A White White Day

One of Iceland’s two top films in 2020, this is the portrait of a man in the process of grieving but with the added touch of revenge upon discovering that his recently bereaved wife was having an affair with a younger man.

Ingimundur is a policeman approaching his 60´s.  He is renovating a small cottage in the countryside for his daughter while on bereavement leave.  He spends a lot of time with his young granddaughter Salka (Ida Mekkin Hlynsdottir, very good).

  When he is strong enough to go through his wife’s belongings, he realizes that she was having an affair and starts to stalk the younger man.  Although he is having therapy, this is ineffectual and we watch as he starts to fall apart in a very controlled Scandinavian way as he deals with a physical loss and a loss of memories, realizing that his wife was not really the woman he knew.  This leads in the last part of the movie to him becoming violent and unpredictable as he tries to cope with all these attacks on his masculine self-image.

Hlynur Palmason gives us both the Icelandic slow-burner, set in the bleak and harsh weather of this Nordic isle but also a look at how men cope with being cheated on and with losing their feminine support, making it hard in a masculine context to process some of these issues.  The relationship with the granddaughter compensates in part but also shows how hard it is to replace an adult support with a young girl.  

There are some surprising scenes and some that are quite beautiful but Palmason also keeps things very mundane as well, showing that this could be any of us.  

Ingvar Sigurdsson is first rate in the lead role.  There may be some rather obvious symbolism in parts but other plot developments are not always so predictable.  Not a classic for sure but it is a very well crafted psychological portrait with aspects of a thriller.

4 stars

H is for Happiness

Australian young adult movie that has a universal message.  Set in the attractive Western Australian port city of Albany, the film revolves around a special 12 year-old girl, Candice Phee, played excellently by Daisy Axon. 

 She is an irrepressible nerd in many ways, smart beyond her years and eternally optimistic.  Trouble is life at home does not match this mood. Her little sister died in a cot death and mother (Emma Booth) has never gotten over it.

Her father (Richard Roxburgh) hides himself in the basement working on potential fantasy computer programmes estranged also from his younger brother due to a fight over the rights to a similar programme.

For Candice some solace arrives in the form of another nerdy kid Douglas Benson from Another Dimension, a boy who things he can tesseract into other dimensions.

  The two help each other in their projects, Candice’s being to unite her family once again.

This is a bright sunny movie with lots of humour. The kids have many adventures and many of their schemes don’t work but others do and, in the process, we get to see how many of the adults around them are hurt and unable to heal. 

 The child actors are spot on in their roles despite sometimes complex speeches and manage to be both their age and a little wise at the same time. Miriam Margolyes rather overdoes it as their teacher at school but in the context gets away with it.

A film that grew on me as I watched it and one that fits into the legacy of Australian wackiness really well.  Well done to first time director John Sheedy, who comes from theatre.

4 stars

63 Up (series)

The 9^th and possibly final edition of a remarkable series that started in the 60´s and follows a group of 14 children through life from 7 years old to their current age of 63. 

 Veteran director Michael Apted who died this month was the driving force behind almost all the programmes that give us a wonderful record of human life, how people grow, change and make their way through life. 

 The children were all British though two live outside the UK now and one died since the last series.  One chose not to take part this time and one returned.  It is fascinating to see how they have aged and how some have weathered the storms better than others.

  Apted and the original crew were keen to see whether class gave an advantage in life and the conclusion seems to be yes, up to a point, but that in the end, people will find their own path however unpredictable it may seem.

  Most interestingly seemed to be against Brexit, which may indicate a reality in Britain staunchly ignored by the politicians.  

The value of family is emphasized in the joy so many get from grandchildren even though many had troubled relationships with their own parents (at least two were in boys’ homes at the beginning).

Overall, it is a measured, respectful programme that has caused much discussion in the UK and exists as an excellent sociological record of British society over the last 60 years.

5 stars

The High Note

On the one hand this is an entertaining movie especially if you like music, being starstruck and the American dream. It’s all slickly enough made and zaps along smoothly. On the other hand, I struggled to believe a word of it.

Grace Davis (Tracee Lee Ross – daughter of Diana) is an 11-time Grammy winner of the ilk of Mariah Carey and Celine Dion, but perhaps a little more oriented to soul.  Her manager, played by Ice Cube, wants to put her out to pasture or rather an eternal season in Vegas. 

 Her young personal assistant Maggie thinks that Grace is good for more.

  Maggie is also trying to become a producer and spends her nights trying to rework Grace’s work and that of a young sidewalk artist she comes across, David (Kelvin Harrison Junior). 

 Magically, Maggie is more creative than all the professionals but no one recognizes it partly because she doubts herself despite having a keenie roommate who insists she’s the best.

  There is a big and unconvincing twist towards the end and the music is pleasant but Ross’s voice is not diva quality, though there is a hint of her mother in there.  Actually, it is Ross’s acting which holds most of this together and she seems to create a credible character skirting around the clichés and with plenty of presence.

Dakota Johnson (daughter of Don and Melanie Griffith) is Maggie and she has charm and magnetism in a tricky part that could have come across badly. 

 The biggest problems for me are a lazy contrived ‘seen it all before‘ screenplay and a paint by numbers direction. 

 Nisha Ganatra directed Emma Thompson in Late Night last year and it had several shortcomings too.  Ganatra is a busy TV director and her films seem to reflect the lightweight, fast nature of that medium limiting her results on the big screen.

2 stars

Uncle Frank

The Green Book meets August in a gay context.  Frank Bledsoe has escaped his South Carolina conservative family in the 1970’s and is working as a professor of literature in New York, as you do when faced with such a situation.

His niece, Beth, aspires to write and find herself, feeling like a fish out of water as well.  When she gets accepted into NY University, she discovers that Frank has another life in the city, completely secret from the family.

  He has a ten-year relationship with Wally, a Saudi Arabian man and generally lives a liberal pot-smoking life.  When Frank’s nemesis (his own gay hating father)

dies suddenly, Frank, Wally and Beth make a road trip back south to attend the funeral and to see if anything has changed back home.

This film is partly autobiographical for writer-director Alan Ball. 

 In many ways it is correctly made, well-acted and things more or less tie together. But there is something very predictable about it and the film comes across as a pastiche of other movies we have seen, even though the conflict is a relevant one even today and is handled very well.

  Sophia Lillis as Beth is quite a find and resembles a young Amy Adams.

  Paul Bettany and Peter MacDissi convince as the lead pair

and it is good to see Margo Martindale,

Lois Smith and Steve Zahn as members of the family.  Watchable, yes, but unlikely to endure in the mind.

3 stars

Monsoon

My initial reaction to this languid, finding oneself in the land of one’s birth movie was not that good.  It seemed like another film with loads of dead time and in need of an edit.  And yet, reflecting on it overnight, I am prepared to credit it for more than I first perceived. Kit (Henry Golding)

was born in Vietnam but his family fled as boat people and his parents dissuaded he and his brother to ever return.  He was brought up in Britain largely estranged from his culture.  The parents die and Kit returns largely to see where he came from and to find a suitable place to deposit the ashes.  Saigon has changed a lot and from the stunning opening drone shot of Saigon traffic,

we get to see massive urbanization, people living cheek by jowl in old housing or in impersonal tower blocks. 

 Much of this is alienating not just to us but to Kit.  

He meets a distant cousin and his family (David Tran, excellent) and some others, locals like Linh who takes him to the family’s lotus tea business, which she despises preferring to pursue studies in modern art. He walks around a lot trying to capture the mood and find a point of contact.  There are many scenes of this fairly aimless wandering as Kit tries to find himself. Apart from a couple of hook-ups, quite the most meaningful new relationship he makes is with Lewis, an American casual clothes entrepreneur, who is also finding himself here, being the son of a Vietnam vet.  Their scenes are the most intense and thoughtful of the movie. 

 Henry Golding does a fair job of Kit in a role which was not that easy to flesh out with the number of long silences. Parker Sawyers as Lewis invests more in his role and this satisfies more. 

 Most of all however we get to see Saigon and Hanoi today, buzzing commercial metropoli that have changed vastly since the past times that hang over the story.  Cambodian director Hank Khaou hints at more to come in this his second feature.

3 stars

The Racer

This is a strange little cycling film, with not that much action and lots of backstory.  It is set at the end of the 90´s when Ireland hosted three stages of the Tour de France and the doping practices were at their height pre-Lance Armstrong.  The film revolves around Dom Chabol, a veteran cyclist who is a “domestique” in his team Austrange.

  This means he sets the pace for the team leader and does everything to help the latter win.  Dom is worried about his future with no contract for the following year and with his body starting to react after all the doping, blood transfusions and simple pressure put on it.  

The team is generally a pretty hard macho mob with no sympathy or compassion shown and this is also seen in Dom’s refusal to leave the tour and go home for his father’s funeral.  He does however strike up a romance with a young Irish doctor Lynn Brennan (Tara Lee) which gives him food for thought. 

 His other big relationship is with the team masseur Sonny Mc Elhone (Iain Glen), who is one of the big facilitators of the drugs and needles.

And so it goes…handling myriad conflicts behind the scenes before going out to fight it out like hell on the bikes.  A grueling existence.  Louis Talpe is convincing and consistent in the lead role which is just as well as both the rather flat script and the unappealing characters don´t make this film readily attractive.

  It does however have a few good scenes but rarely takes flight.  The large number of Belgian and Luxembourg actors playing characters of different nationalities doesn’t seem to help either.  Just OK and interesting as a look into the cycling world at that time but there is a much more exciting and dramatic film waiting to be made here.

2 stars plus

First Cow

Kelly Reichardt is a director of independent films that tend to focus on the harder side of life. Wendy and Lucy and Certain Women are among the ones I have seen and there is always something to admire.  However, the seriousness of the movies and the slow pace can weigh against them.  This film has its slew of nominations and awards and rave critic reviews but I’m not quite so positive.

The plus side of the ledger can be started with the fact that she recreates an era (Oregon in the era of the fur trappers) with seeming authenticity and a clear nod to the difficult life of those days. Our heroes are a cook (John Magaro) and a Chinaman (Orion Lee)and as they are not great at the trapping and hunting they hit on a new business making oily cakes, a sort of doughnut with the magic ingredient of milk, stolen nightly from the cow of a local administrator (Toby Jones). 

 They sell literally like hot cakes in the marketplace of the local trading post and this allows them to start to let their dreams fly high until one night they are almost caught and are obliged to flee.  

They manage to reunite but there is a sad end to the story, highlighting the fragility and cheapness of life in those times.  

The moody darkness of the life is well captured but on the down side the film has a pretty funereal pacing that I don’t feel helps us soak into the setting as some reviewers suggest.  It is, as others would have it, like watching paint dry.  Perhaps not quite that bad but it took nearly 30 minutes of the film to sense that action which pertained to the narrative and not just the setting was actually beginning to move things along. 

 The story is slender and I definitely had the feeling that one of the two hours could have been lopped off and still given us a decent message. Would I watch it again? No. Only for academic or research purposes and I think with her reconstruction of the era and the soft musical soundtrack, she manages to compensate for the rest.  A final thought is that it does sort of represent the shadow side of US life coming out for the reckoning.  This was a harsh time, made no easier by the way the locals treated each other and, of course, the animal life around them.

3 stars 

Stage Mother

Maybelline Metcalf runs a Southern Baptist choir in small-town Texas.  Her husband is a closed conservative and her only son ran away to San Francisco years ago.

  She receives news of his death by overdose and decides to go to his funeral, which she discovers is a musical tribute given by colleagues from his drag show bar. 

 Shocked but curious Maybelline decides to stay on and learns that she has inherited the bar.  Instead of letting it go bust, she galvanizes suspicious grieving boyfriend Nathan (Adrian Grenier) into jazzing the place up and having live music not just lip sync.

  Aided by son Ricky’s best friend, the rather wayward Sienna (Lucy Liu)

Maybelline finds herself making a new family and life as she gets to know the stories of those around her.

  Her initial disappointment turns into forgiveness and love and she makes up for her years of neglect of her son by helping his friends.  

It’s a nice message but does seem awfully pat at times and the “recovery” of all those involved too seamless.  What lifts this film immensely is the presence of Jacki Weaver in the lead,

this diminutive Australian actress is much underrated and can deliver even the corniest lines with meaning and humour.

The musical numbers are good without being wow like Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and on the whole the cast acts well.  Sort of formulaic and enjoyable.

3 stars

Emma

First film of 2021 and another adaptation of the Jane Austen novel which seems to get done either on TV or the movies every 10 years or so.  

I am not a great Austen fan so a movie has to be able to keep my interest as far as the minutiae of English social life a couple of centuries ago is concerned.  Not having read the book I will not debate how faithful this is to the original but at least it moves along smoothly and agreeably for two hours.  

Emma (Anya Taylor-Joy, well-cast) is a spoilt young woman living in a mansion with her hypochondriac father (Bill Nighy brings class to his cameo) and dedicating herself to matchmaking.

  She is so conceited she thinks she can manage the lives of those around her, especially Harriet, a young innocent she has befriended. Her increasing meddling in the lives of others starts to have its effects and apart from ruining a prospective relationship for Harriet, she also gets her own situation in a mess, pinging between Frank Churchill,

a bit of a local wide boy and her best friend, Mr Knightley who is in fact head over heels for her but acts more as a companion than a potential lover.

The film starts as an observant comedy of manners picking up some of the ridiculous customs and forms of the time and slowly winds up being a sort of moral tale, above all after a key scene in which Emma humiliates the well-meaning but tiring Mrs Bates (Miranda Hart, excellent).

The décor and photography are pastel perfect reminding us of Sofia Coppola’s Versailles.

  The music is a little intrusive at times but appropriate and Eleanor Catton’s script gives us the bare bones we need.  Johnny Flynn as Knightley, Josh O’Connor as the reverend Mr Elton

and Mia Goth as Harriet all work well and I did not really feel that there was inappropriate casting as other reviewers have suggested.

  So, for entertainment value and polished production and recreation of the era it gets a decent rating.  Not a classic though.

4 stars