Panic in Year Zero! (1962)

Aka Survival. All normal forms of communications appear to have broken down. Harry Baldwin (Ray Milland), his wife Ann (Jean Hagen), their son Rick (Frankie Avalon) and daughter Karen (Mary Mitchel) leave suburban Los Angeles at sunrise to go on a fishing trip to the Sierra Nevada wilderness, bringing with them a small camping trailer. After a couple of hours on the road, Harry and Ann are startled by an unusually bright light, accompanied by the radio station going to static. Tuning through stations, they hear a sporadic news report broadcast on CONELRAD that hint at the start of a nuclear war, confirmed when the Baldwins see a large mushroom cloud from a hydrogen bomb rising over Los Angeles, now many miles away. The family attempt to return home to rescue Ann’s mother but Harry soon realises that the roads will be clogged by panicked people and what is left of the city will be saturated in atomic fallout. Stopping at a small diner to get food and find out what is happening, Harry hears that Los Angeles was hit by two hydrogen bombs: One over Downtown Los Angeles, the other at the  Port of Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco were also targets. With this news, deciding that his family’s survival must come first, Harry decides to continue to their secluded holiday spot in the mountains, abandoning Ann’s mother back in LA and weather the crisis from there. In the next few days we’re going to have the kind of togetherness we never dreamt of. The Baldwins stop to buy supplies at a small town off the main road, which has not yet been inundated by refugees from the city. Harry attempts to purchase tools and guns from hardware store owner Ed Johnson (Richard Garland) with a combination of $200 cash and a personal cheque for the remainder. However, Johnson believes only Los Angeles has been hit and the government remains intact, so he insists on following state law and withholding the guns for a 24 hours while Harry’s cheques are verified. Harry absconds with the weapons with Rick’s help but he tells Johnson that he will eventually return and pay for them in full. Back on the road, the family encounter three threatening young hoodlums, Carl (Richard Bakalyan), Mickey (Rex Holman) and Andy (Neil Nephew) but manage to fend them off. There must be some good people left. After a harrowing journey, the Baldwins reach their destination. Realising their trailer offers no protection from radioactive fallout, they take the contents of the trailer and find shelter in a cave where they settle in and wait for civil order to be restored. On their portable radio, they listen to war news and learn that what remains of the UN has declared this to be Year Zero … I guess there’s no such thing as complete isolation. Based on a screenplay by John Morton and Jay Simms from a story by Simms, this is tough stuff, particularly for its era and feels rather close to the knuckle in these dangerous days. It pulls no punches in the rapid descent to aggressive and brutal dissent. This realistic portrait of the aftermath of an atomic bomb is notable for its commitment to the idea that society will immediately fragment and the term ‘civilisation’ figures largely. Director and star Milland as pragmatic Harry ruefully admits, I looked for the worst in others and I found it in myself. His relationship with wife Ann (an underused Hagen – initially!) fractures when he takes charge in a radical way and we can only presume Avalon was cast as his son due to his fan base, an attractive factor for producers American International Pictures who had him tour the US when it went out across the states after making its money back in LA. Mitchel is attacked horrifically by the violent hoodlums whose situation is finally avenged but in the doing another young woman is discovered and it is Rick’s idea to rescue her, not his father’s. It’s an unusual role for Milland and he’s the better for it, a wannabe warrior whose instincts are correct but sometime his judgment is lacking. Intelligent people don’t just turn their back on the rest of the world, Ann reasons. As much as Harry wants to protect his family he ultimately realises his limitations but there is humour here too. Nothing like eating under an open sky, even if it is radioactive, muses Rick. The use of sex as a weapon in what is essentially civil war has a grim outcome for this close knit family. And when mom Ann finally takes action in a story that deprives her of input or consequence for the first two-thirds of the story, it’s decisive. This isn’t exactly optimistic about mankind and save for a few obvious studio shots Milland the director marshals the action well. A striking, serious and atmospheric work, filled with foreboding – and guns. Our country is still full of thieving, murdering patriots

The Leisure Seeker (2017)

It’s just something I really need to do with your father.  Retired English teacher John Spencer (Donald Sutherland) and wife Ella (Helen Mirren) take off in their RV without telling anyone in order to escape a probable nursing home (him, with Alzheimer’s) and a punishing chemo regime (her, for cancer). They abandon grown up son Will (Christian McKay) who cares for them each day, despite knowing it’s his sister Jane (Janel Moloney) who’s the favoured offspring and college professor a comfortable couple of hours away. The siblings are up the walls about the disappearance. Even neighbour Lillian (Dana Ivey) is out of the loop. The couple negotiate the Seventies vehicle down the east coast via camp sites, diners, the world’s slowest police chase, historical re-enactments, a stint in a home and occasional beaches, to their eventual destination, the home of John’s hero, Ernest Hemingway, in Key West.  En route their journey has revelations, massive doses of forgetfulness, a holdup, a posh hotel, a terrible (unconscious) admission, illness and phonecalls home… Michael Zadoorian’s novel is adapted by Italian director Paolo Virzi, making his English language feature debut, with Stephen Amidon, Francesca Archibugi and Francesco Piccolo, and it bears up considerably better than you might think. This isn’t just down to the playing of the leads, who are brilliant, although Mirren’s Savannah accent slips a lot.  There are lovely moments particularly when Sutherland is regaling waitresses with lines from his favourite books and when one confesses she’s done her thesis on it he’s in hog heaven. Ella prefers the movie adaptations. They are a joy to watch, sparking off one another and falling into old habits and new ideas.  Their life together is recalled in tranquil bouts of watching slides on a sheet outside the RV at night when they’re camping. Their days are about coping and how exhausting it is to be a carer and to be ill but also how genuinely in love they have been and how that materialises in their concern for one another. Sutherland’s recurring obsession with Mirren’s first boyfriend from fifty years earlier has a funny payoff.  How she deals with his husbandly failing is hilarious.  His physical response to one medication is … unexpected! But its success is also to do with the deep understanding of Alzheimer’s which causes bouts of memory loss and bullying all too familiar to anyone with a relative suffering its predations – I laughed aloud with recognition far too many times.  While this is concerned with ageing in a semi-comic context it’s a very pointed narrative about the ways in which older people are made feel lousy about their right to exist, how they are treated when they are beginning to become infirm and the radical element here is how one couple choose how to live and exit gracefully when they take the opportunity (even if one of them doesn’t really know what in hell is going on). Immensely enjoyable.

 

The Shack (2017)

If anything matters then everything matters. After suffering the loss of his younger daughter Missy (Amélie Eve) to a kidnapper following the carelessness of his older daughter Kate (Megan Charpentier) while on a camping trip Mack Phillips (Sam Worthington) spirals into a deep depression that causes him to question his innermost beliefs and threatens his  relationship with his remaining family including his wife Nan (Radha Mitchell) and son Josh (Gage Munroe). Facing a crisis of faith, he receives a mysterious letter urging him to an abandoned shack in the Oregon wilderness. Despite his doubts, Mack journeys to the shack which he recognises as the location where his daughter’s bloodied dress was found and as he prepares to wreak his revenge he encounters an enigmatic trio of strangers led by a woman named Papa (Octavia Spencer), her son Jesus (Aviv Alush)  and a woman called Sarayu (Sumire Matsubara). Through this meeting, which reveals his problems and past through visions and journeys, Mack finds important truths that will transform his understanding of his tragedy and change his life forever… Being a Sunday it seems appropriate to visit that little genre of Christian movies – oh, give me some old time religion already.  William P. Young’s underground bestseller was taken up by Octavia Spencer as a production project and joins a group of films that have flourished in the last few years tackling thorny issues under the rubric of acceptance and forgiveness and all that jazz. Mack’s background as the witness to his father’s abuse of his mother will hit a lot of targets about the origins of emasculation but Worthington’s somewhat strangulated performance doesn’t really assist the character’s trajectory from Doubting Thomas to True Believer. It may not be your bag and this has a whiff of TV movie about it but the cast is attractive and in a world where Spencer is God I’ll take my chances.  You’ll believe you can walk on water. Adapted by John Fusco and Andrew Lanham & Destin Cretton and directed by Stuart Hazeldine. Paradise is shot by Declan Quinn. Amen to that.

Stand By Me (1986)

Did your mother have any kids that lived?! The Writer (Richard Dreyfuss) is returning to Castle Rock, the small town in Oregon where he grew up. He’s got a newspaper in his hand announcing the death of one of his childhood friends and recalls the summer that everything changed when they and two other twelve year old boys went on an odyssey to view the body of a kid hit by a train passing through several miles away. It’s 1959.  Gordie (Wil Wheaton) is the neglected younger son in a family after his older brother (John Cusack) was killed on the way to basic training. His best friend is Chris (River Phoenix) who’s got a bad name because he comes from a criminal family. Teddy (Corey Feldman) is the abused child of a mentally ill man who claimed to be a WW2 hero. And Vern (Jerry O’Connell) is the chubby kid who overhears about the whereabouts of a missing boy when his older brother talks about it on the porch. They pretend they’re going on a camping trip and learn more about each other than they ever knew as they dodge death on a railway bridge, deal with leeches and a mythical killer dog and Gordie entertains his chums with the Barforama story to beat them all.  Then the older boys come a calling to retrieve the dead body … Wise, witty, sad, moving and hilarious, this is such a true story of friendship and family and is told in a brief 83 minutes, not a moment of which is wasted. The adaptation of Stephen King’s novella The Body (in Different Seasons) by Raynold Gideon and Bruce A. Evans is canny and kind, balanced between comedy and drama and utilising the flashback structure (there are flashbacks within the overall flashback narrative) to illustrate the experience and the effects of the incident very well (it’s quite complex within the novella). Beautifully played sense of time and place, with the interactions between those talented boys utterly believable, this is a modern classic. I never had any friends later in life like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone? Absolutely wonderful. Directed by Rob Reiner.

A Cry in the Dark (1988)

Aka Evil Angels. You could crack walnuts on her face. Fred Schepisi’s docudrama-style retelling of John Bryson’s book is real watercooler stuff:  the appalling tale of a 9-week old baby, Azaria Chamberlain, taken from her family’s tent at a campsite beneath Ayers Rock and presumably murdered, and the prosecution and wrongful conviction of her mother Lindy (Meryl Streep). A dingo’s got my baby! was the war cry attributed to the unsympathetic woman whose every character flaw was exposed by a prurient Australian press who condemned her because of her appearance (that terrible haircut!), speaking voice and curt mannerisms. As played by Streep, she is obviously a more complex, interesting and compassionate woman in private.  Her inner strength is immensely bothersome to a public who are shown reacting variously to news reportage on TV – in their own homes, in bars, on the streets – which serves to demonstrate the horrendous arena that is the court of public opinion as well as distancing us somewhat perhaps from a more penetrating account of the couple at the centre of the tragedy. Michael Chamberlain (Sam Neill) is the pastor at the Seventh Day Adventist church in Mount Isa, Queensland and it is the minority nature of their Christian sect that also works against them when the name Azaria is wrongly reported to mean ‘sacrifice in the wilderness’. His unconvincing and wavering witness testimony does for his wife, as does the sheer incompetence of the expert witnesses, many of whose claims were later discounted. The impact of her interviews and the way in which they are misreported by a baying press is very well handled and her eventual imprisonment on circumstantial as opposed to forensic evidence is still strikingly mediaeval in its stupidity (preserve us all from juries). Streep is terribly good and the portrayal of a loving marriage in all its fraying details is nicely observed:  posited against the procedural detail and the slipshod collection of evidence we are conscious of something akin to a conspiracy. This was released just about the time that the Chamberlains were finally exonerated (but it took until 2012 for the charges to be finally dropped). This isn’t creative so much as it is journalistic and in that spirit it makes up for the actions of some of those sewer rats who waited thirty years to apologise to Lindy Chamberlain for their vile lies. Her ex-husband (they divorced in 1991) died earlier this year. Adapted by Robert Caswell and director Schepisi from John Bryson’s Evil Angels.

Black Mountain Poets (2016)

A shambolic exercise in shaggy dog poetry, or something. Writer/director Jamie Adams had an idea, got an ensemble together and they semi-improvised the scenes over five days in the Black Mountains of Wales. This, by the way, has nothing to do with the actual Black Mountain poets in the US, in case you thought you had stumbled onto an artistic exploration of experimental writers. Two con artist sisters, Alice Lowe and Dolly Wells, narrowly escape the clutches of the law trying to steal a JCB and make off in a stolen car which runs out of petrol. Lost in the middle of Wales they steal a car belonging to the Wilding Sisters, a pair of poets on their way to a poetry retreat – and pretend to be them. Lisa (Lowe) falls for earnest Richard (Tom Cullen) whose ex Louisa (Rosa Robson) shows up unimpressed. Things take a turn when they’re obliged to do outdoor pursuits and go camping and Richard falls for Claire (Wells). (And if you think that’s unbelievable, I narrowly avoided one such writing retreat which forced participants to climb up a waterfall and then dive in – and yes, someone fractured their skull and neck on the rocks below …) Then there’s a pretty funny poem-off with the police dropping by. All the while the real Wildings are wondering why nobody has come to rescue them … Pretty silly and misses its supposed targets and sometimes feels as long as the five days it took to make this 82-minute effort. Mostly daft fun and it’s almost refreshing to see nature take a hold of these neurotic loser thirtysomethings who miss their late dad to the point where Lisa wants to put pen to paper and read out more than a Tesco receipt or the card her dead father wrote her twenty years ago. Harmless, just as long as nobody got hurt putting up those tents.