St Vincent

A pleasant surprise this one even considering its rather unpromising components.  The film is a feel-good story about how even in the most negative people we can find something good and the clichés and plot holes are pretty huge.

Vincent is a Vietnam vet with a wife in a home and a rash of “bad” habits: alcohol, gambling and a Russian prostitute. It shouldn’t work but Bill Murray is excellent at the gruff and grumpy Vincent and manages to sidestep all the schmaltz of the story.  Jaden Lieberher is a find as his 12 year old neighbour Oliver, who he ends up obliged to babysit. His overworked mother Maggie is safe in the hands of Melissa Mc Carthy but what about Naomi Watts as Daka, the Russian prostitute Vincent uses? The weakest link in my opinion but at the same time, her performance also works in its caricature nature. So, you have a film that seems to be milking all the sympathy but in fact it also keeps us guessing and ends up making us reflect quite a bit on what makes someone a saint.

★★★★

Empire

New North American series about a music empire set up by a black hip-hop artist of the 90’s and set in the present day.  Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard) is an ailing entrepreneur who is fighting battles daily on all sides and principally wants to hand over the whole shebang to one of his sons, the one who is strong enough to take it on. So there is a sort of contest a la Greek Myths or King Lear between Andre, a slimy good-looking moral free zone of an MBA grad, Hakeem a young foul-mouthed rapper and Jamal, a sort of Usher like hip-hopper.  Apart from all sorts of skeletons in the cupboard and scandals in what has been dubbed a Dallas or Dynasty for the era, the biggest storyline revolves around a new larger than life mega character for US television, the wronged and vengeful ex-wife of Lucious, Cookie Lyon.  Pint-sized and like an exocet rocket in seeking her target, Taraji P Henson constructs a character that dominates all her scenes, a complete, complicated and very difficult woman who took the rap for one of Lucious’s shady dealings and spent 17 years inside.

It’s a compelling series, with good production and a fast pace and apart from some excellent acting from the main members of the family, we also have the chance to see Gabourey Sidibe, Naomi Campbell, Courtenay Love, Gladys Knight and others in various acting and singing parts.  So far, it has enough to keep me hooked.

★★★★+

My Old Lady

Another film that only gets some of the way.  This is a directorial debut by veteran playwright Israel Horovitz and is about the sins and messes of parents that children then have to live with.  Jim (Kevin Kline) returns to Paris with the news that he has inherited a big house in the centre of the city.  He is a bit of a wreck, three divorces and an attempted suicide behind him and no money or property to boot.  He arrives to find a life tenant in the house, Mathilde, a 92 year-old played by Maggie Smith and all the details of her story which is his too!  Mathilde had an affair with his father.  On top of all that her daughter Chloe (Kristin Scott Thomas) is also in the house and has plans of her own which directly oppose Jim’s desire to sell off the property. And so the past is revealed, plenty of alcohol is downed and some idiosyncracies of both the French and the English are revealed.  There are some good speeches but again they come off more theatrical than real.  The three leads do a great job to breathe life into this but at the end of the day, it is a slightly precious piece about privileged people.

★★★

Unbroken

Angelina Jolie’s big budget debut is based on an amazing true story of Loiue Zamperini, a teenage Olympic athlete who later goes to war against Japan in the air force.  Shot down and adrift he and a mate survive on a liferaft before he is picked up by the Japanese and put in a concentration camp.  There, he refuses to be broken which arouses the ire of the young Japanese soldier who is in charge.  Theirs is a battle which continues to another camp and shows just how cruel the Japanese torture was.  Zamperini survives to tell the story and now Jolie has translated it to the big screen.  She seems a little overwhelmed by it all and makes a self-conscious and rather leaden story that someone like Clint Eastwood would have probably found the way to lighten with the odd touch.  Here the scenes are all epic, which works for some of the air battle scenes early on but even by the raft time we are starting to tire and the camp scenes are heavy with symbolism (the scenes where inmates have to bash our hero and when he is obliged to lift a beam and hold it high as if he formed part of a cross are all a bit over the top).

There are some good scenes and Jack O’Connell and the cast do a good enough job, but it never seems to be getting near the end and the anti-Japanese stance, however justified it might be only starts to irritate.

★★+

Kumaré

A mockumentary about a NY film-maker called Vikram Gandhi who bones up to be a guru and with his granny’s accent takes parts of Phoenix and Tucson by storm teaching yoga and providing self-growth courses.  The film shows how willing to trust many Americans are projecting their idea of a guru onto whoever comes along.  The connections Kumaré makes with his disciples are often deep and when it comes time to unveil himself as a fake it proves harder than he thought.

Beautiful music and well photographed, this is nothing special as a film but does raise lots of issues about our desire to be led by “experts” and place our faith and trust in them.  It could have been a little more reflective on this point.

★★+

The Rewrite

Much better than I expected it to be, this is Marc Lawrence’s fourth movie with Hugh Grant and is about a movie screenplay writer whose career has frozen in Hollywood and takes a writer in residence job at Binghamton university NY state to make ends meet.  There he has to learn to fit into academic life, with predictable battles with Jane Austen specialist (Allison Janney), and come to terms with his new career which seems to involve alternately bluffing and bedding young students.  Prickly Karen (Bella Heathcote – good) is one of his challenges but as he navigates that love interest he ends up getting plenty of support from Holly, a mature student played by the always glowing Marisa Tomei.  Grant is looking older and more weary but still has a good line in elf-deprecating humour.  Remarkably, the film works in its low-key way without trying to be too much.

★★★

Dans la Maison

Very accomplished psychological thriller of the type that the French do so well.  Francois Ozon transforms this play into a most effective story of a high school teacher who encourages one of his students to continue his infiltration in a family which he is writing about. This becomes an obsession which Germain (excellent Fabrice Luchini) shares with his wife (Kristin Scott Thomas) and which sees the boy, Claude become a key part of the family of his classmate to the point of having fantasies about the mother (Emmanuelle Seigner). Its all about voyeurdom and manipulation and apart from being entertaining and often witty, the film says a lot about teaching, writing and the creative process. Most of all it has an energy and freshness that we don’t always see today and newcomer Ernst Umhauer is a find.

★★★★+

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby

It may have a good cast but this debut by Ned Benson is let down by funereal pacing in this film which is made up of two halves: a his’ and hers.  Basically, it is about a couple whose relationship has broken down following the loss of a child.  It is an honest enough piece but too much walking and talking starts to wear and it somehow never gels into anything captivating.  What we see are some good scenes, some excellent observations, some apparent repetitions and some moody bits of music (Son Lux – effective and more) all with plenty of grainy photography.  Jessica Chastain holds the film on her shoulders and she is good but she never really engaged me and James McAvoy as Conor was almost more sympathetic.  Isabelle Huppert as her mother doesn’t really get the space she needs to shine and William Hurt as Eleanor’s father has another one of his dour academic acts to perform.  It is left to Viola Davis to inject some spark in the scenes she appears in as Eleanor’s university tutor. It seems a little hard to damn this with faint praise as it could have been excellent but in all its transparent sorrow, something doesn’t quite work.

★★+

The Giver

Adapted from an award winning novel for young adults, this is a reasonably satisfying movie about life in a community in the future where everything has been sanitised and is controlled and where emotions and memories have been erased from all but one person. Jonas (attractive newcomer Brenton Thwaites) has been chosen to be the receiver of memories and as he starts to work with the Giver (Jeff Bridges), he realises how people’s lives have been affected by these policies and he starts to rebel against them.  Meryl Streep is her usual effective self as the community leader, Katie Holmes has an important role as Jonas’s mother and there is a good supporting cast.  As can be the case in these films, you have to suspend belief at certain concepts and lovers of the book apparently found some changes not altogether to their liking.  On balance however, good photography and Phillip Noyce’s assured direction make this a good watch.

★★★+

Midnight’s Children

The famous book of the even more notorious Salman Rushdie makes the screen at last with the writer adapting his own novel with some help from the director Deepa Mehta.

Neither the critics nor the box office have been very good to this work but I quite enjoyed it.  Nevertheless, it is no masterpiece.  It falls firmly in the magic realism tradition and so you need to allow for plenty of poetic licence as Rushdie attempts to trace the history of modern India via the lives of the 581 children born in the new republic at the stroke of midnight on its first day.  At times, this gets a little far-fetched and there are moments when large chunks of the cast get wiped out by terrorist acts or war, which probably sits better on the page than the screen. This absence means the last part of the film falls largely on the shoulders of Salim (an able Satya Bhabha) as he tries to remake his life with whoever is left.  In some ways the film should have been shot years ago as it ends in 1977 and we would really like to know how the next 35 years has gone.

The acting is generally good and the music and especially Giles Nuttgen’s photography add quality to the film.  Set pieces like the independence of Bangladesh look good.  Rushdie does the voiceovers in an attempt to keep the continuity but some odd spots of pacing in the second half make the film seem somewhat jerky. And in a most clichéd casting, Charles Dance appears as a Brit about to leave the empire, bitter and racist. All told an odd and interesting mix.

★★★