June book and film review

Welcome to this month's media review. Get ready for a rich mix of the sublime and occasionally ridiculous!

BOOKS

INFERNO, by Dan Brown. Our legendary hero Dr Robert Langdon wakes up in a hospital bed in Florence with no idea how he got there. Before he's even rubbed the sleep out of his eyes he's dragged into a global conspiracy where an evil genius is attempting to reduce the world's population by half by the simple expedient of releasing a genetically modified plague virus. Or is he?
Someone has said that reading a Dan Brown novel is like being on a dangerous adventure in the company of an experienced travel guide, which I would say nails his books perfectly. Once again I found myself more interested in the often fascinating detail of the places they visit: in this case, Florence, Venice and Istanbul, than in the often Byzantine complexities of the plot, which, as usual, contain some very irritating wind-ups along the way, making for this reader an ultimately unsatisfying experience. But who am I to judge? Doubtless the book will sell in its millions before being made into a highly lucrative movie. So what do I know? Enough, this time, to announce I shall not be reading any more of the great one's offerings.

A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME, by Anthony Powell
Vol IX- The Military Philosophers
Vol X - Books do Furnish a Room
Nick Jenkins is nearing the end of his voyage through the 20th century. In The Military Philosophers, Nick, now a major involved in liaison with representatives of the Eastern European allies, sees out the end of the war unscathed, unlike many of his friends and acquaintances, and returns to civilian life as a writer and sometime publisher. He meets the sultry Pamela Flitton, (with her gorgeous looks and sulky attitude, strongly resembling, in my mind at least, an old girlfriend of mine, and that didn't end well either), who is what we might today call a ball-buster, snagging men and causing them to makes fools of themselves. She meets Widmerpool,, now a labour MP, and against all expectations, marries him. Glorious stuff. In Books do Furnish a Room, we meet Bagshaw,a left-wing publisher who has gained the soubriquet "Books do furnish a room Bagshaw"  ("Books" for short) who was so named after an incident when, advancing on a reclining nude lover, bumps into a huge bookshelf and showers the contents over his inamorata. Allegedly, or apocryphally, he makes the immortal remark while helping his lover up from the leather-bound debris. Meanwhile, marriage to an MP has not improved Pamela's mien: she leaves him and sets up house with a noted author twice her age. It is said many of the characters in Powell's masterwork are based on real people he encountered. When I have completed the cycle of books (there are just 2 remaining) I shall embark on Hilary Spurling's explanatory book Invitation to the Dance, when I am hoping for much intriguing information to be revealed. Please see next month's review for more on this.

FILMS

THE LEMON TREE (2008) D- Eran Riklis. A lone Palestinian woman tends the lemon grove which has been in her family for three generations. Then the Israeli defence minister moves in next door and the security people decree her grove be cut down as terrorists might lurk among the trees and launch an attack. But the lady does not take the decision lying down, and the case soon hits the media. Acutely observed and well acted, the surprise is that a film this sympathetic to the plight of ordinary Palestinians was made by an Israeli team. There may be hope for them yet...

ALADDIN (Disney animation, 1992) D- Ron Clements and John Musker. Things aren't going well for an Arab boy; then he finds a lamp and rubs it. The rest you know. Innovative and high energy adaptation of the famous story finds the Disney crew in top form, a form they perhaps did not re-discover until Wall E. Robin Williams shines as the voice of the genie, though this was in his relatively early days, before he got all coked up and annoying.

DREAMGIRLS (2006) D- Bill Condon. In early 1960s Detroit, a girl group is nurtured and brought to stardom by a clever and unscrupulous manager. A film which is said to reflect the progress of the Supremes, this is a surprisingly skillful and insightful dissection of the pop world in general and the Tamla Motown phenomenon in particular. Even Eddie Murphy, whom I usually find difficult to stomach, is very good indeed. The film is also notable for Jennifer Hudson's performance, which earned her a unique Oscar in her debut role in a feature film. Highly recommended.

INTO THE BLUE (2005) D- John Stockwell. Somewhere in the Caribbean, a group of very attractive beach-bums go diving for buried treasure, and find it in the form of a tonne of carefully packed cocaine inside the fuselage of a crashed plane. So far so good, but then the "owner" of the drugs demands they go down and retrieve the lot. Their reward? They'll be allowed to breathe.
With stars like Paul Walker on board, the movie comes over like "The Fast and the Furious at 20 fathoms", though the result is scarcely taxing to the intellect. Jessica Alba looks great though...

LINCOLN (2012) D- Steven Spielberg. In the closing months of the Civil War, the American president struggles to engineer a majority in the senate to pass his bill to emancipate the slaves. Meanwhile the fighting drags on. Spielberg really makes two kinds of films: the "ripping yarns" (Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park etc) and his "serious" efforts ( Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan). Personally I prefer his ripping yarns, but of his serious offerings I think this may be his best yet. The whole film is shot is seeming semi-darkness, with everyone talking at once (a technique of which I do not necessarily approve), but shining through almost every scene is the stunning performance of Daniel Day Lewis as the doomed president. Outstanding.

MARLEY (2012) D- Kevin McDonald. The life and times of the great reggae star captured through the reminiscences of his family, friends and fellow musicians. An exhaustive study, richly deserved in view of Bob's global fame. We see his childhood (the son of a young Jamaican beauty and a British army captain, who disappeared shortly after conception) and his gradual rise to megastardom. I thought I knew quite a bit about the dreadlocked one, but nonetheless had a number of gaps in my education filled in by the film. What came through especially vividly was the profoundly spiritual atmosphere that surrounded him throughout his life, and which influenced everyone around him. Everyone except one. His daughter seemed unimpressed by her father's saintly reputation, citing with some bitterness his incessant ganja smoking and partying for stealing her childhood.

Then there was his illness, which I had always ascribed to lung cancer, though as it turns out I couldn't have been more wrong. It all started with a malignant melanoma being found in one of his toes. The doctors recommended a hind-quarter amputation (removal of the entire leg, including the hip joint)- a step so radical he and his supporters could not contemplate such an awful thought. A pity in retrospect, because the tumour came back, spread throughout his body and killed him. As Chris Blackwell commented: "He was badly advised by the people around him" and it's hard to argue with that verdict. They could only see as far as the procedure affecting his stage performances and stopping him playing his beloved football, so they just pretended it wasn't a problem. And you can't afford to do that with a malignant melanoma...

OFFSIDE (2012) D- Jafar Panahi. A football mad Iranian woman is desperate to see her national side in a crucial World Cup qualifying match. Only problem, women aren't allowed to go to football matches. So she disguises herself as best she can, but it doesn't work; she is detained and sent to a roped-off section of the stadium out of sight of the action, where she joins a crew of other girls who have been likewise apprehended. Agonisingly, the girls can still hear the roars of the crowd, and persuade a sympathetic guard to provide a running commentary on the match from his vantage point. Absolutely brilliant portrayal of the absurdity of certain Sharia laws, rooted as they are in medieval times when, as I understand it, they didn't even play football. But of course Sharia law is designed mainly to keep women in their place: at home looking after the children and being compliant to their betters: men.
A thoroughly engrossing and highly professional piece of movie making.

ADVISE AND CONSENT (1962) D- Otto Preminger. An American president has made his choice for Secretary of State (the US equivalent to our Foreign Secretary), unaware that his protégé has a secret past. There follows a struggle not unlike the one we saw in Lincoln, where a scramble ensues to find a majority in the House to confirm the president's selection. My copy of this film had an awful soundtrack, sometimes out of synch, always rather muffled, and this did not exactly enhance a movie which lives and breathes dialogue from first shot to last. But the players (Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton et al), plus the masterful skills of director Preminger ensure it remains a quality product that has dated little since its production more than 50 years ago.

OH MR PORTER! (1937) D-Marcel Varnel. An incompetent railway employee is banished to an isolated station in Northern Ireland where it is thought even he cannot do much harm. They couldn't be more wrong..Yet somehow at the last he manages to snatch glory from the jaws of idiocy. When this film was made Will hay was at the top of his game, Britain's most popular entertainer. And this vehicle, predictably a box office smash, did little to harm that reputation. With a tremendous energy which is sustained from first scene to last, it remains riotously funny even after the passing of three-quarters of a century.

OCTOBER 1917: TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD (1927) D- Sergei Eisentein. Stalin personally authorised the making of this documentary film to celebrate the ten year anniversary of Russia's glorious revolution. Equipped with an unlimited budget, Eisenstein set about re-creating the great scenes, using thousands of extras and exploiting to the full the willing co-operation of the city fathers of St Petersburg (then called Petrograd, later to be known as Leningrad). The result (carefully airbrushed to avoid any reference to Trotsky, by then in exile) is an astonishingly authentic-looking film. Indeed it is almost impossible to view the set-pieces as anything other than contemporary footage.
Extraordinary.

THE TREE OF LIFE (2011) D- Terrence Malick. A lower-middle class family in 1950s Texas struggles to come terms with the standard vicissitudes of family life: death, disappointment and compromise. Here Terrence Malick has created his most thoughtful, sensitive and beautiful film yet. Brad Pitt as the bullying father who is consumed by guilt is superb, as is Sean Penn, who plays one of the children grown into adulthood. His broody presence, almost completely devoid of dialogue (there's actually very little dialogue in the entire film) towers above the movie, while Hunter McCracken who plays the character as a child is also brilliant. And let us not forget Jessica Chastain, whose face can portray enormous emotion with the barest micro-expression.
A strange, hypnotic, sometimes confusing, but ultimately exceptional piece of cinema ..