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The Secret Garden (2020)
Adults get it all wrong
Apparently the critical consensus is that this adaptation is faithful in sprit to the original. It really isn't. There's no gardening or gardener, no dramatic tension, and worst of all it turns Mary Lennox, after one skirmish with Martha, from a girl who can't even dress herself into a know-it-all action heroine with PhD level psychobabble skills. The secret garden is more like Narnia than a Yorkshire garden as it seems to have completely different climate, vegetation and weather from the rest of the estate it supposedly lies within. Key characters and incidents from the novel are completely tossed away and instead we get a ludicrous Freudian drama.
None of this is the fault of the child actors involved, who look good, and are reasonably lively and engaging, as is the dog, though the same can't be said of Colin Firth or Julie Walters, who were clearly content to take the money and run.
What really ruins this film are its production values, or rather its production value, which seems to be "The more this looks like a shampoo commercial the better'. There's far too much CGI, some of it laughably bad, the music is overblown, the dialogue is stilted and unnatural, and the sets and locations are preposterous.
The action is updated to 1947, which could have been an interesting idea, but nothing is done with this, and instead we get a climax seemingly pinched from Great Expectations with Colin Firth in the role of Miss Havisham.
Don't waste your time on this nonsense, and watch the.1949 version with Margaret O'Brien or the 1975 BBC series instead, or better still, read the book.
The Harvey Girls (1946)
Almost perfect. Gorgeous, Funny and Delightful
This film came as complete and wonderful surprise to me, as somehow or other I've never come across it or even heard of it before watching it on DVD recently.
Right from the off it's American self-mythologising at its best, with a light-hearted tongue in cheek humour that suggests British rumours that Americans have no sense of irony are not just exaggerated but downright lies. If you're wondering how the West was won, watch "The Harvey Girls" and you'll learn it was won by waitresses with spotless aprons and fanatical devotion to duty and attention to detail. I hope that's not a spoiler as its more or less the premise of the film from the opening scene, and if that's not enough to captivate you then just wait until you see Judy Garland eat a sandwich!
This film is a joy to watch, not just for Judy Garland, for its lavish and colourful costumes, or its precision controlled big song and dance numbers, but for its witty script, and its excellent supporting cast, which includes Ray Bolger as a blacksmith with a fear of horses, Cyd Charisse as a wannabee dancer, and Virginia O'Brien as a self-deprecating and supposedly unattractive best friend and room mate to Judy. It's not often I find myself wishing a film were longer, particularly a musical as lavish as this, but I was left wanting more, especially of Ray Bolger and Virginia O'Brien.
So, I'd have given this film 10/10 for its glorious use of Technicolor, its unusual scenario, its perfect execution, and wonderful acting., but was sorry we didn't get to see a happy ending for Judy Garland's friends as well as Judy herself. I was especially puzzled by the unaccountable disappearance of Virginia O' Brien, after a wonderful scene with Ray Bolger, so good and so quirky it may live longer in my memory longer even than the deservedly Oscar winning number "On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe". It turns out that Virginia O'Brien was pregnant at the time of the shoot and some of her scenes had to be cut. Apparently some footage from some of these scenes is included on some DVDs of this film, so I'll certainly look out for them.
I should also give a mention to Angela Lansbury, who is also excellent, and glamorous enough to fully merit her role as prime female rival.
I realise I've hardly mentioned this film's leading men. That's not because there isn't anything nice I could say about them, but because they're not what makes this film special for me. That's not to criticise their performances.
I can only sum up by saying this: Watch this film, you won't regret it!
Chicago (2002)
Unbearable
"Out of Africa" has long been number one on my top ten most over-rated pictures. I remember very little about it, except that it was far too long and very dull, but it did have lots of nice scenery. "Chicago", which I'm grateful to have avoided for twenty years, has just knocked it off that top spot. It's less than two hours long, but seems interminable, and isn't dull but something much worse, relentlessly wearing. And there's very little in the way of scenery apart from far too much human flesh trussed up in unpleasantly revealing costumes. I got so sick of it all that I went into the kitchen to escape it, and so mostly only heard rather than watched the last forty minutes or so.
My intense dislike of this film is perhaps best explained by one of the few numbers I came close to enjoying, "Cell Block Tango", which is built up from noises such as a dripping tap, drumming fingers, or someone pacing. It's cleverly done, as is almost everything in this film, but just as an irregularly dripping tap can be briefly fascinating before quickly becoming mental torture, so the music in this film is initially attention grabbing, but so monotonous that it quickly becomes very wearing.
If the music had been more varied in pace, orchestration, and mood, I might have been able to watch to the end, but this would still have been a dreadful film. None of the characters are admirable or likeable, though perhaps Amos comes close, if not quite to likeability at least to arousing a modicum of sympathy. The characters are also one dimensional, and the script is so cynical that it seems almost devoid of genuine feeling.
I quickly tired of the revealing costumes, and of the endless cutting between "real life" and "stage", which made it very difficult either to engage with the story or get caught up in the spectacle as happens with the classic musicals of the 30s,40s and 50s.
As I really can't find anything good to say about this film I shall stop there.
Love in the Afternoon (1957)
Fascination palled quickly
"Funny Face" is a wonderful 1955 romantic comedy set in Paris where Audrey Hepburn is in love with a much older man. And Some Like it Hot is a wonderful 1959 romantic comedy with the same screenwriters and director as this film. In this film it's a cello case rather than.a double bass case that's a starring prop, and the musical humour is provided by an all male gypsy quartet instead of an all-female jazz band, but there are plenty of surface similarities with both films I've mentioned.
The major difference for me from both those films is that this one just isn't funny most of the time, and there's next to no chemistry between Hepburn and Gary Cooper, who is not only too old for Hepburn's instant attraction to him to be believable, but seemingly too jaded, and all too believably not very good at talking, and woefully lacking in the kind of charm that Fred Astaire has in spades in Funny Face. Wilder usually has a light touch and snappy pacing, but in this film, running gags are repeated too long and too often, scenes drag, and the dialogue rarely sparkles. Worst of all, there's something spiritless about Audrey Hepburn in this; though she seems to be having more fun in her scenes with Maurice Chevalier. I'm afraid I was also left cold by John McGiver's turn as the wronged husband whose jealousy leads to the initial meeting between the two stars and whose meddling to the later crucial meeting between Chevalier and Cooper.
I'm afraid most of my favourite moments in the film were made by incidental characters, particularly the dog whose repeated attempts to alert its mistress to possible peril only result in disgrace, though I also enjoyed the scene where the gypsy musicians join Cooper in a drunken binge, particularly the moment where they rouse themselves from alcoholic stupor and start playing again.
The film picks up after this, and had the rest of it been similarly paced I'd certainly be scoring it higher, and the final scene is by far the best between the two stars, though it's two big scenes between Chevalier and Cooper that do most to breathe some life into the story.
As in many other of Wilder's films there is plenty of barely concealed cynicism about conventional morality, and Wilder's first choice for the part Cooper plays, Cary Grant, would almost certainly have made this a much better film, but it's easy to see why he turned the part down; Frank Flannagan is a much seedier character than Philip Shayne, the similar amoral playboy snared at last role he takes in "That Touch of Mink", and much less interesting one than Hepburn's multi-alias love interest in "Charade", the wonderful romcom come suspense film that did see him involved in capers with Audrey in a Parisian Hotel a few years later.
This is possibly the weakest Billy Wilder film I've seen, though the Berlin-set "One, Two, Three" runs it close as a misfiring comedy that makes poor use of its leading man.
I'm baffled at the high scores many reviewers are giving this film, which I can only assume are given out of devotion to one or other of the big names associated with it. It flopped in the US on its first release, and in my view deservedly so.
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994)
Nice wallpaper, terrible film
This is the second terrible and overrated film set in New York that I've watched this week (the other being "Time out of Mind"). The films are bad for several of the same reasons:
1 Hard to follow and essentially pointless dialogue
2 Lack of coherent storytelling
3 Self-indulgent direction
At 2/10 I'm rating this 1 better than Time our of Mind, though to be honest that might just be the better film, or at least the less confusing one as there are fewer characters on screen at a time. What I did like about this film were some of the costumes and the interior decor and the fixtures and fittings, especially in the colour scenes.
I often hear that US viewers struggle to understand Scottish or English regional accents, but I really think US directors need to pay more attention to the comprehensibility of their films for non US viewers. I'm sick and tired of films where actors mutter or drawl to such an extent that I'm tempted to turn on subtitles. Despite her often exaggeratedly precise diction in this film (April rendered as "Ape" -"rill" and usually silent tees pronounced in words such as "whistle" Jennifer Jason Leigh was frequently incomprehensible. This was usually due to her drawling or lurching speech tempo, but also sometimes caused by the general cacophony of actors talking over one another. I find cacophonous environments such as noisy bars where too many people are talking at once quite distressing, and this film had the same effect on me, so that most of the Algonquin round table scenes, which should have been a highlight. Were an ordeal to watch. If I ever decide to put myself through it again I shall brush up my almost non-existent Spanish first, as I'll probably have more chance with the Spanish subtitles (the only ones provided on the region 2 DVD) than with the dialogue itself.
Although I liked the look of the colour scenes it has to be said that the black and white scenes were generally much more entertaining, mainly because they were much easier to follow. The final scenes, set in 1958, were really quite convincing, and for a moment I thought I was watching genuine footage of the time. They were also funny and a little poignant.
But those last few minutes are nowhere near enough to redeem a film which manages to turn some of America's most brilliant 1920s and 1930s celebrities into little more than pretentious and insufferable bores.
Time Out of Mind (2014)
I blame the director
This film has a very good cast, and there's not much wrong with any of the performances, but it's exceptionally hard to follow. Presumably the director is trying to give the viewer an experience of what being homeless and mentally confused is like. In that he has possibly succeeded, but at the cost of telling any kind of coherent story or engaging the viewer's interest or sympathy in any of the characters. The director even deliberately distances us further from the action by filming through doors and windows or from across the street.
I'm astounded that this film has so many good reviews. It joins Woody Allen's "Manhattan" in my personal pantheon of vastly over-rated film about New York.
Possibly younger and more American viewers will find this easier to follow than I did, but much of the dialogue is lost in the background noise, but then again, much of the dialogue *is* little more than background noise, so it probably doesn't matter much.
The protagonist of this film has spent a number of years being unable to make sense of the world around him and being bothered by background noise. By the end of this film you'll find it hard to believe you've only been going through the same experience for two hours.
You'd probably get something not dissimilar to this film if you watched two hours of footage accidentally recorded on people's phones as they wander around New York. Chances are that might be more interesting than this manages to be.
I don't know if the director is also trying to get viewers to care about the plight of homeless people in New York. In that he has failed, at least with me. Watching this is a bit like being forced to listen to a homeless person who is incoherent and whom you just can't understand and wouldn't know how to help even if you had the time - you just want to get away and are relieved when you finally do.
The film is perhaps thematically similar in some ways to "I Daniel Blake". But whereas that film left me saddened and angry by the injustices of the UK social security system, this one mostly just left me thinking that some people are really hard to help.
Jefferson in Paris (1995)
Revolutions in collision?
I'm very surprised at the low rating of this film, which I found fascinating if only for the view we get of French high society just before and at the start of the French Revolution. I loved the glimpses we got of French Opera, the Montgolfier brothers' balloon, Franz Mesmer's experiments, the Royal Court, and a Convent school. All of these are recreated in lavish detail. A considerable amount of the dialogue, especially during the first half of the film, is in French. I can only assume that for many viewers all this detracts from the central drama of the rivalry between three women for Thomas Jefferson's (Nick Nolte's) affections: his troubled and possessive daughter Patsy (Gwyneth Paltrow) whose love for the church threatens to supplant her affection for her father; Maria Cosway (Greta Scacchi), an Anglo-Italian artist and musician whose marriage to painter husband Richard (Simon Callow) is one of convenience and not of passion; and Sally Hemings (Thandie Newton), a young slave who is a much loved nursemaid to Jefferson's younger daughter Polly but also half-sister to his late wife and very much on the cusp of womanhood. Added to this is another family drama, the tension between Sally and her brother James, who has been brought to Paris to learn the secrets of French Cuisine, but who also comes under the influence of revolutionary ideas and yearns for his freedom.
These intimate dramas are all very civilised and restrained, somewhat in contrast to the increasing lawlessness around the protagonists as the revolution gathers pace, but as a stiff upper lipped Brit I enjoyed all the suppressed emotion and coded conversations, and didn't find the film overlong despite its considerable length. But what we see also poses questions about who the liberty and equality promised by the American revolution and the coming French one is for.
With so many ingredients, this is certainly more of a sprawling royal banquet of a film than a perfectly arranged nouvelle cuisine dish, but in an age where "The Crown"'s recreation of the British Royal family's doings has been such a success I think it perhaps should be better received now than when it was first released.
Perhaps not quite such an elegant delight as some of their other films, but still a very worthy opus in the Merchant Ivory catalogue, and I think very much underrated by both critics and audience.
The Time Travelers (1964)
Even better than I remember
It must be close to 50 years since I saw this film on television, I think in black and white, and I've wanted to see it again for ages as the film had lived long in my memory as one of the most disturbing time travel films I had ever seen. I think it has only recently become available on DVD in the UK, and I was excited finally to be able to order it. I've seen a few very poor quality clips on Youtube, so I was a bit nervous about what the picture quality would be like. I was also worried the film wouldn't live up to my memories of it as after all I'd seen it at a very impressionable age.
I needn't have worried about the picture quality, as it was excellent, although I did need to turn down the colour saturation to avoid the characters having a Donald Trump complexion.
But what about the film?
I loved it. OK, it's a B movie, but the plot is really pretty good, and even if the script is a bit cheesy, it's full of great lines with a fair bit of humour thrown in. The cast doesn't include any big names, but the actors do a workmanlike job, though the roles aren't too demanding as most of the characters are the ones you've seen in other old sci-fi movies. What makes the film special for me are a few of the scenes of life in the underground complex: the android workshop scene is great, and somehow a bit reminiscent of the factory scene in Metropolis, and there are a couple of great little sexy scenes involving Reena (Dolores Wells) who gets a crush on Danny (Steve Franken) the electrician who in a way is a cause of all the trouble. When Reena plays seductively on the Lumigraph I found myself wishing I could be transported to 2071 to join her! I think I was a bit too young to pick up on the sexiness back when I first saw it.
It's really all very inventive and shows just how much can be achieved without much of a budget or modern CGI especially if you can repurpose a few standard bits of stage magic. I also really enjoyed the music, which accompanies almost every scene and varies a lot in style and tone, though it did get a little bit repetitive in the long Android workshop scene. Another thing I appreciate is the fairly long takes and unhurried pace of most of the film. I find most modern sci-fi films with their constant jump cuts and overly special-effects laden action very wearing in comparison.
And then of course there's the ending, which cleverly manages to be optimistic, pessimistic and downright creepy all at once, and which will surely stay with anyone who watches the film. Funnily enough it's a bit similar in a way to the ending of my all time favourite British horror film "Dead of Night".
I think this film stands up very well, and deserves a much higher rating than it has on IMDB. I don't care that it's low budget or that the special effects aren't up to modern standards. Somehow or other it's all very satisfying, and I am very glad I've finally got to own a copy of it. This would also be a perfect film to use in a mash-up video or as a projection at an underground disco.
The best value £4.99 I'll spend all year!
The Deep Blue Sea (2011)
Too grim to please
This is well acted and a strong production in many ways, but it's a very unhappy tale told in an often confusing way, with rather too much use of flashback. The first ten minutes or so of the film were very much marred for me by the overly intrusive use of a miserable and very screechy violin concerto by Samuel Barber. I'm unsurprised that the critics liked this film so much more than the audience (80% versus 52% on Rotten Tomatoes): there is some fine acting with several of the characters being seen in a very different light at different times, and a lot of attention to period detail. I found some of the scenes between Simon Russel Beale and Rachel Weisz quite touching and Tom Hiddleston has a great final scene where he regains our sympathy after behaving very badly for most of the film. But it's just too unhappy a story to make satisfying or entertaining viewing and it has a claustrophobic feel that perhaps betrays its origin as a stage play. Worth watching if you are a fan of any of the main actors, but definitely not the right choice if you are in need of something to raise your spirits.
Return to Yesterday (1940)
A delightful early Ealing film
Included as the first film in Volume 11 of the Ealing Studios Rarities Collection I came to this film with low expectations, which were very rapidly surpassed. From the very first scene, in which a young playwright whose first play is to be staged at a seaside theatre is taken down several pegs by the man posting the bill advertising it, the script is as beautifully polished as the accents of the leading characters, and the supporting cast is a delight. There's an enormous sense of fun about the film, though Clive Brook as the jaded British Hollywood star trying to rediscover the secret of his youthful happiness occasionally dampens the mood. Now eighty years old there is also oodles of period charm in various railway and seaside scenes.
If anything lets the film down it's the romantic element of the plot, which is not terribly believable, though I suppose one could make the same criticism of several Shakespeare plays, and whether it's plausible or not without it there would have been no way to set up some of the most entertaining scenes.
Face the Music (1993)
Baffled by the hatred for this film
OK, the story is fairly predictable, and the music is hardly great, though I've heard much worse singers than Molly Ringwald in my time. But I enjoyed this film, which is full of quirky characters and situations. The movie producer's nephew Donny steals quite a few scenes, and there's a very odd workman whose scenes give the impression that possibly some subplot involving him has been cut. That's not to say the two leads do a bad job, and I enjoyed watching both Molly Ringwald as Lisa (lyrics) and Patrick Dempsey as Charlie (composer). Lysette Anthony does her best with her role as the new woman in Charlie's life though the script perhaps could have been a bit more subtle where she's concerned.
I can imagine this film as a thirties screwball comedy, or perhaps as a stage farce, and it might have been funnier and better directed in either case, but I still find it oddly enjoyable.
This isn't a film that takes itself too seriously, and if you come to it willing to be entertained rather than looking to rip it to shreds you probably won't be as disappointed as the 1/10 reviews suggest.
Interlude in Prague (2017)
Well acted, beautifully sung, fanciful drama based on composition of Mozart's Don Giovanni
I'm not usually a fan of films which place real historical figures into imaginary situations, but I'll make an exception for this inventive fable about how Mozart's Don Giovanni might have been inspired/influenced by people he meets while on a trip to Prague. The film's central characters are the man himself (Aneurin Barnard), beautiful and gifted young soprano Zuzanna Lubtak (Morfydd Clark), and Baron Saluka (James Purefoy), who from the very first scene does his best to live up to the inevitable adjectives that apply to all barons worthy of the title: cruel & wicked. If I tell you that Zuzanna's parents also feature prominently (played by Dervla Kirwin and Adrian Edmonson, channelling his earlier role as Count Rostov) I've told you almost everything you need to know to work out most of the plot without even seeing the film. Other notable characters are Josefa Duchek (Samantha Barks) and Barbarina (Ruby Bentall), a half feisty, half put-upon servant girl and Mozart admirer, who is unsurprisingly more than a little reminiscent of Poldark's Verity at times.
Great operas manage to be great in spite of melodramatic characters and implausible but predictable plots, and this film manages the same trick comfortably thanks to the energy of the main performers. But we're nowhere near "Amadeus" - Mozart here is a strangely sympathetic character despite some all too obvious moral lapses. But predictable and preposterous or not, I was gripped almost throughout, only becoming impatient at two points where I was confused as to whether what I was seeing was supposed to be real or Mozart's imagination.
Prague is such a perfect setting for a period drama of this type, that it perhaps made it a bit too easy not to ask questions about the makeup and costumes. Once again, the operatic theme possibly helped here. At this point I should perhaps warn potential viewers that this film thoroughly deserves its 15 certificate - this isn't cosy family-friendly period drama.
It would be remiss to end this review without mentioning the music, which is of course wonderful. Samantha Barks does a great job with her songs, but a special mention should go out to singer Christina Johnston, who takes over from Morfydd Clark when the going gets opera, and does so brilliantly. I must say I felt this was handled very well technically, because I wasn't ever disturbed by the transition between voices or particularly conscious that I was watching something dubbed.
Overall mark 9/10 - just those couple of scenes that left me wanting more clarity lost a mark for me - I was totally willing to forgive everything else some may see as shortcomings, because it just felt so right for this film's theme.