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Reviews
The Father (2020)
Glossy lies about dementia
It was an innovative and well-executed idea: showing dementia from the sufferer's perspective. The growing confusion, the inability to understand who people are or why do things are beautifully portrayed in the performances, the changing sets, the colours and other aspects.
However, like many other mainstream films on this topic, dementia is not shown in any accurate way. The family live in an expensive flat, they can afford carers, Hopkins's character is always clean and well groomed and he doesn't suffer the progression of his disease beyond it's early stages.
His family, even his carers, are the main problem, though. They seem utterly unaware of what inevitably occurs to victims of dementia and make few allowances for them. One would imagine they would learn as time passes but no, they still expect him to understand everything and be the same person he always was. I suspect most people who live with dementia sufferers are much more knowledgeable and understanding.
While Hopkins et al work hard in the limited roles they are given, that is simply unsatisfactory when the script forces them into clearly unconvincing characters.
Gojira -1.0 (2023)
Big budget adolescent fantasy
If I'd discovered that writer/director Takashi Yamazaki was 14 years old and had never left his home town, I would not have been surprised. The script is everything a worldly-unwise adolescent boy could imagine with a budget for convincing FX of the monster, ships, guns and - not so effective - a plane instead of beauty to kill the beast.
This has none of the pathos or drama of King Kong; whether it matches the 1950s Japanese Godzilla films, I don't know. But the most stirring and effective acting is by Sae Nagatani who plays a girl of around two years old with astonishing poignancy. How did she burst into tears on cue?
Plotwise, this runs on rails so straight they might have been taken from the bullet train line, with the ending signposted as large as Godzilla itself - who, oddly, seems able to stand motionless in the ocean. The climax, if one can give it such a dramatic title, is enabled by a 'Japanese' WWII experimental fighter which is plainly a Dornier Do 335 minus its front propeller but with German text in the cockpit. There are tedious and annoyingly lazy holes in the plot that should not have made it past the script's first reading. In the end - and this was where I made my excuses and left - the director gives a pointless nod to Spielberg's risibly sentimental finale to War of the Worlds (2005) by showing the hero's wife returning from a peril she could not possibly have survived.
If you don't mind a script that is slathered with every disaster-film cliche and characters with the depth of puddles, you might not mind this. But for me, it was a waste of five pounds at my local Vue.
Håp (2019)
Dying, decorously, off stage
Anja is, apparently, terminally ill from a brain tumour that metastasised from lung cancer. It would be hard to tell, since she suffers so lightly and with such great artistic depth. She claims to be greatly nauseous from the treatments, yet never does she deign to vomit. Viewers who have experience of this appalling disease will find it difficult to identify with the wealthy, comfortable way of dying represented here. Anja has immediate access by telephone and in person to the best surgeons in Norway. No doubt every other cancer patient has, too.
While the acting is first rate - the uneasy relationship between Anja and her partner Tomas (22 years older, if the actors' ages are taken) is portrayed fairly successfully - the insulated lifestyle they and their family enjoy is never interrogated, just taken for granted. At the end, one would never have thought Tomas and Anja's relationship was anything other than perfect. And, naturally, it's a fade to black before Anja, head still strangely unshaven, is wheeled into the operating theatre for her life-extending procedure.
Only the wealthy can afford to suffer so elegantly.
Polite Society (2023)
Disappointingly inept in most areas
From the largely positive critical reviews, I hoped for much better, but this is maladroit to the point of tedium. Working Title Films, the production company, has a fine record in comedy and action films such as 4 Weddings to which I couldn't help comparing this while I watched it. But the clunkiest line in that rom-com ("Is it raining? I hadn't noticed") is Wildean compared to the best here. The lead character, Ria Khan (Priya Kansara) repeats the trailer's echoed line "I am the fury" on numerous occasions, none of them funny or effective. Strangely, her character - well educated in a private school - seems to think that training to enter her desired career in movie stunts requires nothing apart from learning one martial art.
The plot is paper thin but confused, the humourless script is woefully underwritten - a rewrite by someone with expertise in this genre would have helped - and the direction is monotonous. Slow motion fight scenes are almost always dull and unimaginative, and here they force the energy out of the scene like a leaky balloon being squashed.
Acting from the two leads and the supports is occasionally adequate, often glaringly wooden. Recasting Priya Kansara should have been obvious from the first day of shooting.
The reaction from the audience when I viewed this was complete silence, not a laugh, gasp or giggle. What a shame.
Lo imposible (2012)
Only rich Westerners matter, it seems
I make no comment on the quality of the acting or the cinematography which have been assessed elsewhere. This film openly expresses what must be the view of the writer Sergio G. Sánchez and the director Juan Antonio Bayona: the welfare of Westerners is of vital importance; the suffering of tens of thousands of local people is only the backdrop. That few Western reviewers - with the shining exception of Ed Gonzalez at Slant magazine - were interested in this glaring deficiency in one of the few widely-released films to present the tsunami is an indictment of the state of film reviewing in the corporate media.
Apparently, Western viewers are incapable of understanding what happened to so many desperately poor people; we need to see it only as a disaster affecting rich, American tourists as a kind of theme park attraction on the lines of Jurassic Park.
A shameful waste of talents. Sadly this is one of a long, seemingly unending line of films refusing to take the Global South seriously.
Kelly's Heroes (1970)
Dismal, amoral and not even funny
This is a film I loved as a child and through much of my adult years. On re-viewing it recently, I was aghast at what was on display here. Amorality, a refusal to take life and death seriously or even subversively. For example, an early scene shows Eastwood's character, an American officer, in charge of a German prisoner - also an officer. Despite the prisoner's repeated protestations about his rights under the Geneva Conventions ("We ain't in Geneva now", growls Eastwood), he is denied due process as a POW. Eastwood, once realising that a vast fortune might be in the offing, coerces the officer into inebriation so as to persuade him to reveal the fortune's location. Once the officer has been made use of, Eastwood takes him outside into a situation of dire peril and leaves him, capless and thus difficult to identify in the dark, to be shot by an oncoming German tank. Hilarity did not ensue.
The entire film seems based on this Tarantino-esque uninterest in treating the characters as human beings. This is not a war movie which explores the moral choices forced on soldiers of either side even for humour, it is a heist film which regards the pursuit of private wealth as justification for any number of what would, in the cold light of day, be war crimes. Still, it's a larf, ain't it?