Lockdown catch-up Part One.

No one knew how long ‘lock-down’ – or cocooning as it is called here in Ireland – would last.    I wish I had used it to watch more movies, but the truth is that feeling rather depressed by it, and then losing a dearly loved one, has meant that rather than escaping into movies I  have rather neglected them – and not written about the ones I have watched either.

Well, feeling better now, so here is a ‘catch up’ post.

Among the DVDs that arrived in my post are; 

Portrait of a Lady on Fire, (2019) written and directed by Celine Sciamma, starring Noemie Merlant, Adele Haenet and Luana Bajari, and shot by Claire Mathon.   This French film is beautiful and subversive.   With a female writer, director, cinematographer and cast it presents a direct and explicit challenge to the famous ‘male gaze’.   

It is  set in the 18^th century, a time when women had very little freedom or agency.    Marianne is a portrait painter from Paris,  but to get her pictures into the important galleries she has to pretend they are by her famous father.  Not because he is famous, but because he is male.  Heloise is her beautiful young subject.  Heloise is the daughter of a Countess.   It is clear that she has no choice over who she will marry.  Money is marrying a Title.  Her portrait is to be sent from Brittany to Milan to be seen by her husband-to-be.     The man wants to see his bride to be.   She will not be allowed to look at his  portrait.  But this film allows women to look at women.  

Heloise’s mother had engaged another portraitist before Marianne,  a man, but she would not sit for him.  At first she will not sit for Marianne either,  so she has to pretend to be engaged as her companion - and body-guard.    Heloise’s sister had avoided the same marriage match by jumping off a cliff, and her mother fears that Heloise will follow her if given the chance.    When Heloise sees the portrait Marianne has secretly painted of her she rejects it too.   It is not her.  She has not been truly ‘seen’.  But now she wants to be seen;  not by the man in Milan, but by Marianne.   It is clear that a painter ‘looks’ at their subject in a special way,  objective but intimate.  Heloise points out that she is also looking at the painter.   They are seeing each other.  

As her mother goes away for a few days Heloise, Marianne and Sophie,  their young housekeeper, are left alone in the large old house.    I will say no more about the plot.  I don’t think this film is about plot.   

A few years ago  Sciamma wrote My Life as a Courgette, a delightful and moving animated tale about a young boy sent to an orphanage where, as it says on IMDb ‘he begins to learn the meaning of trust and love’.     She also wrote Water Lilies, Tomboy and Girlhood.       Learning how to trust and love  - and the cost of loving - seems to be her theme.    Learning takes time, and Sciamma is prepared to take time.   She does not rush her shots or her plot.   

I really enjoyed looking at this movie, and the ‘extra’ where the woman who actually painted the pictures used in the film talks about her craft.   I strongly recommend this. 

I got hold of the Australian  Little Monsters mainly because it starred Lupita Nyong’o.   I really enjoyed and admired her in 12 Years a Slave, Us, and Black Panther and her role in this movie seemed to be as different from those as they were from each other.    Here she is a primary school teacher taking her class to a local theme park, accompanied by a Dave, (Alexander England) a single parent who fancies her.    At the Park they meet Teddy McGiggle  (Josh Gad), a children’s ‘entertainer’ - and then a horde of zombies escaped from a nearby US experimental base.   

  

I have learnt to appreciate the way zombie movies have been used as either social commentaries or as comedy.  Two British entries,  Jane Austen and the Zombies, and Cockneys vs Zombies both amused me greatly.      This Australian attempt amused me, mildly.  It did not provide any social commentary.    (Try Host, an early monster movie by the wonderful Korean Boon Joon Ho for that).   Little Monster uses ‘very strong language, strong bloody violence and gore.’  It might amuse you.  Lupita is still wonderful. 

Ash is Purest White is Jia Zhang-Ke’s most recent movie (2018).    It follows a Chinese woman, Qiao (played by Zhang-Ke’s wife Tao Zhao) over the first 17 years of this century.   In 2001 she is a gangster’s moll in the industrial north east of China,  but his fall from power – and her self sacrifice - sends her to jail.  This a movie that could not have been made, or if made not seen in China - even a few years ago.  Some of Yimou Zhang’s earlier movies were banned if they were seen as critical of  the Party or the country.   This film hardly mentions the Party but is deeply critical of the modern China and its corruption.    I have been interested in Asian cinema for a long time, and this seems to me to be a welcome development in social realism.   Chinese criminals have been seen before, but mainly set in pre-revolutionary times (Yimou’s Shanghai Triad comes to mind)  or in Hong Kong based thrillers, such as the original 2002/3 Infernal Affairstrilogy by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, the basis for Sorceses’ The Departed.  I think  Ash is Purest White is well worth watching for its own sake as well as for its Sino/political/social importance.  Tao Zhao is a great actress. 

   

It has taken me a few years to catch up with Pixar’s Coco.  Lee Unkrich co-directed Toy /Story 2/3, Nemo, Monsters Inc, The Good  dinosaur, Ratatouille and Monsters University between them, and even if only Toy Story 3 is really  in my Pixar favourite list I really trust the brand.   And I really enjoyed Coco,  as our Mexican boy hero enters the bizarre Land of the Dead to challenge his family’s ban on music making by finding his famous singing great-great-grandfather.  The music and visuals burst from the screen, the plot is complex enough to engage, the voice cast is great and I am glad to have caught up with it.   Good family fun.  

Bob Fosse’s semi-autobiographical film All That Jazz is very different.    He made it in 1979, after Lenny, 1974, in which Dustin Hoffman channelled Lenny Bruce, and then Cabaret, which Fosse choreographed and directed.  This is a searing honest fictionalised account of his hard working, hard playing, hard loving, hard drinking,  hard drug taking life.    It is not, however, self-aggrandising;  he had no need to do that.   He is still the only person ever to win an Oscar, a Tony and an Emmy in the same year.  He really was phenomenal.  Roy Scheider impersonates him amazingly well, and Jessica Lange, Ann Reinking and Leland Palmer represent some of the women he loved – and who loved him.    Great and suitably over the top acting and dancing.   If you enjoyed his Cabaret I think you will  enjoy this, and if you ever had an interest in Lenny Bruce I think Hoffman gives one of the performances of his life in that film. 

Before the great shut-down I was lucky enough to see house  Rocketman at a big screen movie house.   I was really good to see Rocketman  with a good sound and vision.   It is a big movie with big set pieces that deserve to be seen and heard as well as possible.    Written by the experienced Lee Hall, (Victoria & Abdul, Billy Elliot, War Horse) and directed by Dexter Fletcher fresh from having finished off Bohemian Rhapsody after Bryan Singer was fired.    Unlike that Freddie Mercury ‘homage’ this is an amazingly honest bio, authorised by Elton John who was a co-producer.    We see Elton growing up in his dysfunctional family, then an early descend into a living hell of alcohol and drug abuse,  unable to deal with his success of his sexuality.   

 The story is only slightly fictionalised, being topped and tailed by an imaginary group therapy meeting in which Elton ‘unburdens’  himself.   He marches out of his Madison Square concert in full ‘Red Dragon’ costume and into the group declaring that he is an alcoholic, a drug addict, a sex addict – and a shopaholic.   And he was not kidding.   

But Elton survived.  Not only survived but grew into the committed, generous, drug and alcohol free, happily married man we know today.   I am sure that this is partly because of his musical talent and sheer determination, but also because of the genuine love and friendship that eventually counter-balanced the abuse of others.   Chief among these must be Bernie  Taupin, the lyricist.  I was glad to see his musical partnership celebrated in this movie, and Jamie Bell portraying him.  

But when it comes to ‘portraits’ Taron Egerton is magnificent as Elton.   When he takes over from Matthew Illesley and Kit Conner,  who play Elton as a child and teenager (and do so very well),  Taron is Elton.   The whole cast is praiseworthy; in fact almost every aspect of this production has won awards, including the  Oscar-winning song  (I’m gonna) Love me again. 

That is not ‘an Elton John’ song.    I don’t think Elton has ever written a song.   He has written the music to Bernie Taupin’s words.   That is why these songs are never Elton’s autobiography.  They may refer in some ways to the life Elton has lived, and Bernie witnessed and to some extent shared, but Bernie’s words always came first.  I am sure Bernie does not mind, or if he does he ‘minds all the way to the Bank’),  but lyricists  are just as important as composers, as all the great song-writing teams show, from Gilbert and Sullivan through Kern and Hammerstein, the Gershwin brothers, Lerner and Loewe, Kander and Web (did you know they wrote Cabaret and Chicago?), David and Bacharach,  Lennon and McCartney  - and Taupin and John.  More to come in Part Two. 

Lockdown catch up. Part Two.

Rian Johnson wrote and directed  Knives Out, which I also caught in the cinema before lockdown.   This is a crime mystery about the death of a crime mystery writer, and Rian the writer payed all due homage to the genre, especially in its ‘Big House Murder plus Enigmatic Crime Consultant’ style.    A Big House with a Big Cast and complex plot a la Agatha Christie, but when did you actually care about any of her characters?    Here you do,  and that drives the tension.    The 'Rev' Doctor Mark Kermode (the BBC film critic to be found on iPlayer, Youtube and BBC sounds) says that if the cast of a movie are having fun when making it that often means that the audience won't when watching it.  That is not the case here.    Johnson loves playing with genres, and he does so with style.   Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Ana De Armas, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, don Johnson, Toni Collette and Christopher Plummer - along with relative newcomers Katherine Langford and Jaeden Martell) are obviously having a whale of a time bouncing off each other, and they let us share in the fun.    I cannot think of an ensemble movie this good since A Fish Called Wanda (with of course Jamie Lee Curtis).

I like crime stories where the solution is as much to do with character as the clues, and we are given a rich stew of characters here.    

You do not need to be a ‘crime thriller’ fan to enjoy this movie.   If you like to see really good actors inhabiting a cast of interesting characters  involves in a in a witty plot with a convincing and beautifully lit set, and a DVD print as sharp as the knives, craftily short and directed, then go for this.  

I have used my time to revisit some older movies, thinking I might want to re-evaluate them, including Star Wars VIII; The Last Jedi.    I know a lot of Star Wars fans (I am sure they have a brand name, like Trekkies, but I don’t know what it is) really didn't like this, some almost crying 'heresy!'  I enjoyed the first three Star War’s movies but was underwhelmed by the next three.    The new trilogy (and it spin-offs) renewed my interest, and when I learn that Rian Johnson was going to direct VIII I was really pleased.   

I love Johnson’s movies, starting with 2005’s Brick, which he wrote for his friend Joseph Gordon-Levitt.  Here comes a little diversion, but we will get back to The Last Jedi, I promise.

As a teenager Gordon-Levitt starred in the long-running  TV series The Third Rock From The Sun  playing Tommy Solomon, the oldest alien in the in the group of aliens, embodied as humans to observe us Earthings, but he inhabited the youngest body.    When that ended he found it hard to get a sizable film role, being too much identified with that Tommy .  He did star in the low budget Mysterious Skin, a brave choice, but that did not make much on an impact.   Rian Johnson wrote Brick, first feature film,  for his college mate Gordon-Levitt.  It made twice as much at the box office and won a lot of awards and critical acclaim.   Brick is a black and white film-noir, with all the expected 1940’s tropes and stock characters, but set on a contemporary US High School.    Gordon-Levitt was brilliant as the fast-thinking, fast-talking young hero and Lucas Haas, another child actor famous for Witness, was the ‘villain’.  If you don’t know  Brick, it is worth chasing down - as is of course Witness.  

Gordon-Levitt went on to make 500 Days of Summer, Inception, 50/50 and The Dark Knight Rises, in which there was a hint that he might be a new Robin, but I think that was just a Chris Nolan joke.  Meanwhile Johnson wrote and made The Brothers Bloom, with Rachel Weisz, Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo, before Rian and Gordon came together again in  Looper, with Gordon-Levitt starring alongside Bruce Willis and Emily Blunt.   That is a great movie, and a great performance from Gordon-Levitt as he plays a young version of Bruce Willis, who is also in the movie.   

So, having enjoyed Rian Johnson’s fresh eye and original writing in Brick and Looper,   I was keen to see what he did with Star Wars.     It seems that George Lucas loved The Last Jedi, and asked Johnson to make three more ‘spin-off ‘movies. But a lot of fans did not like what he had done to tLuke Skywalker – namely kill him off.    Critics were also divided, not over the quality of the script or the Direction, but over the liberties taken.  I had no problem with that, and I loved the clarity about the parentage of Rey.   

I had expected that in Star Wars style we would learn that she was the secret child of some Princess or General;  a high born, and therefor able to ‘save the world’.     I expected and hated that idea.   The New Hope had given us a Black Stormtrooper and a ‘low born woman’ as our heroes, and they fit my anti-racist and republican preferences.   And after all, the Rebels were citizens of the former Republic, so we might ask what Princesses were doing there in the first place?  Sorry Leia.    And the thing about The Force is that it is universal, not exclusive, so why cannot Rey access it, or by accessed by it,  as a commoner –  a normal human being ?    So thank you Rian for your revelation in The Last Jedi that Rey was not ‘royal’, but simply and wonderfully like the rest of us, and that the time for the Jedi priesthood was over.   

Mark Hamill was initially and publicly very unhappy about the script, with his smaller part and eventual demise, but when Rian told him that the title was going to The Last Jedi  Hamill realised that he was The Last Jedi and embraced the movie.   For those of you with a theological interest I have always believed that Jesus was what he claimed to be,  ‘a Son of Man’ like the rest of us, not ‘The Son of God’ unlike the rest of us.   If you are shocked by that suggestion I can tell you that there is a wholly respectable school of Christian scholarship behind it.  I also believe that priests are just like everyone else too, which is why I did not and do not wear a clerical collar unless it is really necessary. 

So; you may appreciate my dismay when along comes the royalist cavalry in The Rise of Skywalker, and we are told that Rey is in fact the grand-daughter of the Palpatine Emperor.   He may have been a bastard, but at least he was an Emperor.   Hierarchy rules, hurrah!    Well not for me.  

I notice that it took six men to write The Rise of Skywalker, headed up by Chris Terrio, who also wrote Justice League andBatman vs Superman;  ‘nuff said?   But at least the DC studio brought Wonder Woman in at the end of Batman vs Superman.  

I know a lot of science fiction fans like binaries; black/white, good/bad, human/alien,  android/human but many us  do not go for such simplicities.   Blade Runner was ambiguous, and that is why so many people did not like it in 1982.  Maybe that is also why it is seen as seminal now.  Rian Johnson does not go for binaries either, and that is why The Last Jedi is my favourite Star Wars movie since 1977.   

Having really enjoyed David O. Russell’s The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle I thought I would go back to see his 1999 movie Three Kings again.  George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube and Nora Dunn find themselves in Iraq at the end of the first Gulf War.   They are sure there are fortunes and careers to be made as they launch on a desert Odyssey that is funny and violent, surreal and satirical,  shocking and humane.     I enjoyed it a lot more second time around. 

I also looked at The Dark Knight Rises again.  If you have followed my blog you will know how much I admire The Dark Knight, partly because of its exploration of some of the moral and ethical issues that exercise me.    I wrote a critique and a parish study pack about it, which can be found below if you are interested.    I also think it is of the best films of any genre made in the last 50 years, so the third part of the trilogy had a lot to live up to.    Of course it didn’t, in my eyes.   We had lost both Heath Ledger and Maggie Gyllenhaal.    Tom Hardy and Marion Cotillard are very good of course, but.   There are  plenty of good things to appreciate in The Dark Knight Rises.  It is, after all, a Jonathan and Christopher Nolan movie.  I don’t think that Jonathan gets enough credit for their joint writing endeavours so I name-check him here.   But I did watch Rises again, a little less in the shadow of its predecessor, and I enjoyed it a lot more.   After all the narrative arc needed a resolution, and this one is neat – and of course ambiguous.   Have I been clear that I really appreciate ambiguity?  

I mention the 2016 movie Hidden Figures again because I see that NASA has named its Headquarter building in Washington D.C.  after Mary W. Jackson, the first African American engineer at NASA part of a group of women whose story is told in that film.   The NASA  building is on the recently renamed ‘Hidden Figures Way’, a tribute to the movie and the black women who’s computational and engineering skills played such a great – but previously obscure – part in the early NASA manned Space program.    Their achievements were recounted in Mary Lee Shetterly’s 2016 book Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race.    The film followed in the same year, with Janet Monae playing Mary Jackson,  Taraji P Henson as Katherine Johnson and Octavia Spencer as Dorothy Vaughan.   In 2019 Mary Jackson was also posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. It's a good movie too. 

It says on the NASA website; 

‘In 2017, then 99-year-old Katherine Johnson was there to personally dedicate a new state-of-the-art computer research facility that bears her name at Langley.   Johnson, another original member of the West Area Computing Unit, also was honored as a trailblazer and given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. In addition, Johnson was part of the group honored with the Congressional Gold Medal, and NASA’s Independent Verification and Validation facility in Fairmont, West Virginia, also bears Johnson’s name.

“NASA facilities across the country are named after people who dedicated their lives to push the frontiers of the aerospace industry. The nation is beginning to awaken to the greater need to honor the full diversity of people who helped pioneer our great nation. Over the years NASA has worked to honor the work of these Hidden Figures in various ways, including naming facilities, renaming streets and celebrating their legacy,” added Bridenstine. “We know there are many other people of color and diverse backgrounds who have contributed to our success, which is why we’re continuing the conversations started about a year ago with the agency’s Unity Campaign. NASA is dedicated to advancing diversity, and we will continue to take steps to do so.” 

It's a good movie too. 

A dream of Shakespeare’s Dream.

  

If you love Shakespeare you will love the NT/Bridge Theatre 2019 production of his A Midsummer Night’s Dream being broadcast on Youtube for free for the rest of this week (June 28th). 

If you do not love Shakespeare I think this is the best production to change your mind and heart.   It is hilarious, open hearted, inventive and as clear as spring water.   

I am sure that if he was alive today Shakespeare would have delighted in this production, just as he delighted the audiences at The Globe some 420 years ago.     

Set in London's  Bridge Theatre’s great cube, with staged seating all round the edges, and a central stage surrounded by a pit where a standing audience can cram the edges in touching distance of the players, just like The Globes’s standing groundlings.   

The height of the theatre allows the gender-fluid fairies to use Cirque du Soleil acrobatics on silks suspended from the ceiling.    David Moorst spent month mastering these skills to prepare for his Puck, allowing him to deliver his lines perfectly (and impishly) while cavorting in the air.     

Shakespeare would have loved to use female actors, and Gwendoline Christie, Brienne of Tarthfrom Game of Thrones,  plays Titania, Queen of the Fairies and also Hippolyte,  Prince Theseus’s captured Amazonian bride-to-be, with wit, warmth and steel.  

But Shakespeare also enjoyed gender confusion.   Not only did men play all his female parts, but male characters ‘passed’ as women and vice versa.    Men fell in love with men posing as women, and vice versa.    Oliver Chris,  who plays the King of the Fairies Oberon and Theseus here, was also in the National Theatre’s Twelfth Night a couple of years ago, when Tamsin Gregg was  Malvolia, Lady Olivia’s female steward, rather than a male Malvolio.     

In this Dream Nicolas Hytner has swapped some lines to make Titania tell Puck to sprinkle magic pollen into Oberon’s eyes, rather than vice versa, so Oberon falls in love with the donkey-eared Bottom.    Oberon is bewitched, Bottom is surprised, but rather  ‘hey, why not? ‘ as the two men cavort to Love on Top by Beyoncé, and the groundlings hold hands,  shaking their hips  with the other actors.   Shakespeare would surely have loved that.

Many of the cast engage directly with the audience, ad libbing with them.   Puck, especially and appropriately, taking the most liberties.   At one point Bottom borrows a phone and takes a group selfie of the Crude Mechanicals.   Some purists may not approve, but surely Shakespeare would have used whatever means he had to entertain his audience, and among his actors there were Comedy Superstars who would surely have enjoyed banter with their fans.  

The whole cast (and crew)  are superb.   Alongside Christie, Chris and Moorst we have Hammed Animashaun as the gentle giant Bottom, shy at times, properly over the top as Pyramus in the play-within-a-play, Felicity Montagu as the gender-changed Quince and the rest of the Crude Mechanicals, the four young actors playing the Athenian lovers lost in the woods and in their similarly confused love lives, and the sinuous and sensuous fairies. 

As well as Beyonce’s Love On Top, they use Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s  Je t’aime moi non plus, I Can See Cleary Now by Johnny Nash,  Dizzee Rascal’s Bonkers and Florence + The Machine’s Florence’s Only If For A Night, all providing  a highly intelligent commentary on the play. 

Nicolas Hytner wanted this to be “ridiculous and glorious”, and so it is.  The audience obviously loved it, and so – I am sure – would the antic spirit of Shakespeare.   If you think Shakespeare is difficult, boring or old fashioned, please give it a try.   Money back if not delighted.