This site will share with you hundreds of book and film reviews written since 2009. Also a chance to discuss these reviews together with some of my creative writing to be added.
Lee Chandler is forced to abandon his work as a Boston caretaker to deal with a family crisis back in the small town of Manchester on the New England coast, a far cry from its English namesake. Through a series of flashbacks, we gradually piece together the tragedy which destroyed his life as a loving family man, if over-fond of calling his mates round for drinking sessions into the small hours. We begin to understand what drove him away from Manchester in the first place, and numbed his emotions, so that they can only be expressed in occasional destructive outbursts.
Perhaps a little too slow-paced in parts, this realistic and subtle film, by turns painfully moving but also amusing, explores how people react to life stings and arrows. Lee has had more than his fair share of misfortune, and suffers from the inability to communicate his feelings, but his essential decency and perseverance arouse our sympathy and ultimately respect.
If you watch this film only having heard the hype, you will be disappointed. It is best to approach it with no expectations, just curiosity as to why it has attracted so much attention. The plot is fairly thin, predictable and cheesy in places, and neither would-be trad jazz club owner Seb, nor aspiring Hollywood actress Mia can really sing, although Emma Stone seems to my untutored eye to dance quite well, and Ryan Gosling has achieved impressive mastery of the piano to play his part. You probably need to be a lover of big screen musicals really to appreciate this, although there is only one passable song and instrumental “love theme”.
La La Land is “book-ended” with two quite striking and ambitious dance sequences, there are some jazz pieces which might just enable someone like me to grasp what it is all about and the film is saved from utter vapidity by the bitter-sweet underlying message that following one’s dreams is necessary for personal fulfilment, but may be at a high price.
This subtle, film, for the most part slow-paced and low-key, with occasional flashes of violent action, proves to be a searing indictment of war.
The outbreak of war in 1992-3 has driven away the expatriate Estonian community from a remote village in Abkhazia, a Russian-supported separatist enclave in Georgia. The political geography may be unfamiliar, but it is clear that only Margus has stayed behind to harvest his valuable tangerines, together with his carpenter friend Ivo who provides the wooden crates, but perhaps has an additional unrevealed reason for his reluctance to leave.
A shoot-out on their doorstep between two Muslim Chechen mercenaries fighting for the Abkhazian separatists and a trio of Georgians leaves only two injured survivors, one from each side. This is clearly a recipe for high tension, requiring all the pacifist Ivo’s skills to manage. Yet even as a bond forms between the four men, they are at risk from marauding bands of soldiers from both camps who may turn up at any moment, pumped up with adrenalin to shoot on the slightest pretext.
This film contrives to convey a sense of the value of rural life in its calm, natural rhythm, a growing empathy with all the four main protagonists, with their differing viewpoints and personalities, an awareness of the arbitrary nature of survival and conviction as to the utter folly and waste of war as it impinges on innocent parties.
A near perfect film in its development of characters and storyline, with excellent, naturalistic acting, this is all the more striking for being unexpected and deserves to be more widely seen.
Since it is widely known that historian David Irving lost his libel suit against the Jewish American academic Deborah Lipstadt who had branded him a “Holocaust denier” in her book published by Penguin, I was at first reluctant to watch a film on a harrowing theme about which I considered myself already reasonably well informed.
In fact, I gained quite a few fresh insights from what proved to be a well-acted fact-based drama with a powerful script by David Hare, which manages to both moving and peppered with wry humour.
A feisty and outspoken woman, Deborah is perplexed to discover that, under English law, the burden of proof rests on the defendant, so her lawyers must satisfy the judge that Irving lied in his work, deliberately distorting evidence to show Hitler in an unduly favourable light and to present false evidence to “prove” the Holocaust had never occurred. Deborah’s outrage boils over when it becomes clear that, not only is she to be prevented from taking the stand, but the concentration camp survivors desperate to honour the memory of the dead by giving evidence will also be excluded. The lawyers know that a dispassionate approach, using painstaking historial research to find the flaws in Irvine’s work, will prove more effective than emotional scenes which Irvine, who is representing himself, will twist into theatre to play to the gallery.
The screenplay avoids the pitfalls of getting bogged down in a morass of detail, with a focus in the trial scenes focus on a few striking pieces of evidence to give a flavour of the complex proceedings.
I realised for the first time that the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz is hard to prove, since the Germans bulldozed them causing barrister Richard Rampton to exclaim in despair over the lack of impartial, systematic forensic analysis of the site over the half century following the Holocaust. So, for instance, mavericks have been able to concoct false analysis of the levels of Zyklon B in the brickwork.
There is a double denial in the title: not merely Irving’s deceit, but the fact that, to gain justice, holocaust victims must remain silent while the legal team ferrets out the points which will discredit Irving.
This film may be most dramatic for those who have not heard of the US passenger plane which in January 2009 was forced to make an emergency landing in the near freezing waters of the Hudson River, too close for comfort to the densely built up centre of New York. Both engines shut down on impact with a flock of Canada geese, but the skilled pilot Sullenberger (“Sully”) judged correctly that there was insufficient time to reach a nearby runway.
Clint Eastwood, who has proved a skilled director, saw the potential of the celebrated pilot’s memoirs to produce the kind of drama which will make the most nonchalant air passenger a little apprehensive on his or her next flight. Since the survival of all 155 passengers is still widely remembered, the interest lies in developing the technical and psychological aspects of the story. So we see the outwardly cool and collected Sully suffering stress-induced nightmares and visions of the plane crashing 9-11-style into a Manhattan skyscraper. Even if not prepared to admit to any doubts, he is inevitably forced to question the soundness of his actions by the initial report that one of the engines was in fact working. Has he put lives at risk needlessly?
Yet, although there is compelling drama in the scenes of terrified passengers bracing themselves as the plane hurtles towards the water, or forced out to totter on the wings, awaiting rescue, the film, despite being relatively short at 90 plus minutes, often seems essentially quite thin in content. The heavy reliance on flashbacks is fine, but the repetition of some scenes, however dramatic, Sully’s frequent banal telephone conversations with his anxious wife and shots of his younger self learning to fly or succeeding in a difficult landing often seem like efforts to pad the film out.
The tension between the media adulation of Sully’s achievement and the speed with which a censorious National Transportation Safety Board latches on to the charge of pilot error may have been exaggerated to make the story more gripping. However, when I read the details of the real events online, I was surprised that more drama was not made of the recorded details of the rescue. It bothered me that passengers were shown leaving the plane without life-jackets, unless lucky enough to catch one thrown by the cabin crew, a woman even falling into the water with a jacket hooked precariously over one arm. If the evacuation was performed as shown, it would seem that the cabin crew for whom the pilot was responsible were at fault. This is an interesting twist, but unfair if untrue.
Although the graphics used to show the emergency landing are impressive and the technical details to do with use of flight simulators to recreate the forced landing are interesting, dialogues are sometimes hard to hear, and overall the film lacks the spark it could have had. I would as soon have seen a good documentary on the incident.
⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars
Sully: Miracle On The Hudson [DVD + Digital Download] [2017]
This heart-warming story of the power of love and clear-sighted integrity in the face of prejudice and ill-judged political expediency is worth reviving at a time when many people are too young to remember the true events on which it is based.
When London office worker Ruth Williams fell in love with a black African student who shared her love of dancing to jazz music, she did not realise what problems would be posed by his role as future King of Bechuanaland, a British Protectorate on the borders of South Africa, which was in the process of developing apartheid.
The film is effective in showing the flowering of a romance based on deep-rooted love and the couple’s shifting emotions of shock, despair, anger and defiance as the two find themselves caught between racism and hostility in both white and black communities resistant to change. It conveys a strong sense of place in foggy post-war London and the semi-arid African plains. We see how Ruth gradually begins to forge relationships with the local people, who are perhaps a little too good – gentle and law-abiding – to be true.
The drama is less successful in charting a coherent course through the political shenanigans, as entertaining but stereotyped British diplomats try to cajole, bully and trick the pair into giving up a marriage thought likely to stir up local unrest, or worse still threaten UK access to South Africa’s supplies of diamonds and uranium. Since in real life the couple were exiled from Bechuanaland for several years, perhaps the filmmakers feared the narrative would lose pace unless events were concertinaed somewhat. The weakest scenes are those involving poor look-alikes for British ministers gabbling lines at each other to explain complex geo-politics to the audience, on a set which looks nothing like the House of Commons, as intended.
Such a fascinating story does not need much tinkering to hold our interest. If anything, the film underplays Seretse Kharma’s achievement in developing an independent, much more prosperous and relatively free from corruption African country, renamed Botswana, one of the tragic continent’s few success stories.
The film inspired me to familiarise myself with the details of the original true story, is a salutary reminder of the extent to which attitudes have changed over the past sixty years, and reminds one of the overall benefits of a tolerant, open-minded society – also of the important link between individual freedom and democracy of which we may be in danger of losing sight.
The setting is rural Poland in the aftermath of World War Two. Unable to bear any long the anguished cries of pain which the pure-voiced chanting cannot drown out, a young nun tramps through the snow to the French Red Cross hospital to seek help, with the insistence that the Polish Catholic authorities must not get to hear of it. When a young French nurse called Mathilde is eventually prevailed upon to drive to the convent, she discovers that not only is one nun in labour, but that several others are heavily pregnant, having been raped by boorish Soviet Russian soldiers. As an atheist from a communist-sympathising background, it is hard for Mathilde to comprehend that, far from being supportive, the Catholic Church would close the convent down, causing hardship to all the nuns, who would also be rejected by their families, if the truth ever became known. A further frustration is that the nuns believe it a sin to remove their clothing, let alone be touched, as part of the essential business of giving them medical aid. If the mothers can be saved, what is to be done with the children? At what price should one place religious belief or duty over acts of basic humanity or the expression of natural human emotion?
What could be an unbearably harrowing tale is made a memorable and thought-provoking film through the well-developed plot, focusing on a few specific, clearly drawn personalities to show different points of view as events unfold. The scenes are very convincing in their apparent authenticity, the French Director Anne Fontaine having undertaken very thorough research of the real-life situations on which the film is based. There is a striking contrast between the convent and the hospital. In the former, calm routine prevails against the odds, with Mathilde finding herself moved by the beauty of the singing, but fear, grief and violence keep breaking through the delusion that rules and rituals can carry on as normal. In the crowded hospital with its makeshift operating theatre, Mathilde and the Jewish doctor who fancies her work to the point of exhaustion, then seek release in dancing, drinking vodka and casual sex in the knowledge that, in a few weeks, they maybe posted on separate ways. Meanwhile, the orphaned street children sell cigarettes for coins and clamber over a coffin for fun. The film may suggest that the flawed, secular world is more honest and humane, but the young nun Maria’s ability to maintain both her faith and her integrity support the other side of the argument.
The direction seems flawless apart from the details of a few scenes which I found confusing since the nuns tend to look so similar in their habits. The film has been criticised for a failure to analyse issues in depth and for a rather saccharine ending. Instead, I felt that the Director takes the mature approach of sparking questions in our minds, but leaving it to us to formulate our own answers, while the ending is merely a convenient stopping point, with much yet to be resolved.
The wealthy and successful owner of an avant garde New York art gallery, Susan Morrow is taking stock of her glamorous life and finding it hollow. She is drifting apart from her husband, who resents the humiliation of her casual offer to buy some new artworks to mask his financial problems. Is he having an affair and does she regret walking out years ago on Edward, the first husband she loved, but who disappointed her by his failure to write a successful novel together with his lack of ambition.
She is in a vulnerable state when, perhaps improbably after a gap of almost twenty years, Edward sends her a proof copy of the novel he has finally produced, perhaps ominously entitled “Nocturnal Animals”, a reference to his old nickname for her habits. As she reads it, at night, of course, her thoughts continually turn to memories of her life with Edward, her belief in his creativity as a kind of substitute for her lack of it, her cynical, materialistic mother’s belief that Susan will end up like her, and Edward’s frustration that Susan seems unable simply to trust in their mutual love. In his novel, Edward has stuck to his belief that all writing is ultimately about oneself, but has taken aspects of their relationship to construct a very different world from their own, in which a family’s road trip to rural Texas leads to a shocking chain of events.
The film employs the device of “a story within a story”, requiring intense concentration to avoid confusion as it flits between the two, with Jake Gyllenhaal playing both Edward the sensitive would-be writer and Tony, his fictional hero who is powerless to protect and perhaps too feeble to avenge his wife and daughter against Texan “white trailer trash”.
This psychological thriller interweaves two tales of revenge: the “fictional”, physically very violent, the other “real life”, providing more subtle forms of emotional pain. Both threads are often humorous, the characters well-observed, and scenes visually striking, be they carefully constructed shots with fashion designer turned film director Tom Ford’s obsessive eye for detail in Susan’s gallery and her ultra-modern glass-walled mansion, or on the other hand, beneath dramatic blood-red clouds at sunset, the stark, arid scrubland of Texas, sparsely inhabited by the decaying shacks of the disaffected Trump-voting poor.
Stylish and quite original, the film holds one’s attention until the abrupt, somewhat ambiguous ending leaves a sense of anti-climax, bringing the first opportunity to take stock as to exactly what the film is about. I have read that Tom Ford wants us to be forced to think, but cannot help feeling that much of the film’s impact is visual, such as the geometric pattern of flights of stairs on which Susan continually fades from view only to reappear as she makes her ascent. I find it hard to believe that such a gentle and perceptive soul as Edward would harbour destructive feelings of revenge for nineteen years, nor that either his book, inspired by but far removed from his relationship with Susan, or his ultimate behaviour towards her in any way amount to devastating retribution. So, perhaps I missed something, but I would describe this film as entertaining, visually striking, but not very moving in Susan’s unreal “real life” although Edward’s fiction is more disturbing.
Traumatised by his experiences of World War 1, guilty to have survived, too repressed by a strict upbringing to express his emotions, Australian Tom Sherbourne escapes to the solitary role of lighthouse keeper on Janus Island. His loneliness heightened by the isolation of its bleak beauty, he decides to accept the bold suggestion of marriage made during a very brief acquaintance by the warm, impulsive Isabel Graysmith, carried away by a romanticised view of life as a lighthouse keeper’s wife. Beneath her vibrant exterior, she is very vulnerable, fragile and immature. Already suffering the loss of her two brothers in the war, the blow of two pregnancies ending in miscarriage brings her to the point of mental break-down. At this point, an unexpected event brings an opportunity for happiness, but raises an intense moral dilemma, and considerable possible long-term costs.
Michael Fassbender and Alician Vikander play powerful, intense leading roles, with a strong supporting cast. The photography of the sea and rocky shoreline in different lights and weather conditions – rarely without wind – is very striking. The screenplay retains the impression of having been created from a novel (Australian best-seller of the same title), which may have led the film to seem too long, with a few scenes which might have been better omitted. It is consistently and unashamedly a tear-jerker. There are some implausible aspects to the plot. Despite all this, it explores quite sensitively the complexity of the human problems of handling guilt, coming to terms with grief, taking responsibility for one’s actions, casting blame and demonstrates the power, both positive and negative, of love.
When joiner Daniel Blake suffers a heart attack, he becomes trapped in a surreal world in which medical staff deem him unfit for work, but his Employment and Support Allowance is withheld because he scores just three points too few in a ludicrous Work Capability Assessment questionnaire delivered by a robotic “healthcare professional” employed by the private company to which the DWP has outsourced the task of reducing benefit payments. The Catch-22 nightmare deepens as Daniel struggles to deal with the hurdles of qualifying for Job Seeker’s Allowance, his only other means of obtaining benefits, forced to demonstrate that he is spending 35 hours a week job-hunting when he is not supposed to be working for health reasons, so cannot in good conscience accept a job in the unlikely event of an offer.
The damaging effect of incoherent policies is further illustrated by the plight of the young single mother of two Katie whom Daniel befriends in righteous indignation over the way she has been sent hundreds of miles from London to Newcastle where housing is cheaper, but is denied access to the money she needs to feed and clothe her children.
Leavened with wry humour and often unbearably moving, this is a hard-hitting attack on the lack of “joined up thinking” in the provision of welfare in C21 Britain, and the way in which Jobcentre Plus staff have too often become dehumanised by jargon-ridden and misapplied procedures culled from the private sector, as if they will miraculously improve the situation. Their bureaucratic rules seem designed to drive benefits claimants to give up, despite genuine need. The social costs of these crude, short-sighted and counterproductive attempts to deal with the fundamental problem of scarce resources are made all too apparent.
In a step-chain of logic, Ken Loach shows us how sick people are made even more unwell, mothers driven to desperate measures and children damaged by “the system”. The simple dignity, humanity and support which people in need often show each other are in sharp contrast to the casual contempt of those paid to help them.
Skilful in arousing our sense of injustice, Ken Loach even manages to make shoplifting and graffiti seem justifiable, and to make me realise that sanitary towels might be a more useful donation to a food bank than biscuits.
The film may gloss over obvious ways in which Daniel Blake could have helped himself more, it may caricaturise and exaggerate the crassness of the Jobcentre Plus staff but it is a powerful indictment of “austerity Britain”, and is a sobering reminder of the fickle fate that gives some of us too much while others have too little. There is of course an irony in middle-class people paying to be reduced to tears over the plight of the poor, when they could simply have used their imagination and given the money directly, although charity is a sticking plaster response to a fundamental problem.
Antenna Reviews 