Good Posture (2019)

I’m not much of a reader. Lilian (Grace Van Patten) is a budding filmmaker living in New York City after her father Neil (Norbert Leo Butz) abruptly moved to Paris with his girlfriend. When her boyfriend Nate (Gary Richardson) dumps her for being immature, she moves in with family friends who she last saw when she was a baby. While musician Don (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is welcoming and friendly his wife Julia (Emily Mortimer), a famous and reclusive British novelist, immediately clashes with lazy Lilian and it appears she bullies her husband. Lilian smokes marijuana with Don which leads to his having a fight with Julia and he promptly leaves the house. Julia sequesters herself in her room and begins communicating with Lilian through messages in Lilian’s private journal.  After running into Nate and his co-worker, filmmaker Laura (Condola Rashad), whom Lilian works out he is seeing, Lilian pretends she is working on a documentary about Julia to make herself look good. Rather than ask Julia for permission, Lilian begins scouting for cameramen and settles on Simon aka ‘Sol’ (John Early) and uses her father’s connections to contact famous writers and interview them about Julia.She finds out from Jonathan Ames that her father is back in New York and his girlfriend is pregnant. She also realises that Julia is using her as possible writing inspiration and has used her as inspiration before, when she was a child. Then Julia finds out about Lilian’s documentary when Lilian is late to meet Sol, and he enthusiastically tells Julia everything. Julia cuts off all communication with Lilian. Depressed, Lilian makes a move on Julia’s reclusive dog walker George (Timm Sharp) who rebuffs her. Then she reconciles with her father and meets his girlfriend Celeste (Emmanuelle Martin, the film’s costume designer) and they don’t even tell her what she already knows about their future plans … Tell Miss Havisham I’m on it. It’s difficult to tell what age our heroine Lillian might be even though when we meet her she is clearly (formerly) involved with an adult male but she wears pigtails, is parented by phone from Paris and also does drugs. She’s tricksy, unlikable and a bit ungrateful. Likewise her authoress host is prickly as a porcupine, sour and not exactly pleased to see her. A bit like real life then. A writer who doesn’t write, a musician husband who hasn’t made a record lately, a house guest of indeterminate duration who doesn’t read yet wants to make documentaries but admits that she has ‘never sat through one’ and fixes on making one about the woman she refers to as Miss Havisham whose books she doesn’t know. Yet we find out Lilian’s mother abandoned her (she died) and Julia lost a baby. It’s a film about people in the mass media who don’t know how to communicate with each other. Information is passed like contraband behind people’s backs. Julia writes in Lilian’s diary and uses it for a new novel. We find out about the story from the songs composed for the soundtrack by Heather Christian. It’s also about how the children of well known people coast through life using their parents’ contacts and money. It’s about how bereavement plays out for years and years.  It’s about how people can’t see what’s staring them in the face. It’s about the millennial generation’s sense of entitlement.  It’s replete with contradictions and human comedy and the film within a film boasts cameos from novelists Zadie Smith and Jonathan Ames who play along gamely with the witty script but leave it to Martin Amis (who is gleefully credited as ‘Self’) to deliver the zinger that is both dramatic and comically relevant: It’s not an intellectual stimulus, being happy. On the contrary. The performances are perfect. Mortimer is an underrated actress. She looks so harmless but one remark can hit right below the belt and power several scenes ahead when she’s nowhere to be seen. She has one employee solely to care for her dog whom he walks and cooks for yet she bullies her own husband out of the family home. Van Patten has a tough role and plays it excellently – spiky, spiteful, irritating and manipulative, eventually developing a degree of self-awareness. The epistolary nature of her relationship with Mortimer reminds us of nineteenth century literature. Low-key, writerly, amusing and ironic with an unpredictably clever romcom happy ending plot-engineered by master puppeteer Mortimer: I would expect no less from writer/director Dolly Wells, Mortimer’s co-star in the cherishable TV series Doll & Em, similarly set in Brooklyn.  Let’s keep it happy

A Canterbury Tale (1944)

I was born here and my father was born here. You’re here because there’s a war. On the way to Canterbury, Kent during World War II, American G.I. Bob Johnson (real-life soldier John Sweet) mistakenly gets off the train in Chillingbourne, where he encounters British Army Sergeant Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price) and British Land Girl Alison Smith (Sheila Sim), who’s working as a shopkeeper. When they’re confronted with a serial criminal who puts glue in women’s hair, and Alison becomes his newest victim, these twentieth century pilgrims are drawn into a mystery that brings them closer together. During their stay they get to know local landowner and magistrate Thomas Colpeper (Eric Portman) who wants to share his local knowledge with the new residents … Sergeant! The glue-man’s out again! This almost indefinable film from the Powell and Pressburger stable is a pastoral account of Englishness, an expressive linking of past and present, city and country, displaced persons and new community. At a time of lockdown Sim’s plaintive cry is resonant:  Why should people who love the country have to live in big cities? The shooting style of German Erwin Hillier lends itself beautifully to an idea of a new Romantic era in England, piercing wartime privations with an almost bucolic sense of possibility and nodding to Chaucer. And yet it’s the story of a man who puts glue in women’s hair and how in solving the mystery of his identity three very different people find their own way to a kind of spirituality and even a miracle in the case of bereaved Sim. Sweet is terribly engaging as the figure who enables a boost in Anglo-American relations. The moment of awe is apposite – when Price plays the organ in Canterbury Cathedral after years of being consigned to movie theatres. The city has been devastated by German bombs but the music soars.  This is the point where Powell and Pressburger engage in a kind of angelic conversation and it is appropriately inspiring. Narrated by Esmond Knight who also plays a soldier and the Village Idiot. You can’t hurry an elm

The Hand of Night (1968)

Aka Beast of Morocco. I’m a harbinger of death and desolation. Paul Carver (William Sylvester) is a guilty widower grieving the deaths of his wife and children in a car accident when he takes an unusual and hazardous job accompanying archaeologist Otto Gunther (Edward Underdown) and his assistant Chantal (Diane Clare) on a North African tomb-hunting expedition. They learn of a legend involving a female Moorish vampire who haunts the tomb taking her revenge against men. Before long, Paul has succumbed to the seductive wiles of a mysterious Moroccan woman Marisa (Alizia Gur) whom he first encounters at Gunther’s party but who nobody else apparently saw. She begins to bend him to her will and he follows Omar (Terence de Marney) around the city looking for her, finding her in an apparently abandoned palace where her sirens dance for him. It is left to Chantal to come to his rescue, but her attempts place her in even greater jeopardy; ultimately it is Paul who has to break free of Marisa’s evil clutches and destroy her before she destroys him… I know that a man can misunderstand himself but surely not forever. Good looking cult item shot on location in Morocco in 1966 best seen as a moody piece of low budget work with an intermittently interesting score by Joan Shakespeare, blessed with omens and portents and second sight and a very alluring vampire. Strange to say the most appealing aspects are the rather realistic approach, blending the touristic filming style with local storytelling, Dracula, mummy myths, a vanishing castle and the opportunity to see stalwarts of British Bs in a very different setting. It fits in more with the European vampire films of the era than anything being made in the UK. It was British-Hungarian Clare’s last film and she’s very good indeed;  fans of the genre remember her for Witchcraft and The Plague of the Zombies. The stunningly beautiful Gur, who was a former Miss Israel, had appeared in From Russia With Love and after this she would only record five more screen credits, all for TV. (Weirdly, as the daughter of German Jewish emigrants who fled Nazi Germany, she married two men boasting the initials SS.) Sylvester would go on to greater things with 2001: A Space Odyssey. An Associated British-Pathé production written by Bruce (Timeslip) Stewart and directed by Frederic Goode who had made another archaeology-themed film in North Africa a few years earlier, Valley of the Kings. For fans of such esoterica it’s interesting to compare with The Velvet Vampire, made a few years later. You seek the road into the dark

 

Another Time, Another Place (1958)

I still have a world of love to show you.  American journalist Sara Scott (Lana Turner) is stationed in London during the last year of WW2 and meets BBC reporter Mark Trevor (Sean Connery). It’s love at first sight for both. Sara is conflicted on whether to marry her rich American newspaper owner boss Carter Reynolds (Barry Sullivan) but she chooses Mark on the eve of his departure for Paris – only to have him admit that he is married and has a son and wife in a small town in Cornwall. They decide to stay together and try to work things out. When Mark dies in a plane crash Sara collapses in grief and has to be treated in hospital for her nerves. Carter persuades her to return to New York and work for him. But to make herself come to terms with her loss she pays a visit to Mark’s hometown in Cornwall and accidentally meets both his son Brian (Martin Stephens) and his widow Kay (Glynis Johns) and after being found collapsed in the town recuperates at their home and lives with them, working to turn Mark’s wartime radio scripts into a book without ever revealing her role in Mark’s life. Carter arrives and tells her she must inform Kay exactly what she was to Mark …… His work in London first of all took him away from me. His death made it final. Now you’re bringing him back.  Adapted by Stanley Mann from veteran screenwriter Lenore J. Coffee’s novel Weep No More, this is Grade A soap material performed by a wonderful cast particularly Johns. Turner is in her element as the lovelorn woman driven mad by loss. And how about Connery – but more particularly, his eyebrows?! They take up so much space on his face they deserve a credit of their own. And then there’s Sid James playing a typical – New Yorker?! Terence Longdon acquits himself well as Mark’s colleague and best friend, who knows exactly who Sara is because he met her in London and wanted Mark to drop her. There’s also a great opportunity to see Stephens, the creepy boy from The Innocents in an early role. It’s all very nicely done but what a shame this isn’t in colour because the location shooting by Jack Hildyard would have made it quite lovely.  Directed by Lewis Allen, a British director who worked on Broadway and in Hollywood and did that great atmospheric chiller, The Uninvited. Coffee would get her final screen credit two years after this on Cash McCall but lived until 1984. And the places that knew them shall know them no more

Dolittle (2020)

The doctor is back. Eccentric Dr. John Dolittle (Robert Downey Jr) lives in self-imposed solitude behind the high walls of his lush manor in 19th-century England. Devastated by the death of his wife Lily (Kasia Smutniak), his only companionship comes from an array of exotic animals that he speaks to on a daily basis. But when little Lady Rose (Carmel Laniado), accompanied by young orphan Tommy Stubbins (Harry Collett), asks him to assist young Queen Victoria (Jessie Buckley) who has become gravely ill, the eccentric doctor and his furry friends embark with Stubbins, now his new apprentice, on an epic adventure to a mythical island to find the cure. He is pursued by Dr Blair Müdfly (Michael Sheen), a jealous medical school rival who is conspiring with evil courtier Lord Thomas Badgley (Jim Broadbent) to kill the monarch. However he must don a disguise to fool his former father-in-law, the wild brigand King Rassouli (Antonio Banderas) who still resents Dolittle for taking away his beloved late daughter. And to obtain the cure for the Queen of England, Dolittle must do battle with the mythical dragons that lie in his way but Müdfly gets there before him… I’m too beautiful to die. A remake of the legendary 1967 musical flop (and Eddie Murphy’s 1998 dissociative iteration) based on Hugh Lofting’s Victorian friend of the animal world, from a screen story by Thomas Shepherd, this is written by director Stephen Gaghan & Dan Gregor & Dan Mand & Chris McKay. From squid and stick inset spies, to a parrot narrator (Emma Thompson), a gorilla answering the door and Downey essaying every accent in the British Isles while attempting to alight occasionally in Wales, this is a creature feature of a different variety. Unfairly maligned, this is mild entertainment determinedly pitched at a kiddie audience. It skips through a vaguely sketched plot that even has an Innermost Cave taken from the Hero’s Journey story model, giving Sheen mugging opportunities in another Blair-ite role; while Frances de la Tour has her impacted CGI dragon colon relieved in a leek-induced surgery clearly meant for bottom-obsessed children. This is wonky but it has a good heart and some inappropriately contemporary linguistic efforts to befriend an ethnic audience using a big-name voice cast for the CGI animals (including Ralph Fiennes as a troubled tiger called Barry, Rami Malek, Octavia Spencer, Selena Gomez, Kumail Nanjiani), plus some of that toilet humour to ruffle the feathers. It’s far from a masterpiece but you know that already and Downey is, well, Downey. For some of us that’s plenty, even when his charm is severely tested talking down to the youngsters. Team work is dream work

The Gentle Sex (1943)

We’ve got a world where people have to die because we don’t know how to live. Seven women from different backgrounds meet at an Auxiliary Territorial Service training camp. “Gentle” British girls, including sensible Scot Maggie Fraser (Rosamund John), Anne (Joyce Howard), who is from a service family and the youngest, Betty (Joan Greenwood), they are joined by Czech refugee Erna Debruski (Lilli Palmer) and are now doing their bit to help out in World War 2 from drilling and driving lorries to manning ack-ack batteries … You’ve a great resemblance of a girl I’ve a mind to marry. Writer and co-director Leslie Howard [with an uncredited Maurice Elvey who worked on it following the death of his colleague’s mistress] voices an ‘ironic’ narration (written by Doris Langley Moore) which may have its own ironically patronising overtones but this portrait of female solidarity, hard work and loss while those brave menfolk are overseas is not just fine propaganda but a bewitching home front experience. Six characters in search of … what? Howard deadpans. With additional dialogue by Aimee Stuart and uncredited rewrites by Roland Pertwee and Elizabeth Baron from an original story and screenplay by Moie Charles, it gifts John with one of her best roles and she excels, especially in the comedic relationship with John Laurie. This is a woman’s war. The structure provides the anticipated social overview but interestingly these are women who do not require men’s approval (unlike the similarly themed Millions Like Us). Good on detail, relationships and loyalty, it’s a fount of social history, utilising a documentary style and emphasis on the collective to achieve the affect of togetherness:  it works. Now we have hatred to fill the empty spaces in our hearts

The Call of the Wild (2020)

He was beaten but he was not broken. It’s the 1890s. Buck is a big-hearted St Bernard/collie mix whose blissful domestic life in Santa Clara, California, at the home of an indulgent small town judge (Bradley Whitford) gets turned upside down when he is suddenly uprooted by a thief and transplanted to the exotic wilds of the Alaskan Yukon during the Gold Rush. As the newest addition to a mail-delivery dog sled team led by Perrault (Omar Sy) and his wife Françoise (Cara Gee), Buck has to learn to toe the line behind alpha male Spitz but then he bests him and becomes leader of the pack, heeding the call of the wild that intervenes to periodically remind him of his canine forebears. When the team is sold with the advent of the telegraph the team is acquired by nasty adventurer Hal (Dan Stevens) who is about to kill Buck when the dog is rescued by grizzled old John Thornton (Harrison Ford). John is drinking heavily to get away from his own family home – he has left his wife following the death of their son and decided to follow the boy’s dream to depart from chartered territory and find his heart’s desire where X marks the spot. Buck and his new master are true friends and battle the natural elements where Buck becomes his true self in the wild until Hal seeks revenge … This is not the south lands. Michael Green’s adaptation of the 1903 Jack London wilderness classic takes some liberties and makes some changes, presumably for reasons of political correctness, ensuring a direct hit on kids’ sensibilities without the fear factor or the race aspect. The shortcuts and alterations minimise the human cruelty, probably a good thing. The first five minutes are hard to watch, as though shot at double speed and played back fractionally slower (Hobbit-like), but then the physicality of the film slows down to set up the story, again a little differently from the book. Tactile Buck may be but his actions were laid down by renowned actor and gymnast Terry Notary and then he was magicked into life by CGI:  in an interview Ford said the scale and scope of the film could not have been achieved otherwise. And who would want any animal put through their paces as these sled dogs are? The titular call is actualised in the image of an ancient black dog who appears ghostlike every so often but it is a clear representation of Buck’s personal growth, a sign that he is becoming his true wild self. And as he does,  John and Buck save each other. The end is of course tragic in part but Buck reaches his destiny, in the wild. It’s a rather brilliant fable and very well told. That lump in your throat is definitely not a special effect. Directed by Chris Sanders.

Lost (1956)

Aka Tears for Simon. I didn’t neglect my baby. U.S. Embassy employee Lee Cochrane (David Knight) and his wife Sue (Julia Arnall), receive a shock when they discover that their 18-month-old son, Simon, has disappeared in London from Kensington Gardens. He was last seen with their nanny, and the couple seemingly have no leads that might help police Detective Inspector Craig (David Farrar) in his investigation but the pages of a popular novel might provide a useful lead that involves several staff members to look for a clue. The media sensationalises the incident, causing an unnecessary distraction as the couple prepares to confront the culprit face-to-face when they get a series of phonecalls despite warnings not to give a ransom as time is running out … Can a career woman be a mother as well? That’s the tabloid headline screaming from a newspaper article that Sue agrees to be interviewed for in order to secure publicity for her missing son – and that’s what a woman journalist writes about her. The screenplay by the estimable Janet Green never ignores the gender-baiting of the era in this punchy thriller which allows ample time for Sue to shed tears and do anything she can to save her child while she loses it psychologically too. Farrar is his usual tough and brusque character but there are some good jibes about his bachelorhood in an office boasting a female Sergeant (Meredith Edwards). Everley Gregg (a favourite actress of Noël Coward) has a great bit as a Lady who likes cars; while Thora Hird, Mona Washbourne, Joan Sims, Joan Hickson, Barbara Windsor and Shirley Anne Field all make appearances. The parallel investigation narratives – by the police and the parents – are well intertwined and converge in literally a cliff-hanging ending. Shot by Harry Waxman, edited by Anne V. Coates and directed by Guy Green. You have a genius for the obvious

November Criminals (2017)

I guess I’ve gotten pretty good at pretending to be okay. High school student Addison Schach (Ansel Elgort) is the only guy in class trusted by his friend Phoebe Zeleny (Chloë Grace Moretz) to take her virginity before they leave high school. While they’re engaging in sex for the first time classmate Kevin Broadus (Jared Kemp) is shot dead in the bakery where they’ve just left him.  Addison is still dealing with the trauma of his mother’s sudden death six months earlier but his father Theo (David Strathairn) doesn’t grasp the extent of his emotional problems. When the police treat the boy’s death as part of gang activity Addison can’t accept it and undertakes his own investigation with Phoebe reluctantly tagging along, knowing that her well-connected mother Fiona (Catherine Keener) is already wary of the association with Addison. They soon discover that there is more to the case than meets the eye…  I don’t want you to get involved with something that will most definitely hurt you. Adapted by Steven Knight and director Sacha Gervasi from the novel by Sam Munson this is a strangely restrained piece of work, clearly bursting with a fast-extinguished passion that doesn’t actually go anywhere, rather like the thwarted protagonist. Elgort and Moretz are sympathetic and engaging (and were previously paired in the remake of Carrie) but are not given enough with the script which already has a short running time at 85 minutes. It’s a combination of family drama and crime thriller but its generic ambitions don’t fully mesh in a story which is essentially about a naive approach to bereavement:  this boy is no private eye. There are nice scenes with the respective parents, Strathairn and Keener, and the lo-fi approach to technology (pagers, colour VHS recording) makes a nice alternative to the social media used in most contemporary teen movies, but it’s an unfulfilled premise. That’s how life is: it provides these accidental answers. Or it seems to. You have to judge by results

Smilla’s Sense of Snow (1997)

Aka Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow.  The devil assumes many forms. Copenhagen police say otherwise, but amateur scientist Smilla Jaspersen (Julia Ormond) who studies ice crystals in a university lab thinks her young Inuit neighbour Isaiah (Clipper Miano) was chased by an adult before he fell to his death from the roof of their apartment block. The daughter of an Inuit who spent her childhood in Greenland, Smilla learns that the boy’s father died while working for Dr. Andreas Tork (Richard Harris) in Greenland who heads a mining company and she is directed by former accountant Elsa (Vanessa Redgrave) to get an Expedition Report from the firm’s archive.  She asks her father Moritz (Robert Loggia) for help interpreting the information but has to deal with his young girlfriend who resents her interference in their life. After sharing her murder theory with a mysterious neighbour called The Mechanic (Gabriel Byrne) who never seems to go to work, she pursues her suspicions and her life is endangered as the impact of a meteorite hitting Greenland in 1859 is revealed in a reanimated prehistoric worm which proves toxic to human organs … Why does such a nice woman have such a rough mouth? Peter Høeg’s novel was very fashionable in the Nineties and encompasses so many issues – identity, language, snow and ice, ecology and exploitation, friendship and bereavement, medical issues, astronomy, being far away from home, being motherless … that you can quite see how difficult it would be to fillet from this a straightforward thriller which is what the cinema machine demands. Ann (Ray Donovan) Biderman does a good job streamlining the narrative threads which form an orbit around Ormond who has a tremendous role here but director Bille August doesn’t really heighten the tensions  sufficiently quickly that they materialise as proper threats. What works as a literary novel seems rather far-fetched on screen when stripped of all those beautiful words. Nonetheless it’s a fascinating story and it’s a shame Ormond’s feature career never had the momentum it once seemed to possess. Costuming by Marit Allen. The way you have a sense of God I have a sense of snow