifully free for me of any of his distracting mannerisms: he is Lincoln from the moment he appears on screen and that authenticity and authority is sustained throughout. He never has been, and for me perhaps never will be better. The Oscar’s, rightly, in the bag. There are many other superb support performances – from Tommy Lee Jones (another Oscar if there’s any justice); a feisty Sally Field; the greatly under-rated David Strathairn and the ‘guvnor’ of US movie character actors – 88-years old Hal Holbrook.

The deepest flaws in this period story do not lie in the film or the performances – but in the history itself.  On November 19th 1863 at Gettysburg, in one of the best known, most admired political speeches ever made, President Lincoln began thus:

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal….”

Spielberg’s film makes it clear that as far as the real political events were concerned this should have read – “that all men should be treated as equal before the law”. America still awaits the full-hearted consent of its people to the fundamental truth as Lincoln stated it.

Further additions to accommodate truth would be:

“…..conceived in liberty, established in genocide, and dedicated to the proposition that all men, except Native Americans, are created equal….”

Black Americans were granted citizenship, a pre-condition of enfranchisement, by the 14th amendment of 1868. It would be a further 56 years before the same ‘privilege’ was accorded to all Native Americans: and a further 40 years before the last American State granted them the right to vote.

Lincoln was a great man. Within the limits of what was possible at the time he was courageous and principled. But as with much history, not just but especially American, his life is as much a greatly needed myth as historical truth.

Filed under: 4 stars, Drama, Extended essay, Historical, Hollywood, Oscar Winner, Political, Steven Spielberg, War | No Comments »

The Visitor

Did you visit me dark angel
did you whisper
did you call
do you come unbidden
does my will
do my choices
make a difference
to anything at all

I am not my body
I am not my brain
and though these may
become no more
I shall still remain
for I am mind
or thinking soul
as some would say

I am cut
I am sawn
I am stitched and sewn
Man’s finest art
touched my heart
to gather in
gifted precious time
I might not have known

So for another while
gratefully
I remain
body heart and brain
love of thought
and thoughtful love
held my trembled hand
and loved me back again

Have you gone dark angel
‘til we meet again
for meet again we must
but thoughts of love
and love of thought
are not paced in time
this fragment of eternity
is a gift we take on trust

Filed under: Emotions, Family, Loss, Love, Philosophical, Poems, Spiritual | No Comments »

Les Miserables

Les Miserables – Tom Hooper

Against all the odds – a triumph: of conception, execution, and performance. Hooper has taken perhaps the most iconic post-war, quintessentially theatrical stage musical; successful beyond all expectation and initial critical reaction, and captured its spirit in the radically different aesthetic form of film.

The assurance with which Hooper threads his way through a series of critical directorial judgements, each of which could have sabotaged this powerful, moving film, is truly impressive. He uses the freedom of film to open out the playing space of Les Mis just enough to convey an atmospheric evocation of a politically turbulent Paris of the early 19th century; yet he stays in close to distil a keen sense of intensity and emotional power as Hugo’s idealistic tale of the ultimate triumph of hope over despair and a humanitarian faith in the courage of good men and women, whatever the practical pressure of necessity to act otherwise, to first recognize and then fight injustice – social and personal.

Hugo’s contrast between the spirit of justice, tempered with mercy; and the unbending rigidities of the law, indifferent to the impossible conflicts of responsibility created by random circumstance; is perfectly represented by the central narrative thread of Les Mis – the implacable legal absolutism of Inspector Javert (Russell Crowe) in his obsessive pursuit of Hugh Jackman’s Jean Valjean – sentenced to 20 years for stealing bread to keep his sister’s family from starving. Hugo’s moral sub-text represented by Valjean is the authentically Christian ethic of ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ – forgiveness, redemption; while Javert’s dogmatism sees a single illegal act, whatever its context or motivation, as irremediable, indicative of a sinful soul consigned to inevitable and deserved, eternal damnation.

If the moral framework of Les Mis is provided by Christian ethical sentiment; its spirit is very French: a profound belief in the possibility of instinctive goodness and honour, even, indeed especially, in the poor and oppressed. It is in this humanitarian idealism that it seems to me the deeper appeal of Les Mis resides. Of course the central story of Fantine (Ann Hathaway) struggling against poverty, deprivation and exploitation to protect her child Cosette, is rich in sentiment and pathos but while the characters engage our sympathy it is the wider possibilities of the courage to hope, the determination to survive with honour and integrity intact that makes the appeal of Les Mis so universal and inspirational.

I can’t remember a film in recent times where the commitment of the players is so tangible and total. Hugh Jackman is a revelation as Valjean with a performance of subtlety and nuance; this surpassed only by Anne Hathaway’s Fantine, sometimes ethereal and detached in the stage version. Hathaway’s Fantine is the flesh and blood, viscerally passionate mother of Hugo’s imagination: used, abused and wronged but unwavering in her courage to save and protect her child. Although on screen for not much more than about 15/20 minutes overall, Hathaway is mesmerising and her I Dreamed a Dream conjured from a singing voice technically not much more than adequate, is one of those special, unique moments in cinema. Those few minutes are worth the price of admission in themselves and should, if there is any justice in such things, bring her the Supporting Actress Oscar she so richly deserves.

Other parts are equally well cast and judged: Eddie Redmayne’s fine voiced Marius extracts every frisson of sadness from Empty Tables; and Samantha Barks makes the most of Eponine’s spine-tingling On My Own. The chorus rouses us with the anthemic Red and Black, Drink with Me and Do You Hear The People Sing. Under Hooper’s careful guidance Jackman, gradually teasing out the limits of a fairly good voice, finally lets go with One day More, Bring Him Home and the reprised Who Am I?

I missed a little the rambunctious cathartic, theatrical release of tension represented on stage by the unspeakable Threnardier’s; but Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Coen’s sly, insinuating performances are still well judged. As the grown up Cosette, Amanda Seyfried has a pleasing soprano and a light touch for a part offering few opportunities to shine; needing to convince rather than impress. Ten-year old Isabelle Allen is touching as the waif-like young Cosette and Daniel Huttlestone’s Gavroche suitably cheekily defiant. Crowe’s Javert took a little time to settle with me and is as near to marginal casting as it gets in this Les Miserables: but in the end his bluff, physically uncompromising presence works well in suggesting a man hiding his insecurities behind an uncompromising outward persona; a man morally lost and adrift when his prejudices are first challenged and then disproved.

In another brave and perfectly judged decision, Hopper opted to go for broke and record the soundtrack live, as played, contrary to the safer convention of recording in the studio and post-synching. Not only does this make the singing an integral part of the performances but I suspect created a sense of danger and risk that feeds directly through to the power and commitment of the performances.

The universal appeal and popular success of such an uncompromisingly operatic form with virtually no dialogue, based upon a 19th century French novel by a writer often sniffily intellectually dismissed by a cultural elite of his own countrymen, was always an unlikely phenomenon. But to see Les Miserables on stage was to fall under its spell thanks to the brilliance of Claude Michel Schönberg’s music and Herbert Kretzmer’s resonant English lyrics. By inspired direction, carefully nurturing the vocal limitations of his fine cast, Tom Hooper has done Schönberg and Kretzmer proud. He has added a new and impressive dimension to one of the best loved musicals of recent decades.

If you loved it on stage – see the film. If you haven’t seen it before – see the film. This is popular art of the very highest order. Let the melodies and anthems which have insinuated themselves into the consciousness of we who know the piece, benignly infect you as well. Really: do not miss.

Coda

Reports of spontaneous applause, even standing ovations greeting Les Miserables in British cinemas; and people moved to tears by it, add weight to the intriguing question of what it is in us that is touched so deeply by this piece with its uncompromising, non-populist aesthetic form.

It might be argued that our trust in idealism, political and moral was destroyed at 12.30 Central Time at Dealey Plaza Dallas Texas on November 22nd 1963*. Any fragments of innocent faith remaining were blown away first on April 4th 1968 at the Lorraine Motel, Memphis Tennessee at 6.01 Central Time**; and finally and definitively erased exactly 2 months later on June 5th 12.15 (Pacific Time) in the Kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel Los Angeles***.

As if to mock our democratic naiveté and credulousness, the revelations of the systematic, cynical venality of Richard Nixon’s White House exposed at Watergate and further fuelled by the revisionist post-hoc character assassinations of both the Kennedy brothers and Dr King, persuaded the American people and the wider democratic world to which they offered leadership, that not only had our heroes been destroyed but that they were never worthy heroes in the first place.

A healthy democratic scepticism gave way to a sophisticated cynicism, which despite the brief but flawed respite of the Clinton Administration, was amply reinforced by the self-serving inadequacies of actual political leadership, the nadir of which was the selfish, self-serving cynical hubris of 8 years of George W Bush.

The relief felt outside America at the signs of a re-kindled idealism within Barack Obama’s rhetoric was palpable; even if tempered by the limitations of implementation presented by a distrustful and disillusioned American electorate and a polarized electoral system.

My point, fanciful perhaps, is that there is an instinct deep within us as human beings that wants to believe, no even demands to believe – not in the perfectability of Man/Woman but that an instinct to recognise and resist injustice; a desire to respect and honour one’s fellow human beings is as real and verifiable as is the more easily proven prevalence of greed and self-interest.

While the sentiment and yes, elements of sentimentality of the lives within Les Miserables engages us on a personal level, the overwhelming success of this piece of popular art for me appears to strike a deeper chord within us – one which links the injustices and inequalities of Victor Hugo’s 19th century France with the ample examples of the same inequity and iniquities persisting almost 300 years later.

Philosophically my only reservation is perhaps the assumption of organised religions; whether the Catholicism of Hugo’s time or the more diverse faith groups of the 21st century, that without God(s) and faith, the instinct to resist injustice and risk all on behalf of one’s fellow man/woman, would not exist. It is again a very French philosophical perception that such an instinct to altruism and humanitarian empathy may be a given of human nature which religion uses and deploys rather than exclusively generates. That we ultimately have a choice between our better and our baser natural human instincts, unmediated by metaphysical assumption or next world rewards is itself a philosophical perspective powerfully represented in the French intellectual tradition of Camus, Sartre and Existentialism.

Of all the Arts, Music cuts straight to the heart; unmediated by words and reason: in this the rigorous operatic form of Les Miserables perfectly represents an immediacy of connection that appears, even in a popular culture in some degree hostile to it, to strike a resonant chord in people of very different cultures and traditions all over the world. That is an achievement that transcends even its undoubted commercial and financial success.

* The assassination of John F Kennedy
** The assassination of Dr Martin Luther King
*** The assassination of Robert Kennedy

Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

Buffy Sainte Marie

President Barack Obama

St Albans, England – January 7^th 2013

Dear Mr President,

I need your help to recognise a deep wrong which we both share: you as an American and President; me as the descendant of English and European race and culture. Recognise not remedy, because the wrong in question is beyond remediation; one of those uniquely appalling events in human history – like the holocaust and of course slavery.

At your first Inauguration, both the fact of your election as the first black President; and the form of celebration you chose, resonated powerfully back down 600 years of injustice and inhumanity. Who can forget the inimitable Aretha Franklin celebrating both your election and the ‘belonging’ for African Americans it represented. In a voice the gift of the angels.

Your second Inaugural offers a unique opportunity to recognise just as necessarily and powerfully, an equally profound historical wrong: and just as in the on-going struggle for equality and justice for black Americans; it’s still going on in the country you now serve. This further recognition of profound injustice is equally more than 600 years overdue

I sometimes ask my English friends if they can name 10 prominent African Americans – in any walk of life. All can; from yourself and other politicians, through entertainers, sportsmen, musicians, singers, even the odd businessman.

Then I ask them how many prominent Native Americans they can name. Usually none. Even if I allow them dead First Nation figures, most get stuck at about 5 – almost every one remembered not from the truths of history but the myths of Hollywood. Mostly profoundly, shamefully false.

My debt? As an Englishman, in my historical education, about three quarters of the map of the world was coloured pink. I was raised to celebrate Empire and Colonial conquest: defer to the Monarchy, and admire the imposition of a British culture and way of life, often under military force, upon nations, peoples and races whose indigenous rights and precious cultures we didn’t try to understand, dismissed and sometimes destroyed.

As a European and an agnostic, with respect for Christian ethics, I cannot read the actual words of the Papal Bull defining the Doctrine of Discovery without a deep sense of shame – human and religious. Equally when I read for the first time in recent years the meaning and basis of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and its effects in practice on the deep spirituality of the thriving, diverse, precious culture lived by the indigenous peoples of North America for millennia before Columbus – I weep. Bitter, and yes guilty tears.

I am proud to be an Englishman and Briton: how could a countryman of Shakespeare, Darwin, Newton, Eliot, Austen, Hume, Wilberforce, Pankhurst et al not be? And I was born in Thetford, Norfolk birthplace of Thomas Paine. It is precisely the inspirational thought and beliefs of these truly great Britons that demands a critical revision of my jingoistic, handed-down historical perspective just as do the uncomfortable truths of American History and the irremediable wrongs and injustices inflicted upon the indigenous Native American peoples: often in the name at least of ‘Christianity’ and its many tribes.

You now have a perfect opportunity to symbolically set the tone of reconciliation and unity of the modern United States of America and commit the courage of your second administration to face challenging and disturbing truths as a necessary, though not sufficient condition for tackling the many seemingly intractable problems at home and abroad over the next 4 years.

Surely 600 years after the genocide in which the United States was born, endless injustices past and current, broken promises and torn up treaties; it is time to symbolically recognise the courage and honour of the American Indian peoples – alive today, vibrant against all the odds and still, against all their actual experience, believing and trusting that the way to pursue justice and recognition of human rights is through the law and due process – not the barrel of a gun.

And you have your Aretha: my exact contemporary, (Dr) Buffy Sainte Marie has worked tirelessly for her people and indigenous peoples around the world for over half a century, during which time she has also penned and sung 100’s of songs including perhaps the best known anti-war song ever written (Universal Soldier), Oscar-winning love songs and protest songs against an unjust war for which she was banned from US radio. My Country ‘Tis of Thy People You’re Dying is the most heart-rending plea for justice I have ever heard. But her activism and faith in hope defines her: for justice, for her people, and for what is best in America.

She also has a voice to die for, undimmed at 70. This is her America The Beautiful:

Use your 2^nd Inaugural to recognise the people whose spirit roams the mountains, streams and plains of not just most the powerful, but one of the most beautiful lands on earth. It was theirs: tell them, show them, they belong. They, like African Americans, have waited 600 years to hear it.

Don’t let me, them, and yourself down. They have waited long enough.

Sincerely

(Keith Farman)

Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

Hey Ho - the gangs all here

Technical Quality

Dramatic Quality

 The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – Peter Jackson

This visual realisation of a fantasy world of endlessly warring kingdoms is a technical tour-de-force: graphically state of the art with special effects to match. Simon Bright’s Art Direction aided by Andy McLaren and Ben Milson, together with Dan Hennah’s Production design and Ra Vincent’s set decoration have combined to create a cinematic work of art; massive in scale and ambition, and endlessly impressive throughout the 169 minutes of Peter Jackson’s latest labour of love for Tolkien.

Ignore the nonsense reported about the ‘Super HD’ HFR 48 frames/second process – to me it simply gives the images a consistently pin-sharp look that the eye, characteristically, very soon takes for granted. Jackson is also one of an increasing number of Directors who are beginning to get the hang of using 3D to serve an aesthetic vision rather than dominate it: not being afraid to go in close and taking full benefit of the depth of field 3D offers and being very judicious in his use of the unnatural illusory space between screen and viewer.

A technical triumph then: but for me a dramatic disaster; endlessly tedious with every chase and battle preceded and followed by swathes of exposition that try the patience and constantly destroy any momentum and pace the technical whizzkids dazzle us with. As the imagination soars with stunning imagery, the turgid nerdy screenplay constantly slows us down and drags us back to Earth – Middle or otherwise.

I should confess that not only did I find Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings  unreadable; but I also failed The Hobbit: my hippie-loving, fantasy-chasing credentials lying in pieces at my winkle-picked, flare-trousered feet. It beggars my belief how in Gandalf’s name, Jackson is going to stretch this slight, fey little children’s story into 3 multi-million dollar epics – still less, Saruman save us – why.

I like Martin Freeman and I suppose he makes a lovable little Hobbitty, Bilbo Baggins – were not the wide-eyed, archly chirrupy little munchkin such an infuriating little twerp. While the hapless and mostly scriptless Freeman spends much of the movie staring into space and looking lovably bewildered, one sentiment I can wholly identify with, his mentor and agent provocateur Ian McKellen intones the most preposterous tosh about kings and wizards and wars and, well, stuff; with all the misplaced gravitas only a Shakespearian Knight of the Realm can muster. The clue’s in the name – Gandalf the Grey. Just so.

Apparently there’s a dragonny thingy called Smaug (all the names in Tolkien look like anagrams – (‘am Gus’ here perhaps) who’s nicked the land of Erebore (re-boree?) from the Dwarves – er Dwarfs, led by Hunky Thorin (Richard Armitage) after their King lost his head and thus his battle with a bunch of skin-headed Orcs with the kind of dogs our real-world skinheads would give someone else’s back teeth for. In revenge, and offering no decapitation allowance to the Orc leader Azog, Thorin renders him armless with a quick swish of his dwarvy sword. Thorin thinks the match ended Dwarf 1 – Orc 0: but he and we are soon thrillingly, I jest, to discover that this was only a half-time score.

Cheerful Charlie Bilbo is therefore dragged into the Quest to recover Erinmore, er Elsinore, sorry Erebor accompanied by 13 very hairy, very oddly dressed vertically challenged little guys. Who the hell is looking after Snow White while they’re all off enjoying themselves Director Jackson does not vouchsafe to tell us. Baggy is recruited as the team’s ‘Burglar’ a mystery of nomenclature that will perhaps not be explained for another 3-4 hours and a further couple of hundred million dollars.

Much running about, mostly up and down mountains ensues during which hundreds of exotic, fleshy little chaps are crushed, stabbed, thrown off bridges and mountains etc to their utterly unimportant, totally disposable deaths. While Gandalf drones, Bilbo moans and they all fetch up in the land of the Elves which I’m sure has an anagrammatic name – I just can’t remember it as I had just about lost the will to live at this point.

The deepest mystery of all in Jackson’s Tolkienian world is how the hell any of them got there – as the hundreds of thousands of Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits, Goblins (Gin Slob) and Orcs can scrape up only one female between them. Now I’m sure the feisty Cate Blanchett is more than up to the reproductive challenge this represents but her Elvy Galadriel (Radial Leg) wafts about so ethereally that she looks about to disappear in a wisp of smoke at any moment. Aided by her Head Elf Elrond (Del Ron – Hugo Weaving) Celestial Cate, as if fully aware of her token woman role, wears a constantly beatific, if vapid smile probably generated by how much she is going to get paid for doing so little. Good on yer Cate.

Leaving Elvish Presently, the doughty dwarves head across the mountains. Then, after a bruising quasi-genocidal encounter with another race of fleshy foes Azog catches up with them and challenges them to play off the second half of their match. More stunning special effects conflict kicks off though it has to be said that by this stage I was beginning to get a bit of awed wonder-fatigue.

Before the second half confrontation, Billy-boy meets up with gobby goblin Gollum (L O Glum) who does a lot of hissing, I’m not sure why, possesses an odd wide-eyed evil demeanour and carelessly drops a magic gold ring that Billy Boy promptly snaffles – perhaps that’s why they called him the Burglar. Nice little gismo though – it makes the wearer invisible: what every happy Hobbit longs for – though I can’t see the attraction myself. Invisibility is no big magical deal anyway – in the real world you can achieve the same result just by reaching the age of 65.

All the ingredients safely in place for Hobbit 2 – The Journey Even Longer than Expected: we leave our chirpy chums perched precariously on the tip of a rock staring mystically and attractively into the distance – probably wondering where Professor Brian Cox disappeared to.

In accordance with my duty to you dear reader, I will return to the ring to battle manfully with the Big Bob Gains Baggy sequel. But I really don’t think I can get into the Hobbit.

WARNING

There are at least three versions of The Hobbit doing the rounds:

3D 48 frames/sec (HFR) – only in specially equipped cinemas
3D standard 28 frames/ sec
2D 28 frames/ sec

I’m not sure whether there is a 2D HFR.

If you can, the HFR version is well worth seeing but Cineworld staff didn’t really know much about it and their advertising does not make it clear what version is been shown. They talk of ‘super-hd’.

Coda – Cinema’s Cinderella

I was going to put this at the top of the piece but did not want to qualify my genuine admiration for The Hobbit’s technical excellence.

It is beyond reason, bewilderingly perverse, that after millions were spent on this movie to ensure the purest, highest quality of images, the sound balance between dialogue and musical score is absolutely abysmal for at least the first 30 minutes of the film: starting right up front with an at times occasionally inaudible voice-over.

Of course it could be that the cinema got this wrong but if the music comes through loud and clear it would suggest the fault lies within the film. The essence of the cinema experience is that it draws you in, almost as a silent witness to events. Here the sound level of dialogue especially is so low that it distances you from what is going on – it’s at about the frustrating level of having your favourite TV programme turned low because some fool has come round for a cup of tea. Or even, sorry ladies, trying to get into the atmosphere of the Manchester Derby with a low sound level competing for attention with the current progress of the Christmas shopping.

The Hobbit isn’t the first to display this deeply frustrating, culpably unacceptable fault – but given the technical brilliance, even excess of attention to graphics and visual imagery I do wonder whether anybody actual sat down to listen to the movie before finishing production. If so they weren’t listening properly.

It is not a matter of volume: it is a question of acuity, especially for the spoken word. This persistent weakness can be partially mitigated if you can get to a cinema with a Lucas THX sound system – infinitely better than the industry standard Dolby, especially at the higher, lighter end where the human voice plays.

Sadly this Cinderella of movies is neglected in different ways. Everything from the self-indulgent mumbling of say Joaquin Phoenix at the beginning of The Master; through lousy music/dialogue balance as here in The Hobbit; to erratic acuity in group dialogue that leaves key meanings unheard.

There seem to be two conceits at work here: the aforementioned UIOA (up its own arse) acting; and then the apparent indifference to words, dialogue, in contrast to the infinite pains taken with images. In fact it is at times as if Cinderella Sound has a twin sister, Cinderella Screenplay: both unjustly neglected in favour of the pushy ugly sisters – CGI and SFX.

Directors must know that sound is a critical part of the final experience so why they are so persistently deaf to its quality and effectiveness in their precious creations defies rational understanding.

One of the many reasons I love sub-titled films is that they completely eradicate this problem.

Filed under: 2 star, Action, Drama, Fantasy, Hollywood, Humorous, Oscar Winner, Peter Jackson | No Comments »

Mads Mikkelsen

The Hunt – Thomas Vinterber

This sensitive, insightful Danish film is the flipside to the Jimmy Savile saga. A timely warning that the undoubted truth that we should always listen to children, does not, cannot, mean that we must always take everything they say at face value. What this beautifully acted, subtly scripted, impeccably cast little film demonstrates is that first encouraging young children to talk about sexual issues and then sifting the truths of fact and experience from those of the imagination – is a profoundly difficult challenge. It needs a finely tuned sensibility – to young children and their inner lives; and not least to the minefield that is language. Procedurally it almost certainly needs the discipline of relevant professional qualification to protect against the inherent dangers of ‘transference’ – in these cases the redirection of adult fears and emotions onto the child.

Lucas (the excellent Mads Mikkelsen) is an attractive, acrimoniously divorced Primary School teacher; missing his adolescent son Marcus who is reluctantly living with his mother. Lucas’s school has shut down and he is standing in at the local nursery school. As the only man on the staff Lucas is immensely popular with the kids, especially the boys, who love the opportunity he offers as a guy, for a rough and tumble.

Lucas is well established in the village with many long-term friends. He is comfortably included in the macho men’s world of hunting, drinking and rambunctious singing – but this is merely a part of his life, not it’s raison d’etre. Marcus indicates that he wants to come back to live with his father.

Lucas displays a sensitivity to all the children in the school, tempered by a clear sense of the boundaries between teacher and child. His best friends Brun and Agnes’s daughter Klara (a heart-stopping Annika Wedderkopp), perhaps 7/8, goes to the school and loves Lucas’s dog Fanny. Klara is painfully sensitive and shy with that dread, common in children, of stepping on the lines in pavements. Klara’s fear is obsessive: Lucas finds her upset and lost in the town, because she says, she was looking down too much to avoid the lines and so didn’t see where she was going. Lucas, with empathy and insight simply joins forces with her: she to see they avoid the lines; he to see where they are going so they both get home safely.

Klara makes a special message for Lucas which she gives him: then when she sees him at school buried under a pile of mock-fighting noisy kids she rushes to join in and exuberantly kisses him on the lips. Speaking to her privately afterwards, very low key, Lucas just comments that kissing on the lips is only for Mummy and Daddy. When Klara later sees the other children having fun with Lucas she decides she hates him. This is such a noticeable change that the headmistress asks Klara about it. And so Lucas’s nightmare begins.

The narrative drive of the film kicks in. It is tense and disturbing, redolent with with a deep sense of foreboding and a horrified realisation of the inexorable, irreversible logic of what ensues. Potentially a real life tragedy. If one’s child being sexually abused is every parent’s worst fear; it is every man’s, especially a teacher’s nightmare to be falsely accused of abuse: whether unwittingly or maliciously. These fears are an ineradicable part of our modern endemically sexually charged culture and go to the very heart of our relationship with children of course: but crucially, as this richly layered film shows, they alter the balance of all relationships, especially trust within friendship and between partners. The chance exposure of young children through the ubiquity of graphic sexual imagery is a key element in the narrative here.

The Hunt explores the corrosive effect of first suspicion, then doubt and finally disgust this deepest of human aberrations arouses in us. Our response is so visceral and instinctive that it subversively reverses one of our highest principles – that one is innocent until proven guilty. We may be willing to take risks for ourselves: even to a degree, as with sports etc, calculated risks with our children; but the irreversible nature of the harm done to a child forces us to reject even the possibility of a risk where there is even the slightest suspicion of abuse. The tragedy at the heart of The Hunt is that a person not only is guilty until proved innocent: but that in the end there is no such thing as proof. Everyone, the accused, children, parents and friends stand to lose their innocence – and once lost, by definition, it cannot be recovered. The courage and effort required to prevent this asks more of ordinary people and communities than they are usually willing to give.

Wittgenstein said: “the world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy…. the world becomes quite another, it so to speak waxes or wanes as a whole.” A random, catastrophically misunderstood moment of time changes Lucas’s world. Forever.

This is a deeply absorbing film which leaves no thread in the complex weave of possibilities in a profoundly disturbing issue, unexamined. It is about trust, friendship, parenthood, and above all else, the fact that real moral issues are not about simple factual questions of right and wrong; but about perplexing human judgements based more upon one’s deepest beliefs and faith; not what we know or can be proven – and our courage to live up to them in the most challenging of circumstances. That Lucas retains the trust and faith of some but not others is both encouraging and dispiriting at the same time. Especially as one can so easily understand those who can’t resist their fears.

The instinctive manliness of hunting and coming of age marked by owning one’s first rifle provides the contextual thread that gives us the title and provides the dramatic coda to the film. This leaves me completely cold but in no way detracts from the main narrative of the film.

Sadly far too few people are likely to see The Hunt and many will be unwilling even to acknowledge the dilemmas it poses. At its worst this toxic attitude of willful ignorance leads to such madness as stoning the house of a Paediatrician.

A moving, deeply felt, accomplished film; beautifully shot, unobtrusively edited and with moments of almost unbearable tension and exquisite vulnerability. Please don’t miss it if you can help it.

Filed under: 4 stars, Drama, General, Philosophical, Thomas Vinterberg | No Comments »

Seven Psychopaths – Martin McDonagh

The spirit of Joseph Heller (Catch-22) haunts this anarchic, scabrous black satire. And it doesn’t get any better than that. Heller took the established but contradictory conventions and attitudes to war as premises and then with a rigorous, implacable logic followed them through to a reductio ad absurdum conclusion: thereby demonstrating not only the falsity of the premises but the lethal absurdity inherent within them.

That In Bruges Writer-Director Martin McDonagh’s more modest targets here are the established but equally contradictory conventions and inherent values of Hollywood does not detract from the power of this deliciously scathing, weirdly quirky, gratuitously funny and gratuitously violent movie. The spirit of anarchic rebellion in Seven Psychopaths, may use the easy targets of Hollywood’s preoccupation with marketed violence and fetishized weapons, but it hints and nags away at the dark, disturbing reality that underlies them. You laugh from the gut; and then your mind feels uneasy.

McDonagh’s writing is clever, witty, intelligent and funny. There is a real possibility, to be savoured; that if, as it should, it wins an Oscar for best original screenplay it will do so only because the members of the Academy haven’t really understood it.

And all the actors are on board: brilliant performances all round testify to the fact that Messrs Farrell, Rockwell, Walkern, Harrelson and a superbly ambiguous Tom Waits et al – all get it. You can’t just deliver the lines for this stuff – you have to see the absurdity, feel the contempt, to get the right timing to let the humour play. It’s a bit like the film of Catch-22: a long line of A-list actors delivered their lines well enough; but it took Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould as Hawkeye and Trapper in Mash, a completely different film (released at the same time), to capture the true anarchic spirit of Yossarian and the other characters in Heller’s book.

A shocking opening scene in Psychopaths sets the tone for what follows and introduces us to our first psychopath – a masked vigilante emabarked on a mission to seek out and kill serial killers: a serial killer of serial killers as we may say. A plot thread of a bunch of dog-knappers lightening the over-filled pockets of wealthy doting owners allows McDonagh, superbly supported by his actors, to spin and twist the characters so that we really have no idea who’s going to do what next.

McDonagh has written a screenplay about an alcoholic screenwriter ‘Marty’ (Farrell) ‘writing’ a screenplay for which he only has a title Seven Psychopaths. He is aided by Billy (Rockwell) an off-the-wall fellow member of a dog-knapping gang, leaderless but sort of deferring to Hans (Walkern) who manages to return a dog they’ve ‘napped’ with such sincere self-deprecation that grateful owners give him more than the stated reward.

McDonagh then introduces us to each of 7 psychopathic characters through Billy operating as Marty’s muse. Each of these characters is nuttier than the last including a wonderfully dead-pan Tom Waits as Zacharia, a one-time serial killer who has fetched up on Marty’s doorstep thanks to an ad for psychopaths Billy helpfully put in on Marty’s behalf. Zacharia had once been teamed up with Maggie (Amanda Mason Warren) on a killing spree but she had gone solo following his squeamishness at the brutality of her methods. Zacharia agrees to be one of Marty’s psychopaths on a condition to which Marty agrees but which comes back to bite him.

Each of the eponymous nut-jobs proves to be more off-the-wall than the last and McDonagh draws them together in his actual film through fictional Marty’s development of his fictional screenplay. Almost as if the characters are making the plot up as they go along it twists and turns so that for example seven turns out in fact to be six.

Not wanting to make just another violent Hollywood movie, Marty discusses with Billy his aesthetic aspiration to give his movie a spiritual dimension with one of his psychopaths being a Buddhist. Billy is dismissive of this and champions the all-action, super-violent conventions of commercial Hollywood. Billy’s vision looks only too likely to prevail when they kidnap hoodlum Charlie’s (Harrelson) Shih Tzu thus setting up the search to destroy theme of the second half of the movie.

This could all have become a bit tedious and contrived but for McDonagh’s surreal, sparky dialogue and surefooted direction which keeps the non-sense bubbling along nicely: plus those performances – Farrell is good, Rockwell surprisingly so and Walkern at times simply sublime. Consistent with the conventions being parodied, the women in Psychopaths are merely token: Abbie Cornish being wasted as Marty’s girlfriend Kaya. Indeed Hans, having read Marty’s script takes him to task for writing lousy parts for women.

Wonderfully disreputable fun. Don’t go if ‘bad’ language or stylised violence bothers you: otherwise ride with the laughs – you can feel guilty afterwards. If you do go – don’t miss the beginning and don’t leave before the credits end. Nuff said.

Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

Armalite Action Man

End Of Watch  – David Ayer

End of Watch is David Ayer’s much praised follow-up to his equally critically approved Training Day. It is action-packed, often tensely exciting, rattles along at a furious pace and looks like being a massive box-office hit. It is also in my view a thoroughly bad movie – aesthetically and morally.

The lead characters, LAPD beat cops Bryan Taylor and Mike Zavala are so convincingly played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena you almost believe some of the meretricious hype with which this cynically packaged product is being promoted. An unattributed source in the real LAPD reportedly observed “at last someone got it right.” The ‘it’ got ‘right’ one assumes means this is supposedly a truthful portrayal of what it is to police the no-go ethnic ghettoes of Los Angeles.

Yet look behind the uber-cool, Raybanned ‘Bro’ and ‘Dude’ sheen of Bryan and Mike and there is no one there. Just a bunch of brutish attitudes, expressed with crude, brutish relish in crude, brutish language. This isn’t dialogue: it’s 2nd rate ‘white’ Rap without the saving grace of a compelling rhythm. Dude and Bro’s attitudes are arrogantly racist, sexist, adolescent – especially about sex; and expressed in a slick cliché-ridden Washingtonian (Denzel that is) argot that is as irritatingly repetitive as it is impoverished. Considered as two professional cops in a seriously dangerous operational environment they are also just plain stupid. Justification later.

God help LAPD if these two are authentically representative of dedicated, committed law enforcement officers in the City of Angels – even in the apparently gun-soaked, armalite-littered streets of what here looks like a war-torn suburb of Mexico City; better armed than Kabul and marginally more dangerous than Gaza.

The inauthenticity of the characters emerges from the disconnect between the intelligence of the actors, which they can’t hide; and the dumb words they are given to say and sheer banality of the thoughts and feelings their impoverished language is supposed to express. That is true even ignoring the fact that to convey a sense of gritty ‘realism’ every sentence is punctuated by ‘Bro’, ‘Dude’ and all conceivable adjectival and adverbial forms of f*ck” and its synonyms.

Just when you think this studied, stylised inarticulacy can’t be beaten, we get to hear the vaguely Latino, Mexican, South Americany army of contract killers discuss their ‘plan’ to eliminate Bro and Dude. A priceless exercise in communication and the screenwriter’s art, it goes very much like this:

“F*ck you. We gotta f*cking get these f*cking f*ckers or we’re f*cked. I’m f*cking not f*cking kidding, the f*cking boss will f*ck us if we don’t f*cking nail those f*ckers: and I mean to-f*cking-day.” This is an abbreviated version of what we perhaps should call f*ckwit-speak. More stars than the Milky Way and much less illuminating.

Bryan and Mike, streetwise and street cool enthusiastically sniff out wrongdoing and wrong-doers from their patrol car. They are successful in their freewheeling, gut instinct policing style which seems to have nothing to do with established procedures or being part of a systematic, operationally disciplined policing programme. Following these instincts they fortuitously uncover and recover a big cash and drugs haul while pursuing more minor infringements. The kudos this brings them puts them onto the radar of the Mexican drugs cartels whose cash and product they have confiscated. They are warned by one of their contacts in what I guess Ayer would call the ‘hood’ that there is a contract out on them.

Our heroes, forewarned, but unlike their would-be assassins, not four-armed; all the f*ckwit gang have to do is run a red light and draw our derring duo gleefully into the inevitable ‘look-out-here-we-come car chase – good for movie action; bad for sensible operational practice. When their fugitives, at least 4 in number, suddenly screech to a halt and disappear into a building in a dodgy part of town what do you think they do? Smell a rat? Call for back-up and wait? Split up and approach cautiously from different sides to try to assess the threat, judge the risks? Nah: that’s for wimps; they rush straight into the building in hot pursuit of a gang who outnumber them 2 to 1 even before they get inside the building. When they can’t immediately find their quarry they of course rush up and down blind corridors snatching glances into any rooms on the way. It is of course when they are trapped in the apartment of a mother and child that the brilliant tactical supremacy of their would-be assassins pays off with a fusillade from half a dozen heavy duty automatic weapons which chews up windows, furniture and any other solid object offering them inadequate cover.

“Oopsadaisy – it’s a trap! Now we’d better call for back-up.” You don’t say! So f*uckwit cops leg it – chased by the f*ckwit gang still loosing off enough ordnance to fill a couple of pick-up trucks. I won’t spoil this ‘paint-by-numbers’ apology for a narrative but suffice to say, true to the tradition of sketchily devised and lazily rounded off Hollywood plots, we are then invited to emote tearfully and gratuitously in scenes for which neither the dramatic context nor empathy with the characters has been established. It beggars belief that intelligent, discriminating critics are willing to buy into this stuff just because it is well acted, shot and edited.

The women in End of Watch are of course token WAGs: brain-cell challenged, their sole aspiration apparently to dutifully satisfy our heroes’ inalienable masculine right in their off-duty moments to as many inventive sexual techniques as such gun-totin’ dudes manifestly deserve and then embarrassingly (to us as well) share all the possibilities with each other on a night out.

Towards the end of the 70s after the 50s and 60s dominance of the Western genre in movies and TV had given way to slick, formulaic cop shows like Kojak and Starsky and Hutch, writer/Producer Steven Bochco under the MTM (Mary Tyler Moore) production banner helped to create a gritty, realistic Cop show of a precinct in a tough neighbourhood of a city modelled on Chicago. Very much an ensemble piece with a diverse group of cops at all levels, working in a multi-ethnic team in a deprived and challenging inner city area, the series went on for 7 years to 147 episodes, 98 Emmys and justified acclaim.

Hill Street Blues was crammed with dozens of carefully written, well-established characters. The wives and girl friends of the cops had their own brain cells and their own aspirations in life. The cops, whether as Captain or beat cop had lives and interests outside of policing often threatened or compromised by their commitment to the idea that policing could be an honourable pursuit; worthy of respect; socially valuable. Even the criminal fraternity they policed was ethnically diverse, full of complicated, interesting people, many struggling to keep their families and their values intact in a social setting that put them under constant threat.

It is hard to believe that Ayer actually expects us to take End of Watch and its lazily conceived stereotypes, racial and social, as authentic or real. He is so committed to investing a tough job in an appalling social setting with a slick Hollywood sheen of hip street-cred and unremittingly pointless violence that it beggars belief that any decent man or woman would ever want to be a cop. Bryan and Michael and their equally thick-headed, unappetising colleagues aren’t fighting crime or trying to make life more bearable for decent law-abiding citizens trapped in a criminal environment. In their instinct for violence and ill-concealed passion for guns and the power they represent, this LAPD and these LAPD cops have, deep down more in common with the criminals they are at war with than the people on whose behalf they are supposed to be fighting.

Why in God’s name any half way intelligent, committed member of the actual Los Angeles Police Department would willingly identify with this dumb duo as written, is beyond me. But then I rather think it is Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena, Hollywood stars and the vicarious celebrity of End Of Watch that excites them. This curious phenomenon, absolutely American in character, rests on a deep-seated attachment to myth over reality. The iconic object that best expresses this profoundly disturbing attachment is the gun: and the indiscriminate power it represents. A power equally available not only to police and criminals alike but to anyone with the money to buy.

That’s why End of Watch, for all its (eventually irritating) cinema verite arty pretense at authenticity isn’t about Law enforcement, Policing, at all; it is about war, a struggle for dominance mediated not by legality and due process – but by the power of the gun and individual will.

Take End of Watch seriously as we are invited to do by the hype and promotion – and it sucks. Treat it as a violent, pacy, amoral Hollywood action movie with no pretense to authenticity, then if that’s your bag it’s sort of ok; but by no means as exciting as many other examples of a legitimate and honestly unpretentious genre – like say the Die Hard franchise. The rest is smoke and mirrors hype.

Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

Jennifer Lawrence

Silver Linings Playbook – David O Russell

The mesmeric Jennifer Lawrence almost makes this phoney movie work – but not quite. For me at least. Claudia Winkleman on BBC’s now equally unwatchable Twittery Film 2012 loved it; while her mate on the show, Danny ‘Boy’ Leigh hated it. Reluctantly, I’m with Danny Boy; but my wife lines up in the Claudia (grimace, grimace) corner. ‘Winkie’ as I like to call her, is the only person on the planet who can shrug her eyebrows. Mixed responses from critics too: from 2* rubbish to 5* Oscar bait.

It’s odd: in Extremely Loud and Terribly Close, Stephen Daldry used an absorbing dramatic context within which superbly and sensitively to show, not tell us, about the perplexing and deeply affecting difficulties of suffering from living one’s inner life somewhere on the spectrum of Aspergers and/or Autism. Most critics fell into two camps: those who got it and hated it; and those who, oblivious to his isolation and pain; disliked the character of Thomas for precisely the mannerisms and behaviour characteristic of his affliction.

In contrast critical acclaim, especially in the US has been heaped on this patronisingly shallow movie which trivialises and exploits rather than illuminates the self-subversive and destructive problem of bipolar disorder. You have to have more insight and imaginative sensibility than Mr Russell demonstrates here to make the clinical root of manic depression remotely romantic, let alone funny – except in a cruel or crass way.

Bradley Cooper’s Pat Solatano is a parody of a manic depressive; given to violent mood swings, obsessive intensity often towards the most trivial of things or events. After a violent confrontation with the lover of his wife Nikki, Pat has spent 8 months in a psychiatric hospital. Deluded that he is now better and need not take his meds he persuades his mother Dolores to reject the advice of the doctors and court-order him free. He then single-mindedly pursues the equally deluded objective of returning to marital bliss with Nikki who has in the meantime, wisely, buggered off.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure you can find examples of Pat’s behaviour in any text book on Bipolar disorder. But symptoms are supposed to be something experienced by a person whereas Cooper’s Pat is just a bundle of symptoms in search of a recognisable character to have them. Pat’s faintly ludicrous behaviour as Russell has written and then filmed it, is simply annoying and exasperating until a hint of sympathy is sparked when we meet his father Pat Senior (Robert de Niro). Pat is the kind of Obsessive who gets OCD sufferers a bad name. Messianically devoted to his local American Football team the Philadelphia Eagles, Pat makes de Niro’s other paranoid alter ego, Jack Byrnes (Meet The Fockers) seem like a laid-back pussycat.

Using Nikki’s sister Veronica to try to find out where his scarpered wife is now living, Pat meets Tiffany (Lawrence) whose grief at the death of her cop husband has found expression, among other things, in sleeping with all 11 of her work-colleagues plus a few odd strays who keep turning up at her parents’ door hoping for second-helpings. Seemingly bipolar-light, Tiffany tries to deflect Pat from his doomed efforts to resurrect his marriage. One form this takes is to challenge him into partnering her in a local ballroom dance competition. There is some profoundly unconvincing father/son stuff which leads Pat Senior to risk all his savings on a ‘Parlay’ bet which links an Eagles match to Pat and Tiffany’s score in the dance competition. Although Tiffany is a sexy mover and Pat a likeable ‘hunky’ sorta guy: both are crap dancers. So the bet, the family finances and Daddy’s belated ‘trust’ in his ‘nut-job’ son all seem to be heading down the tubes. Tiffany can only get Pat to dance by lying to him that Nikki will be there to watch.

If one gave a rat’s fundament for any of these contrived characters the predictable outcome could have been as touching as Russell obviously intends. I don’t think it’s fair to blame Cooper for the failure here – he tries hard with a part so superficially written that he begins as a set of OTT symptoms only to transmute into Bradley Cooper at the end.

In the execrable The Fighter, Russell managed to write real people as cardboard characters. He is at least consistent in the narrative of Silver Linings: characters now fictional are equally foldable. Except – almost – for Tiffany.

There are very real Lawrentian pleasures here. Jennifer, magnificent in her Oscar-nominated debut role in Winter’s Bone; and entertainingly charismatic in Hunger Games, invests Tiffany with a degree of real emotional strength and passion not in the writing. Sheer power of performance turns the feisty Tiffany into a character we can begin to recognise and thus care about. Unfortunately she has no one to play off – so it all comes to naught. However she has a 2 minute-ish monologue when she takes on the half-witted macho bullshit of Pat Senior which is worth the price of admission alone. Her delicious demolition of De Niro on Pat Senior’s own masculine NFL football territory recalls one of the great moments in movies when Marisa Tomei did the same about cars in My Cousin Vinny.

Like The Fighter, this is a film consciously and manipulatively pitched at awards. They couldn’t possibly do that could they? Jennifer Lawrence is too good to get an Oscar for a second-rate role in a third-rate movie.

Filed under: 2 star, Comedy, David O Russell, Drama, General, Hollywood, Romance | No Comments »