Wednesday 5 September 2018

Here are some of the movies I watched this summer.


 They are, in order; 

Audition
A Fish Called Wanda
The Death of Stalin
You Were Never Really Here
Creed
Loving
Mud
The Leopard
Black Hawk Down
1000 Times Goodnight
Mamma Mia; Here We Go Again
Mission Impossible; The Fallout
The Happy Prince.


Starting  with Audition,  Miike Takashi’s  film based on a short story by Ryu Murakami, released on the Tartan Asia Extreme label – and it really is extreme.    A widower, Shigaharu Aoyama,  is persuaded by his teenage son that he really needs a new wife and a colleague suggests that they hold auditions for a video, one that his company will never actually shoot,  in order to meet some ‘suitable’ young women.    Shigaharu does indeed meet and court a beautiful young woman, Asami Yamasaki.   

What happens next to deeply ambiguous.   Either Asami turns out to be psychopathic torturer - or we enter into the dream world of Shigaharu’s  deepest fears and guilt.    I will watch this compelling movie again soon,  and try to track the moment when either version kicks in.    

A total change came when some friends gathered to watch A Fish Called Wanda.  We had all seen it before (of course), and all agreed I was well worth seeing again (and again).    The veteran director Charles Crighton came out of retirement to Direct the script that he and Cleese wrote together.    What a wonderful coming together of talents.   The script is diamond sharp, and the performances spot on.  John Cleese is deeply sympathetic as Archie Leech – the name is of course an in-joke) and we really do see him fall in love with Jamie Lee Curtis’s utterly seductive, witty and intelligent Wanda while she runs ring round Kevin Kline’s (maybe, sometime CIA) dim hit-man Otto, a performance that fitting won Kline a Best Supporting Oscar), all in the company of Michael Palin’s victimised Ken.   I still think this is the best work ever by Cleese, Curtis and Crighton,  funny and heartwarming.   

The Death of Stalin is another ensemble piece, starring Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Paddy Considine, Rupert Friend, Jason Isaacs, Angel Riseborough and James Tambor,  directed  by Armado Iannuci and adapted by him and David Schneider from the comic book of the same name by Fabien Nury and Thiery Robin.    This is a very different comedy, an imagining of the panic that descended on the Soviet Union’s inner political circle when Uncle Joe suddenly died,  and any of those who surrounded him could be pitched into the outermost  political circle - or the deepest circle of hell - at any time.   This is not a history lesson, but I am sure it accurately represents the fear and paranoia, machinations and betrayals of the time.     Wonderful performances keeping the show just this side of pantomime.  

I was not really looking forward to seeing Lynne Ramsay’s film You Were Never Really Here.   I knew it starred Joaquin Phoenix  as a deeply traumatized mercenary hired to recover an abducted girl/child and inflict ‘just punishment’ on her abductors.   I knew there  would be brutality and psychosis.        I am not a great fan of brutality on screen, but this was  Joaquin Phoenix, an actor I deeply admire, and Lynne Ramsay,  the Scottish Director of Rat TrapMorwen Caller andWe Need To Talk About Kevin,  so this combination prompted me to gird my loins, strap on my  seatbelt and watch it, while also being prepared to eject the DVD at any time.     I did not do so.  I could not take my eyes from the screen.    

The images often seemed as chaotic and incoherent as the inner world of the hit man, and yet both were compelling.    Brutality and tenderness, damnation and redemption, ugliness and a kind of beauty vied for my attention and sympathy.    I cannot remember ever seeing a film like this (The Night Porter and The Dark Knight suggest themselves, but neither of them touches  the parts of me that this film does).     I am not in a hurry to watch it again very soon, but eventually I will, and I am sure I will be rewarded by doing so, as I enter even more deeply into its horror and humanity.    Maybe I need to watch Phoenix in Inherent Vice or Magdalene again first! 

Having seen, enjoyed and admired the Black Panther I picked up a DVD of Creed, also directed by Ryan Coogler and starring Michael B. Jordan, both of whom came to attention in their first film together, FruitvaleStation.    Creed reworks the themes of the Rocky movies, and some of their characters, including Rocky himself, now recruited to coach the son of Apollo Creed, the heavyweight who defeated Rocky  many years earlier.     I do not think that Creed is a boxing movie; it is a movie that involves boxing.   The ring work,  however, is as convincing as any I have seen.    I was never a Rocky or Sylvester fan (though I did admire his rather subtle work in Cop Land, 1997) .  Jordan is as magnetic here as in Black Panther,  and Coogler’s direction as sure-footed.     I really enjoyed this movie.  

Then I watched Loving again.  I have written about this before, saying how much I admired it the first time round.    Written and Directed by Jeff Nichols it is one of the most simple and subtle films I have seen for some time,  and both qualities shine in the direction and performances.   Neither of the lead actors, Joel Edgerton or Ruth Negga, have much to say, and neither of their character emote a lot, and yet so much is communicated.    This is a true story, and its telling rings with integrity.   

I also caught up with a previous Jeff Nichols film, Mud (2012), starring Michael McConaughey and Tye Sheridan.    Nichols used the same photographer, Composer and Editor later in Loving.   This has been described as a ‘Mark Twain story, adapted by Ernest Hemingway and shot by Sam Peckinpar’.    I think that is unfair on the actual writer/director,  Nichols, who did it very well all by himself.    

This is one of  McConaughey’s remarkable recent performances, going back to Killer Joe,  Magic Mike,  The Dallas Buyer’s Club,  InterstellarFree State of Jones, and of course his TV work with Woody Harrelson in True Detective.     But the real star is Tye Sheridan.  I first saw him as the youngest of the three brothers in Terrence Malik’s  2011 film The Tree of Life.  He did not have a large part in that, but working with Malik meant being able to improvise, at length, as the Director kept the camera’s running.    He made Mud a year later, aged 16.    Sheridan has gone on to play in X-Men; Apocalypse and lead Stephen Spielberg’s  Ready Player One.   In Mud he played a Mississippi teenager looking for a father figure – and a girlfriend – and choosing badly in both cases.   His performance is understated and utterly convincing.  Reece Witherspoon, Sam Shepard and Michael Shannon also appear.   Well worth watching.    

I have wanted to see Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of the Lampedusa novel The Leopard for many years, and eventually saw a copy in a Charity Shop.    

It is st in Sicily in the 1860's, and it has been said that  ‘The Leopard was written by the only man who could have written it, directed by the only man who could have directed it, and stars the only man who could have played its title character.’   Roger Ebert, doyen of film critics,  said that. “The first of these claims is irrefutable, because Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, a Sicilian aristocrat, wrote the story out of his own heart and based it on his great-grandfather.  Whether another director could have done a better job than Luchino Visconti is doubtful; the director was himself a descendant of the ruling class that the story eulogizes. But that Burt Lancaster was the correct actor to play Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, was at the time much doubted; that a Hollywood star had been imported to grace this most European - indeed, Italian - indeed, Sicilian - masterpiece was a scandal.”

But in time Lancaster’s invaluable contribution has been recognised by most.  Not only did he bring in the studio money that made the film possible, but his performance was superb.     Although -  or because - he was a circus acrobat of Irish descent his physical grace lent itself to the role of a Sicilian Prince.    Being called ‘The Leopard’ fitted him.   At 50 Lancaster had learnt enough of his craft to  achieve more by doing less.   He was reserved, self-contained and dignified.     He was also still sexually attractive enough for his (unspoken, un-acted upon and absolutely unconsummated) relationship with Angelica, the fiancĂ© of his young nephew Tancredi, played by the gorgeous 25 year old (and Sicilian) Claudia Cardinale, to be credible.   
In the last 45 minute Ball room scene we see them dancing together,  their mutual desire is palpable, their mutual reserve is impeccable.   

As so often, Roger Ebert puts in well;  Finally the prince dances with Angelica. Watch them as they dance, each aware of the other in a way simultaneously sexual and political. Watch how they hold their heads. How they look without seeing. How they are seen, and know they are seen. And sense that, for the prince, his dance is an acknowledgment of mortality. He could have had this woman, would have known what to do with her, would have made her his wife and the mother of his children and heard her cries of passion, if not for the accident of 25 years or so that slipped in between them. But he knows that, and she knows that. And yet of course if they were the same age, he would not have married her, because he is Prince Don Fabrizio and she is the mayor's daughter. That Visconti is able to convey all of that in a ballroom scene is miraculous and emotionally devastating, and it is what his movie is about.’  

The film was shot by Giuseppe Rotunna and scored by Nino Rota, and this Ball is a masterclass in cinema.  

In these last 45 minutes nothing of importance is said, but the whole film is recapitulated and summed up.    Prince Don Fabrizio knows that the old order is about to crumble, as Garibaldi’s reforms forces sweep the land.   It is not yet the end, but it is the beginning of the end.    So as his estates and fortunes will need protection the Prince knows his family must come to terms with the future.  His nephew, bearer of his hopes, will marry Angelina, the daughter of the mayor,  a man who has land and money, but no aristocratic breeding.     The Ball is a kind of requiem, a requiem for something that Visconti, Marxist though he was, knew was worth recognising.    

The future can only be built on the past, and just as the future order will not (yet) be perfect,  nor could the past be perfect.  That is no reason why it should not be honoured as it passes.    

Working for most of my life in an institution with 2000 years of tradition I came to see that being a Traditionalist did not mean trying to preserve the past, but to honour it, learn from it, and build on it.    Sometimes that may mean tearing down parts of it to build on the foundations.   

Black Hawk Down is based on the true story of what happened when a Black Hawk helicopter crewed by US Special Forces, part of the UN Peace keeping force in Somalia,  was shot down in Mogadishu.   Jerry Bruckheimer and Ridley Scott went to great lengths to authenticate the actual events and characters, and the Special Forces trained the actors, Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor,  Tom Sizemore, Eric Banner, William Fichtner, Ewan Bremmer and Sam Shepard,  in how to move like real soldiers engaged in Urban Warfare.     The work pays off, and this visceral movie feels almost documentary.   It came out in 2001 but I did not see it then, despite my admiration for Ridley Scott.   I am glad I eventually saw it on DVD, partly because in the cinema it might have been somewhat overwhelming, but also because of the extras on the 3 disc Columbia/Tristar edition.   

1000 Times Goodnight stars Juliette Binoche, and that is usually enough to get my attention.   Ms. Binoche is a risk taker and makes some extra-ordinary films.   Sometimes they do not work for me but when they do, and this one does, they work well.   This film is about the personal conflicts encountered by the men and women who travel to the world’s trouble spots, even war zones, to document what they see through their photography.   1000 Times was written by a former photo-journalist, the Norwegian Eric Poppe, who turned to film making after a work-related injury in Columbia,  and it incorporates pictures taken by the famed British photojournalist  Marcus Bleasdale. 

But this is women’s story,  as we follow Rebecca, the Binoche character,  first of all in Afghanistan  where she photo-documents a group of Taliban women ritually preparing a female suicide bomber.   Later, having returned home to recover from her subsequent injuries, she is confronted by her husband and two daughters, the people who stay at home and worry; those who fear for her very survival.    In a sense she gets the rewards but they pay the cost.    

While we were watching the DVD my friend asked ‘Why would any woman, any mother, do this?’ which prompted the further question ‘Why would any man, any father, do this?’   

This movie does not provide easy answers, and we can see the conflict played out not only between family members but also within Rebecca herself, as Binoche uses all her subtle skills to speechlessly convey her dilemma.    Any actor can show us courage, cowardice, fear, guilt or shame, but the ones I admire most are those who can also convey vulnerability.    I did not really ‘get’ Colin Farrell’ until I saw In Bruges, where I saw exactly that, but I have long seen that ability in Binoche’s work.     

This is a Norwegian/Irish production, starring the French Binoche, the Danish Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as her husband,  the Irish Lauryn Canny as her eldest daughter and Maria Doyle Kennedy as her sister in law.  It is a ‘Euro-pudding’ as they say, one of those movies needing a raft of support by many production companies from across Europe to get made,  and that can compromise and damage a film.   In this case I do not think that compromise happened.    I recommend it.

On a wet weekend I also saw Mamma Mia; Here We Go Again, and Mission Impossible: Fallout.     Of course they both delivered exactly what is expected. 

I also saw The Happy Prince again, and that was time well spent.  

I hope you had some worthwhile movie watching!