Robert Mapplethorpe emerged in the late 70’s as an avant-garde NY photographer blending nude bodies, porn, male organs, orchids and celebrities in work that was deemed too risqué for exhibition.
He passed early at 42 from AIDS and has left a foundation that has done wonders promoting his work around the world, funding research into cures for HIV/AIDS and offering financial support and scholarships to young photographers.
Mapplethorpe shared a flat with Patti Smith in his early NY days and was well-known by celebrities like Blondie, Grace Jones and many others.
So, now this biopic. This type of film is great for filling in the gaps of what you know about a famous person – I was aware of him but in other hemispheres at the time though do recognize his iconic work.
However, biopics come with some traps. One risk is that we end up trooping through the “events” of the subject’s life and perhaps lose some of the depth necessary to really grasp the person. I sense this is the problem here. The recreation of the period seems fine but what we get is a superficial tour of his life and apart from a few speeches in a few scenes, the greatness does not shine through.
Maybe Mapplethorpe was as unlikeable as he is portrayed here, and rather uncaring towards the people around him. But then we could have seen more focus on his art. He says at one point that he doesn’t know how he takes good pictures.
Innately, he did. He probably just did not know how to verbalise it.
Ondi Timoner’s film suffers from the faults of the biopics above, a fairly clichéd script, and a thread that moves beyond the chronological.
Matt Smith does what he can in the lead role but any charisma is missing and Patti Smith played by Marianne Rendon, just seems too young and naïve.
Most of the other relationships in the film are not given time to develop or need more work such as those with his mentor Sam and his much younger photographer brother Ed.
I managed to make it through this but felt I wanted to see the same material done way different and more in keeping with the daring scandalous subject himself.
At the very least this film has a certain originality in story and style. Directed and written by Italian brothers Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo, this is a sort of fable and fantasy at the same time with pretty dark leanings.
Ostensibly a true story built upon a lie, one of the directors’ techniques is to use a narrator to link different events in this dormitory suburb of Rome during some very hot summer days. There is a plot of sorts which becomes more apparent towards the end but mostly it seems like a string of vignettes involving three families.
One family, the Placidos, consists of the father who acts as the perfect violent macho but folds into a useless crying baby when faced with a situation beyond his control.
Elio Germano depicts these contradictions very effectively. His wife is cut of similar cloth and they have two very intelligent children, the elder of which, Dennis has hit puberty and looking at losing his virginity but is also very much a child.
Amelio Guerrini and his son Geremia are next. Father is a sort of raucous well-meaning but exhausting cheerleader of his son who barely ever speaks and just seems overwhelmed.
Pietro Rosa is another hot-headed father with a simpering wife and a shy daughter who is subjected to all sorts of humiliation by her parents. There are other characters like Vilma, the pregnant teenager (excellent performance by Ileana D’Ambra) who is the subject of Dennis’s stare, a very unorthodox teacher
and some other colourful souls.
As the film goes on, we experience the inconsistency and unfairness by which the children are raised, with parents who do so many things they shouldn’t and are not solid role models. This has its effect as does a society that is now obsessed by social media, online pornography, consumerism and garage sales and a constant desire to climb socially via economic status.
It is not surprising that things turn out badly in the film. The children are wiser than the parents but not that much and there is a general sense of lack of control because everyone is just sort of lost (Italy as a nation too?).
I think there is a lot to appreciate in the film not the least of which is excellent photography. The uneven plotline, certain ambiguities make it hard to follow at times, and some moments, objects or scenes are presented only to vanish forever. Not at all sure of the narrator, unfinished diary technique either. And mostly it is not a pleasant watch as we squirm with embarrassment and apprehension many times. Despite all of these doubts, there is a lot of talent on show and they are directors to watch.
Best film so far this year. A true tale of North America written and directed by Chloé Zhao who came to the US at 18. Amazing. This film is one for its time and captures the past present and future of the American dream.
Fern is a widow who spent much of her life living in Empire, a small Mid-West town. When a local mine closed down and all jobs with it, around the time of the 2008 recession, Fern’s husband died and she is obliged to move away for work. She puts her belongings in storage, gets in an rv (recreational vehicle or motor home) and heads off to Nevada to work at an Amazon depot. During this short-term job she gets to know others who have been on the road for some time, many of whom are over 60 like herself. They cannot find work where they live and cannot sustain the expenses of a fixed house and are also unable to live on any pensions they have. Hence, they move around the country from job to job and are dubbed “nomads”. Shades of the hobos during the Great Depression of the thirties. They are a resilient lot and teach each other survival techniques for the road. Many choose to be alone and they all seem to be grateful for being able to be closer to nature. And so it goes: doing laundry in drab launderettes, working in menial jobs, brewing up tea in sparse or unofficial campgrounds. Money is scarce so there is a lot of exchange and favours and despite their independence – most seem to be alone – strong friendships are formed.
Zhao takes a cast of largely non-professional actors, nomads themselves and inserts Frances McDormand into the lead role as Fern. We follow her from Nevada to Arizona, to south Dakota and the north of California, picking up seasonal work and battling to keep her van going. We see her sister and family at one point and later Dave (David Strathairn) who she met on the road but has decided to settle with his son and new grandchild.
Both Dave and her sister offer Fern stability and a home but the call of the road is too strong for her.
Superb characterization by McDormand of a determined independent decent woman who has been dealt quite a few blows in life but despite bouts of melancholy, keeps herself going. Her scenes with nomads Linda May, Bob Willis and Swankie are excellent, especially the latter who is coming to the end of her life.
Interspersed with these are many beautiful scenes of the wilderness that remind us of documentaries or films by Terence Malick. Zhao does a top job editing.
Above all of this is a gentle but firm commentary on the state of the nation today. While we don’t see the same immigration issues brought up in Lingua Franca, this film shows how the state and government in its rampant capitalism has failed many Americans who have to learn to live outside the system. Ventures like the mine collapse and no one is there to give a hand to the workers. We also see the contrast between the scenes of nature and the ugly warehouses, factories, campsites, restaurants, etc that man has constructed. Cold unwelcoming places. Finally, there is a whole question in the movie of transience, on this planet and in life. What do you take with you when you can’t take anything with you in the end? It is a lesson that Fern is busy learning.
Nomadland is a film that surprises you in the sense that it is not typical of American cinema. Sure we have seen the down and outers in Norma Rae, North Country, etc but this is something far less strident and melodramatic. Like Lingua Franca, maybe it is the turn of Asian women filmmakers to give us a different view of the US, one that is so far distant from the Trumps of this world as is possible.
This independent film touches on topics that are relevant today but seldom covered. Olivia is an undocumented carer looking after an elderly Russian woman in Brooklyn, NY.
Like so many nurses, nannies and maids from that part of the world, she is a godsend to the family, is hard-working and practical and is saving up money to remit back to her family at home. She is also trying to get a Green Card by entering into an arrangement with an American man. The current arrangement is not working. One final point is that Olivia is transgender which presumably limits her potential choices.
Into the house comes Alez (Eamonn Farren), a sort of black sheep younger son who has returned from the mid-West supposedly overcoming a drinking problem and trying to go straight. At first, he and Olivia are distant towards each other but slowly a relationship starts and despite some hitches on the way, he offers to marry her for the Green Card.
This means going against his own macho Russian immigrant background and may mean suffering the taunts of his friends.
This film is not so much about the story of navigating the various immigration obstacles even though we are constantly reminded during the film of the rounding up of immigrants during the Trump presidency. It is mostly about how human beings handle the uncertainties of life, how they learn to cope with things and people that are different to them.
Here, Olivia has been through all of that and she treats each person as she finds them. Alex, on the other hand, is a baby, sheltered by his context and finally starting to see other people and find a way top connect with them. It is another open-ended film but gives us a very nice look at the need to adapt and learn in life. Isabel Sandoval acts, directs, writes and produces here and does a very good job considering her relative inexperience. Lynn Cohen as the gran is great and she died recently at 86, working right up to the end.
The cast is made up of interesting mixes of present and former immigrants to the US, reminding us that most North Americans came from somewhere else. A sensitive and solid piece of art.
An Irish film set in Dublin and developed from a stage play. Colm is a 46 year-old married with two children and employed at the Dublin docks. The picture of domestic perfection. But life starts to shake things up. First his father dies and later he is made redundant at work. In the midst of all this, deeply repressed urges start to come to the surface and Colm finds himself paying for a rent boy.
Very nervous at the start he begins to find it easier to confide in this young man than in his own family and friends. Of course, this focus away from the family puts even more strains on his marriage and the life he has with his children. Like Krisha, in the film of that name, Colm is undergoing a breakdown and doesn’t know what to think and do, which leads to some ill-chosen decisions.
This is an artistic film with a remarkable degree of authenticity. Anyone hoping for rational decisions and a clear denouement is going to be disappointed. What it does is show how hard it can be when you wake up one day and discover you have been living a lie, that what you have been told is not necessarily true and that those closest to you are not necessarily those best placed to help you. We also get to see how Irish culture has plenty of toxic masculinity and repression, which adds a layer of complexity.
Tom Vaughan-Lawlor is Colm and is convincing in his portrayal of a man spiraling downwards fast.
Tom Glynn-Carney grows into the part as Jay, the hustler.
Monica Dolan also starts quietly as Colm’s wife and Eileen Walsh has a couple of good scenes. On balance, this is neither a big film nor a momentous one. In its own quiet way however, it depicts a critical moment in a man’s life in a way we could all relate to.
What a hard film to review! George Clooney’s latest, adapted from a novel is a movie set in space and in the dystopian future with planet Earth increasingly covered by deadly radiation and a few brave souls venturing out to K-23, a moon of Jupiter which has conditions for humans to live on.
The film rotates between two main scenarios. One is a base in the Arctic where astronomer Dr Augustine Lofthouse, dying of a terminal disease has decided to live out his days while everyone else is evacuated into space.
Played by George Clooney as a sort of God-like figure with white beard and piercing looks he discovers a young girl who has been left behind and he looks after her as well as trying to keep in touch with whatever is going on in galactic radar.
The other scenario is a sophisticated spacecraft manned by five crew returning from K-23. They have lost some of their navigational equipment and are unaware that Earth is no longer habitable. Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Demian Bichir, Kyle Chandler and Tiffany Boone play your typical astronaut types.
The main problem with this film is that there is little story or plot. Basically, the point is that at some stage Lofthouse will make contact with the crew to tell them to forget Earth and go back towards Jupiter.
This is the main conflict of the story. Will they make contact or not? There is a brief bit of suspense when they are attacked by space debris while repairing their craft but that is it.
So, much of the film drags on with the viewer wondering where we are all going and naturally picking up on all the plot holes and lack of information that we are given. And these are pretty major! There is also a twist at the end that is not entirely unexpected and is very artificial, a la Hollywood! And there is a sole creative scene involving Neil Diamond’s hit Sweet Caroline!
So, there is a sense that Clooney is going through the motions here, believing he is making a film that is exciting or meaningful when it is neither. And I felt I had seen so much of this before. Sure, there are some holograms and a few modern elements but nothing to get too excited about. Acting is fine but the characters are fairly underwritten.
This good cast does what it can. Photography by Martin Ruhe is excellent and the score by Alexander Desplat is beautiful, possibly one of the best scores of the year BUT inappropriate for the movie and too dominant. What a shame! It ends up taking a protagonism that the story needed to have and doesn´t.
The first film by Trey Edward Shults of “Waves” fame. Set at Thanksgiving in a family home in Texas it revolves around the visit of Krisha to her family for the first time in ten years. Krisha is a train wreck. In her 60´s, she is fresh out of a relationship, is addicted to medication, formerly alcoholic and totally stressed by the return home. Of course, there are more secrets in the family college to reveal.
Sister Robyn has a seemingly nice lifestyle. They have a large house, some nearly grown up children (including a pack of boisterous football loving boys) and a new grandchild. Husband Doyle is a tricky one but they have stuck together while Krisha opted out and disappeared to “heal herself”.
Put in charge of the turkey, the initial joy at the prodigal sister’s return turns to a meltdown as Krisha herself starts to say and do the wrong things and the family struggle to know how to respond to her behaviour. Supposedly she is bipolar but is at the very least unbalanced and needy.
The story is fairly slim but in 80 minutes Shults really captures a mood for us and with the odd flashback and slightly non-sequential editing we get a real feel of the havoc Krisha has wrought and also how she herself must be feeling.
Shults’ own aunt Krisha Fairchild is magnificent in the lead role and is an actress that deserves more exposure. Robyn Fairchild is also good as her sister and Bill Wise does a nice turn as the brother-in-law.
Shults himself plays a minor character.
Some of this is based on real facts but one senses that Shults has worked it into something of a virtuoso piece to show off his ability in the art. A fine debut film.
To recover from Chernobyl I turned to a 2014 mini-series on the life of iconic British star Cilla Black. Singer and later highly-paid television performer and presenter, Cilla was your typical Liverpudlian girl, friend of the Beatles and part-time singer in the clubs of the time like the Cavern Club.
Just when she thought she was fated to be a typist, Brian Epstein, the manager of the Beatles offered to manage her too and got her a recording contract which led to two enormous hit singles,
many other successes (she was best British female recording artist of the 60´s) and later a TV career that saw her become a sort of mother of the nation. The series looks at her beginnings up until the untimely death of Epstein in 1967. What we get is a look at the bleakness of post-war Liverpool tempered by the enthusiasm of the music scene there (think Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers and others) and the struggles and fortunes of those seeking a path out of this. Epstein himself was based in Liverpool but in those days of the swinging sixties, London was the Mecca. We see Cilla’s family, dad a former merchant seaman, mother who could yodel in family singalongs,
her office worker friends and Bobby Willis, in love with her from the beginning, at first her road manager and then later her husband for life.
We see the rise of the Beatles but in this film they are just local friends who drop in for a chat. The Cavern Club seems tiny and cramped, religious bigotry between Catholics and Protestants is not far from the surface and life is all a bit of a grind. Apart from a none-too-successful trip to New York, the rest of the film involves Cilla’s recordings and the life of Brian Epstein, closeted gay and pill-addicted manager who seems to not quite believe his own success either.
Sheridan Smith provides her own take on Cilla. She is a convincing character and we get to see an ambitious side that must have existed but is not much aired in discussing Cilla. Smith has a good voice but there is a slight haunted quality in Cilla’s tone that I am missing here as well as an element of charisma she had. Of course, this may have come out more later on TV which is where I remember her from.
Aneurin Barnard is excellent as Bobby and Ed Stoppard is a nuanced Epstein.
Cilla passed away from an aneurism and fall in 2015 after this series was shown and her story has now morphed into a stage show. I am glad she is being remembered because there is something emblematic about her that captured an essence of Britain not only in that time but since.
Cilla could only have existed in Britain and the British people felt she was “one of them”. Comparisons have been made to wartime singer Gracie Fields but Cilla was very much of her time, the musicalized 60’s and the subsequent television years.
Chernobyl has been one of the most successful TV series ever, created by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck. It recreates with apparently close authenticity, in most instances, the nuclear reactor disaster in the Ukraine (former Soviet Union) of April 1986 and the aftermath thereof.
It is no walk in the park. I found it dark, bleak and somewhat unrelenting as I suppose it should be, given its subject matter. The fact that this heavy darkness also manages to make good television is indeed interesting and comes down to factors beyond the screen as much as it does the quality of the product. Still, getting an audience to sit through over 5 hours of Soviet desolation is an achievement, especially when some scenes portray horrendous burns
and others the shooting of pet animals that have become contaminated. Perhaps the distance we have from the tragedy helps. Even during the disaster, the media had limited coverage of it because the Soviet Union controlled and censored the media and much of what was broadcast related more to the fears European countries had of radiation blowing across their territories. As a final product, this HBO series does not give good press to the Soviet Union at all and this exposure of the typical reaction of authoritarian regimes, as I shall suggest later, also helps to sell the show to the world public.
Before continuing on the question of why this particular disaster show has been such a phenomenon, let’s consider the quality of the series itself. Very much filmed in a British style with actors using their own accents (ie, there is no uniformity of accent) the show revolves around 3 main characters:
Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), nuclear physicist charged with resolving the situation of the burning reactor,
Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard), deputy Prime Minister responsible for making the political side of the clean-up happen and Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson), a nuclear physicist from Minsk who is a composite figure representing those scientists who contributed to discovering how a supposedly failsafe nuclear reactor could actually explode as it did. The series skillfully shows how these three characters move beyond basic distrust and a lack of cooperation from those around them to start piecing together some answers.
Harris and Skarsgard build a quiet understanding between them and Watson gives a restrained performance in portraying a dogged scientist determined to get to the truth. The three anchor the series with their work and Skarsgard, in particular, manages to elicit compassion for a tough man in a difficult position. There are countless minor characters that we get to know during the episodes from Lyudmilla, the firefighter´s wife who is pregnant at the time to the staff of the control room led by the ambitious and sloppy Dyatlov
and including young staffers who are forced to obey decisions made on insufficient information and for the wrong reasons.
As the series progresses we see the miners who negotiate a deal to build a tunnel under the complex
and end up digging in the nude because of the intense heat, the recruits brought in to spend 90 seconds each to throw graphite off the roof and into the reactor core and those sent to kill all the animals in the vicinity who have been contaminated. Despite the legion of characters, it is clear to us who is doing what and how they must be feeling.
Cinematography by Jakob Ihre, which is largely in dark and sombre tones, seems appropriate and Hildur Gudnadottir, Iceland’s successful composer, accompanies these heavy scenes with music of a suitably mechanical and industrial tone. Considering the darkness of the theme and treatment it is a credit to them that we go willingly from episode to episode even though watching more than one hour at a time proved a little beyond me.
But of course, the underlying foundation of the success of this series are the messages that it brings us, messages that hold plenty of continued relevance today. At one point in the final gripping episode largely set in the trial of the operators after the event, the question is posed: What is the cost of lies?
The series sets out to show how, despite some very seriously bad decisions taken by the staff before and during the explosion, much of this was brought about by a culture of lying. Lying to promote the idea of a nation that is invincible and an industrial and technological leader in the world, lying to give one’s superiors what they want to hear, lying to save one’s own back, lying to blame others rather than accept collective responsibility, lying promoted by the government through its secret service and spy agencies to preserve a false reputation for the Soviet Union. Lying because of a culture which cannot bear to be humiliated (a sort of psychological Achille´s heel)!
The price they end up paying are the lives of those killed or affected by the radiation, the enormous costs at covering up and rectifying all the ensuing problems. All because too many people in the chains of command did not want to hear the truth. Audiences understand this is the real story here, however much some Soviet apologists might want us to stick to the official line (there has never been any proper Soviet or Russian investigation into the real numbers of casualties from Chernobyl). In our pandemic times, we have seen the same attempts to discredit scientists in China, the same fake news in many countries spread by leaders scared of admitting mistakes or announcing bad news. We have seen it this week in the trumped-up coup d´état in Myanmar.
My take on this is that politicians need to be held to increasing scrutiny if we are not to see ongoing cases of members of the public sacrificed in disasters and accidents that could have been avoided by more honesty and accountability on the part of their representatives. People are intelligent enough to know that mistakes are made, that things go wrong. What they don’t want is denial and blame shifting that exacerbates the problem and it seems today that the world over most leaders know only that: denying the reality of a problem and trying to place the responsibility of it on others. They frequently seem to scorn the advice of specialists because such experts are of the wrong political colour or are suggesting solutions that are not in line with the political or ideological beliefs of the leader. This series is so powerful because it shows us how these messes happen and how more transparency and humility among those in charge of our countries could reduce suffering. Will the leaders learn? I wonder. But if artists continue to produce works like this series, at least the public can start to understand some of the machinations of political life that have produced so many catastrophes in the world. From understanding, we can hopefully add volume to the voices who demand that things start to change. And encourage voters to be merciless with those representatives who do not act for the greater good of society. These concepts must be installed in public life with greater force than ever if we are to survive on this planet.
As much as I will not be rushing back for a second viewing soon, the makers of Chernobyl have given us a story that shows us what went wrong and points us in the direction of what not to do in a similar situation.
A period piece with a difference. Armando Iannucci takes the Dickens classic and uses it as an inspiration for a new tale in many respects.
Most of the characters are still there and some of the broad-brush plot strokes are there but this is far from the original story of grim survival in Victorian England.
It is a sort of zany comedy in which child abuse, racism and the class structure are all very much commented on but in a different way and largely through humour. Plenty of focusing on the absurd.
At the same time there is the choice to cast actors of different races as if society is genuinely multicultural and that white mothers have black babies, etc. A very interesting attempt to take racism out of the equation.
Dev Patel plays David and is growing in stature as an actor and more than capable of giving us a sympathetic central figure. Morfydd Clark takes the dual role of his mother and his potential future wife. There are some great cameos from supporting cast members like Tilda Swinton as his aunt
, Hugh Laurie as her cousin,
Peter Capaldi as Mr Micawber, Rosalind Eleazar as Agnes and Ben Whishaw, excellent as usual with his version of the creepy Uriah Heep.
Zac Nicholson gives us bright sunny scenes (another departure from Dickens), especially those in Great Yarmouth and Christopher Willis gives us a romp music-wise.
Perhaps most polished of all is a witty screenplay adapted by Iannucci and Simon Blackwell.
This may not be a perfect movie and there are some odd questions of pacing but it shows what can be done to play around with a classic and give it a new spin. Richer than Emma.
passionfilm 