April 2014 book and film review

BOOKS

PARADISE LOST, by John Milton. In a world where Joss Whedon and the Avengers production team decide to make a $200 million movie called "Paradise Lost", only the love of God can save the Human Race now. Let's face it,  all the ingredients for a blockbuster are here: a host of action sequences requiring the most cutting edge graphic effects, like where Lucifer (played by Robert Downey Jr) and his band of fallen angels take on Jesus (Bradley Cooper) and his league of superheros (sorry, angels) in a Titanic struggle to re-take Heaven and evict God ( Morgan Freeman, naturally) from his lovely home. All this before God decides to create Adam and Eve (Jesse Eisenberg and Jennifer Laurence), and way before Satan, disguised as the Serpent (amazing blue-screen special effects here) tempts Eve with the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

What's not to like? This feature is going to go down a storm everywhere: fundamentalists of all the Big Three religions buy into this story. Re-titled "The Devil: Winter Soldier" or some such, by the time it hits the screen it will bear little if any resemblance to Milton's original classic, but, we will all say: who cares? it's a movie Goddammit...

THE ABOMINABLE MAN, by Maj Sjowell and Per Waloo. An old man is lying in the cancer ward of a Stockholm hospital, within days of his death. But that isn't good enough for someone, who breaks into the ward and slits the old man's throat and disembowels him before making his escape.
But as Martin Beck and his team struggle to find a single meaningful clue to the perp, what they learn about the victim opens their eyes wide. Seems he was a senior police officer himself, and one who regularly beat confessions from suspects and planted evidence on innocent men and women. Suddenly the list of possible suspects with a grievance grows to epic proportions...

Number seven in the famous ten-book series from two of Sweden's most insightful crime writers, and I think they are getting better and better. And not just in the thrilling and sometimes horrific depictions of violence, but also their political analysis, with their rejection of Sweden's great social experiment of the 1960s, which cast aside the noble traditions of the past without replacing it with anything more inspiring than faceless apartment blocks and clover-leaf road junctions. An experiment which drew together the nation's police forces into a single homogeneous mass with the emphasis on para-militarism and red tape. But amidst this faceless bureaucracy are the people: Beck himself, the anarchic Gunnvald Larsson, Melander with his amazing photographic memory (better than any computer) and the other plods who work long and hard, sometimes putting their lives in danger, all to ensure their pensions.
A very fine read.

BEIRUT NIGHTMARES, by Ghadda Samman. In 1975, a young woman finds herself literally caught in the crossfire of Lebanon's vicious civil war. Trapped in her apartment by a sadistic sniper in the hotel opposite who kills anything that moves in his gun sights, she slowly begins to run out of food. And water. Understandably perhaps, her sleeping hours are inhabited by a series of nightmares, each one stranger and more terrible than the last. Eventually nightmares and "daymares" become fused into a long, horrific narrative of destruction and murder.

Apparently written from manuscripts she created during her real-life incarceration in Beirut's city centre during the war, this book is a remarkable and entirely authentic portrayal of the horrors of urban warfare as it affects the non-combatants,. Not easy reading, but unforgettable.

FILMS

OPEN BETHLEHEM 2013, (Docu), D- Leila Sansour. Sansour  left Palestine aged 17 to live in Paris, but returned in 2004 to document the building of the segregation wall around her village by an implacable  Israeli occupying force. As she was filming she came up with the idea of creating a "Palestinian Passport" and offering them to the great and good in the Rich World. This novel idea caught the imagination of a public starved of genuine information about the injustices being perpetrated in the occupied territories, due to the careful news management of Zionists around the world.

So here we have a fascinating piece of film making, but one which at the same time seems somehow dated. The action is at least ten years old (apparently there were a lot of production problems) and you feel this is kind of old news. Nonetheless the finished product is very polished and worth watching.

HEART OF GLASS (1976) D- Werner Herzog. An 18th century Bavarian village is famous for its glass making, and especially its trademark ruby-red colouring. Then the old glass Meister dies and the secret of the ruby-red glass is lost with him. Now the village panics; everyone from the lowliest glass blower to the local count embarks on a desperate search to re-discover the secret before everyone goes broke. And insane. Then they seek out a hermit/seer who lives nearby; unfortunately his counsel offers little encouragement. Looks like they're screwed...

Famous for Herzog's technique of hypnotising the cast members just before they went on camera, this film does indeed carry a strange, hypnotic atmosphere throughout. It can't have been an easy thing to do; certainly Herzog never used the same technique in any other film, but it stands as a fascinating relic of  Germany's most celebrated film maker.

EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS (2014) D- Ridley Scott. In a world where Egyptian Gods and Kings (specifically Joel Edgerton) exercise cruel dominion over their Israelite slaves, one man (Christian Bale) is born to turn things around for his God-forsaken people.

OK then. Here we have what is essentially a remake of Cecil B deMille's The Ten Commandments. His 1950s version (already a remake of his silent movie made in the 20s) established a vogue for historical and Biblical epics which hit the heights in the 60s and continues to some extent to this day. DeMille's second attempt featured everyone's favourite epic actor in the shape of Chuck Heston, who went on to secure his rep in Ben Hur, but this latest offering from Ridley Scott can only offer up Christian Bale, a good actor I'm sure, but no match for Chuck, a man whose very looks and physique exemplified the word epic. And as for Joel Edgerton in the Yul Brynner role, well it just don't  cut it in my book. And it suffers too from the same fault of so many Biblical epics both then and now: a poor script stymied by over-reverence to its subject matter. Pity, because I love Scott's work. He has made some of the most acclaimed movies of my life ( Alien, Bladerunner) but I fear he has lost his way badly this time.

THE SECRET OF THE INCAS (1954) D- Jerry Hopper. Adventurer Harry Steele (Charlton Heston) is in Peru in the search for a legendary artefact: a solid gold, jewel-encrusted starburst believed lost hundreds of years ago. Tall and rangy, toting a large black revolver and donning a brown leather jacket and fedora hat (does that remind you of anyone?) Harry acquires an Eastern European lovely (Nicole Maurey) along the way to assist him in his search. But there are others equally keen to get their hands on the treasure, even it means clutching it out of his cold, dead hands...

Notable both for its providing a model for the Indiana Jones movies as well as being one of the first Hollywood movies to be filmed (almost) entirely on location in another country, this film charges along much like a Spielberg thriller and looks great on the screen. It also features Yma Sumac, the celebrated Peruvian singer showing off her extraordinary five octave range in several songs.
Terrific fun.

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIES (2013) W/D- The Coen Brothers. In the New York of the 1960s a young folk singer (Oscar Isaac) struggles to make his mark on the music scene while attempting to bring his personal life into some sense of order. As we watch one week in his chaotic life, we see him achieve these ideals with varying degrees of success.

Allegedly loosely based on the life of singer Dave Van Ronk (who he? -Ed) I also detected parallels with a rather more notable figure, i.e. Bob Dylan, strains of whose song Positively Fourth Street can be heard issuing from a bar towards the end of the movie.

I have a lot of time for the Coen brothers, who have worked together on some of the key films to come out America since the 80s (Fargo and The Big Lebowski would be two of the best examples) but here I failed to be convinced. The characters fail to grab the attention of the viewer and it was not as well written as some of their other work. I was also puzzled by the award of an And to the performance of Justin Timberlake who plays another aspiring folk singer. Wiki informs me that this accolade is given to major stars who have a significant, if not a leading role in a movie. But Timberlake appears on screen for barely five minutes and he can scarcely be regarded as a major film star, regardless of his success with NSync.

THE PAST (2013) D- Asghar Farhadi The Buddhists tell us we should be living in the present, but that isn't always easy in practice, as the players in this film discover. An Iranian man travels to Paris to finalise his divorce settlement with his ex, only to find she has shacked up with another middle-eastern man. Then he learns that the new bloke is married, but to a wife who now lies in a hospital bed in a deep coma. Even if he can put this out of his mind, there are still the problems of his old relationship to negotiate- and here there is clearly a lot of unfinished business.

This film was widely praised on its release, nominated for best foreign language film, though I imagine its Iranian connection scuppered any chance of it winning. Maybe they would have been luckier if the film had come out now, when the US is once again cosying up to Iran under the threat of IS. I certainly enjoyed this movie, even though it becomes rather melodramatic in its closing phases.

GEORDIE (1956) W/D- Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat. Somewhere in the wilds of western Scotland, a weedy youth sends off for a booklet with instructions on how to transform from a six stone weakling into a super-hunk. He learns to throw the hammer, and soon he's turning heads at the Highland Games. There he is spotted by a talent scout who suggests he may have a shot at the Olympic title, But does he really want to leave the mountains and glens of his beloved Scotland and the bonnie lass who is his sweetheart?

Hard-bitten observers of today might find this movie naive, though I think a better word would be innocent, or even elegiac. Bill Travers wanders through the film in a kind of dozy, half-asleep glaze, oblivious to all but his girl and the desire to better himself physically. The result is an extraordinary effort, much loved at the time though its reputation has been somewhat trashed in subsequent eras. In my opinion, however, the original praise it attracted was entirely appropriate.

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2 (2014) D- Dean DeBlois. It's five years on from when Hiccup trained his first dragon and showed his people how to live in harmony with the fire-breathing monsters. But on an expedition to the outlands he finds another chieftain who is training dragons- to destroy...

I really liked How to Train Your Dragon, with its plot of a young man who befriends and helps an injured Night Fury (the most terrifying of all dragons, apparently) and teaches his people to work with, rather than spend all their time trying to kill, all dragons. But this one was... too much. Now there are literally thousands of the buggers, darkening the skies as they mass for attack. Now I don't know a lot about dragons (apart from what I've learned in Game of Thrones) but I do know that there definitely weren't many of them about. And there you have it- an overblown dragon film, My verdict: see the first one, don't trouble yourself with this.

DUMB AND DUMBER TO (2014) W/D- Bobby and Peter Farrelly. When Harry Dunne (Jeff Daniels) rescues his friend Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey) from a mental institution he informs him that he needs a kidney transplant. Then they remember an old flame with whom Harry may (or may not) have had a baby. Maybe she will be a) a compatible and b) a willing, donor. OK, sounds like a plan, though such a plan would present a challenge even to people of normal intelligence, never mind two folk with the combined IQ of a brain damaged gnat. Hilarity ensues, as we might imagine.

I remember quite enjoying the original D and D all of twenty years ago, watching it with my son who was only seven but still got most of it. And this too sort of tickled the old funny bone (although I did watch it on a plane, which can have a strange effect on one's perspicacity). The film didn't go down well critically, though it made money at the box office. Not too bad.

X MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST (2014) D- Bryan Singer. In the world of today, mutants are threatened by super-robots that have been imbued with "X Men"-like attributes. So an idea is hatched to send Logan, aka Wolverine, aka Hugh Jackman back 50 years into the past to ensure the damn things are never invented. In order to achieve this they use the special powers of one particular mutant who can hurl people's consciousnesses back into the past. Clear so far? Good. OK, we're back in 1973 and we've got Wolverine trying to persuade a youthful brat who only later will become Dr Charles Xavier to help with the grand plan, along with the young Magneto, aka Eric Lehnsherr, aka Ian McKellen.

I have loved the X Men movies and have watched them over and over. I loved their look, their pace, their special effects and perhaps most of all their high standard of acting, courtesy of such giants as Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. All these elements seemed to be in place for this latest offering, and certainly the public has taken it to its heart in a big way. However I found this one just too complicated and the pace a little too manic. Maybe it's me, or maybe the whole franchise has reached its sell-by date. Don't be too sure though. I've heard at least two more X Men movies are in the pipeline...