Wild Rose

Falling fairly and squarely into the category of “follow your dream” films, Wild Rose is about a young Scottish country music singer who is trying to make her career happen despite the tough beginnings she has in Glasgow, the fact that she has just spent a stint in prison for selling drugs and that she has two young children being brought up by her disapproving mother.  

After Rose-Lynn gets out of jail with an ankle tag, she starts cleaning homes and it is the owner of one of these homes, a well-off Londoner who pulls strings and gets her an interview at the BBC with their country music specialist.  You would think this would mean lift-off for a stunning new career.  

However, Rose-Lynn is her own worst enemy and is also in the middle of a major dilemma: pushing her career would mean abandoning her children again. 

Eventually, she does go to Nashville and does come back and while the ending is optimistic, it is probably not what we expected and avoiding some of the clichés of this genre is to the films credit.

Jessie Buckley gets her breakout role in this 2019 film and shows that not only is she a competent actor, but she is also a very good country singer – in fact she toured with the songs from this movie.  I found her voice got a bit monotonous at the end but that sort of goes with the territory.  Some songs, notably one she sings in the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville is excellent.  

Julie Walters plays Marian, her hard done by and realistic mother with the efficiency we know Walters is capable of and Sophie Okenedo is a welcome face as the sympathetic employer.

At the end of the day I felt it failed to lift above a competent wet Sunday afternoon movie.  

There was not enough backstory and grit to strengthen the rather clichéd dream, however valid it may have been and bits of poetic licence skimmed over rather implausible situations.

3 stars plus

The Lost Daughter

Elena Ferrante’s novel has been brought to the big screen by Maggie Gyllenhaal in her debut as a director.

The story of Leda, a middle-aged academic on holiday in Greece, we see how this apparently innocent working vacation triggers memories of her time bringing up 2 young daughters and trying to advance her career at the same time.

What brings these memories back is the brief disappearance of the daughter of a young mother, Nina (Dakota Johnson) at the beach Leda is frequenting. Leda identifies with Nina even though their circumstances are very different.

The reappearance of the girl, but the loss of her favourite doll brings Nina’s extended family in close contact with Leda.

They are a strange bunch for Leda who is your self-effacing Brit on holiday, laced however with a streak of stubbornness and indignation.  Leda is alone in all this. 

 No apparent partner and her now grown-up daughters are far away.  We see a couple of flirty approaches between Leda and the local rep for the rental apartment company,

one Lyle (Ed Harris) who is an American washed up in Greece for decades and with a young Irishman doing holiday work at the local resort.

All in all it is a layered slightly mysterious journey into the psyche of a mother who is trying to come to terms with choices she has made in her life. 

Olivia Colman shows why she is one of the most in demand actresses of the moment.  Her performance here is both subtle and complete and she has a rare ability to convey conflicting feelings at the same time.

Jessie Buckley plays her younger self effectively and Dakota Johnson again underlines that she has masses of talent to match her beauty.

I’m not sure this is a great film and my interest tended to drift a little towards the end but it does represent a very strong first feature for Gyllenhaal, who both directed and scripted it.

4 stars

Freeland

An independent movie by Mario Furloni and Kate McLean, Freeland is the story of Devi, a 60-something woman who runs her own independent cannabis growing farm in a far-off part of Northern California. 

 She has been in the business since her hippie days and likes the personal nature of the work, sourcing her own clients and using a few young people to work with her each year.  Intense but easyish work during the day and a few tokes at night, what better life?  Along comes the legalization of marijuana and suddenly things turn hard for Devi.  The local council want to shut her down or make her go legal at a huge cost and new investment is muscling into industry holding corporate fairs and generally changing the whole nature of the thing.  

Devi’s friend Ray is packing up his farm and giving it in while Devi is trying to carry on preserving her small patch but with the increased worry of how to pay the workers if clients are deserting her. Not because the quality of her product is worse – in fact it’s probably better – but because the game has changed.  

It’s a rather sad movie nostalgic for another time.  Not a lot really happens and the merits of the film are solidly placed on the shoulders of Krisha Fairchild, an actress who has found relative fame late in her career and who is simply wonderful to watch.

  As some critics have said, she is able to fill in the backstory to a not particularly detailed character and you feel you are seeing a whole living and lived life in the figure of this woman. John Craven and Lily Gladstone add good supporting work here but its Devi we came to focus on.  Nice photography and music but what makes this movie worth seeing is the lead actress.  

The rest, we have seen before.

3 stars

The Novice

Some strange things happened to me with this movie.  I actually did not like it that much but at the same time I realize that there are many quality features in the work.

Following in the footsteps of Whiplash and Black Swan, this debut feature by Lauren Hadaway takes a freshman student called Alex Dall who is studying physics and at the same time has a very strong desire to be in the varsity rowing team.  

So much so that she is obsessed with building up strength and speed and beating off all her rivals.  Within a few months her colleagues regard her as a psycho.  As in the other films, we watch this descent into hell where there are no limits, no ties to reality and normal life.  

Alex starts the term by having the obligatory night of sex with a male student but it soon becomes apparent that she prefers women and the most humane part of her behaviour is a relationship she has with a teaching assistant on one of her courses (played by model/singer Dilone).

But this relationship has no more chance of pulling her out of this tunnel vision than her colleagues and coaches.  She is determined to be the best. Self mutilation comes next and deprival of all pleasure and relaxation in the quest to achieve her goal.

There is something predictable about the outcome even if the way Hadaway tells it is not always so obvious. Given that Alex is neither a likeable nor interesting person, the viewer struggles to find something to grab onto in this movie. 

Isabelle Fuhrman does a very solid job in the lead but there are other aspects that attracted me more.  Alex Weston offers a throbbing and somewhat detached soundtrack that fits the mood and Todd Martin’s dark bleak photography is claustrophobic even when the scenes are outside.

Mostly it is Lauren Hadaway’s direction that impresses.  She is visually very strong and adds in visual metaphors (crabs), quick cutaways, montages and blurred suggestions to give us a kinesthetic sense of what the protagonist is experiencing. For that reason, I am willing to give a good rating to a movie that otherwise I wouldn’t be too worried about never seeing again, especially when rowing holds little interest.

3 stars plus

J’Accuse

I prefer to keep the French title since it is also the title of the letter that Emile Zola sent to the French government accusing them of wrongly convicting Alfred Dreyfus of treason with him being exiled in solitary confinement on an island off the coast of French Guiana.  

The newest version of this real tale comes from Roman Polanski complete with an upsurge in #metoo protests about his rape of an underage girl in the 1970s in the US. It is a bit like Woody Allen and Polanski, now 88 has been restricted from going to certain countries for fear of arrest.  He made a plea bargain for a lesser charge but the justice system later wanted to revert that and send him to prison, hence he fled the US in 1978 (44 years ago). Nonetheless, there have been many attempts to get him back to the US in that time and he was under house arrest in Switzerland for a time, apart from also making a substantial financial agreement with the woman concerned. His case seems so typical of many these days with judicial error and ‘corruption’ muddying the case along with unacceptable delays in reaching conclusions.  Maybe some cases are just born to be messy.

Polanski has continued to direct successfully and on a reasonably regular basis and The Pianist was a major Oscar winner of its year.  J’Accuse would not get the same support for the above reasons.  It’s the same thorny question.  Do we stop listening to Michael Jackson because of his sleeping with young boys?  Somehow we need to separate the talent from the person.  The French Academy rewarded this film with some Césars but there was also a lot of public and industry backlash.

 I liked the film.  It is a straightforward relatively pacy recreation of the scandal in a way that we can all understand.  There are no great technical or narrative tricks, simply a well-told story.  

Scenes are economical and last for the length needed to give us the information.

Jean Dujardin plays Picquart, a colonel who is in charge of the division which investigated the Dreyfus case and he comes across evidence suggesting that Esterhazy, another soldier was the real traitor.  The bigwigs in the military don’t want to look into the case and prefer a cover-up but Picquart insists on bringing the information to light, part of which action includes the letter written by Zola, a famous novelist of the time.

  The cast is full of French heavyweights: Louis Garrel, Mathieu Amalric, Vincent Perez and many actors of the French academy plus Emmanuelle Siegner, Polanski’s wife and muse.

Pawel Edelman photographs the film in greyish tones befitting the era and there is a haunting soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat.

Polanski has hired some of the best to make the movie and it shows together with his sure-footed direction and sound script.  A pleasure.

4 stars plus

The Gulf (Series 1)

In the same vein as The Sounds and One Lane Bridge, New Zealand continues to follow the Scandi-noir style of moody crime series set in gorgeous locations.  This one takes place on Waiheke Island, in the Hauraki Gulf just outside Auckland City.

Detective Jess Savage (Tracy Elliott), who has just been in a car crash where she lost her husband is pressed back into service to solve the crime of a boy who has reappeared after being held hostage for five years.   She is in no real condition to work with memory loss and is being heavily medicated against pain.

With a yuppie like assistant Justin Harding (Ido Drent) for support she manages to solve the crime. In this series there are three stories each of two episodes a la Bordertown.  So, all quite derivative.  

Did I like it?  Not that much.  The series looks good with excellent photography, music and a packaging aimed at attracting tourists to the area. The acting is mostly solid with a number of well-known Kiwi actors in supporting roles like Jeff Thomas, Alison Bruce and Donogh Rees.  

The back and forth travel scenes and the arrival and departure of cars to push the narrative on gets a bit much at times.

The main problems lie elsewhere. Firstly, there is no good reason why this detective should be at work blacking out and scrambling round to get extra drugs.  We really only get to the bottom of her issues at the end of episode 5 and episode 6 which is a long time.  

I also found the character pretty bereft of redeeming features, constantly moody, generally impolite and an absent mother. This is the fault of the scriptwriters who let mystery prevail over interest.  Much the same could be said for Harding who we know has a backstory but precious little has come out in this series at least. Another issue is the lack of depth to the criminals.  Only by the third story do we start to get a good idea of what might have motivated some characters’ behaviour but it is too little too late.

My overall impression is that this is a paint-by-numbers crime series, with a glossy appearance and a lack of any real soul.

2 stars

Edie

The idea is a good one.  An 85 year-old woman, recently widowed, realizes that she has “wasted” her life and decides in the heat of the moment and to avoid being put into a depressing old people’s home at her daughter’s behest to do something about it.

  She takes an unfulfilled dream she had with her father to climb Suilven, a mountain in the Western Highlands of Scotland. 

 Up she goes by train and after a few false starts she finally begins to climb.

  This is made possible with the help of Johnny, a rather lost young man who is co-owner of a camping and outdoors shop in the nearby isolated village.  

That’s about it.  The odd couple bicker and split up, then get back together.  

There are a few subplots about Johnny’s life in the village and Edie reminisces about her youth.

The scenery is wonderful with loads of drone shots, the message is great but a fairly spare script and a somewhat plodding pace makes this less inspiring than it should be.

Sheila Hancock does a great job in the lead, never overplaying the part and Kevin Guthrie supports well as Johnny.

2 stars plus

The Social Dilemma

Can’t quite decide where I stand on this documentary.  It is clearly promoted by a group that advocates humane technology and features many former employees of different social media platforms. 

 I liked the way it emphasized that the invention of these different apps or programmes were usually with the best intentions but that the business model in which they are employed has given rise to many undesirable consequences. This is all very clearly explained.

To bring it home even more clearly, we get some dramatised scenes of how it affects a family which are fair enough, though some other scenes of “algorithms” seeking to provoke reactions from users in order to keep them consuming overdo a valid point.  

Finally, there are some suggestions of how these Silicon Valley parents are limiting social media use with themselves or their families.

It’s interesting, it flows, we may get shocked by it but I came away wanting something slightly different.  

Perhaps more hints at how we can fight against these machines or programmes that know us better than we know ourselves and even more importantly how to counter the damage they can do in international or racial/cultural situations like the Rohingya in Myanmar or the Russian use of valid social media loopholes to influence the US election.

Definitely worth a watch as a clear starting place on the matter.

3 stars plus

Swan Song

A lot of money and effort has been spent to make this sci-fi movie by debut director Benjamin Cleary look so good.  Set in the near future, we see robot refreshment dispensers in a train, flash cars and contact lens with cameras.  The scenario is credible it would seem.  

A dying man called Cameron decides to join a programme in which he is cloned minus the pesky DNA strands causing his illness, His memory and thoughts are transferred to Jack AKA Cameron 2 and when the time comes and before Cameron tells his wife and family of his illness, the clone replaces him at home. 

The movie is slow-moving and rather philosophical. Is this morally the right thing to do?

Will Jack be a better Cameron than Cameron, etc, etc. It is a relevant topic for today’s world. However, despite many plus features the end product didn’t wow me completely. It all seemed a little cold and calculating.

The number one asset is Mahershala Ali in the lead role(s). He is a very convincing and compelling actor and brings tremendous solidity to a basic and somewhat undramatic character.  

Naomie Harris, also seen in Moonlight, is equally sound as his wife but with much less to do and we have Glenn Close, the laboratory/business head doctor of the deal being Glenn Close.  I also wondered what Awkwafina was doing there.  She is OK as a fellow clone/departer but added very little.  Photography is very good and Jay Wadley offers a suitably muted soundtrack.

Close’s part is not dissimilar to one Charlotte Rampling played in a death transitioning film a couple of years back and the Rampling role and performance was far more intriguing.  All told, a professional but somewhat distant film.

3 stars 2 plusses

Yo, Adolescente

Argentine film based on a story by a blogger from 2005-6 who wrote about his life as a 16 year-old negotiating school, parties and love affairs with both girls and boys.

Zabo (Renato Quattordio) is his name and the film revolves around him.  

The dark side of the movie relates to the suicide of one of Zabo’s friends Pol, gay and appearing with life lessons during the story. 

The good in this work by Lucas Santa Ana are the dialogues between friends up to the point when they get philosophical and start spouting clichés.  

Another positive feature is the editing and Quattordio and Malena Narvay as Tina act well. 

The rest is all a bit uneven.  The denouement does explain some things but arrives rather abruptly and there is an overall sensation that the film wants to transmit some messages.

It’s title in English – Memories of a Teenager perhaps fits better but all in all it is probably most suited for people who remember the era or who like slightly dark teenage dramas.

2 stars plus