Tuesday, 26 June 2012

Fast Five / Fast and Furious 5: Rio Heist (2011)

This is the best of the franchise so far. Within its genre, this film achieves all its goals fantastically well: Great non-CG special effects. Great action set pieces. Good characters with clear strong stakes. Good "Mission Impossible" style story-line. Actors with the chutzpah to carry it all off. The suspense of waiting to see if / when the two alpha males on each side of the law, car thief Vin Diesel and DEA agent Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, will face off. What's not to like?

As Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times Film Critic, enviably quipped, "Who knew that the best place to put Vin Diesel would be between the Rock and a hard place?"

The film kicks off where number 4 left off, on a deserted US highway, with the rescue of Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel), sentenced to life imprisonment without hope of parole, by rolling the prison transport coach off one end of Brian O'Conner's (Paul Walker's) car, in a mind-boggling display of timing and bravery.

The action shifts to Rio, Brazil, where Dom's sister, Mia (Jordana Brewster), and Brian and Dom agree to take part in an equally amazing theft of several hot-rod cars from a moving train. Again, the pure mechanics and logistics of the equipment and techniques used to pull of the crime are in themselves fascinating and thrilling. Throw in the human drama that emerges as a double-cross is revealed and lives are put in peril, and the result is pure cinematic joy.

The aftermath is that the trio are blamed for the deaths of three US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) officers, and a team of DEA DS officers, led by legendary Captain Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson), arrives with an arsenal of weaponry and a mission to arrest Dom, Brian and Mia, and enlists the assistance of local rookie cop, Elena Neves (Elsa Pataky), as an interpreter.

Meanwhile, the trio discovers that the brains behind the double-cross is Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida), a drug-running local crime lord / politician in virtual control of all the favellas (slum areas) in Rio. Dom decides to take on this crime lord, and assembles a team of specialists, very much in the style of a classic heist or modern Mission Impossible scenario.

To come is a great chase sequence across the roofs of the favellas; a well-orchestrated unarmed combat sequence between two of the principals; a very well staged and bloody fire-fight in the suburbs, and last but not least, a brilliant breath-taking extended chase sequence through the streets of Rio following the heist.

The heist elements are cleverly written, with more than one unexpected turn. The car chases are brilliantly filmed, partly using a very effective rig that allows the director to shoot cars driving head on into the path of the camera, as is explained in a DVD extra documentary short.

The principals are very sympathetic. Dom is a career criminal with a strong ethical code in which loyalty to family and workmates is paramount. Brian, in previous films as an undercover cop torn between his sworn duties and his love of Mia and his liking for Dom, is now an out-and-out renegade cop on the run from the law. Dom's sister, Mia, once again in a relationship with Brian, as we have seen in previous films in the series, is clearly a "good" girl. Hobbs is given no back story but has a strong onscreen presence. His police interpreter, Neves, is given enough screen time and back story to make her sympathetic. The villains, Reyes and his lieutenant, Zizi (Michael Irby), are given just enough character and show of villainy to make the audience welcome their come-uppances. The characters of the heist team that is assembled, including Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, Tyrese Gibson and Sung Kang, are much more perfunctorily sketched in, and are little more than one-note performances. High full price.

  • Director: Justin Lin
  • Writers: Chris Morgan (based on characters by Gary Scott Thompson)
  • Starring: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Jordana Brewster, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, Tyrese Gibson, Sung Kang, Gal Gadot, Matt Schulze, Tego Calderon and Don Omar

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Chocolate (Chokgohlaet) (2008)

Taste the fury.

A Thai martial arts action thriller, where an autistic young teenage girl, Zen (JeeJa Yanin), learns to fight by copying moves used in martial arts classes next door and from TV shows and movies. It is a B-movie graced by a series of beautifully staged fight scenes between the girl and different groups of gangsters.

As for the plot, I was not entirely clear about people's roles or relationships but, in essence, Zin (Ammara Siripong), her Thai mother, and Masashi (Hiroshi Abe), her Japanese father, were mixed up in the world of organised crime, and her father had to return to Japan before she was born. She grows up autistic, becomes transfixed by people doing martial arts training, takes to working out herself.

Her only friend is Moom (Taphon Phopwandee), a much-bullied fat kid, who discovers she is able to catch anything thrown at her from whatever direction, and uses this as a money-making scheme, getting her to perform in public for donations. When somebody throws a knife at her and she catches it, he realises he has something special, and when a gang of teens attack them, her fighting ability is triggered.

Then Zin, the girl's mother, falls ill with cancer, and they desperately need large amounts of money for treatment and medicine. The boy finds a debt book amongst the mother's possessions, with names of local debtors and the sums that they owe, presumably as protection money to a gangster organisation. The boy realises that this money would pay for the mother's treatment, and he takes the girl with him to start collecting the debts...

Compared to Kill Bill 1, for example, for me, this is preferable. This is grittier, more authentic in setting and feel. The boy Moom is a believable and interesting character, and in the lead role of Zen, JeeJa Yani is very sympathetically portrayed and has amazing athleticism. The stunts are very well staged, and the end credits includes, Jackie Chan like, a series of injury clips, showing how arduous the stunts were, and how they were done in real life, not with digital effects, The villains, however, crime boss Number 8 (Pongpat Wachirabunjong) and his henchwoman, Priscilla (Sirimongkol Iamthuam), are completely two dimensional, with little plausible motivation, and a laughably foolish set of henchmen and henchwomen, who insist on throwing themselves into the fight despite the piles of bodies of their colleagues already littering the floor.

The very definition of a well done genre movie.

  • Director: Prachya Pinkaew, martial arts choreography by Panna Rittikrai
  • Writers: Chookiat Sakveerakul, Napalee
  • Starring: JeeJa Yanin, Hiroshi Abe, Pongpat Wachirabunjong, Taphon Phopwandee, Yanin Vismitananda

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Monday, 5 September 2011

The Seven Year Itch (1955)

It TICKLES and TANTALIZES! - The funniest comedy since laughter began!

What would any normal guy give to be one-to-one with Marilyn Monroe? What are the chances? Wouldn't even a happily married man with a kid get the "seven year itch"?

It's summertime in Manhattan, and like many men, publishing editor Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell) sends his wife Helen (Evelyn Keyes) of seven years and young son Ricky (Butch Bernard) up north for a 2-week vacation in Maine, while he stays and works in the city. Back at his apartment that evening, awaiting a phone call from Helen, Richard determines to keep on the straight and narrow during this time: no cigarettes, no drinking, and settles down to work on the patio with a manuscript. But out of the blue, literally, he is almost killed by a falling flower pot accidentally dislodged by his new upstairs neighbour, a stunningly gorgeous blonde bombshell played by the wonderful Marilyn Monroe.

Against the dictates of his rational mind, Richard, mesmerised by his neighbour's beauty and overcome with desire, can't stop himself inviting her to his apartment, and Monroe's character is so ditzy (innocently silly and scatterbrained) that she seems to have no idea what objective Richard's instincts are driving him towards.

So, will Richard be able to withstand the range of temptations available to the married man left alone in the big city, and in particular, to any male neighbour of Monroe? How will Monroe's character respond?

This is pretty much a two-hander between Ewell and Monroe. Though creepy like a lizard at some points in the film in his lust for Monroe, overall, Ewell's performance is magnificent. A great deal of the script has Richard dialoguing with himself, which is quite an unnatural thing to do, highly stylized, and could have gone disastrously wrong. Ewell pulls it off pretty well though, so that it is mostly very acceptable. Richard is a bit of a Walter Mitty, highly imaginative, and a lot of the fun consists of his imaginings coming to life, and delighting or scaring him. Monroe plays her rather challenging ditzy role very well, simpering like a small excited girl in a grown woman's body, highly desirable in a sexual way, but not slutty, managing to stay pure and chaste in herself.

The lack of political correctness in this film goes well beyond current socially-sanctioned norms, with Wilder commenting on the audience's fascination with beauties like Monroe, for instance, in the way Richard's publishing house markets their books, pandering to our men's objectification of women as sex objects. It is this film that includes the justly famous scene where Monroe stands over the air vent in the white dress, innocently enjoying the cooling breeze that pushes the skirt of her dress up in such a revealing flutter. Talk about objectification: Monroe's character does not even merit a name, for pity's sake, being labelled "The Girl" in the credits.

The peeping Tom aspect of cinema audience's appetite to watch actresses like Monroe is clearly paralleled in Richard's relationship with Monroe. The fourth wall is even broken at one point, in the third reel, by Ewell referring explicitly by name to Marilyn Monroe. This makes the story quite a meta-experience, but also makes one feel quite queasy while watching, as you come to understand that this is the true subject or target of the film.

The element of psychology is included in the person of Dr. Brubaker (Oskar Homolka), the author of the manuscript that Richard is editing, and whose writing is used to introduce statistics about temptations for married men in the summer and the "seven year itch" in particular. Ewell externalises the conflicts within him in the form of an itch on his chest, near his heart (geddit?), and a nervous twitch in one of his thumbs (presumably with phallic connotation?).

Apparently, the film is based on a three-act play by George Axelrod. In Wikipedia's entry for this film (see link below), there is an interesting discussion of the restrictions put on the film, compared to the play, by the studio's adherence to the Hayes Code of the time.

Five years later, in "The Apartment" with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, Wilder revisited the temptations-of-summer-affairs-in-Manhattan scenario introduced in "The Seven Year Itch" and created a human drama of great warmth and darkness and resonance. This film, while interesting, and a great showcase for Monroe's talents, does not approach those heights.

  • Director: Billy Wilder
  • Writers: George Axelrod, Billy Wilder
  • Starring: Tom Ewell, Marilyn Monroe, Evelyn Keyes, Marguerite Chapman, Robert Strauss, Oscar Homolka, Sonny Tufts, Donald MacBride

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Sunday, 21 August 2011

Monkey Business (1952)

The quest for the recaptured vigour of youth, that holy grail for the middle-aged and elderly, is at the heart of this wonderfully fun light-hearted comedy that showcases the brilliance of Cary Grant's comedic skills, and reveals that Ginger Rogers too was not only nimble on her pins, but also a very gifted comedienne.

Grant's character, Dr Barnaby Fulton, a chemist, works at a laboratory where they are trying to develop an anti-ageing, vigour-restoring product, a kind of whole-body viagra-type drug. Grant's aged, overweight boss, Mr Oliver Oxley (Charles Coburn), seems to have a personal stake in the speedy resolution of this product, connected to the person of his private secretary, Miss Lois Laurel (Marilyn Monroe), whose considerable personal charms outweigh her lack of secretarial skills.

But Barnaby's research has hit a roadblock. As the story begins, his mental preoccupation with "the formula" is showcased with some nice absent-minded professor style business, that also allows his relationship with wife Edwina (Rogers) to be shown as very solid and loving, with she being very understanding. It also allows Hank Entwhistle (Hugh Marlowe) the family friend and old flame of Rogers' youth to make his appearance.

The next day, in the lab, there is some excitement as it seems one of the experimental subjects, an elderly chimpanzee, is exhibiting extremely uncharacteristic youthful behaviour, and Mr Oxley, with Miss Laurel in tow, gets quite excited, till it is revealed to be a false alarm. Barnaby goes back to the drawing board, re-mixing his formula, but a young chimp, who has been observing him, concocts its own formula, to taste, and pours it into the water cooler stand, where it becomes mixed with the only drinking water available in the laboratory.

So begins a series of joyously comic set pieces where first Barnaby, then wife Edwina, then Barnaby and Edwina together, drink increasingly greater amounts of the formula, washing it down with water from the cooler, and mistakenly ascribing the effects to Barnaby's formula. In each case, it is an excuse for the actors to indulge in progressively more juvenile behaviour, much to the delight of the audience. Grant and Rogers are both fit and agile, and are impressively up to the physical demands of their roles, where they have to act and speak as much younger people. One imagines that the actors must have really had fun playing these parts, and the transformations are a joy to watch.

The conceipt of this 1952 film, with adults acting as children, is reminiscent of Dennis Potter's horrific comic psycho-drama "Blue Remembered Hills" (1979, part of BBC TV's "Play for Today" series), where adults play themselves as children, and sometimes the children they are playing choose to play at being adults, resulting in multiple levels of interpretation.

Never work with children or animals, film-makers are told, but Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers worked with both here, and emerged unscathed. Grant has such a great way of looking nonplussed and exhibiting his mental processes in physicality, and acting the character straight, not tongue in cheek.

Saw this film on 12 May and again on 3 August, with equal pleasure. My hesitation about awarding the film a very high mark is that it is lightweight in theme. On the other hand, it is perfectly executed.

References

  • Director: Howard Hawks
  • Writers: Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer, I.A.L. Diamond
  • Starring: Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Marilyn Monroe, Charles Coburn, Hugh Marlowe, George Winslow

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My Life Without Me (2003)

On receipt of news of terminal illness, there are perhaps four key choices that any of us would have to make:

  1. On receipt of such news, in the short term, how would we choose to respond, say, by going to pieces or by remaining calm?
  2. Who, if anyone, would we choose to share the news with? Family? Friends?
  3. How would we choose to spend our remaining days? Would we spend our time putting our affairs in order or, exploiting a release from future consequences, throw caution to the wind and fill our time with wild debauchery?
  4. Where would we choose to die?

"My Life Without Me" is the story of Ann (Sarah Polley), a young Canadian mother of two living in straitened circumstances in a mobile trailer home in her mother's (Deborah Harry) back yard, who goes to the doctor with symptoms of early pregnancy (nausea, stomach cramps and so on) only to learn that she has an inoperable tumour and has at most two or three months left to live. If this sounds like the premise of a traditional weepy, a sentimental drama "based on a true story", well, certainly for Ann the stakes could not be any higher. There is strong emotional content in the film, but the emotions are true emotions, and muted more often than amplified, and the high quality of the acting and direction lifts the story above clichéd dramatics to a level of apparent realism and authenticity.

In response to the news of her imminent death, rather than going all to pieces, Ann responds in an admirably level-headed way. Seeking to maximise the time she has left, she makes out a list of things to do before she dies. It is the nature of this "To Do" list, and the other choices she makes in response to the news that make this story compelling, particularly given the particular circumstances of her life, which emerge during the course of the film.

The lynchpin of the film is the performance of Polley, and she is totally believable in the role, portraying a young woman of intelligence, courage, determination and heart. She is so good with the girls who play her daughters (Jessica Amlee, Kenya Jo Kennedy) that it's hard to believe she is not their mother in real life. The supporting cast is uniformly good: Julian Richings as the doctor, Scott Speedman and especially Mark Ruffalo, respectively, Ann's husband and Ann's admirer, Deborah Harry and Alfred Molina as Ann's parents, Amanda Plummer, Leonor Watling, and Maria de Medeiros as Ann's friends, neighbours, co-workers, acquaintances.

The script is intelligent and the direction is unostentatious. The story is based on the book "Pretending the Bed Is a Raft" by Nanci Kincaid, and the scene where Anne acts out with the girls on the bed being on a raft, beset by dangers of different kinds, is a wonderful scene, one that as a parent I envy, like the scene in Crash (2004) where the admirably resourceful Daniel (Michael Peña) calms his daughter's fears of neighbourhood drive-by shootings with the invention of an invisible bullet-proof fairy cloak.

References

  • Director: Isabel Coixet
  • Writers: Isabel Coixet, Nanci Kincaid
  • Starring: Sarah Polley, Scott Speedman, Mark Ruffalo, Deborah Harry, Amanda Plummer, Leonor Watling, Maria de Medeiros, Julian Richings, Alfred Molina

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Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

Evolution Becomes Revolution

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a very well-realised and thrilling prequel to the stories of the well-known "Planet of the Apes" science fiction film series of the late 1960s / early 70s, featuring a compelling performance by the lead actor (Andy Serkis), through the magic of "motion-capture" digital replacement technology, as Caesar, a chimpanzee with increased intelligence.

Any film presents its makers with a number of challenges, most commonly, to develop a compelling story peopled with interesting credible characters played by actors of talent and skill. In this prequel to the first film in the original series, Planet of the Apes (1968), the filmmakers had a number of special challenges. One was to come up with a credible scenario laying the groundwork for the tale of a lost astronaut, George Taylor (Charlton Heston), who discovers an upside-down world dominated by intelligent, talking apes, where humanoids exist as low status low intelligence non-speaking animals. Another challenge was to find a suitable alternative to the hairy costumes, clumsy facial prosthetics, and stooped postures of the human actors playing the apes in the original series of films, which at the time were good enough to garner an honorary Oscar for special make-up, but which to modern eyes, used to hyper-realistic computer-generated effects, would be hopelessly inadequate at suspending disbelief. [On the issue of make-up, despite the ground-breaking portrayals of apemen by talented mime actors in Stanley Kubrik's superior "2001: A Space Odyssey", released the same year, their achievement got no Oscar nomination for make-up, possibly because, as writer Arthur C Clarke speculated, the Academy members didn't realise the performers were not real apes.] A final challenge was to develop a wider theme, subtext or moral, without which any story is only an locally significant event.

The first challenge is well met, with a scenario involving the use of apes as experimental subjects in a search for a cure for Alzheimer's disease, a brain disease that progressively strips away the memories and thinking abilities of its victims. Dr Will Rodman (James Franco), is a scientist at a commercial medical research laboratory in San Francisco, California, trialling a genetic therapy to cure Alzheimer's, delivered by modified viruses, with a personal interest in the results, as his father, Charles (John Lithgow), under nursing care at home, is in an advanced stage of the disease. When one of the test subjects, a female chimpanzee, apparently suffers violent side-effects from the treatment, Will's boss, Steven Jacobs (David Oyelowo) stops funding for that research line and orders all the test subjects destroyed. Will and his assistant, Franklin (Tyler Labine), cannot bring themselves to kill a baby chimpanzee, delivered covertly by the primary test subject. Will makes the fateful decision to rear the cute little infant in secret at home, despite warnings from his girlfriend, veterinarian Caroline (Freida Pinto), that after they grow up, chimpanzees are too dangerous to keep as pets.

The second challenge, of finding a way to portray the apes, is also very well met, using "motion capture" ("mo-cap") technology, where actors, wearing special suits and facial makeup, act the parts as normal, and then are digitally replaced by artificial substitutes, in this case, apes. Andy Serkis, notable for his performances as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings series (2001-2003) and King Kong in the Peter Jackson remake (2005), plays Caesar, the chimpanzee Will takes home from the lab, both as a child and as an adult. This is in fact the lead role of the film and brilliantly played in an Oscar nomination-worthy performance (giving the Academy an opportunity to redeem itself for (controversially) previously omitting Serkis from acting nominations because of the total replacement of his body by a computer-generated animated character). To be honest, for the first half hour or so, I was not entirely convinced by the digital rendering of the apes shown, but subsequently, as I got to know the characters, either the computer graphics got better or I grew more accepting, because I lost that feeling and became totally caught up in the stories of the apes. The issue I think is primarily with regard to the rendering of faces. Our critical faculties are so strongly developed that the tiniest deviation from absolute authenticity in the rendering of a face is punished by causing our minds to "jump the shark". Apes are not human, but ape faces, particularly chimpanzee faces, are complex enough or human-like enough to betray slight inaccuracies or infidelities. James Cameron's Avatar (2009) did a little better, I think, in its portrayal of human-like faces, fooling my brain from the very first meeting with the Na'vi aliens. In any case, this "mo-cap" technology is astounding in potential. It looks like, in the near future, filmmakers will have sufficient resources to create computer-generated human beings that are absolutely indistinguishable from real human beings, though whether that will be a good or bad thing is another question. Will we see digitally cloned James Deans and Marilyn Monroes in multi-film franchised sequels, e.g. Rebel Without A Cause or Some Like It Hot, part 2?

The final challenge for the filmmakers was one of theme, subtext, moral. The original Planet of the Apes had a strong racial metaphor, reflecting conflicts within American society between different ethnic groups. It also had the concept of reversing roles between humans and (some) animals, showing people in cages, so allowing the audience to consider animal welfare from the point of view of the animals. Ape society was largely indifferent to human rights, and the "good apes" were two research scientists, who were especially kind and considerate towards humans. Science and scientists are the allies of the human protagonist, against the formalised ethnic stratifications, and the fossilised faith systems, of ape society.

In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the moral is the more familiar trope of the dangers of science, the Frankenstein theme: science is a powerful but dangerous tool. Typically, scientists, attempting to improve our world by conquering death or extending life, accidentally create the conditions to unleash a disaster or produce life-threatening monsters. Terry Gilliam explored similar animal rights / medical research themes in "Twelve Monkeys" (1995) and Splice (2007) has scientists secretly raising an experimental subject at home.

On reflection, I would say that the true underlying genre of Rise of the Planet of the Apes is that of the prison movie, though of course in this case the prison inmates are not people but apes. As in any prison movie, we see how and why our central character, Caesar, came to be imprisoned. Though a gifted individual with a loving family, he is an orphan from a very different ethnic background, and as he grew older, his home life became more troubled, and there were quarrels with the neighbours and episodes of rage and violent behaviour. During the incarceration phase of the movie, the audience's feelings of identification with the central character may be increased by injustice, such as sub-standard accommodation or food, maltreatment by authority figures, and difficulties with other inmates, including the issues of social hierarchy (pecking order) and cliques (gangs). If he is lucky, there will be a special supportive friend and visits by close family. Much free time is spent remembering past idylls, and holding on in expectation of future release from incarceration, though if that dream is dashed, other avenues may need to be explored. Milos Forman's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest" (1975), for instance, has quite a similar story arc.

Amendments:

Changed the phrase 'the heroes were two research scientists' to 'the "good apes" were two research scientists'.

References

  • Director: Rupert Wyatt
  • Writers: Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver (premise from La planète des singes by Pierre Boulle)
  • Starring: Andy Serkis, James Franco, John Lithgow, Freida Pinto, Brian Cox, Tom Felton, David Oyelowo, Tyler Labine, David Hewlett, Jamie Harris

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Saturday, 13 August 2011

The Wrong Man (1956)

An innocent man has nothing to fear.

The Wrong Man (1956) is an interesting split-genre film, in which a procedural crime mystery morphs into a psychological drama, like a trial run for Psycho (1960).

This film, according to Wikipedia, based very closely on a true story, is a study how of an ordinary working family man in New York City, accused of being a hold-up robber, becomes deeply embroiled in the US legal system.

The title, The Wrong Man, suggests a case of mistaken identity, but the opening scenes, in which we meet the protagonist, Manny (Henry Fonda) introduce small fragments of doubt. Manny is shown to be a quiet sober man with a steady job as a musician in a nightclub, a loving husband and beloved father to two young boys. Manny's wife, Rose (Vera Miles), needing expensive dental treatment, despairs of their constant struggle to make ends meet, but Manny reminds her of all the good things in their life, and reassures her that, in the short term, they can borrow money on her life insurance policy, like they did before on his life insurance policy, and that, in the long term, things will somehow work out all right.

So far so good: Manny seems to be satisfied with his lot. But when he opens his evening paper, his eyes are drawn to advertisements for luxury products, well beyond his means, promoted aspirationally as improving the quality of family life, and he turns from these to the horse racing form pages where he starts making notes in the margins, in the way that nowadays in the UK many working people with dreams of sudden wealth turn to the lottery or scratch cards. Could Manny be less honest than he seems? Could he have a secret vice? Where is he going to get the money for Rose's operation?

That afternoon, at the insurance office, Manny, with his wife's insurance policy in his pocket, dressed like almost all the men in this film in dark suit and tie, overcoat and hat, enters and is "recognised" as the man who held up the office the previous month.

Most of the rest of the film is a Kafkaesque nightmare (Kafka's The Trial, 1925, is the ultimate fictional legal conundrum, where the protagonist, K, can't even determine what crime he is being charged with) in which Manny is led through a judicial process where the labyrinthine progress of the legal machinery is so inexorable and inflexible and inhuman that circumstantial evidence is sufficient to point the finger of guilt and protestations of innocence are routine, making a mockery of the film's tagline, "An innocent man has nothing to fear".

Arrested outside his house, Manny is interviewed by detectives, then subjected to a series of witness and other types of identity tests, each of which seems to be technically flawed in some way, then formally charged and inducted into the US legal system. The filmmakers take care to show in precise detail the steps in the process, and how clinically de-humanising the process is. With an array of witnesses and other evidence positioned against him, as the detectives point out, it all looks very bad for Manny. If he cannot find cast-iron alibis, it seems that he will be found guilty.

I imagine Hitchcock was attracted to this true story partly because of its Kafkaesque aspect, but mainly because of the other, more overtly psychological, aspect, which comes in the final reel, in which the prospect of a physical prison gives way to the horror of a metaphorical mental prison, a prison of ideas, a theme which will be explored more thrillingly in the film Psycho.

Fonda, with his back catalogue of likeable honest characters, e.g. Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), is brilliantly cast in a role calling for a person audiences of the time would have assumed was innocent. His performance is very understated, like a blank that the audience can project themselves into. Interesting to read in his Wikipedia entry that, unlike daughter Jane, schooled in the Stanislavski / Strasberg Method, he was an intuitive actor without conscious technique. As for age, as is so common in the old Hollywood contract system, he was a good deal older than his character, a 51-year old playing 38. Vera Miles handles her role very well, nicely underplaying the dramatic challenges.

References

  • Director: Alfred Hitchcock
  • Writers: Maxwell Anderson, Angus MacPhail
  • Starring: Henry Fonda, Vera Miles, Anthony Quayle, Harold Stone, Charles Cooper

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Thursday, 4 August 2011

Creation (2009)

How he saw the world changed it forever

Creation (2009) may not have done very well at the box office, and had mixed reviews, but I found it extremely moving. The importance of the theory of evolution of species through natural selection is hugely important in our modern world, and the story of the man who travelled the world in his youth, and then spent 20 years developing the theory into a well-substantiated, carefully-articulated explanation of the story of life is of great interest.

According to Wikipedia, the story is factually based, being an adaptation of the book "Annie's Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution" by Darwin's great-great grandson, Randal Keynes. The title of the book gives the key to this film's interpretation, the story hinging on Darwin's relationship with his daughter, Annie, who died young.

The plot zig-zags between two key periods in Darwin's life: the course of the illness of Darwin's oldest and much beloved child, Annie, and a later period of time, when Darwin's work should have been reaching fruition, but finds him paralysed by a number of things, effectively stifling his scientific output. During this period Darwin's suffered chronic ill health, and was in conflict with his wife, Emma, a devout Christian, about the direction of his work. He was also wracked with guilt about the death of his child, Annie. Annie appears to him, as a kind of ghostly companion, with whom he converses. As Darwin listens to animal breeders, who speak knowledgeably about the frequent casualties incurred when mating closely related animals together in order to select desired inheritable characteristics, he comes to realise that Annie's illness may not have been random in origin, but may have its roots in the very nature of his and Emma's family closeness: being first cousins before marriage.

As the two story-lines develop, Darwin comes under increasing pressure from outside, and also, internally, shown partly through sleeping and waking dreams and visions, particularly of Annie, whose life-like presence becomes increasingly harder for Darwin to tolerate. Others may have disliked the device of Darwin interacting with Annie's ghost, but I thought it worked on many levels. For him to fully reject Christianity would mean necessarily losing the last vestige of her, her spirit. We also see the loving relationship Darwin enjoyed in former times with his wife, Emma, contrasted with the frosty alienation in the later period.

The performances by Bettany and Connelly (real life husband and wife) are superb, perfectly embodying the conflict and crisis in the Darwin family. Bettany brilliantly portrays the pain of conflict of a man whose intellectual discoveries bring him increasingly into conflict with local community life and his family's religious traditions and beliefs. Connelly personifies a devout woman bitterly at odds with her husband's beliefs. Nice performances too from Martha West (Annie), the talented Benedict Cumberbatch and Toby Jones (Darwin's scientific colleagues, Joseph Dalton Hooker and Thomas Huxley), Jeremy Northam (Reverend John Brodie-Innes, the local vicar).

Interesting how the content of the film is ostensibly about one key scientific domain, the theory of evolution, but how the real subject is one of psychology: how Darwin is being paralysed and made physically ill by his own subconscious (an entity he himself sneeringly dismisses) and the subconscious guilt he feels for the death of his daughter, Annie, and how the film's climax takes the form of a psychological release relating to the expiation of guilt, and voicing of subconscious or largely unspoken fears between he and his wife.

As a coda, in connection with the publication of Darwin's book (On the Origin of Species, 1859), one has to wonder at the casualness of the postal service of the day, and remark how, with a single catastrophic jolt from a stone under the wheel of a post cart, our understanding of the living world around us, and ourselves, might have been terribly impoverished.

According to Wikipedia, Darwin's theory of evolution is still so controversial in the USA, outside the intellectual strongholds of the West and East coasts, that it took months of lobbying to find a distributor. Quote from Wikipedia: "According to producer Jeremy Thomas, the United States was one of the last countries to find a distributor due to the prominence of the Creation-evolution controversy. Thomas said: "It is unbelievable to us that this is still a really hot potato in America. There's still a great belief that He [God] made the world in six days. It's quite difficult for we in the UK to imagine religion in America. We live in a country which is no longer so religious. But in the US, outside of New York and Los Angeles, religion rules."

I think one stumbling block is that many people take the word "theory" to mean untested "hypothesis" or notion, something that still very much that needs to be verified. But in science, a theory is a much stronger entity. It is an explanation that has to fit in with verifiable facts, and has to be framed so that it can be shown to be false. But though many have argued against Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection, nobody has been able to falsify it on genuine evidence-based scientific rational grounds, only on religious grounds. Of course, it is a work in progress, but subsequent evidence of carbon-dating and discoveries in genetics, including the role of DNA in the cells as biological blueprints, all support Darwin's great idea. To date, addressing the question of life on Earth, and taking into account huge mountains of evidence, it is the best explanation we have.

References

  • Director: Jon Amiel
  • Writers: John Collee (based on the book "Annie's Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution" by Darwin's great-great grandson, Randal Keynes)
  • Starring: Paul Bettany, Jennifer Connelly, Jeremy Northam, Toby Jones, Benedict Cumberbatch, Bill Paterson, Jim Carter

Written in WriteRoom, formatted using TextWrangler and HyperEdit, posted from my MacBook Pro



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Woman of the Year (1942)

The picture of the year!

Woman of the Year (1942) is the first pairing of the legendary on-screen romcom couple, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. The film poses the question, still relevant today, of how the busy modern woman can manage to combine a career with a happy marriage and home life, and, winning the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, it packs quite a punch.

The story wastes little time in throwing together Sam Craig (Tracy), a hard-headed sports reporter and all-round regular American, and Tess Hardy (Hepburn), a high society sophisticate and international charity worker, fluent in various languages, who writes a column for the same newspaper. Their little literary spat develops into a series of start-stop dates, driven by mutual attraction, but frequently delayed or interrupted by Tess's hectic schedule.

The gulf between their lifestyles is underlined. Sam takes Tess to a baseball game, something which she knows nothing of, but quite enjoys. Tess invites Sam to an evening party at her apartment, but has little time to talk to him. After failing to bond with groups of non-English speaking refugees and diplomats, he slips out early. He travels to sporting events, and hangs out in bars. She travels to conferences and holds open house in the evenings in her uptown apartment. Eventually, they kiss, confess their love for each other, he proposes, she accepts. Cue a happy ending...

But the story does not end there. It goes on, beyond the honeymoon period, itself not without its issues, to examine subsequent married life for such a loving but busy modern couple. It also, very cleverly, examines the issue of the quality of care for very young children in such a setup. So, the question remains till quite late in the story: can they make it work? And will they be able to meet in the middle, or will one have to make unequal compromises?

One has to appreciate the generally modern, progressive view of the sexes, evidenced by the script in the characters of Sam and Tess throughout most of the story. To my mind, the dilemma faced by Tess is never really satisfactorily resolved, but, along the way, Hepburn gets to do a revealingly inept extended comic kitchen routine.

There is real chemistry between Tracy and Hepburn. They both have impeccable comic timing. Tracy is very likeable, so that the male can identify with him, and Hepburn is a fine woman with stunning looks and personality, an aristocrat in the best sense of the word.

  • Director: George Stevens
  • Writers: Ring Lardner Jr., Michael Kanin, John Lee Mahin, Garson Kanin
  • Starring: Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Fay Bainter, Reginald Owen, Minor Watson, William Bendix, Gladys Blake

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Tuesday, 2 August 2011

The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

A fascinating adventure into the unknown!

There is a simplicity and rigour to this story, from the novel by the great Richard Matheson, that makes it a classic of "What if?" science fiction, in this case, what if you found out your body was shrinking, that you were getting progressively smaller?

The script is very tight, swiftly introducing the young businessman at the centre of the tale, Scott Carey (Grant Williams) and his wife, Louise (April Kent), sunning themselves on the deck of a borrowed motorboat, apparently without a care in the world. No sooner does Louise go below decks than a strange metallic cloud envelopes Scott, at the time to no apparent ill effect. Later, however, Scott begins to physically shrink in size, maintaining all his relative proportions, but getting smaller.

The scripting for this is very nicely done, as the principals struggle with the symptoms of the phenomenon. At first, everyone tries to find natural explanations: Scott blames his clothes, Louise focusses on his reduced appetite, and their doctor suggests that previous records were wrong or that it's just an extreme case of the height reduction we all experience over the course of our day, as gravity compresses our vertebrae. When the change becomes so significant that acceptance becomes unavoidable, the medical experts are brought in and a battery of tests done, trying to find an explanation, and a cure.

Along the way, most of the key questions that come to mind in such a scenario are touched upon, if not always resolved. As a man got progressively smaller, would he be able do his job, and even if he could, would he be allowed to keep it? Without a job, how could he pay his bills? As he got smaller and smaller, what would he do for clothes? Would he be able to maintain independence in a world full of devices designed for full-sized people? Speaking of large people, what kind of relations would he be able to maintain with his normally-sized wife? Would he perhaps fit in better with the kind of people who never grew tall?

For a film made over half a century ago, the special effects are really pretty good. As Scott gets smaller, his size becomes determined relative to his surroundings. It's amazing how something as simple as using oversized furniture and household objects can provide sufficient visual cues. Likewise, his hold on existence becomes more precarious, and the dangers inherent in his surroundings become more apparent. Increasingly, his world becomes a battlefield, with disasters that to people of normal size are nothing more than minor nuisances, but to him are dangerous puzzles to solve, and life-or-death challenges to overcome, including duels to the death with ferocious household pests. My wife, who suffers from arachnophobia, had to leave the room during the final reel.

The two special effect giveaways are the rather obvious back projection during the duels with animals, and, despite good tonal matching, the tell-tale lack of a shadow for Scott.

The theme, like that of "I Am Legend", Richard Matheson's 1954 novel of the last man on Earth battling alone against a world of zombies, is essentially one of alienation and loneliness, with Scott being removed progressively from normal human interaction, involving loss of relations with professional colleagues, loss of relations with all normal-sized people, loss of status as a civilised human being resulting through a series of accidents in him being thrown back into a primeval life-or-death survival mode, like a miniature caveman beset by privations, natural disasters and monstrous predators. Even with a group of social outsiders like circus midgets, he can find no lasting refuge. The story can be seen as a parable of alienation. The novel, according to Wikipedia, investigates his relations with other people with a much harsher, less forgiving view of society.

The performances are fine. In the title role, Williams is well up to the physical exertions of the part. He could be said to lack the charisma of a more major actor, but in a way his very anonymity helps to increase the credibility of the performance. The supporting actors are good. But all in all, the story and the script are the most important elements, and they are top notch.

  • Director: Jack Arnold
  • Writers: Richard Matheson, Richard Alan Simmons, based on the novel by Richard Matheson
  • Starring: Grant Williams, Randy Stuart, April Kent, Paul Langton, Billy Curtis

Written in WriteRoom, Formatted using TextWrangler, posted from my MacBook Pro



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