SPIRITED AWAY (2001) Studio Ghibli animation
A young girl goes out on a picnic with her parents, but when she wanders away finds herself in a parallel universe inhabited by dragons, witches and goblins. And that she must enlist the help of all these frightening entities in order to return to her own world.
An enthralling piece of cinema from one of the world’s most innovative animation studios. One is drawn in completely to the bizarre regions of the Japanese subconscious in a way that a European can still follow, even if they miss most of the cultural references that doubtless inhabit this movie.
Strange, but beautiful.
SENSE AND SENSIBILITY (1993) D- Ang Lee
In 19th century England, a genteel family tries its best to find the ideal partners for its nubile daughters. And as so often in the stories of Jane Austen, those people thought initially to be paragons prove themselves to be anything but, while the unsung heroes come through to show their true worth by the end.
I so admire it when someone makes a film about a country they are strangers to, like Louis Malle with Atlantic City, or Wim Wenders with Paris Texas. And here, Ang Lee, a Taiwanese national, has tapped magnificently into an English preserve, namely the artificial landscape which is Jane Austen’s 19th century world. How do they do it? I couldn’t tell you. All I do know is, with sterling performances from Emma Thompson and Kate Winslett, and brilliantly conceived by Mr Lee, this film is a must.
Thursday, 31 May 2018
May 2018 film review part one
MARGIN CALL (2011) D- J.C. Chandor
2008. A time of cheap money, a time when greedy banks were offering mortgages to everyone, regardless of whether their clients could ever repay them. In Manhattan, a bank executive works out that his bank has horribly overreached itself and that if they don’t do something, now, the whole institution is going to come crashing down.
The excellent Stanley Tucci plays the exec who discovers the problem while Jeremy Irons plays the smooth-as-silk CEO who realises he’s got to be utterly ruthless if he is going to save his bank. Meanwhile, his lieutenant, played by Kevin Spacey, is charged with conning the rest of the world into believing everything’s fine.
I want to say something about Kevin Spacey. Caught up in the maelstrom of moral outrage that came out of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, he found his own behaviour called into question and in a heartbeat, his career was over. I’m not saying Kevin Spacey is a saint. Far from it. He likes young men, perhaps rather too much, and has behaved unacceptably towards several of them. He groped, he fiddled, he importuned, and when he was drunk found it difficult to control himself. Like a lot of people I know. But he never raped anyone, has never been charged with a crime. Nonetheless, the world has lost one of the finest acting talents in a generation as a result of the Me Too movement, and I think that’s wrong. He’s apologised, but that isn’t good enough. In this brave new world of political correctness, he has been outed as a sinner, and cast into the outer darkness. What happened to forgiveness, to reconciliation, to drawing a line under the past and moving on?
ARBITRAGE (2012) D- Nicholas Jarecki.
Wiki says ‘arbitrage’ is the buying and selling of securities and other commodities, taking advantage of differing prices for the same asset in different places. And that’s exactly how Richard Gere has made himself a billionaire in this movie. It’s all going swimmingly, until, in an incident reminiscent of Chappaquiddick, a girlfriend dies in a car he was driving. Can he keep himself out of the investigation long enough to secure a really enormous deal that’s hanging in the balance, or will everything unravel?
I talk about this film directly after Margin Call because of some rather obvious parallels, which might be summarised as: people will do almost anything to make a buck. Both films tell their seedy stories of the unacceptable faces of capitalism skilfully, and both, as in Woody Allen’s masterpiece Crimes and Misdemeanors, illustrate how powerful people often get away with their unscrupulous behaviours.
GHOST DOG: WAY OF THE SAMURAI (1999) D- Jim Jarmusch
Forrest Whittaker plays a hitman who bases his life on the principles of the Samurai warrior. He murders, but ethically. Then, after he takes out a mafioso, guess what, they go after him. Big mistake... This guy is a kind of antecedent to John Wick, with his ability to take out everyone in a crowded room before they have a chance to react.
There’s something about Jim Jarmusch’s movies, and this is a case in point. It has a dreamy, contemplative feel, combined with hyper-violence at times, and even a dusting of pathos. It isn’t quite up to his magnum opus Down by Law, but it’s close. Give it a try, and try not to worry too much when the pace flags a little in the mid section of the movie.
2008. A time of cheap money, a time when greedy banks were offering mortgages to everyone, regardless of whether their clients could ever repay them. In Manhattan, a bank executive works out that his bank has horribly overreached itself and that if they don’t do something, now, the whole institution is going to come crashing down.
The excellent Stanley Tucci plays the exec who discovers the problem while Jeremy Irons plays the smooth-as-silk CEO who realises he’s got to be utterly ruthless if he is going to save his bank. Meanwhile, his lieutenant, played by Kevin Spacey, is charged with conning the rest of the world into believing everything’s fine.
I want to say something about Kevin Spacey. Caught up in the maelstrom of moral outrage that came out of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, he found his own behaviour called into question and in a heartbeat, his career was over. I’m not saying Kevin Spacey is a saint. Far from it. He likes young men, perhaps rather too much, and has behaved unacceptably towards several of them. He groped, he fiddled, he importuned, and when he was drunk found it difficult to control himself. Like a lot of people I know. But he never raped anyone, has never been charged with a crime. Nonetheless, the world has lost one of the finest acting talents in a generation as a result of the Me Too movement, and I think that’s wrong. He’s apologised, but that isn’t good enough. In this brave new world of political correctness, he has been outed as a sinner, and cast into the outer darkness. What happened to forgiveness, to reconciliation, to drawing a line under the past and moving on?
ARBITRAGE (2012) D- Nicholas Jarecki.
Wiki says ‘arbitrage’ is the buying and selling of securities and other commodities, taking advantage of differing prices for the same asset in different places. And that’s exactly how Richard Gere has made himself a billionaire in this movie. It’s all going swimmingly, until, in an incident reminiscent of Chappaquiddick, a girlfriend dies in a car he was driving. Can he keep himself out of the investigation long enough to secure a really enormous deal that’s hanging in the balance, or will everything unravel?
I talk about this film directly after Margin Call because of some rather obvious parallels, which might be summarised as: people will do almost anything to make a buck. Both films tell their seedy stories of the unacceptable faces of capitalism skilfully, and both, as in Woody Allen’s masterpiece Crimes and Misdemeanors, illustrate how powerful people often get away with their unscrupulous behaviours.
GHOST DOG: WAY OF THE SAMURAI (1999) D- Jim Jarmusch
Forrest Whittaker plays a hitman who bases his life on the principles of the Samurai warrior. He murders, but ethically. Then, after he takes out a mafioso, guess what, they go after him. Big mistake... This guy is a kind of antecedent to John Wick, with his ability to take out everyone in a crowded room before they have a chance to react.
There’s something about Jim Jarmusch’s movies, and this is a case in point. It has a dreamy, contemplative feel, combined with hyper-violence at times, and even a dusting of pathos. It isn’t quite up to his magnum opus Down by Law, but it’s close. Give it a try, and try not to worry too much when the pace flags a little in the mid section of the movie.
May 2018 book review
Welcome to this month’s book and film review, broken into several parts as is the custom imposed on me by my equipment.
Apologies for the paucity of my blogs lately. I have been, shall we say, a little preoccupied. Still recovering physically and emotionally from the threat of spending the rest of my life in prison for crimes I did not commit, and then completing a book on that very subject, I have found little time left over for broadcasting my views to the nation. I still have them, I assure you, and you will hear more, if you are interested. But today, please find May’s book review below. Enjoy.
WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE, by Marcel Proust
A young man in fin de siecle Paris falls hopelessly in love with a neighbour, and they have fun for a while, then she tires of him, or is the other way round? Even he isn’t sure. Then his beloved grandmother takes him to spend the summer on the Normandy coast, where he tries to forget his paramour by falling for another young lovely. Does it work? Read on...
A la Recherche continues with this marvellous dissection of the agonies of adolescence, told in Proust’s languid style, its prose shining like a duchess’s tiara. No one has ever written so sublimely on what it is like to be human, and I suspect no one ever will. But if you decide to delve, don’t expect a quick read. You must take your time with Proust. You don’t rush Pell-Mel through a beautiful garden, you wander at your leisure, taking your time to study the flowers, their perfume and the setting as a whole. And feel uplifted by the whole experience. That’s Proust. Go on, treat yourself.
A NECESSARY EVIL, by Amir Mhukerjee
India, 1920. The British Raj is thriving, but there are already murmurs of discontent from the locals. Then the crown prince of a small but wealthy state is murdered before the eyes of a local English detective. Who gains from such an atrocity? That’s our detective’s starting point for an investigation that takes him into the heart of Indian power-politics.
There appears to be an infinite appetite for murder mysteries among the reading public. From Sherlock Holmes through Nordic noir; historical detectives and American gumshoes, the list is long. And now we have Mr. Mhukerjee, with his modern ‘tales from the Raj’. He writes engagingly and uses an interesting added theme: following a war wound, our hero has become an opium addict...
THE INNOCENT MAN, by John Grisham
In 1980s Oklahoma, a young girl is raped and murdered. The police ‘like’ Ron Williamson, a young man who lives nearby: he’s a bit of a weirdo, been charged with rape before (though found not guilty in court) and drinks too much. It’s got to be him, right? It all fits, the police think, and the DA agrees. He is arrested, charged, convicted on the thinnest of evidence and sentenced to death. After 11 years on death row, he is given an appointment to have the needle placed in his arm just 3 weeks away. Almost at the last moment, Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project gets to hear about the case and manages to obtain a stay. But can he stop the authorities giving Ron a new date with the executioner?
John Grisham is best known for his fictional courtroom dramas, several of which have been made into highly successful movies. Here he makes his first foray into nonfiction, and produced a book every bit as gripping as any of his novels. His account of a case even more horrific than my own, Grisham has here written one of the most riveting, and disturbing books I have read in years.
THE EMIGRANTS, by W.G. Sebald
Comprising four tales of emigrants in the 20th century, all from Germany to various locations around the world. Why did they leave their homeland, and how did they manage in their adopted country? Read on...
In a recent blog I described Vladimir Nabokov as the writer of some of the most beautiful prose in the history of literature. In Marcel Proust we have another supreme exponent. And here, with ‘Max’ Sebald, we complete our triumvirate. What a wonderful treat for the mind it is to read Herr Sebald! Whether he is talking about a man who made his life as butler to an American playboy, or an artist who has washed up on the grimy streets of Manchester, one finds ones self totally immersed in their worlds, the breath almost taken away by his insight and charm. A.S. Byatt described this book as “strange, beautiful and terribly moving”. Wish I could write reviews like that.
Unmissable.
Apologies for the paucity of my blogs lately. I have been, shall we say, a little preoccupied. Still recovering physically and emotionally from the threat of spending the rest of my life in prison for crimes I did not commit, and then completing a book on that very subject, I have found little time left over for broadcasting my views to the nation. I still have them, I assure you, and you will hear more, if you are interested. But today, please find May’s book review below. Enjoy.
WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE, by Marcel Proust
A young man in fin de siecle Paris falls hopelessly in love with a neighbour, and they have fun for a while, then she tires of him, or is the other way round? Even he isn’t sure. Then his beloved grandmother takes him to spend the summer on the Normandy coast, where he tries to forget his paramour by falling for another young lovely. Does it work? Read on...
A la Recherche continues with this marvellous dissection of the agonies of adolescence, told in Proust’s languid style, its prose shining like a duchess’s tiara. No one has ever written so sublimely on what it is like to be human, and I suspect no one ever will. But if you decide to delve, don’t expect a quick read. You must take your time with Proust. You don’t rush Pell-Mel through a beautiful garden, you wander at your leisure, taking your time to study the flowers, their perfume and the setting as a whole. And feel uplifted by the whole experience. That’s Proust. Go on, treat yourself.
A NECESSARY EVIL, by Amir Mhukerjee
India, 1920. The British Raj is thriving, but there are already murmurs of discontent from the locals. Then the crown prince of a small but wealthy state is murdered before the eyes of a local English detective. Who gains from such an atrocity? That’s our detective’s starting point for an investigation that takes him into the heart of Indian power-politics.
There appears to be an infinite appetite for murder mysteries among the reading public. From Sherlock Holmes through Nordic noir; historical detectives and American gumshoes, the list is long. And now we have Mr. Mhukerjee, with his modern ‘tales from the Raj’. He writes engagingly and uses an interesting added theme: following a war wound, our hero has become an opium addict...
THE INNOCENT MAN, by John Grisham
In 1980s Oklahoma, a young girl is raped and murdered. The police ‘like’ Ron Williamson, a young man who lives nearby: he’s a bit of a weirdo, been charged with rape before (though found not guilty in court) and drinks too much. It’s got to be him, right? It all fits, the police think, and the DA agrees. He is arrested, charged, convicted on the thinnest of evidence and sentenced to death. After 11 years on death row, he is given an appointment to have the needle placed in his arm just 3 weeks away. Almost at the last moment, Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project gets to hear about the case and manages to obtain a stay. But can he stop the authorities giving Ron a new date with the executioner?
John Grisham is best known for his fictional courtroom dramas, several of which have been made into highly successful movies. Here he makes his first foray into nonfiction, and produced a book every bit as gripping as any of his novels. His account of a case even more horrific than my own, Grisham has here written one of the most riveting, and disturbing books I have read in years.
THE EMIGRANTS, by W.G. Sebald
Comprising four tales of emigrants in the 20th century, all from Germany to various locations around the world. Why did they leave their homeland, and how did they manage in their adopted country? Read on...
In a recent blog I described Vladimir Nabokov as the writer of some of the most beautiful prose in the history of literature. In Marcel Proust we have another supreme exponent. And here, with ‘Max’ Sebald, we complete our triumvirate. What a wonderful treat for the mind it is to read Herr Sebald! Whether he is talking about a man who made his life as butler to an American playboy, or an artist who has washed up on the grimy streets of Manchester, one finds ones self totally immersed in their worlds, the breath almost taken away by his insight and charm. A.S. Byatt described this book as “strange, beautiful and terribly moving”. Wish I could write reviews like that.
Unmissable.
Wednesday, 2 May 2018
April 2018 movie review
SEA FURY (1958) D- Cy Endfield
A crusty old tugboat captain (Victor McLagen) plying his trade on the coast of northern Spain is seen as the ideal husband for a Spaniard’s lovely young daughter (a very young Lucianna Paluzzi, who you may remember as the red-headed assassin in SPECTRE’s employ in the film Thunderball). Unfortunately she has eyes only for the first mate, a young and virile Stanley Baker. They keep their affair under wraps, but in a small town no secret remains secret for long. And when McLagen finds out he is being usurped, he is not best pleased, as we might imagine.
Cy Endfield achieved cinematic immortality when he directed Zulu, and in this earlier offering demonstrated his potential. This film, so British in its conception, is thoroughly engaging and really quite moving in its straightforward analysis of age versus youth.
This is one of the first films I watched on the relatively new “Talking Pictures” channel, to be found at no. 328 on Sky, and available on most other platforms too. It specialises in films from the 30s, 40s and 50s, many of which have expired copyrights and are therefore free to screen. See below for more.
THE STRANGER (1946) D- Orson Welles
A Nazi war criminal hides in plain sight in a small American town. He even manages to snag beautiful Loretta Young on the way, but Edward G Robinson is the Nazi hunter on his trail and determined to bring him to book.
Orson Welles is a one-off. Impossible to categorise, he secured his immortality with Citizen Kane, and spent the rest of his career trying to emulate that success. He never managed it, but got pretty close at times. Chimes at Midnight, A Touch of Evil, and perhaps this film, with its gothic feel and oppressive atmosphere are perhaps his best efforts. Gripping stuff.
THE SQUARE RING (1953) D- Basil Dearden
At a seedy pro boxing stadium a number of hopefuls and has-beens prepare to do battle for limited purses but with the dream of the big money that might one day come their way. Jack Warner plays the coach, worrying about his charges but doing the best he can to help them along.
What emerges is a fascinating series of vignettes of low-life aspiration to the big time which always stays just out of reach. Quality Brit cinema.
THE ROCKING HORSE WINNER (1949) D- Anthony Pelissier
A young lad is bought a rocking horse by his doting parents who can only just afford it. His mum is a would-be socialite spendthrift; his dad is a lousy card-player who loses every night. The boy is befriended by the handyman, who confesses his love of the gee-gees, and teaches him how to “ride” his rocking horse. He becomes obsessed by the horse, and then finds that if he rocks hard enough he enters a kind of trance in which the names of winners of real races are revealed to him. He passes the names onto the handyman, who begins to make a packet, for our young man’s predictions are never wrong...
Based on a short story by D.H. Lawrence, this strange little piece is really a very good film indeed. All the players are excellent, and the director does an extremely good job with his material. Highly recommended.
A crusty old tugboat captain (Victor McLagen) plying his trade on the coast of northern Spain is seen as the ideal husband for a Spaniard’s lovely young daughter (a very young Lucianna Paluzzi, who you may remember as the red-headed assassin in SPECTRE’s employ in the film Thunderball). Unfortunately she has eyes only for the first mate, a young and virile Stanley Baker. They keep their affair under wraps, but in a small town no secret remains secret for long. And when McLagen finds out he is being usurped, he is not best pleased, as we might imagine.
Cy Endfield achieved cinematic immortality when he directed Zulu, and in this earlier offering demonstrated his potential. This film, so British in its conception, is thoroughly engaging and really quite moving in its straightforward analysis of age versus youth.
This is one of the first films I watched on the relatively new “Talking Pictures” channel, to be found at no. 328 on Sky, and available on most other platforms too. It specialises in films from the 30s, 40s and 50s, many of which have expired copyrights and are therefore free to screen. See below for more.
THE STRANGER (1946) D- Orson Welles
A Nazi war criminal hides in plain sight in a small American town. He even manages to snag beautiful Loretta Young on the way, but Edward G Robinson is the Nazi hunter on his trail and determined to bring him to book.
Orson Welles is a one-off. Impossible to categorise, he secured his immortality with Citizen Kane, and spent the rest of his career trying to emulate that success. He never managed it, but got pretty close at times. Chimes at Midnight, A Touch of Evil, and perhaps this film, with its gothic feel and oppressive atmosphere are perhaps his best efforts. Gripping stuff.
THE SQUARE RING (1953) D- Basil Dearden
At a seedy pro boxing stadium a number of hopefuls and has-beens prepare to do battle for limited purses but with the dream of the big money that might one day come their way. Jack Warner plays the coach, worrying about his charges but doing the best he can to help them along.
What emerges is a fascinating series of vignettes of low-life aspiration to the big time which always stays just out of reach. Quality Brit cinema.
THE ROCKING HORSE WINNER (1949) D- Anthony Pelissier
A young lad is bought a rocking horse by his doting parents who can only just afford it. His mum is a would-be socialite spendthrift; his dad is a lousy card-player who loses every night. The boy is befriended by the handyman, who confesses his love of the gee-gees, and teaches him how to “ride” his rocking horse. He becomes obsessed by the horse, and then finds that if he rocks hard enough he enters a kind of trance in which the names of winners of real races are revealed to him. He passes the names onto the handyman, who begins to make a packet, for our young man’s predictions are never wrong...
Based on a short story by D.H. Lawrence, this strange little piece is really a very good film indeed. All the players are excellent, and the director does an extremely good job with his material. Highly recommended.
April 2018 book review
AGUA VIVA, by Clarice Lispector
A young Brazilian woman sits in her apartment contemplating the eternal verities: time, memory, love, and whatever else springs to her extremely adroit mind.
What emerges in this mercifully short book (it runs to only 90 pages) is an extraordinary stream of consciousness writing which is unique in my limited experience. I say mercifully because it is scarcely light reading. I could only manage 20 pages at a time, less than half of my usual intake, such is the density of her prose. With application, however, what emerges is a strange, surrealistic journey through the mind of one of Brazil’s most acclaimed writers. Dying much too young (she was barely 47) she could have gone on to far greater things. Go for it if you enjoy a challenge.
SWANN’S WAY, by Marcel Proust
A boy is growing up in a small rural town in northern France. There are two walks the family likes to take on a Sunday afternoon. One is the Guermantes way, a longish ramble that necessitates checking the weather first, lest they be caught in the rain. On that route they may be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the Duke of Guermantes’s family, local landowners and serious nobility.
The shorter route is the way by Swann’s, not a noble but a very well connected and wealthy man. There our hero might espy Swann’s beautiful young daughter Gilberte, with whom he is hopelessly in love, though she is barely aware of his existence. On either route, he can divert himself with such delights as the hawthorn blossom when in season, or an array of other bucolic delights to be found in the French countryside. Later in the book, Swann, the man in full, is described, with particular reference to his love for a Parisian coquette named Odette
Swann’s Way is the first in the six volume series of Proust’s masterwork A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (“In Seach of Lost Time”) which is described by some as the greatest novel ever written. As each book is over 500 pages long, it will not be a quick read, but oh my goodness, what a delight awaits!
I first read this book in 2005 and 2006 and determined immediately it deserved a re-read at some later stage. I have waited long enough to treat myself, and the time has arrived!
A young Brazilian woman sits in her apartment contemplating the eternal verities: time, memory, love, and whatever else springs to her extremely adroit mind.
What emerges in this mercifully short book (it runs to only 90 pages) is an extraordinary stream of consciousness writing which is unique in my limited experience. I say mercifully because it is scarcely light reading. I could only manage 20 pages at a time, less than half of my usual intake, such is the density of her prose. With application, however, what emerges is a strange, surrealistic journey through the mind of one of Brazil’s most acclaimed writers. Dying much too young (she was barely 47) she could have gone on to far greater things. Go for it if you enjoy a challenge.
SWANN’S WAY, by Marcel Proust
A boy is growing up in a small rural town in northern France. There are two walks the family likes to take on a Sunday afternoon. One is the Guermantes way, a longish ramble that necessitates checking the weather first, lest they be caught in the rain. On that route they may be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the Duke of Guermantes’s family, local landowners and serious nobility.
The shorter route is the way by Swann’s, not a noble but a very well connected and wealthy man. There our hero might espy Swann’s beautiful young daughter Gilberte, with whom he is hopelessly in love, though she is barely aware of his existence. On either route, he can divert himself with such delights as the hawthorn blossom when in season, or an array of other bucolic delights to be found in the French countryside. Later in the book, Swann, the man in full, is described, with particular reference to his love for a Parisian coquette named Odette
Swann’s Way is the first in the six volume series of Proust’s masterwork A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (“In Seach of Lost Time”) which is described by some as the greatest novel ever written. As each book is over 500 pages long, it will not be a quick read, but oh my goodness, what a delight awaits!
I first read this book in 2005 and 2006 and determined immediately it deserved a re-read at some later stage. I have waited long enough to treat myself, and the time has arrived!
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