October 2015 book and film review

BOOKS

THE BOOK OF IMAGINARY BEINGS, by Jorge Luis Borges. Being exactly what it says in the title, this remarkable little volume is indeed a comprehensive guide to the human imagination by way of the fabulous creatures it has dreamed up over the centuries. From famous monsters, like the Basilisk, whose mere glance was fatal, through the unicorn, dragon (there are several varieties) and minotaur, to less well known horrors like the Shaggy Beast of La Ferte-Bernard, a creature that survived the Great Flood and came to dwell in the area of the river Huisne in northern France, where it lived quietly unless roused, when it breathed fire upon cattle and men alike.

Reading these pages is a bit like staring at the panels of some painting by Heironymous Bosch and produces a similarly disturbing sensation, and of course Jung would would have much to say about the collective unconscious and the theory of archetype. Or we could consider how the people of the past sought explanations for the unexplainable in their world. Whatever, we find an utterly intriguing discourse on monster myths gathered from cultures around the world, and compiled by one of the acknowledged masters of 20th century writing. Highly recommended.

MARLBOROUGH: HIS LIFE AND TIMES, by Winston Spencer Churchill (Book Two). Please forgive the wind-up, but as I still have 100 pages to go before finishing this 2000 page behemoth (check the book above for a detailed description of what that is) I shall not post my review until I have. If you are interested, I shall post my review by Friday of this week. Sorry about this.

FILMS

ALEKSANDRA (2007) D- Alexander Sokurov. Amidst the chaos of the Chechen war, a young officer's mum arrives at the front to visit him and generally experience the war zone first hand. After wandering around the army camp she visits the town where the army is encamped. The locals are suspicious of her at first, because she is a hated Russian, but slowly she gains their trust and a touch of humanity and compassion is added to the horrible mix of death and destruction that is a civil war.

Built around the indomitable character of its protagonist (played by Galina Vishnevskaya) this is a powerful, moving piece of movie making from one of Russia's best cinematographers

BIG EYES (2014) D- Tim Burton. In the late 1950s, aspiring artist Margaret (Amy Adams, and is she hot right now or what?) finds the courage to leave a loveless marriage and relocate to San Francisco with her daughter. There she develops a style of portraiture, especially of children, which emphasises their eyes (geddit?) to a massive and rather hypnotic degree. She meets Walter Keane (a pretty good Christopher Waltz) and they marry. Soon, with her reluctant compliance, he is passing her work off as his own and has the connections in the art world to take that world by storm. Not that the cognoscenti think much of the work, but the public lap it up to the point where Keane is one of the world's most bankable artists. But cracks form in their marriage, and as it falls apart she finally comes out and announces the work is not his at all, but hers. A thrilling legal battle ensues...

Normally I have a lot of time for Tim Burton's films. Beginning with Edward Scissorhands, through Beetlejuice and on to the especially fine Ed Wood, I have admired his skill and general attention to the smallest detail of the film making process. But here I had problems with the character development of the film's main protagonist. We see how  Margaret Keane can find the courage to leave her husband in 1958, at a time when that was anything but common, yet there is little explanation for why she allowed her husband to appropriate her work for so many years. I know people are befuddlingly complicated sometimes, but I'm just saying it kind of jarred with me. But as always, Tim's film looks great on screen.

UNBROKEN (2014) D- Angelina Jolie. Louie Zemperini grows up in rural California where he shows great prowess in running, to the point where he is selected for the Olympic team to compete at the Berlin Olympics. But war soon overtakes his life in athletics, and he joins up as a pilot. Then his plane is shot down over the Pacific and the crew drifts for no less than 47 days before being rescued... by the Japanese. Once ensconced in a prison camp, the commandant discovers the backstory to his latest charge, and determines to cut him down to size. What follows is an horrific account of Louie's life behind the bamboo bars, where a brutal contest of wills develops between the two men. One does everything he can to break him, the other is equally determined to remain unbroken. See?

Angelina had to do something to take her mind off having a double mastectomy, and turned to directing in this very creditable attempt which has attracted a lot of praise. It is certainly very well made and contains some memorable and harrowing scenes, perhaps cathartic in nature for La Jolie herself. Gripping stuff.

THE TIME THAT REMAINS (2009) D-  Elia Suleiman. Being the life and times of a Palestinian film maker born and raised in a Nazareth that was forcibly occupied by Israeli troops in 1948 and which has struggled to assert its Arab identity ever since. Whereas to some extent the film looks to Fellini's famous Amarcord, where an ageing director looks back over his long, illustrious life and wonders whether it was all worth it, this film has a unique, comic aspect which owes something to Jacques Tati. Like his previous minor masterpiece, Divine Intervention, a number of bizarre vignettes are presented which may or may not reflect real life, and which find themselves reprized throughout the movie in a disturbing, but also hilarious procession.

We would need to be made of stone not to appreciate his main point, which is that the Arabs who happen to live under Israeli control would prefer to be left to their own devices to lead their lives free of oppression, but Suleiman achieves this with the skill of one of the world's most accomplished directors. Brilliant.

THE DRESSER (2015) D- Richard Eyre. At the height of the Blitz, a famous actor (Anthony Hopkins) is about to go on stage to reprise one of his most celebrated roles, King Lear, but there's something wrong. Is he drunk, is he depressed or has he just reached the end of his rope? It falls to his dresser (Ian McKellen) to pull him together and get him on stage for his first cue. At times this seems an impossible task, and management are all for cancelling the performance, especially as the bombs are falling even as the curtain is rising. But after 226 performances, our dresser isn't about to let his boss fail on this, the 227th.

 Ronald Harwood's play was originally filmed in 1983, with Albert Finney and Tom Courtney in the main roles. I haven't seen that, but I must say it will have to have been pretty amazing to live with BBC 2's latest adaptation.  Hopkins is superb as the ageing thespian on his last legs, while McKellen is if anything even better as his fiercely loyal servant. Emily Watson also excels as Hopkins's long suffering wife. All in all, mark this one down if they choose to repeat it, maybe around Christmas.

MAN OF MARBLE (1977) D- Andrzej Wajda. In post-war Soviet Poland, a young man is hailed a hero of the people for his sterling efforts in the subtle art of bricklaying. He even has several statues built in his image- in marble. Twenty years on, a film maker decides to make a film of his life, but finds he has sunk into obscurity, and few people are even prepared to talk about him. Odd. But our director is a determined, feisty creature who won't leave her project alone, even if it ruffles the feathers of the communist establishment. Eventually, she tracks him down, and the whole, seedy story emerges...

Wajda has been at the forefront of Polish cinema since the early 1950s (Polanski began his career sitting at his feet) and has received wide acclaim, even in America, where they awarded him the Oscar for best foreign film for his The Promised Land in 1975. His portrayal of communist society as an animal that might live and thrive if not for he malign influence of the Soviet iron fist has struck a chord with critics and public around the world, and his skill in constructing a movie is perhaps unrivaled in central Europe, except by Polanski himself, who of course turned his back on Poland and settled in America (which as we know he had to leave in unseemly haste) If you're not familiar with his work, redress that oversight immediately...

THE BIG RED ONE (the reconstruction) (1980) D- Samuel Fuller. A crew of American grunts, all wearing a red "One" on their shoulders indicating they are part of the US Army's First Infantry Division, are led by captain Lee Marvin in the struggle against the Hun in various theatres: North Africa, D Day, Bastogne, the liberation of the concentration camps. Slowly their numbers are whittled away under the toll of battle, but they retain their cohesion, and, even less likely, their humanity amidst the inhumanity of war.

This sort of warts-and-all naturalistic portrayal of war was pretty unusual for its day, and hence carried a terrific impact at the time. This has been somewhat dimmed with the passage of time and the arrival of many ultra-realistic war films like Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and Saving Private Ryan. Even so this film retains the power to move as well as shock. Indeed, the recent television series Band of Brothers covered almost the exact same ground as this film, showing if you can't generate a good idea of your own, it doesn't hurt to borrow someone else's...

EXTINCTION: JURASSIC PREDATORS (2014) D- Adam Spinks. A motley collection of young folk journey deep into the Amazon jungle (funny, most of it looks more like the Forest of Dean, but what do I know?) to find and catalogue new species, but, as we might infer from the title, find rather more than they bargained for. You've got it. Before they know it they're being confronted by T Rex, allosaurs and velociraptors (oh yes, I know my dinos, almost as well as your average six-year-old, though I don't recommend any of them watch this). No longer at the top of the food chain, our crew quickly finds itself being viewed as excellent pre-dinner snacks.

Using lots of shaky hand-held camera work and creating a "what the hell's going on?" atmosphere, this film owes a big debt to The Blair Witch Project, which remains in the record books as the film to make the most money in relation to the cost of making it (it cost a couple of million, and to date has made nearly a billion). I guess the producers were hoping something similar might happen with this relatively low budget offering. Thing is, whereas Blair Witch was innovative, exciting and pretty scary, this is anything but. Most of the acting is execrable, the camera work annoying more than ground-breaking,  and I have already indicated how the locations do not in any way suggest it was set in the Amazon rainforest.
Dismal.