Bad Education

Primetime Emmy winner for Best Made for TV Movie, this is an enjoyable tale of embezzlement in a Long Island High School early this century.  

Frank Tassone, the superintendent of the school is a vain but successful manager.  

He and his administrative chief Pamela Glucklin use the school credit card as a personal card, siphoning money off to their own personal accounts and to the benefit of relatives.  

Nobody minds while the school is so successful and helping real estate prices in the area to balloon.

Until Rachel (Geraldine Viswanathan), a reporter on the school paper and part of the school board/office both start to suspect something.  

Frank goes into damage control, not very successfully and Pam is fired.  But the snowball is still rolling.

Based on a true story, Cory Finley constructs an entertaining film which is an allegory for corruption in other contexts.  

Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney are very convincing in the main roles.

4 stars

The Dry

Based on a best-selling novel, this Aussie murder mystery is a solid professional affair.  

Apart from exploring two cases, one in the present and one connected well over 20 years previously,

the film also illustrates the effect of climate change on this Victorian rural town and how so much has dried up over the last decade or two.

Eric Bana is the centre of this movie as police inspector Aaron Falk, who returns to the town after many years partly because his childhood best friend is the victim.  

Luke’s parents ask him to stay and check things over and he quickly becomes involved in the case and receives flak from some of the locals who still think he is involved in the previous case.

  The film is tightly written and captures the atmosphere of small-town Australia well.  

Bana is watchable, Genevieve O’Reilly provides a good past/present love interest,

BeBe Bittencourt is a young actress to watch as the young Ellie and Matt Nable and Miranda Tapsell do good supporting work in a large cast.

  This is no masterpiece and adds little to the genre but is satisfyingly filmed.

4 stars

Jockey

Rather sombre indie movie set in the horse racing world of Arizona.  

Jackson Silva (Clifton Collins Jnr) is an ageing jockey whose body is now starting to show the wear and tear of falls and broken bones.  Nonetheless he wants to keep going a couple of seasons more, especially as the trainer he works for Ruth (Molly Parker) has an exciting young filly who could be a future star.

  At the same time, a young jockey called Gabriel (Moises Arias) comes looking for him with the idea that Jackson might be his father.

Filmed with many dark lyrical scenes early morning and twilight Jockey is an ode to the unsung horsemen who often end up permanently injured thanks to the dangers involved and earn precarious wages dependent on their fitness and confidence.  

Though Collins is very good and his scenes with Parker shine, the film itself was a bit dark in all senses.  Clint Bentley has made a work he can be proud of and captures a world we know little of.

3 stars

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande

I was pleasantly surprised by this two-hander which would be a great play.  Emma Thompson plays Nancy Stokes, a 55-year-old widow who hires a sex worker to overcome her fears and lack of experience in the matter.  

As a former religious instruction teacher she is also very structured and judgmental which doesn’t make loosening up any easier.  

Leo is an Irish sex worker who is apparently preparing for university studies and has plenty of experience handling anxious clients.

Over the space of 4 meetings with all Nancy’s doubts and resistance, the two have long conversations and manage to get some hanky-panky in too.  

All very tastefully done and you have to cheer Thompson’s willingness to show herself full-frontal (she’s 63 in real life).

I found it a funny, insightful look at the way we construct our sexual life and identity and how perhaps this is changing with new generations.  Katy Brand has written a cracking script and Sophie Hyde does a good job keeping our interest when working with limited scenery.

Daryl McCormack holds his own against the commitment and openness of Thompson, who like her or not is a consummate actress.

4 stars plus

Zola

Something of an unexpected success for debut director Janicza Bravo who took a story that had been uploaded online in Twitter (148 tweets to be exact) and turned it into a film.

The story is about Zola (Taylour Paige), a pole dancer and waitress

who is befriended by wannabe Black white girl Stefani (Riley Keough), also a pole dancer.  Stefani steamrolls Zola into a trip from Detroit to Tampa, ostensibly to dance and in the company of her squeeze Derrek (the gormless Nick Braun) and X (Colman Domingo) a sort of pimp.

  The trip ends up being nothing like what Zola is promised and involves a lot of on the spot changes and quick escapes.

The story is told with considerable humour especially through the wry eyes of Zola who is no innocent but has her limits.

The film has a zeitgeist quality – even the musical references (Hannah Montana), allude to new generations who approach the world differently and yet find themselves in similar situations to those which the past experienced.  I guess each generation has to discover this for themselves. 

 At 87 minutes, it is not too long and wraps up quickly.  Some nice directorial style here, great music from Mica Levi and an especially enjoyable turn from Elvis Presley’s granddaughter Riley Keough.

4 stars

I Used to go Here

Another small indie film directed by Kris Rey and set in Carbondale, Illinois.

Kate (Gillian Jacobs, satisfactory) is a 35-year-old writer with a newly published book that is not doing well and a love life that is worse.  

She gets an invitation to visit her Alma Mater, the university in Carbondale to give a reading of her book. Her host is the smarmy creepy professor David (Jemaine Clement) who clearly has other intentions.

Kate finds it strange being back and she has frequent conversations with her sister Laura (Zoe Chao) who is expecting a baby.  

She somehow gets involved with the current students living in the student housing she was in 15 years previously and that leads to some bizarre adventures. 

 Josh Wiggins appears as one of them.

In the end Kate learns that she hasn’t grown much wiser in the 15 years since she left university.

The story is no great shakes but there is a nice vibe about the movie, some unexpected comic twists in the subplots and it doesn’t take itself too seriously.  Clement is clearly the star here – his boyishly incorrect lecturer would have #Me Too activists up in arms but then middle American small towns are a good cover for anything.

3 stars just

Giant Little Ones

Finally, a film that achieves what it sets out to do.  This is a modest Canadian effort, a coming-of-age story that manages to avoid the cliché and present an idea that one’s identity and sexuality as an adolescent is fluid and not defined permanently.

Franky (Josh Wiggins) is a typical 17-year-old in the swim team at school.  

On the night of his birthday, he and his best friend end up in bed even though both have girlfriends.  Franky is subsequently shunned by his friend Ballas (Darrell Mann) and labelled as the school faggot.

He ends up strengthening his relationship with Tash (Taylor Hickson), Ballas’s sister who has been through her own hell.

And little by little he finds ways to deal with the animosity of his friend and of others in the school.  He also manages to get the relationship with his father on another footing.  

His father has left home to live with his boyfriend. This character is played by Kyle MacLachlan, who handles a scene with a big speech very well as he should.

Maria Bello plays Franky’s mother and is also up to her usual standard.

The beauty of this piece by Keith Behrmann is that he manages to show how the characters learn and develop in the process of different events that they might not have wished for.  Enjoyable and wise in a quiet way.

3 stars plus

Elvis

Baz Luhrmann returns with a homage of sorts to Elvis.  Very much in his over-the-top glam style. It’s a long film of 2 hours 40 minutes, of which at least 40 could have been cut.  Not a good look for a musical biopic.

What didn’t I like?  I thought the pacing was a major minus in this movie.  The first half is frenetic and doesn’t allow you time to draw breath and then the second half gets more dramatic and philosophical and drags and that is without dwelling on his sad last days.

I understood the importance of emphasizing the role Colonel Tom Parker played as his manager. He was a con-man of Dutch origin who basically used Elvis to fund his own gambling addiction and did not act in the best interests of his protegé.  As had been the case with many famous musicians.  

However, I think that using him as the frame for the film, coupled with a somewhat dubious performance by Tom Hanks took away from really getting to know Elvis more.  Thirdly, I wanted more whole songs and not this collage of snippets of songs throughout.  

The collage effect goes with the overall pastiche of the movie but its strongest points were by far, the entire song performances and one or two dramatic scenes.  Finally, there were too many heavy-handed signposts like the repetitive use of the song “Suspicious Minds” to signal Parker’s negative actions.

In favour of the film is the competent performance by Austin Butler as Elvis – he creates a believable character, and the spotlight put on Elvis’s interest in black music and in his humble origins.

In the end, I felt unsatisfied by this gallop through Elvis’s life.  His story had the potential for an excellent film but this wasn’t it, affected too much by the director’s hand, wanting to be the outrageous director of spectacles as always.

2 stars plus

The Souvenir part 2

In part 1, Joanna Hogg brought us a semi-autobiographical story of Julie, a young film student in the 80’s who has an affair with a mercurial young civil servant in the Foreign Office.  He turns out to be a heroin addict and Julie ends up borrowing to support his habit.  Anthony dies tragically and this film takes up the story some time later.  

Julie decides to ditch her previous plan and instead make a film which depicts the essence of her relationship with Anthony who exerted an unreasonable power over her.  

So, it is part of her therapy and her grieving and partly a way of making sense.  As she and the other graduates help on each other’s graduation films she has a hard time explaining all the motivations behind the actions of her protagonists.  

Naturally, as she is still sorting through those emotions herself.  

To add to the personal nature of the film, the camera is very subjective. 

 It focuses on things and drops them, misses actions as though it is the subjective reality of the individual.  

To that end, I did not feel entirely satisfied at the end of the movie.  Not because this is not a brave and unconventional effort to consider the meeting point of life and art but rather because I ended up not really caring about the story and the protagonists.  

It is better than an artificial intellectual experiment but that fulfilling wholeness of a story well-told and rounded off is missing for me.

Honor Swinton Byrne is very credible in the lead and it is a pleasure to see her mother Tilda Swinton as the twin set and pearls mother. 

A difficult different film.

3 stars

The Last Bus

The pitch has potential.  Recently widowed octogenarian Tom decides to go back from his home in John O´Groats, Scotland to the other end of the country – Land´s End Penzance to complete some unfinished business and fulfil a promise to his wife.  

And he’s going to do it all by bus, free of charge because of his age.

The problem with this is that Gillies MacKinnon, Joe Ainswright and crew commit most of the clichés possible in this small film turning it into an artificial an strangely unsatisfying work.  There are many many issues with the script.  Name any perchance that may befall our hero Tom and it will happen.

Many scenes also seem very forced and would not play out the way they do in real life.  Being rescued/kidnapped by Ukrainians to end up in a birthday party just comes across as bizarre and oddly flat when it should be otherwise.  There are many other scenes, fights, thefts, drunken and arrogant people where a dramatic conflict presents itself but is not well-handled. 

Then we have the question of Timothy Spall.  I’ve seen him act a lot better than this.  Here, albeit playing an infirm 89 year-old or whatever, he seems to have only two expressions here: bewildered or pouting.  I recognize some of the uncertainties of old age but Spall gives us a caricature of the doddery old codger with a few key speeches and a lot of falling asleep on the bus and missing his stop.

The message of the film is also supposed to be about Britain today as compared to when he was young.  It’s not a pretty look on the whole but I ´m not sure how real it is.  The public seem to veer between abandoning him and smothering him, between ridicule and distant admiration.  It doesn’t quite click.  Nick Lloyd Webber (son of) composes and all too serious soundtrack.  The flashbacks to his youth and later years of his marriage which fill in the blanks are all right but are more functional than dramatic.

All told, a bit of a let down.  Sheila Hancock climbing mountains in Scotland was much more fun and dramatic.

2 stars