shewhomust | Entries tagged with films

A fortnight ago, I wrote about Greta Gerwig's Little Women, a film adaptation of a popular nineteenth century novel with a substantial autobiographical element, which is played up by emphasising the aspect of the story which depicts the making of a writer. It is given a twenty-first century flavour by its emphasis on the need of all four sisters to find their own creative voice, and by a major star having a whale of a time in a minor rôle (that's Meryl Streep as Aunt March, if you've just joined us). It also acknowleges that many readers feel the central character marries the wrong person.

On Wednesday we went to see Armando Iannucci's The Personal History of David Copperfield, a film adaptation of a popular nineteenth century novel with a substantial autobiographical element, which is played up by emphasising the aspect of the story which depicts the making of a writer. It is given a twenty-first century flavour by its colourblind casting, despite which it has room not only for a major star having even more of a whale of a time in a minor rôle (that'd be Peter Capaldi as Mr Micawber) but also for two lovely performances from familiar faces so inhabiting their parts that I forgot for minutes on end that they were Tilda Swinton and Hugh Laurie. It also acknowleges that many readers feel the central character marries the wrong person.

I may or may not have read David Copperfield: if I have, it was half a ccentury ago. I recognised much of the story, but that doesn't prove much; I also failed to recognise much of the narrative, which doesn't prove much either, and also doesn't matter. I was greatly entertained, and the film certainly didn't make me any less likely to read the book.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/706655.html

I'd read enough about Greta Gerwig's Little Women that I was curious to see it:

nineweaving loved it,

fjm (over on FaceBook) hated it, and both for what seemed to be sound reasons. I've just failed to find

fjm's post, so this is vague, but she was critical of things which appeared to be details, but which misread the attitudes of the period, and of the March / Alcott family in particular. Hadley Freeman makes some related points in more general terms (and I'll come back to this).

We saw the film last Wednesday, and we both enjoyed it: ( does the concept of spoilers apply to 'Little Women'? If so, there may be some... )

Tom Gauld has the last word.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/705249.html

Countdoen runs up to a series final before Christmasm which is fun, and then takes a break until the New Year. An unintended side effect of this is that the ironing builds up. By now,

durham_rambler is down to his last shirt. So this afternoon I watched Some Like It Hot on BBC2 while I ironed. It stood up very well to this not-entirely voluntary umpteenth rewatch.

Our New Year guests are within the county: time to return to the kitchen!

The cinema at the Gala theatre doesn't often show the interesting documentaries I read about in the reviews: but they weren't going to miss Daniel Draper's The Big Meeting. I enjoyed it, and there's a lot of good stuff in it, but I can't review it; it'd be like reviewing your friend's family album: "Oh, look, there's so-and-so; where was this picture taken? that's not a very flattering one of so-one-so; my, he's in a lot of the pictures, isn't he?" The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw liked it (and gave it four stars), but his favourite bit was art historian Robert McManners talking about mining art, which is all good stuff but not about the Gala. Which I think is what I just said...

Robert McManners was - of course - filmed in the Mining Art Gallery in Bishop Auckland. We were there ourselves on Thursday, to hear poetry and publishing co-operative Vane Women reading their poems inspired by a recent exhibition at the Gallery, on the theme of Women at the Coal Face. We'd expected it to be a rather downbeat event, as we'd heard last week of the death of founder member of the group (and one of my favourite poets) Joanna Boulter. What we learned, though, was that although Joanna had been diagnosed with dementia, she had emerged from this, and had lately been writing again, and there id hope of another book. She is still missed, but the evening was more cheerful than I had expected.

A recent trio of BBC programmes, with the unpromising title Raiders of the Lost Past brought together three archaeological discoveries on the eve of the Second World War. We have watched the first two (of three) and I am not convinced that the coincidence of date is significant, but programme one was worth watching, just for the loving close-ups of the Sutton Hoo treasure. (It is probably not the fault of presenter Janina Ramirez that the camera loves her, and lingers on her gazing raptly at each item, with the focus shifting between the watcher and the watched.) It was Lucy Mangan's review of episode two which alerted me to the series, and my knowledge of its subject matter barely amounts to that picture looks familiar. It is, apparently, the oldest piece of figurative art ever discovered, lovingly reconstructed from smithereens. Which is interesting, but the (not quite so old, but no so as you'd notice) horse from the Vogelherd cave is visually more appealing. The cave is now part of a UNESCO World Heritage site, but the little horse is in the museum in Tübingen (which caught my eye because Tübingen is twinned with Durham).

The dilemma of the restaurant critic: Zoe Williams struggles to describe food that is just tasty:
It's not an angel dancing on your tongue; it didn't crack open your understanding of what a vegetable should be, or its meaning in the universe; it wasn't like an explosion, or an epiphany; it didn't have the deep, resonating familiarity that brought you so close to the quiddity of a steak that you felt as if you could speak cow just by eating it. It's just tasty - or quite tasty.

I don't even want my food to be an explosion, or an epiphany, or an angel dancing on your tongue - tasty is what I'm looking for (and good company and a glass of wine).

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/695692.html

The Guardian gave Yesterday a four star review and the line "As fab as it could reasonably be expected to be." That sounded good enough for a summer rom-com, to be followed by dinner at the Elm Tree before the quiz (no-one had told me that their kitchens are closed pending refurbishment, and that big bowl of nachos wasn't going to happen).

We both enjoyed the movie; nothing I say hereafter should be taken as evidence to the contrary. It's a Richard Curtis romantic comedy - a Richard Curtis romantic comedy directed by Danny Boyle, and with an intriguing premise, but even so, there's a limit to how far that can take you, and "I enjoyed it" pretty much reaches that limit.

You could view that premise as science fiction: what if Something Happened, and no-one but you remembered the Beatles? The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw enjoys this 'What if...?' aspect, and opens his review by thinking of some of the resultant absences. But the film itself doesn't seem interested in playing this game. Jack - who remembers the Beatles, and is building a career on their songs - brings out Back in the USSR in the Moscow of the present, and the script dances around the clever retro use of USSR, but it doesn't examine whether this world contains the Beach Boys or not (either option has its drawbacks). There are a couple of jokes about other things which only Jack remembers, but apparently nothing where he is wrong-footed by something that he, alone, doesn't remember. Yesterday is not about the world building, it's about the plight of the protagonist.

Who is, obviously, a Richard Curtis romantic hero, and so likeable but entirely hapless. He works part-time in a wholesale warehouse (his manager would sack him, but the customers like him) having given up teaching to pursue a career as a singer-songwriter. His manager and number one fan Lily James is transparently in love with him, but having established that they are just friends, he can't - he repeatedly fails to - redefine their relationship, just as he repeatedly failed to resist the blandishments of Hollywood, expressed in the person of a truly terrifying rival agent. When it comes to the entirely hypothetical question, if you were the only person who remembered the Beatles, would it be OK to present their music as if it were your own, Yesterday answers yes, on two spoiler-rich grounds. This disposed of, the film moves on to the grand denouement, which is very grand indeed, courtesy of Ed Sheeran, who generously plays himself as an inferior precursor of this wonderful new music. This raises questions that might actually arise in the real world, about how you behave to other people, in love and in business, which Yesterday doesn't actually acknowledge.

Despite all of which, and more, I enjoyed it. And there is one magnificent coup de théâtre, in the form of an uncredited cameo by Robert Carlyle.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/688337.html

The cold continues, and I continue not swimming. I am also tending to nod off, mostly on the sofa. Other than that, it isn't interfering unduly with life.

So on Tuesday we went to a talk (in the Gala cinema - the University is doing outreach) by Richard Gameson (Professor of the History of the Book) on New Light on Durham's Illuminated Manuscripts about a research project bringing together the departments of History and Chemistry to carry out non-invasive analysis of the pigments of medieval manuscripts. It was a fascinating talk, with many beautiful pictures and many delightful scraps of information (illustrative example: an illumination showing pigments being prepared and applied, with the explanation that the reason why you get your apprentice to grind up your pigments is that most of them are very toxic...) I wish I could give a coherent account of it, but I do not absorb information well by ear, some cold-induced drowsiness may have occurred and, to be fair, the structure of the talk may have been here's an old book! but this one is even older! and here's a pretty page! ooh, shiny! I asked

durham_rambler on the way home whether I could have unferstood correctly that the project's secret weapon is a spectroscope reduced to portable components, and he thought that yes, he had got that impression. The project web page says "a unique, custom-built, fully mobile suite of equipment optimised for the study of manuscripts" so yes, apparently.

We came home and ate pizza and watched the first episode of Shetland, which involved more severed limbs than I am entirely comfortable with (and an interesting musical choice, at one point). Too soon to say what I think about all this.

Yesterday back to the Gala, the larger cinema this time, to see All is True: Kenneth Branagh directs and plays the lead as Shakespeare, returned to Stratford after the Globe Theatre has burned down. Judi Dench quietly steals the show as Anne Hathaway, Ian McKellen makes the most of a cameo as the Earl of Southampton. It says something about what kind of film this is, and what it expects of its audience, that in this short scene sonnet 29 is recited in full twice, first by Branagh, then by McKellen. If you like that sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you will like.

Like Upstart Crow, which I have not been watching, it is scripted by Ben Elton. I wanted to like Upstart Crow, because Shakespeare, David Mitchell, these are recommendations, but I watched the first ten minutes of the first episode and did not want any more. Now I picture Ben Elton, researching and writing his comedy anc having all sorts of thoughts about Shakespeare which didn't fit into that show - wrong length, wrong shape, wrong mood, or maybe just not enough room - and finding a home for them in All is True. It's very episodic, and in as far as the different set pieces are linked by an actual plot (people have secrets; women have thoughts) this was less than the sum of its parts.

It is gorgeous to look at. Dorney Court plays the part of New Place beautifully (though it is too small, according to The Telegraph). Shakespeare in retirement takes up gardening, which provides a useful amount of stage business. But it also justifies plenty of autumnal landscapes, and if the garden is wilder and less formal than a prosperous Jacobean house would expect, well, that's why the master has taken up gardening. I was a bit suspicious of some of the more colourful fall foliage (can those really be maples?) but it was all very pleasing to the eye.

Walking home after the pob quiz,

durham_rambler wondered what

nineweaving would think about it. I hope we shall find out.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/674022.html

Another week, another movie - another 'portrait of the artist' movie, too, though this time it's not a portrait of a young woman just starting out, but a double portrait of two aging men (they are both in their 60s) at the end of their careers. I didn't choose to watch it as a companion piece to Colette, I 'chose' to watch it because it was showing at my local cinema - but the more I think about it, the more the two films counterpoint each other in my mind. Full disclosure: the cinema obligingly provided an early evening screening on Wednesday, our preferred timing as it allows us to see a movie, walk up the hill and get something to eat at the Elm Tree before quiz time. But I don't think that's the only reason why I feel kindly to Stan & Ollie.

( Other reasons... )

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/669534.html

I wonder how much of the story the audience of Wash Westmoreland's film Colette is supposed to know before seeing the film? Here's my local cinema's summary:

After Sidonie-Gabrielle 'Colette' marries a successful man of letters known simply as "Willy", she moves to Paris and writes a semi-autobiographical novel about a country girl named Claudine.

Unfortunately, because Willy convinced her to ghostwrite for him, she doesn't get any of the credit for the phenomenon that her novel becomes. And in the years to come, while her and Willy's adventures become the talk of Paris, she defies everyone to get her name on the books she writes.

Which takes you a fair way through the narrative of the film. Yes, young Gabrielle will marry Willy, yes, she will join his stable of ghost writers, yes, her book will be published and will be successful (in the interests of full disclosure, I admit I hadn't realised that Claudine's success was quite such a phenomenon). Considering the television version of the Jeremy Thorpe story, I said it provided an interesting case study in considering whether spoilers matter: the same is true of Colette. Will our heroine manage to claim the literary glory usurped by her husband? (Clue: would this film have been made if she hadn't?)

Is it, in this context, significant that it's a British film, not a French one? I kept being disconcerted by this. When Colette is shown writing, what she writes is in French, while she speaks the words, in voice over, in English: this detail feels significant to me, though I can't say what it signifies. You could, in any case, know that Colette was a major literary figure without knowing how or whether she and Willy resolved their personal lives. In which case you could watch the film as a romance: will Colette find happiness in her marriage or elsewhere? And in these terms, the film offers a happy ending, by making Missy the romantic hero. Which works, so long as you stop before the love affair does. It makes Missy a very attractive character, as much transgendered as gay (I have no idea what, if anything, this distinction might mean to people of this time). The film left me wanting to read more Colette, but to know more about Missy.

For the rest, it was a pleasure just to look at the pretty pictures: this is the belle époque at its most beautiful, from Sido's garden in Burgundy to the glittering salons of Paris. Keira Knightley is beautiful as Colette (more beautiful, I suspect, than Colette herself, and less feline) and wears a succession of costumes which have already been examined by the fashion pages of the Guardian. Paris is ravishing (and mostly in Budapest, although Burgundy, apparently, is in Oxfordshire) and spotless: this is a world in which poverty id having the bailiffs arrive to remove some antique furniture before you go out to dinner. There's even a sprinkling of steam trains.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/668310.html

The good: On Thursday we were at the social evening of one of Durham's other residents' associations. This followed a committee meeting, and was mostly for their own members, but one or two outsiders had been invited. Our invitation was to durham_rambler " - and shewhomust, too, of course!" which was kind, but my expectations weren't high. In fact I had a delightful evening, talking almost entirely to the (adult) daughter of an old-but-not-close friend (increasingly I feel the need for a word to express this relationship). There was a touch of acid in this pleasure: she was spending a few days with her father, because he had just received some very bad medical news. But the conversation was wide-ranging and generally delightful.
The bad: On Friday morning we learned of the death of a friend's husband. His health had been poor for a long while, and he had been particularly unwell lately. I had accepted that our plan to meet for a meal during our pre-Christmas visit to London was unlikely to happen, but the latest news was better than expected, and it was possible that there would be a slow process of recovery. And no, as it turns out.
The movie: If you are looking for a Christmas movie guaranteed to make you feel bad about Christmas, and antidote to any seasonal sentiments, any cheer and goodwill, may I recommend Await Further Instructions? @ComradeMorden tweeted that "Await Further Instructions is the bat-shit crazy Christmas film you didn't know you needed. Lovecraft and Cronenberg and Carpenter's lovechild with a tinsel topping!" and who am I to argue? He is far better versed in the genre than I am. I went to see it because scriptwriter Gavin Williams is a friend - you would not guess, from his pleasant exterior, what a deeply twisted mind he has. The film starts out with the young man bringing his girlfriend to meet his family and spend Christmas with them, which is a recipe for disaster at the most mundane level (David Bradley has a whale of a time playing the grandfather); then it shifts into a whole new kind of nastiness; and when you have started to wonder just how this can possibly end - badly, of course, but what kind of badly? - it goes somewhere entirely unexpected.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/664103.html

We did not go to Danny Boyle's Pages of the Sea last Sunday, although we could quite easily have gone to Roker, one of the participating beaches. Why did we not go? As you know, I was feeling ambivalent about all this remembering, and marked the moment of the Armistice by composing a post about it. And I was afraid the event would be horribly crowded, that too. Seeing photographs of the event, I think I was wrong on both counts: here's my favourite picture (the photographer reserves his rights, but it's worth clicking through. Also, a description of the event, and more photographs in this set.).

Why Pages of the Sea? It's a line from Carol Ann Duffy's poem, The Wound in Time, which also does a fine job of balancing solemn commemoration with actual remembering.

We did, though, watch Peter Jackson's film, They Shall Not Grow Old, though I watched a fair bit if it with my hand over my eyes. It's an astonishing piece of work, opening with the familiar jerky black and white film flickering in a small square in the middle of the screen, the men's voices telling cheerfully how they had signed up, singly and in groups (and many of them so young) and been trained for war. And as they set off for France, the image began to fill the screen, the motion became smoother and more natural, until suddenly there was colour. Like Summer Holiday, only completely different.

It was fascinating, but I wasn't as moved by it as I had anticipated. There were moments when I had to look away (not always fast enough!) but overall it left me with more questions than emotions. I'd have loved to see an accompanying 'making of', not so much for the technical 'how did they do that?' questions (some of which are answered by this Radio Times article) as the editorial questions: who filmed this in the first place? And how, and why? What choice did Jackson have from the material available to him? Likewise for the commentary, which is compiled from oral archives recorded in the 60s and 70s by the BBC and the Imperial War Museum. Jackson comments on its extraordinary stoicism, which is true, but only part of it: against the background of every idea we now have about the war, it is positively cheerful. Not just in the opening scenes, when you might expect the film-maker to select extracts which reflect the light-hearted, optimistic expectation of a war which would be over by Christmas, not just the matter-of-factness of the descriptions of life (and death) in the trenches, the cold, the mud, the rats, the man next to you falling dead from sniper fire, but at the end of the film, the men who looked back and 'wouldn't have missed it for the world'... These were, of course, by definition the survivors, and more, the survivors who were prepared to speak to authority about what they had survived.

Meanwhile, the camera reminded you all the time of what voices were not saying. Who was the intended audience of these scenes? The cheerful groups at mess tables, or marching past the camera shouting "Hello, Mum!", I can imagine these scenes being shown: but the squalor of the trenches, both in tragic mode (those youthful faces now looking up from corpses half eaten by the mud) or comic (the rows of bare bottoms strung along a pole above a latrine pit), would this ever be shown to those at home? The footage of life in the trenches was so immediate and candid, too, it was a struggle to remember that it wasn't filmed on the ubiquitous iPhone, but on heavy cameras that had to be manhandled into position.

'Manhandled'. that's another thing: this was the war as we have only recently learned not to think of it, exclusively male and white. Was it Jackson's decision to focus in this way, to exclude the women who overcame official opposition to do their bit at the front? Or are they absent from the IWM's archive, neither seen nor heard? Similarly, it's a very European view of the war to be made by a New Zealander: Jackson talks about his interest in the war beginning with stories of his grandfather, who signed up (admittedly with the South Wales Borderers) in 1910, but fought at Gallipoli as well as in the Somme.

Against all this, my last question is trivial, but I stumble across it every time I try to think or talk about the film: how did they decide on the title They Shall Not Grow Old? The phrase draws so much power from Binyon's For the Fallen, and then stumbles, because it's wrong: I keep wanting to say the familiar words, ",They shall grow not old..." Does it work with that association? Someone must have decided it does.

And that's it, a century plus a week has passed. Will World War II be commemorated in the same way? I find that unthinkable, it seems such an entirely different matter (don't ask me why).

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/661167.html

The glowing obituaries of Fenella Fielding remember her primarily for her contribution to the Carry On... films - which is fair enough. But for me she will always be the Blue Voice from Dougal and the Blue Cat:

"Blue is Beautiful" (Watch on YouTube)

She was blue, she was beautiful, she was best.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/651652.html

durham_rambler wasn't sure he'd have time for a silly movie this week, but he was due at the cinema café for a meeting, at just precisely the time of the Saturday afternoon showing of Early Man. So we walked into town together, and then he went to his meeting and I went to see the latest from Aardman animation. I might have had doubts about going to what is technically a children's film on the Saturday afternoon of half-term week, but in fact they were a great audience, and the bonus is that you get to see an entirely different set of trailers.

Early Man, according to Nick Park's commentary for the trailer on IMDB is "a Prehistoric underdog sports movie" (from the 'neo-Pleistocene' era, of course). A Stone Age tribe are evicted from their valley by invaders from the Bronze Age, for whom it is simply a place to mine for ore. But young Dug (aided by his faithful hog, Hognob) challenges the Bronzians: the fate of the valley will be decided by a game of football. Seeing the bombastic and showy game played in the Bronzian city, Dug realises the meaning of the tribes ancestral paintings: once, long ago, they invented this sport of the tribe...

If I can get this much enjoyment from a film about football, someone must be doing something right. There is constant slapstick humour, of course, but there are also plenty of clever verbal gags: I liked the stall in the Bronzian city selling 'Jurassic Pork', and another one called 'Beaker Folk'; and I don't know which I liked better, the reminder that 'you haven't eaten your primordial soup, or the soup itself, ominously green and full of - well, that would be telling. The city itself is full of eye-candy, glorious Bronzepunk decorative work.

Given how full the screen is of the most creative anachronism, it is probably perverse of me to be bothered by the fact that the tribe subsist mostly by hunting rabbits. I didn't bat an eyelid at the Giant Man-Eating Mallard, but apparently I draw the line at the depiction of rabbits as native to Britain. Go figure.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/618829.html

( The Post )

( Will Finn and Rosie Calvert at South Shields Folk Club )

( Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri )

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/617282.html

We woke quite early this morning to a heavy frost, and by the time there was enough light to see how white it had painted the ground, snow was falling. And is still falling, and settling. D. and

valydiarosada have chosen an interesting day to drive up for their New Year visit...

durham_rambler had an errand this morning, but before he went out he set up his iPad so I could watch The Red Shoes through the iPlayer. That's my memory of childhood Christmases, watching old films on television while snow fell outside (how often did it happen? well, at least once!). I've seen it before, of course, but had forgotten everything about the plot except the Hans Andersen elements and the ballet. I had also forgotten how very intense the colour was: Technicolor loves the red shoes themselves, of course, but it also loves the location shots. If the Monaco Tourist Office weren't paying for that exposure, someone was missing a trick (oh, and look! there's Covent Garden still functioning as a vegetable market!). I wonder if Gene Kelly had seen The Red Shoes: as the main ballet sequence progressed, I was reminded of his Broadway Melody from Singin' in the Rain, and once I started thinking of The Red Shoes as a rather highbrow musical, I couldn't stop. It has that sort of plotting, where people do completely idiotic things for no better reason than that the plot (such as it is) must be advanced from here to there.

helenraven sent me a peekaboo puffin: winner in the under-12s category, British Wildlife Photography Awards (doesn't seem to allow direct linking - sorry).

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/612666.html

As agreed, the bathroom fitters arrived on Tuesday morning to start work on the downstairs bathroom. They ripped out all the fittings, and took up the floor. They discovered, what we had already told them, that there was damp underneath the floor (this, indeed, more than a desire for a shiny modern wet room, is the reason why the downstairs bathroom heads the list of home improvements). "I thought there would be joists under the flooring," said the boss, and we made sympathetic noises, and refrained from saying that we had told him the floor was solid (and he had confirmed explicitly that he felt competent to take on a job which was likely to involve remedial building work). The work will take longer and cost more than the original estimate, but this hasn't come as a total surprise. The most unnerving thing is hearing the excited Polish conversations and not knowing what they are about.

To the cinema, to see Their Finest. It is based on a novel called Their Finest Hour and a Half, which strikes me as a clever and witty title: I wonder why they changed it for one which people are forever getting wrong? But the film was enjoyable, if you didn't think about it too hard. Apparently it is still inevitable, if a man and a woman are on friendly terms, that romance will ensue (and I don't think that can be regarded as a spoiler since it is, as I say, inevitable). It also has to balance - or perhaps juggle - a humorous depiction of the making of a film which will boost morale during the Blitz, with the depiction of the Blitz itself, which isn't in the least funny. This dissonance was amplified by the fact that the film within a film is a sentimental account of Dunkirk, and one of the trailers preceding the main feature was for a particularly bloodthirsty account of the same event.

We walked home over Milburngate Bridge, which we haven't done for some time, as parts of the route (not always the bridge itself) have been closed for various reasons. We had a fine view of the pile of rubble where the Passport Office used to be - literally, in that the plan is to use the debris of the old building as a platform on which to build the new, so raising it above the main flood risk. The heron was strolling along the weir, admiring his reflection in the still water above it.

Yes, election day. We, like many other parts of the country, have county council elections. You are forgiven for not noticing. The news media have occasionally mentioned the elections for the new powerhouse mayors (thankfully, we have escaped this one so far), but county councils are beneath their notice: London doesn't have one, so it can't be anything important. Finally, today they had to notice. The Today programme this morning kept announcing that 'we aren't reporting on politics today' in what I thought was a very passive-aggressive manner.

For what it's worth, I'm not convinced that reporting on the issues - such as they are - of the General Election would have had much influence in this ward. We have been showered with leaflets by both Greens and Lib Dems, who have good grounds for claiming that neither Labour nor Tories have a hope. I'm quite insulted that the Labour Party haven't felt it worth making an effort: they control the County Council, and seem to resent that the City is an enclave of dissent, but they haven't tried to win us over. The other contender was an independent - a semi-detached Green, and I wonder what the story is behind that? Anyway, the polls have just closed - the count is tomorrow.

Crossposts: http://shewhomust.livejournal.com/578257.html

We have just watched the final of University Challenge; as always, I am amazed at the things the contestants know. It isn't just a matter of knowing the subjects they are studying: they are impressively well informed about the history and geography of far-flung parts of the globe. They have their blind spots, though: asked to identify the film maker whose works included Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, they hesitated, then ventured "Jean-Luc Godard?"

Crossposts: http://shewhomust.livejournal.com/573950.html

So, La La Land: Does it end happily or unhappily? Both. ( Let me explain that at inordinate length, and with spoilers: )

So, La La Land: did it win the Best Picture Oscar, yes or no? Both.

Another movie: at this rate I'm going to have to make a suitable icon! We have worked out that if there is a five o' clock showing on Wednesday, we can go to the pictures and then get something to eat at the Elm Tree before the pub quiz, and this arrangement suits us very well. It also means that if there is a film we are interested in seeing we can say OK, let's do that on Wednesday, instead of meaning to see it sometine and then forgetting about it. Win all round. Plus, the more we go to the cinema, the greater the chance we will be tempted by seeing a trailer (though on the whole I'm as likely to be deterred by the trailer as attracted). Anyway, we had seen the trailer for Hidden Figures, and thought it looked promising.

Am I missing something about that title? (Also the title of the book on which the movie is based.) It's a fair indication of what the film is about: the women (figures) whose mathematical work (figures) is little known, deliberately overlooked (hidden). I can't help feeling that it's a pre-existing phrase, but one I don't recognise? Am I being dim, or just too demanding? THat's my only niggle. And I'll tell you what, forget La La Land, this is a feelgood movie. Three Black women triumph because they are intelligent and determined: with mathematics and space rockets. What's not to like?

Like Denial, this is a piece of comparatively recent history, and like Denial, it struggles to create dramatic tension despite the likelihood that its audience already knows how things turn out. Will John Glenn survive, or will the capsule burn up on reentry? What do you think? On the other hand, I was sceptical about the last minute hitch when the computer figures don't match up, and Glenn says he's ready to take off providing "the girl" checks the figures - and this turns out really to have happened (though not, NASA points out, quite at the last minute).

Anyway, you can't make assumptions about what people know and don't know. It is our habit to watch the credits through to the bitter end, by which time we are not infequently alone in the cinema with - well, I still think of him as 'the projectionist'. He's not that young, but he was shocked by the depiction of a segregated America: "But this was in the sixties!" Well, yes. And he's right to be shocked, because it is truly shocking. But I did know about segregation as something that happened, and that people were fighting to end.

The thing that struck me as a surprise (of sorts) was the extent to which anti-Russian feeling outweighed any pleasure or excitement in the Soviet space programme. Of course I knew that this was the 'space race', that the American space programme was in competition with the Russians, and I knew, too, that 'duck and cover' air raid drills must have had some success in making people genuinely frightened. But could the scientists who were directly involved with trying to put a man into space have seen that it was possible and thought that this was entirely bad news? Have thought 'they've done it and we haven't' without thinking 'but we will - if they can, we can'? Perhaps. Perhaps I'm being naïve, and this is just the result of being brought up left wing, that I remember how thrilling it was to hear the news of Gagarin's flight?

This was the one sour note in the film for me. Oh, there were plenty of moments where people acted meanly or without considering what their actions meant to others, but this was the only one where I felt that something was wrong and the film didn't see it as wrong. Elsewhere, one of the things I liked was that it was made very clear how far a rotten system was perpetuated by people who thought they were doing right by the protagonists, but could and should have been doing more. This is made explicit in the character of Mrs Mitchell, the (white) supervisor, who consistently fails to support Dorothy Vaughan in her quest for promotion. When she finally adresses her as 'Mrs Vaughan', it would be easy to dismiss the change as too little, too late. But Hidden Figures sets this tiny triumph in the context of the genuine, historic triumphs of NASA's unsung number crunchers, which removes the sting.

Reviews of the film Denial have been pretty mixed, but I think Peter Bradshaw sums up the issues pretty well: it may be a bit pedestrian at times, he says, but it's an astonishingly timely film, telling a story that needs to be told right now. I'd agree with that.

The timeliness, though, is actually one of the puzzling things about it. How long does it take to get a feature film from green light to a screen near you? David Irving's libel action was decided in 2000; Deborah Lipstadt's book about it (on which David Hare based his screenplay) was published in 2006. Somehow the film, after showing at festivals in the autumn of 2016, manages to reach UK cinemas in the early days of the post-truth presidency; I saw it within a week of the Holocaust Memorial Day from which the White House had managed to exclude the Jews. Did someone know it would be needed right now?

I suspect that some of the criticism of the film's 'clunky' exposition (yes, Hadley Freeman, I am looking at you) is just critics saying "But I already know this! Doesn't everyone?" But if you concede the need for any exposition at all (and if you don't, you probably don't see any reason to make this movie) then the way it was done was methodical and thorough but I didn't mind it (and yes, I did know quite a lot of it already). I found it funny rather than irritating that you could tell when the scene had shifted to London because it was raining.

There's a related problem, I think, that people who remember the case will also know what the verdict was, which makes it difficult to create dramatic tension on that account. Even if you don't remember the case, you might feel that the tone of the narrative made one outcome by far the most likely. I certainly felt that the narrative was working quite hard to supply an alternative source of tension, in the relations between Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) and her legal team. Deborah Lipstadt initially assumes that she will take the witness stand. No, say the lawyers, your testimony is in your (allegedly libellous) book, and it is our job to destroy Irving's case, not yours to defend yourself. She isn't entirely comfortable with this, although we have already seen a prologue in which David Irving tries to derail one of Lipstadt's lectures, and she declines to debate with him (saying that you can debate opinions, but certain things are facts). Later the disagreement takes a different form: a woman who has been watching from the public gallery reveals herself as a Holocaust survivor, and asks, when will our voices be heard? Again Lipstadt agrees with her, and again the lawyers win the argument. Only when the case has been won can the rift be healed by Lipstadt's realisation that her barrister (Richard Rampton, played by Tom Wilkinson) was truly committed to the cause, that his reactions on their visit to Auschwitz showed not indifference but a mind already at work on the case, and that through his onslaught on Irving the voices of Hitler's victims have indeed been heard.

This is touching - and for all I know it may really have happened. It felt a little trivial, and beside the point. There was a reminder, too, that the task of the barrister is to represent the client, whoever that client may be, in the passing remark that in a previous case, Rampton's client had been McDonald's. Wait, what? Yes, that McDonald's libel case: representing the full might of McDonald's against a couple of Greenpeace activists doesn't look quite so much like the work of a knight in shining armour - though he can't have known at the time that the case was even murkier than it appeared, the allegedly (and partly) libellous leaflet having been co-authored by an undercover police officer.

If Hollywood demanded that the good guys not only do the right thing but also display their impeccable motives, it also left no room for doubt in its handling of the bad guy. Timothy Spall's David Irving is almost a pantomime villain. Watching the man himself on Newsnight (a clip from which was recreated in the film) he is loathsome, but not - even when playing up to an audience - grotesque.

I won't embed that video, because it's not something you'd want to come across unawares, but it's a very interesting half hour. Better than the movie? No, despite my reservantions the movie is an important story well told. But it's good to have a little reality as a chaser.

1. Hull...: The Guardian offers an insider's guide to the City of Culture, including a hotel recommendation. Not that I'm planning a cultural jaunt to Hull, but it might be worth a stopover if we were, say, taking the ferry from Hull to Zeebrugge. And we might be planning something of the kind. First, though, I need to renew my passport.
2. ...and high water: It's been raining, and when we crossed the river on the way to the pool yesterday morning we were both impressed by how fast the water was flowing. Also, vacation is over, and the student swimmers are back, occupying a third of the pool and making waves.
3. ...with gently smiling jaws: The press report as good news Donald Trumps statement that he'll be only too happy to do business with a post-Brexit Britain, and none of this nonsense about delay or going to the back of the queue. Folks, when a businessman tells you that he's only to happy to make this deal, and don't you worry your little head about those pesky details - well, maybe that's the time to slow down.
4. From Hartlepool...: The Reading Group has been discussing comics set in England, and as always, relying heavily on members contributing items from our own collections - but this week I've been reading a book from the library's collection, The Hartlepool Monkey by Wilfrid Lupano and Jérémie Moreau. This is a first in the current discussion, I think, a French perspective on an aspect of England - though publisher Knockabout are very discreet about that origin: only a little sticker on the cover, saying "Winner of the Rendez-vous de l'histoire Award 2013 gives the game away. Identifying the book as historical BD, a mainstream genre in France, makes a lot of sense, and the story - that during the Napoleonic wars the people of Hartlepool hanged a monkey as a French spy, earning themselves the nickname 'monkey-hangers' - has become more widely known since the electoral success of Stuart Drummond.

Lupano's narrative is carefully pitched: there's just enough pathos to season the farce. The people of Hartlepool don't come out of it well, though to be fair, nor does the French captain who appears briefly in the opening scenes; Moreau's art has a scratchy, cartoony quality that reminds me of Ronald Searle, and his scribbled landscapes give a fair impression of Hartlepool's Headland (there are some samples in this review).

There's a sting in the tail in the closing pages, with the identification of the doctor who has involuntarily broken his journey in the town and witnessed the grotesque events, accompanied by his young son. I'm ambivalent about this: as far as I can discover it has no historical basis, and the respect with which he is treated (visually, in his clear lines and blocks of colour, as well as verbally) suggests what while the poor are fair game for satire, the wealthy are exempt. It's a neat little twist, though, to close the story which otherwise does just what it says on the tin.
5. ...to La La Land: To the cinema yesterday, for La La Land, accompanied by J. who did not like it At All. This may have cast a dampener on my own reaction, best summarised as:Fun movie, what's all the fuss about? We both enjoyed the references to classic films, but we both thought it went on too long. And really, if you're going to remind me of Singin' in the Rain or An American in Paris, you risk me feeling that that was very nice, but actually I'd rather be watching Singin' in the Rain or An American in Paris.

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News from Nowhere

Entries tagged with films

... and then two come along at once.

Books are better

Just a drive-by posting

What do four things make?

Yesterday

Sniffing in the dark

Stan & Ollie

Colette

Christmas: the good, the bad and the movie

Remembrance Sunday

She died with her eyelashes on

Saturday afternoon at the pictures

Two films and a folk club

Winterlude

Five things make an election day

A film I'd like to see

Life imitates art

Hidden Figures

Denial

Five things make an LJ post