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Films CXXV-CXXVIII
Catholic night at the Carbuncle...
CXXV: Brideshead Revisited (Julian Jarrold, 2008)
Solidly middle class Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) - who is to become an artist and a soldier - falls in with fey aristocrat Sebastian Flyte (Ben Wishaw), and visits the ancestral pile at Brideshead where the matriarch (Emma Thompson) asks him to look after Sebastian and he falls in love with his sister Julia Flyte (Hayley Atwell). Decorum is breached, promises broken, marriages are made and fail.
I've not read the novel - I've only read Scoop and one of the Sword of Honour trilogy by Waugh - and I never saw more than oddments of the tv series, but this comes across as a bit of a horror story, with the matriarch as the mad woman in the attic and the ancestral pile as the gothick mansion. I guess the plot does span twenty years (none of the characters look 18 at the start) but I'm not sure how it could be stretched to eleven episodes.
Patrick Malahide quietly steals the show as Ryder's father.
CXXVI: In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, 2008)
Effectively a triple hander, in which inexperienced hitman Colin Farrell and veteran killer Brendan Gleason await in Bruges for their orders from Ralph Fiennes - who channels Ray Winstone or Ben Kingsley in full gnagster mode. Whilst Gleason is happy to do the museums and churches and the whole tourist bit, Farrell is bored and falls in with a beautiful woman (Clémence Poésy) and midget (Jordan Prentice).
Whilst the plot is a little obvious for the first three quarters - the identity of the next hit is hardly a surprise - Farrell's character is set up as thoroughly dislikeable and is saved only by whether you find his kind of untidy Oirishness appealing. The dialogue is very slick - Pinter without the pauses - and clearly anyone who dislikes swearing needs to stay away.
I had realised that this was a directorial debut by McDonagh, and it bodes well - it's not as dark as some of the Ealing Comedies, but it is a long way from feel good.
Burn After Reading (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2008)
The Coens found their feet again with No Country For Old Men - which married elements of Blood Simple, Fargo and Raising Arizona (with fewer laughs) - and their segment of Paris, Je T'Aime - after a remake of The Lady Killers which I daren't watch and a misfired comedy Intolerable Clooney. The critics, who built the Coens up again, have knocked them down again, but whilst this is not in the same league as No Country it has much to commend it (and it shares a composer with In Bruges).
It has moments of Enemy of the State and Point Blank, but is actually a relationships comedy. Alcoholic Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) is fired from his job in intelligence, unaware that his wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton) is having an affair with agent Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney, in his third Coen brothers film), who himself is unaware of the fraility of his marriage to children's author Sandy (Elizabeth Marvel). When a disk of Cox's financial records fall into the hands of Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and idiot Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), an attempt at blackmail unfolds and unravels.
The success or otherwise of this film turns on how well it switches from spy thriller - a genre which should be a gift for the Coens to spoof - and dark romantic comedy. I think there needed to be more of the former, with its pacing down corridors and files being dropped on desks - and J.K. Simmonds steals the film from under the noses of McDormand and Pitt. Clooney gurns a little too much as his world falls apart, but it's perhaps a happier pairing with the divine Swinton than Michael Clayton. Of course, even something on as wide a scale as No Country actually ends up being about a handful of characters trapped with each other (I can see their interest in The Lady Killers and there is no way out of Fargo. Again a film dependent on the musicality of swearing.
CXXVIII: Macbeth (Geoffrey Wright, 2006)
Wright has never really topped his Romper Stomper - a film portraying skinheads which never knew whether to hate or love them, and was in the end deeply homoerotic. Here he attempts to do for The Scottish Play what Baz Luhrmann did for Romeo and Juliet. And just as Romeo and Juliet had West Side Story before it, this had Joe Macbeth. Macbeth (Sam Worthington) is a hood on the make who learns from three schools girls that he is to be promoted and eventually become the king pin of a gang. His wife (Kate Bell) encourages him to kill the don (Gary Sweet). Macbeth takes over the gang, but has to kill people who stand in his way.
It's all leather coats and machine guns, although Macbeth looks increasingly like a cross between Bono and Michael Hutchence. The magic becomes a bad drug trip, and it's not clear whether Banquo (Steve Bastoni) has even seen the three witches. There are cuts - the Hecate masque which tends to be dropped, the English king and scrofula, and the confusion about who the third murderer is. Macbeth's key speech - "Tomorrow, Tommorrow, I'll Love You Tomorrow" - is shifted from its rightful place to the end (and is used on the DVD title page) but loses the lines about tales told by idiots.
It's not quite stylised for the verse to really work - and frankly the acting is not good enough (and Worthington is no Sproutboy). I'm definitely not against modern dress productions - although this one didn't quite make snese, especially with a surveillance thread. But I have to say that the Polanskit version works better and is more shocking.
Totals: 128 (Cinema: 56; DVD: 67; TV: 5)
Bonus:
CXXV: Brideshead Revisited (Julian Jarrold, 2008)
Solidly middle class Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) - who is to become an artist and a soldier - falls in with fey aristocrat Sebastian Flyte (Ben Wishaw), and visits the ancestral pile at Brideshead where the matriarch (Emma Thompson) asks him to look after Sebastian and he falls in love with his sister Julia Flyte (Hayley Atwell). Decorum is breached, promises broken, marriages are made and fail.
I've not read the novel - I've only read Scoop and one of the Sword of Honour trilogy by Waugh - and I never saw more than oddments of the tv series, but this comes across as a bit of a horror story, with the matriarch as the mad woman in the attic and the ancestral pile as the gothick mansion. I guess the plot does span twenty years (none of the characters look 18 at the start) but I'm not sure how it could be stretched to eleven episodes.
Patrick Malahide quietly steals the show as Ryder's father.
CXXVI: In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, 2008)
Effectively a triple hander, in which inexperienced hitman Colin Farrell and veteran killer Brendan Gleason await in Bruges for their orders from Ralph Fiennes - who channels Ray Winstone or Ben Kingsley in full gnagster mode. Whilst Gleason is happy to do the museums and churches and the whole tourist bit, Farrell is bored and falls in with a beautiful woman (Clémence Poésy) and midget (Jordan Prentice).
Whilst the plot is a little obvious for the first three quarters - the identity of the next hit is hardly a surprise - Farrell's character is set up as thoroughly dislikeable and is saved only by whether you find his kind of untidy Oirishness appealing. The dialogue is very slick - Pinter without the pauses - and clearly anyone who dislikes swearing needs to stay away.
I had realised that this was a directorial debut by McDonagh, and it bodes well - it's not as dark as some of the Ealing Comedies, but it is a long way from feel good.
Burn After Reading (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2008)
The Coens found their feet again with No Country For Old Men - which married elements of Blood Simple, Fargo and Raising Arizona (with fewer laughs) - and their segment of Paris, Je T'Aime - after a remake of The Lady Killers which I daren't watch and a misfired comedy Intolerable Clooney. The critics, who built the Coens up again, have knocked them down again, but whilst this is not in the same league as No Country it has much to commend it (and it shares a composer with In Bruges).
It has moments of Enemy of the State and Point Blank, but is actually a relationships comedy. Alcoholic Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) is fired from his job in intelligence, unaware that his wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton) is having an affair with agent Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney, in his third Coen brothers film), who himself is unaware of the fraility of his marriage to children's author Sandy (Elizabeth Marvel). When a disk of Cox's financial records fall into the hands of Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and idiot Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), an attempt at blackmail unfolds and unravels.
The success or otherwise of this film turns on how well it switches from spy thriller - a genre which should be a gift for the Coens to spoof - and dark romantic comedy. I think there needed to be more of the former, with its pacing down corridors and files being dropped on desks - and J.K. Simmonds steals the film from under the noses of McDormand and Pitt. Clooney gurns a little too much as his world falls apart, but it's perhaps a happier pairing with the divine Swinton than Michael Clayton. Of course, even something on as wide a scale as No Country actually ends up being about a handful of characters trapped with each other (I can see their interest in The Lady Killers and there is no way out of Fargo. Again a film dependent on the musicality of swearing.
CXXVIII: Macbeth (Geoffrey Wright, 2006)
Wright has never really topped his Romper Stomper - a film portraying skinheads which never knew whether to hate or love them, and was in the end deeply homoerotic. Here he attempts to do for The Scottish Play what Baz Luhrmann did for Romeo and Juliet. And just as Romeo and Juliet had West Side Story before it, this had Joe Macbeth. Macbeth (Sam Worthington) is a hood on the make who learns from three schools girls that he is to be promoted and eventually become the king pin of a gang. His wife (Kate Bell) encourages him to kill the don (Gary Sweet). Macbeth takes over the gang, but has to kill people who stand in his way.
It's all leather coats and machine guns, although Macbeth looks increasingly like a cross between Bono and Michael Hutchence. The magic becomes a bad drug trip, and it's not clear whether Banquo (Steve Bastoni) has even seen the three witches. There are cuts - the Hecate masque which tends to be dropped, the English king and scrofula, and the confusion about who the third murderer is. Macbeth's key speech - "Tomorrow, Tommorrow, I'll Love You Tomorrow" - is shifted from its rightful place to the end (and is used on the DVD title page) but loses the lines about tales told by idiots.
It's not quite stylised for the verse to really work - and frankly the acting is not good enough (and Worthington is no Sproutboy). I'm definitely not against modern dress productions - although this one didn't quite make snese, especially with a surveillance thread. But I have to say that the Polanskit version works better and is more shocking.
Totals: 128 (Cinema: 56; DVD: 67; TV: 5)
Bonus:
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1,673 / 50,000 (3.3%) |
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