December 2014 book and film review

Welcome to my final media review of the year. A diverse collection once again awaits. In the New Year I intend to write a "review of the year in media"; meanwhile here are my final offerings for 2014.


BOOKS


A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS, by Khaled Hosseini. A young girl is born out of wedlock in Afghan and finds herself a social outcast without understanding why. Then her mum dies and her dad marries her off to a bloke who lives in Kabul, far from the tiny mountain village which was her home. All seems to go well with her new husband until she finds herself unable to carry a pregnancy...


Khaled Hosseini's first book, The Kite Runner was a huge hit world wide, with its basic message of "The Afghan people are good, the Taliban are bad", a message the West was only too keen to adopt in a post 911 world. That story was a relatively simple tale, but here Hosseini sets his narrative against a backdrop of 30 years of turbulent times from 1974 to 2004. And most interestingly, his two main protagonists are both women- women whose characters are drawn with considerable skill and remarkable empathy. But once again, his message shines brightly: lives full of hope threatened by brutish, murderous thugs who wish to impose their will on the world. Notable.


THE BOOKSHOP, THE GATE OF ANGELS and THE BLUE FLOWER, by Penelope Fitzgerald.
Three short books by one of Britain's most skilful and subtle writers. I had never heard of Fitzgerald and her most famous book, The Blue Flower until I heard a discussion on Radio 4's A Good Read when two contributors named it when asked to cite their favourite novel of all time. Better give it a try, I thought, and I shall be forever grateful to that programme for the tip. The edition I purchased contained two other novellas which also turned out to be perfect little gems of writing, indeed, minor masterpieces is not too strong a phrase to describe them.


In The Bookshop,  a middle aged widow decides to set up a bookshop in a small town on the East Anglian coast in the late 1950s. Business is anything but brisk until she hears of a publishing sensation that has books racing off the shelves around the country: Lolita. Suddenly she is turning a healthy profit, but reactionary forces in the town disapprove of her and would seek to bring her down.


A deceptively simple tale where very little appears to happen, but in which a marvellous spell is cast by an author of supreme narrative powers.


The Gate of Angels is set in the Cambridge of 1912, where a junior fellow of an ancient college meets a girl under rather strange circumstances and immediately falls head over heels in love. Slight problem? His college does not allow its fellows to marry. Worse, the girl disappears before he can get a chance to become acquainted. Undaunted, our hero sets out to track her down and snag her before someone else does.


The Blue Flower concerns the early, and tragically brief life of the German poet Friedrich von Hardenberg, who adopted the pseudonym of Novalis and established himself as the first great romantic novelist. Barely out of his teens, Fritz, as he is known throughout, who has been recognised from childhood as possessing a prodigious intellect, dismays his friends and family by falling for a twelve year old girl who is not very bright and not even especially pretty. He announces he will wait for her majority and then marry her. As he is from an ancient noble family and she is less high-born her parents approve. No one else does though. Not that Fritz cares. He is in love, and that's the end of it. Then she falls ill...


All these stories seem very simple on the surface and are remarkably easy to read: funny, thrilling, spooky sometimes. But they all have the same touch of greatness about them. Simply wonderful.


FILMS


FROZEN (2013) D- Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee. (animation) A beautiful young princess inherits the throne when her parents are lost at sea. Grieving over, all seems set for a great future for her and her ditzy kid sister Anna. Except for one thing. The new queen Elsa (Idina Menzel) is an "ice genius": she has the ability, sometimes at her command, sometimes involuntarily, to turn everything to ice. And her strange gift/curse is getting worse. After a row with her sister she disappears; meanwhile her entire realm is plunged into eternal winter. Some elements would wish to find her and kill her; her sister however wants to find and rehabilitate her. Somehow...


This Disney/Pixar movie has become in less than a year the most popular animation feature of all time and the fifth most popular movie of any kind. Based loosely on Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen, the film looks great and the characters are exquisitely drawn. The two female leads both have that innocent/foxy appearance which is highly alluring (my wife has forbidden me from buying the dolls as terrible things might happen to them at my hands) and the dialogue is amusing and sometimes very knowing. In summary, what's not to like about Frozen? The answer is, practically nothing, a verdict apparently shared by the entire nation, and indeed the whole world.


THE LEGO MOVIE (2014) W/D- Philip Lord and Christopher Miller. (animation). In a Lego world threatened by evil president Business, only everyman construction worker Emmet, armed with the legendary Piece of Resistance can save the day from mindless conformity and create a brave new world of diversity and individualism. In this seemingly impossible task he is assisted by "Wild Style" (think Melanie Griffith in Something Wild) and Morgan Freeman playing his spiritual advisor (think a kind of Lego Obi Wan Kenobi).


Got all that? It doesn't really matter if you don't. This movie races along at breakneck speed with its assortment of zany characters delivering one-liners with lightning speed before plunging to its life-affirming conclusion: the world is a better place if we are allowed to be ourselves. Visually it is quite unique. The screen is constantly busy, perhaps too busy for the small screen- in common with films like Paris, Texas or Laurence of Arabia, this is one you really need to see in a cinema. And you will need to set aside your misgivings about any movie which is essentially a 95 minute commercial. Lego has seen its already healthy profits soar since this movie came out, and like Frozen this film has clearly tapped into the zeitgeist with unerring accuracy: it was Britain's most popular movie of 2014. And it's hard to begrudge its success.


SINBAD THE SAILOR (1947) D- Richard Wallace. Sinbad, everyone's favourite lovable rogue, engages in a search for the lost treasure of Alexander the Great, ably assisted by Maureen O'Hara. Oh, the japes and scrapes they get themselves into!


Maureen O'Hara, I am ready to reveal. is the main reason I obtained this movie but I fear it was an error. Certainly her luminous loveliness shines in every scene she is in, and her costumes are sumptuous, but really this is a terrible movie, slow, leaden, uninspired and featuring a Douglas Fairbanks who had not modified his acting style one jot from his days as an icon of the world of the silent movie. See it only if you are a seriously committed O'Hara fan.


BAGDAD (sic) (1949) D- Charles Lamont. A beautiful Bedouin princess (Maureen O'Hara) enlists the help of the military governor of Bagdad (Vincent Price) to track down her father's murderer, but he'd rather get inside her panties than assist her in her quest, which maybe even leads back to himself. But she has an ally in the form of a local potentate who also finds her somewhat appealing. Appealing? Yes. Arab? I think nottle. With the gorgeous peaches and cream complexion of a coleen born and raised in the Emerald Isle Maureen O'Hara is the least likely Bedouin you could ever imagine. No matter. O'Hara herself said later about these films (see Sinbad the Sailor) that the producers called them "tits and sand" (you could also call them "lust in the dust" I suppose)  movies, they being principally vehicles to dress the divine one in a series of lavish and low cut gowns. They have no argument from me on that score, but as we have seen, cinematically they were not of the best. This one wins out slightly over Sinbad in that it is more tightly paced and saved to some extent by a gloriously evil Vincent Price. Passable, but barely.


ELYSIUM (2013) D- Neill Blomkamp. In a world destroyed by environmental catastrophe, the elite have decamped to a vast orbiting space station and live lives of unbridled luxury. They even have some sort of scanner which can cure any disease. Enter Matt Damon, whose GF's daughter is dying of leukaemia, to hatch a plan to take the girl through the elaborate security net surrounding the space station and procure a cure before she succumbs.


Neill Blomkamp received a lot of praise for District Nine, a film which used the device of aliens arriving on Planet Earth only to be herded into compounds and abused as a means of highlighting the evils of apartheid. Here the gulf between the poor and the rich is his starting point, though for me it doesn't work half as well as District Nine.


For me the biggest problem is the space station. As Neil deGrasse Tyson might have observed, why didn't the wealthy elite simply requisition Hawaii or somewhere and build their exclusive paradise there? You could say for security, but as we soon find out, it seems perfectly easy to penetrate the net surrounding the space station anyway, thereby kind of negating the whole idea of putting an exclusive paradise in space. Having said that, Matt turns in his usual effective performance, as does Jodie Foster, who makes an excellent job of the autocratic director of the space station. Not bad.


THE IMITATION GAME (2014) D- Morten Tyldum. At the time of Britain's darkest hour in World War II, a team of cryptographers is assembled to attempt to crack the "unbreakable" German ENIGMA code. Its unlikely leader is an eccentric Oxford don by the name of Alan Turing, a man of whom the Americans might say "does not work well with others". Can this motley collection of crossword buffs and theoretical mathematicians pull of the impossible?


The story of Alan Turing is now well known to the wider public. His contribution to the war effort, his perhaps even greater contribution to the world of computing is well known, as is his homosexuality, which cost him his freedom when it was uncovered by an over-zealous police force in the early fifties. And here, in a film which despite its high production values still feels more like a television play than a mainstream movie, we see the man in full played superbly by Benedict Cumberbatch in a role which could have been created for him (for all I know it was). I also liked Charles Dance as his C.O and Keira Knightly as his somewhat improbable love interest. Superior stuff.


THE MONUMENTS MEN (2014) D- George Clooney. At the close of World War II a crack team of art experts, under the command of George Clooney (who also wrote the script, so we certainly know who to blame for it), is put together to retrieve at least some of the vast haul of art purloined by the Nazis.


There you have it. All the elements, you would have thought (huge star in the lead, brilliant plot outline, all the money in the world to make it look good), to make an outstanding movie. Wrong. This movie sucks. There's no drama, no death or glory, no real love interest (despite the presence of Cate Blanchett in the cast) and, most importantly, no emotional engagement.
When the North Koreans hacked into Sony's emails, one emerged showing how George was truly devastated by the poor reviews for his film, believing he had really given it his best shot. Poor old George. We can only hope he has sought, and found, solace in the arms of his lovely new wife. He won't get any from reading this. Or the box office takings. It bombed


AMOUR (2012) D- Michael Hanake. An elderly couple are enjoying the autumn of their lives together in Paris when she has a stroke. She is paralysed down the right side but can still speak, but soon she is descending a slow arc towards oblivion and death. Her husband promises he will never send her to hospital or a care home, but he is over eighty and becoming disabled with arthritis. How will he manage?


This marvellous film justifiably carried all before it in 2012, winning the highly sought after Palme D'Or and securing for Emanuelle Riva the best actress BAFTA, at 85 the oldest ever winner of that award. Jean-Louis Trintignant too shines as the husband, crowning a career that goes back over fifty years, while Isabelle Huppert is terrific as the daughter who is crushed by her mothers decline. Brilliant.


THE POLAR EXPRESS (2004) (animation) D- Robert Zemekis. A child is woken by the sound of a train outside his house. Funny, he lives nowhere near the railroad tracks... He gets on regardless and is taken, along with a group of other wide-eyed kids, on an epic journey to the North Pole to meet Santa Claus.
Now what could possibly be wrong with that? You start with one of Hollywood's most successful directors adapting an enormously popular children's book. Then you book Tom Hanks to voice not one, but six characters and finish off by spending no less than 165 million dollars on it, still the most money anyone has ever laid out on an animated picture. And what do you end up with? I'm sorry Bob, but with something ultimately unsatisfying. True, some of the set-pieces, like when the train has to traverse a frozen lake and comes off its tracks, or where it is roaring through vertiginous mountain passes, are really stunning. But you never get inside any of the characters; you almost don't care if they get to the North Pole or not. I also had a problem with the animation. The style was hyper-realistic, so realistic in fact that I wondered why they didn't use real actors and just animate the other stuff, just like Zemekis did so brilliantly with Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
 I imagine if you'd hacked Zemekis's emails you'd have seen the same sort of "I just don't get it, why didn't the public go for it?" laments. In the event it did make its money back, but only just. Disappointing.


WE OWN THE NIGHT (2007) D- James Gray. "We Own the Night" is the catchy little epigram carried on the badges of night cops in New York City, but there's a gang of ne'er-do-wells out there who would seek to own the night for themselves. Police chief Robert Duvall is there to prevent that. His son  happens to be the manager of a night club where the bad guys like to congregate. So Phoenix is recruited, albeit a little reluctantly, into the service and goes undercover with a wire. But these bad guys aren't stupid...


Tough, realistic cops and robbers thriller which held my attention well, even if parts of it are a little predictable. Enjoyable.


THE BIG STEAL (1949) D- Don Siegel. An army lieutenant (Robert Mitchum) is robbed of a $300,000 payroll he is guarding and army detective William Bendix is convinced he's walked off with it himself and goes in search of him. But Mitchum is himself trying to track down the real perp, whose girlfriend is the extremely attractive Jane Greer. He finds her alone and soon strikes up a friendship, made easier as it emerges she has been left in the lurch. All this is going down in a lawless Mexico where other miscreants hear of the loot and would wish to obtain it for themselves. All is winding up to a pretty thrilling climax...


The world had already seen the on-screen chemistry between Mitchum and Greer in Out of the Past (also known as Build my Gallows High) two years earlier, and this film only cements it. Here we find what The Polar Express and The Monuments Men  lacked: belief in the characters. We love Mitchum; we'd like to be him if we could, we're certainly on his side, we want him to get the girl; why, we even like William Bendix even though he's trying to bring down our hero. This is film noir close to its best.


THE BEAST OF THE CITY (1932) D- Charles Brabin. Police captain Fitzgerald (Walter Huston) is determined to clean up the mean streets of Chicago but the gangsters are extremely well organised and will stop at nothing to maintain their power base. As usual, they have the best looking molls too, in this case a twenty-year old Jean Harlow, already fizzing with the sexuality that would make her a legend..


Famous for the extreme violence of its final, climactic scene, shocking even today, eighty years later and also for its first featuring role for the blonde bombshell herself, this shows what Hollywood could do before it got de-balled by the Hays code. Stirring stuff...