The Fall Guy (2024)

You fall down, you get right back up. How far would you go for the one that you love? Hollywood stuntman Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) works as the double for famous action star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor Johnson) who always says he does his own stunts. However, he is severely injured during a stunt gone wrong and he abandons his career and his girlfriend camerawoman Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt). 18 months later, Colt, now a valet for a small Mexican restaurant, is contacted by Tom’s film producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham). She informs him that Jody is directing her first film, sci-fi epic Metalstorm, and wants him to work on the production in Sydney Australia. After arriving on set, Colt learns that Jody never requested him and is still angry about their breakup. Gail reveals that Tom has disappeared after getting involved with drugs: she wants Colt to find him before his absence causes the film’s cancellation. Not wanting Jody’s directorial debut ruined, Colt visits Tom’s hotel room and a nightclub, where he gets into fights. In the hotel room, he finds a dead body in a bathtub full of ice. When Colt returns with the police, he finds the body has disappeared. Meanwhile, as production of Metalstorm continues, Colt and Jody begin to rekindle their relationship until Gail abruptly informs him that he has to go back to the US. Instead, he continues looking for Tom by tracking down his PA Alma Milan (Stephanie Hsu) and they are both attacked by people looking for a phone belonging to Tom in Alma’s possession. Colt defeats them after an extended chase through Sydney involving a rubbish truck. He and his friend Dan Tucker (Winston Duke), the stunt coordinator on Metalstorm, unlock the phone at Tom’s apartment. They discover a video of an intoxicated Tom accidentally killing his previous stuntman Henry. The henchmen attack Colt and Dan, destroying the phone with shotgun pellets. Dan escapes, but Colt is captured and brought face-to-face with Tom, who has been hiding out on a yacht on Gail’s instructions. He reveals that Gail is framing Colt for the murder using deepfake technology to replace Tom’s face with Colt’s on the incriminating video. Tom also reveals that Colt and Henry’s ‘accidents’ were orchestrated by himself. Henry’s body is discovered and the doctored video is released on news media, while Gail tries to convince Jody that he is guilty. Colt escapes and is presumed dead after a boat chase, though he swims to safety … I’m the director. You’re a stunt guy. We need to keep it super profesh. If last year was the Summer of Barbenheimer, that compound of mutually assured box office billionairedom, the films’ respective supporting stars are the whole show of this decade’s Romancing the Stone, at least its descendant by way of Howard Hawks and screwball. Much has been written concerncing memed-about Gosling’s super-ironic commentary on modern masculinity, a career pivot which makes him – in the words of a Guardian writer’s recent article – the most important Hollywood star, so we’ll go with it. Dry supercilious wit being a thing Blunt does well, they’re a great pairing in a story that both sends up Hollywood and mines its great romantic inclinations. Adapted very loosely by Drew Pearce from the beloved Eighties TV show created by Glen A. Larson which starred Lee Majors, Heather Thomas and Jo Ann Pflug/Markie Post not to mention a Rounded-Line Wideside truck (and an outdoor bathtub). Stuntman turned director David Leitch cut his teeth on great action movies and is responsible for helming John Wick among others and this is not just the most recent ode to the craft (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Gosling’s own turn in Drive, Burt Reynolds was Hooper, then there’s The Stunt Man, to name the most outstanding in this sub-genre) which is due to be honoured at the Academy Awards one of these years, it’s a clever metatextual behind-the-scenes examination of the business, the deceptive nature of stars’ PR, and the pitiless nature of the production machine when you’re not flavour of the month (or fit to work). It’s all of that but mostly it’s a crash-bang-wallop action movie with ever more spectacular sequences. This is a precision-tooled mainstream hit with something for everyone, a genuinely warm and funny knowing adventure-satire with finely tuned star performances. Unlike the show, when Majors got to croon The Unknown Stuntman (covered here by Blake Shelton in a great soundtrack featuring AC/DC and Kiss), Gosling hasn’t got a theme song – this year’s showbiz highlight has got to be his Oscars rendition of I’m Just Ken, but he doesn’t need another tune, that’s already part of his star text so everyone just incorporates it and tucks it away into what they know about supposedly the most important Hollywood star, the self-deprecating caring sharing modern action man. And, since this is about stuntmen, big up to Logan Holladay for all those rolls. Huzzah! It ain’t about how hard you can hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward

Glamour in Venice

Paul Newman and Barbara Steele on their way to a party hosted by Giovanni Volpi di Misurata at the 1963 Venice Film Festival. Newman was there to promote Hud; scream queen and Fellini starlet Steele was likely publicising The Ghost/Lo Spettro. Those were the days! Sigh.

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

To start inventing you need something real first. Grenoble, France. In an isolated mountain chalet novelist Sandra Voyter (Sandra Huller) decides to reschedule her interview with a female literature student Zoe Solidor (Camille Rutherford) because her husband, university lecturer and aspiring author Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis) plays music loudly on a loop in their attic, disrupting the interview, making recording impossible. After the student drives away from the chalet, Samuel and Sandra’s visually impaired son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) takes a walk outside with his guide dog Snoop (Messi). When they return home, Daniel finds Samuel dead in the snow from an apparent fall. Sandra insists that the fall must have been accidental. Her old friend and lawyer Vincent Renzi (Swann Arlaud) suggests the possibility of suicide while Sandra recalls her husband’s attempt to overdose on aspirin six months earlier after going off antidepressants. After an investigation, Daniel’s conflicting accounts of what happened shortly before his father’s death, combined with the revelation that Samuel sustained a head wound before his body hit the ground and an audio recording of a fight by Samuel and Sandra the previous day, Sandra is indicted on charges of homicide. A year later, during the trial, Sandra’s defence team claims Samuel fell from the attic window and hit his head on a shed below; the prosecution suggests that Sandra hit him with a blunt object, pushing him from the second-floor balcony. During a courtroom argument with Samuel’s psychiatrist Jammal (Wajdi Mouawad) Sandra admits she resented Samuel due to his partial responsibility for the accident that led to Daniel’s impaired vision: he should have collected him from school but called a babysitter instead so he could stay home and writer. In the recorded fight, Samuel accuses Sandra of plagiarism, infidelity and exerting control over his life before their argument turns physically violent. The prosecution claims that all the violence came from Sandra but she points out that they’d been having conversations and disagreements that he’d recorded for six months as a substitute for writing and his transcriptions when presented by him were not accepted by a publisher in lieu of a novel … I don’t believe in the the notion of reciprocity in a couple. Written by the married couple Justine Triet & Arthur Harari (who appears as a literary critic) during the COVID lockdown, director Triet’s film sustains its mysterious premise right until the conclusion which may prove disappointing – perhaps a European take on the customary bittersweet Hollywood ending. it’s a Choose Your Own iteration of the murder procedural with flashes of Hitchcockian wit throughout. There is a re-enactment and a single flashback but the eccentric courtroom presentation is very different to the Anglo-Saxon convention with witnesses for the prosecution and defence talking over each other, a low threshold for evidence and an equally bizarre concept of the burden of proof (opinion-led, apparently). Sandra’s bisexuality and her affairs are brought up as a reason for her husband’s violent arguments with her, his use of anti-depressants rooted perhaps at her contempt for him when their young son was blinded because he should have been picking up from school, her relentless output still not sufficient to pay the bills while he is at home, renovating, homeschooling Daniel, having no time to write outside of his teaching job. At the heart of the story is a blame game between husband and wife – an accident that caused Daniel’s sight loss and a burning envy of a wife’s success whose latest plot is largely ‘borrowed’ from a passage in a novel Samuel abandoned, a writer wannabe now reduced to transcribing daily home life as a form of autofiction. As the USB recording from Samuel’s keyring is re-enacted he accuses Sandra of stealing his time and ‘imposing’ her worldview upon him despite his having forced the family to relocate to his hometown where she speaks English and the use of language becomes an issue in this French-German union where nuance, suggestion and meaning are potentially lost in translation – English is the no-man’s land resort of communication. Sometimes a couple is a kind of a chaos. The discursiveness masks the fact that it is their blind son and his dog who are the sole witnesses to the accident, spicing up the issue of court appearances and compounding the ambiguous nature of the crime and the lack of compelling evidence. Triet and Harari wrote this with Huller in mind (following an earlier collaboration) and she is a very modern heroine, word-smart, intellectually able, psychologically penetrating and completely at ease with herself to the point of lying easily. She is superb as this take no prisoners character, taking nonsense from nobody and while profoundly concerned with her son’s well-being she also boasts a terrifically charismatic nonchalance. Nevertheless, she is obviously unnerved by the courtroom experience in a language not her own. A sidebar to the exposition is the frank admission by Vincent that he has long thought highly of her. This is of course about writers and what happens when one half of a couple is more accomplished and successful than the other and how envy can eat like a cancer through a relationship. Samuel is destroyed by what he has done to his son, Sandra has dealt with it through adultery while also cheerfully churning out novels and doing translations on the side. She is pragmatic above all. Does Samuel commit suicide and are the recordings made in order to frame Sandra for his alleged murder? Maybe. Did he fall or was he pushed? Is the flashback from the visually impaired son true? Does Daniel lie? Why did he make a mistake in his first account? Rage does not exclude will! Guilt, jealousy, blame, language, meaning, all suffuse this tension-filled narrative which asks questions about how writers make their work and how much it plunders their private lives. How and why the story turns unexpectedly marks out the forensic narrative style. Rightly lauded, the exceptional screenplay was awarded at the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs and the Academy Awards among others and the film won Cannes’ Palme d’Or with the Palm Dog going to Messi! The first 9 minutes of the film are dominated by that appalling music which frankly would drive anyone to murder, if you want to know the truth. We won’t even name it such is its earworm potential for homicidal triggering. Gripping. A novel is not life! An author is not her characters! #700daysstraightofmondomovies! MM#4547

The Lesson (2023)

Good writers have the sense to borrow from their elders. Great writers steal! Liam Sommers (Daryl McCormack) is an aspiring ambitious young writer and Oxford English grad whiling away his twenties tutoring potential Oxbridge entrants for their exams. He eagerly accepts a position at the family estate of his idol, renowned author JM Sinclair (Richard E. Grant) who hasn’t published since the tragic death of his older son. Liam is tutoring his seventeen-year old son Bertie (Stephen McMillan) under the watchful eye of his French mother, sculptress and art curator Helene (Julie Delpy). JM is cold to Liam whereas Helene checks up on her son each day. Liam manages to help JM with a computer problem when the novelist can’t print something out. Liam wonders about a second server in another location in the house. Helene asks Liam about his writing – and reminds him he included his dissertation subject on his CV – JM Sinclair. His technological nous is such that Sinclair eventually offers him to swap novels. Liam compliments his idol’s work but says the ending feels like a different writer whereas JM destroys Liam’s efforts with cutting comments. Then Liam finds a file that illustrates that he is ensnared in a web of family secrets, resentment, and retribution … We don’t talk of his work, we don’t talk of Felix. Follow those rules and you should be fine. A working class wannabe is invited into a wealthy household and eventually his presence apparently destroys the power base and he is handed the keys of the kingdom. The head of household is played by Richard E. Grant. Sounds like Saltburn? Yes, and any or all iterations of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley. In this case Grant is a revered novelist and the tutor for his truculent son has written his dissertation on him and has ambitions to write novels himself. And it appears that Delpy’s Helene is a real femme fatale as the story unravels. So we might call this Slowburn. In fact, it is a very clever wonderfully constructed mystery thriller focused on writerliness and authorship with death as its beating heart. Quite who might be teaching whom, and what the lesson is, changes with each of the three acts and there’s a great payoff (in fact, there’s more than one). Everyone’s intentions are concealed, nature and water are utilised symbolically to plunder the psychological text and the central motif – the rhododendron – is key to the family secret which spills out to engulf Liam, the visitor with ulterior motives. He is played by Irish actor McCormack, whose subtle ingratiating into this warped family picture is not necessary because for quite some time he’s the only person here who has no idea why he’s really been hired. As he adds to the Post-Its for his next novel trusted butler Ellis (Crispin Letts) takes note because the references are entirely parasitic, reminding us that this plot has been used before with Jean-Paul Belmondo in The Spider’s Web and Terence Stamp in Theorem, throroughoing murderous black comedies about the bourgeoisie eating itself. However, integrating the writing experience into this social analysis, the suicide of an older son and a wife’s intricate plan to get revenge while saving her younger son from the same fate, add an entirely new dimension to the premise by debut screenwriter Adam MacKeith. The scheme is brilliantly exposed, with even clever clogs Liam not anticipating the conclusion. You’re not the first. Grant is scarily good as the dinner table bully mercilessly exploiting his older son’s death in private while a chilly Delpy’s character has secrets in abundance. Beautifully shot by cinematographer Anna Patarakina at Haddon House in Derbyshire with a sharp score by Isobel Waller-Bridge to match the shrewd and finely etched performances, this is a marvellous watch, a modern British noir, with an appropriate reminder of an old school screen villainess in the film Grant’s vicious Sinclair watches in his cinema, another element of planting that pays off properly in a knowing thriller. Directed by first-timer Alice Troughton. What makes an ending?

Civil War (2024)

We are now closer than we have ever been to victory. The near future. A civil war has broken out between an authoritarian US Government and various regional factions. The dictatorial President (Nick Offerman) who is serving a third term, claims that victory is close at hand. Renowned war photojournalist, Colorado-born Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) saves aspiring photojournalist Jessie Cullen (Cailee Spaeny) from a suicide bombing in Brooklyn. Lee and her colleague, Florida-born Reuters journalist Joel (Wagner Moura) intend travelling to Washington DC to interview and photograph the president before the city falls. Lee’s mentor New York Times veteran journalist Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson)asks to accompany them as far as Charlottesville where the Western Forces (‘WF’) of Texas and California are presently assembling. Despite Lee’s hesitance she and Joel agree. Unbeknownst to Lee, Jessie persuades Joel to take her with them as well. After leaving NYC, the group stops at a rural gas station protected by armed men where Lee negotiates the purchase of fuel in Canadian dollars. Jessie wanders off to a nearby car wash, which she saw from the road. There, she finds two men being tortured by the owners, who claim that the men are looters. One owner follows Jessie but Lee defuses the situation by taking a photo of the man posing with his victims. After leaving, Jessie berates herself for being too scared to take photos. Following an overnight stop close to ongoing fighting, the group documents the combat the next day as militiamen assault a building held by loyalists. Lee sees Jessie’s potential as a war photographer, while Jessie photographs the militia executing captured loyalist soldiers. Continuing on, the group spends the night at a refugee camp  before passing through a small town where, under watchful guard, residents attempt to live in blissful ignorance. Look at the tops of the buildings. Be subtle. Lee and Jessie grow closer, trying on clothes at a local shop. Later, they are pinned down in a sniper battle amid the remains of a Winter Wonderland theme park. No one’s giving us orders, man. Someone’s trying to kill us and we’re trying to kill them. The snipers they are with mock Joel’s attempts to ascertain which party they are fighting for or against, telling Joel that they and the sniper in a nearby house are simply engaged in a struggle for survival. Jessie’s nerve builds and her photography skills improve as she witnesses several deaths and she develops a mentorship under Lee … They shoot journalists on sight in the capital. Writer/director Alex Garland’s latest film plugs into the inflammatory State of the Union as it currently pertains, figuring a fissure that is as much physical as ideological with the Western secessionist states of California and Texas pitched against the federal forces that protect a President hiding out in the White House. Garland’s work from The Beach onwards has focused on trouble in paradise and lately on dystopia. Lee and Joel are both camouflaging psychological disturbance from previous war zones – she has PTSD, he has modern-day shellshock and Lee especially exhibits something world weary cynicism to control symptoms that threaten to erupt into something worse. It’s gonna make a good image. How that dissonance within Lee translates into a kind of mentoring relationship with Jessie reflecting Sammy’s relationship with her provides much of the tension as the action and violence spiral the further into the US they travel. I remember you at her age. The juxtaposing of beautiful landscapes with jarring imagery of shock and awe combat provides much of the troubling visual texture. The sense of reality, the minutiae of a road trip under fire and the urgency of the storytelling has the quality of reportage from the front line. The fact that Lee wants to photograph the President to prove he is still alive speaks volumes. What happens ultimately is straight out of the Romanian playbook. The ones who get taken are always lesser men than you think. With no enemies identified, the viewer is asked to come to their own conclusions, a motley crew of varying protagonist-journalists providing a kind of collegiate and immersive focus group of the population, a prism for coming to terms with radical change and war as Americans fight Americans. Every instinct in me tells me this is death. Whether the presence and role of good old-fashioned photojournalists recording events makes a difference is not really questioned here – it’s presumed necessary for history: proof that things are happening because seeing is believing. Hence the acknowledged reference to Lee Miller in Dunst’s character’s name. What kind of American are you? A powerful state of the nation portrait that feels immediate and true. What happened back there is nothing in comparison with what we’re heading into

And the Band Played On (1993) (TVM)

Is there a name yet for this disease? 1976: by the Ebola River in Zaire. American epidemiologist Don Francis (Matthew Modine) of the World Health Organisation arrives in a village where he finds many of the residents and the doctor working with them have died from a mysterious illness later identified as the Ebola haemorrhagic fever. It’s his first exposure to this kind of epidemic and the images of the dead he helps to cremate haunt him when he later becomes involved with HIV/AIDS research at the CDE (Centres for Disease Control and Prevention) in Atlanta. 1981: Francis becomes aware of a growing number of deaths among gay men in Los Angeles, New York city and San Francisco from a rare lung condition – pneumocystis pneumonia. It only afflicts people with weakened immune systems. He moves to Atlanta, Georgia where CDC Administrator Dr. James Curran (Saul Rubinek) asks him to begin an in-depth investigation into this new immune disorder. Due to the Reagan Administration’s clampdown on public spending, Francis is forced to work with little money, limited space and outdated equipment including microscopes. He clashes with members of the medical community, many of whom resent his involvement because of their personal agendas. Francis comes into contact with the gay community after he and his colleagues find strong evidence that the disease is spread through sex. Some gay men support him, such as San Francisco activist and congressional aide Bill Kraus (Ian McKellen) but others such as Bobbi Campbell (Donal Logue) express anger at what they see as unwanted interference in their lives, especially in his attempts to close the local bath houses, read as homophobia. Kraus works with the doctors treating gay patients to try to save the gay community from the virus, to the point that it costs his own relationship with boyfriend Kico Govantes (BD Wong) who moves on with an architect. Francis and other CDC staff are shocked that representatives of the blood industry are unwilling to do anything to try to curb the epidemic because of potential financial losses. While Francis pursues his theory that AIDS is caused by a sexually transmitted virus (based on his own interest in feline leukaemia and Hepatitis B) his efforts are stymied because of competition between French scientists from Paris’ Pasteur Institute led by virologist Luc Montagnier (Patrick Bauchau) and American scientists, particularly Robert Gallo (Alan Alda) of the National Institutes of Health who is enraged when he finds out that Francis collaborated in typically collegiate fashion with the French scientists. The researchers squabble over who should receive credit for discovering the virus and for development of a blood test. Meanwhile the death toll climbs among many different types of people including children who receive infected blood. One day in 1984, while exercising at a local gym, Kraus notices a spot on his ankle and worries that it might be Kaposi’s sarcoma, an AIDS-defining illness … The party’s over. One of the two most essential publications of the 1990s (the other being Crisis in the Hot Zone) was Randy Shilts’ 1987 non-fiction book And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. Excellently adapted by the venerable screenwriter Arnold Schulman (who died February 2023 aged 97) and premiered at the Montreal Film Festival before being screened on TV first by HBO and later by NBC, it knits several strands of storytelling together. It of course has the flavour of public service broadcasting as well as that benighted niche, Movie Illness of the Week. But with this cast and talent never mind the source material it still possesses a unique urgency. This could be the first deadly epidemic in history in which nobody officially died. The intricate scaffolding of the screenplay is constructed to bring together the various aspects of the teams working in silos who unwittingly find commonalities but take their time to work out their findings collectively through accident and coincidence until finally they discover the starting point. Almost everyone I know has or wants to. An internationally starry cast including Lily Tomlin, Steve Martin, Nathalie Baye, Glenne Headly, Anjelica Huston and Tcheky Karyo – with Richard Gere’s cameo as a version of (unnamed) acclaimed choreographer Michael Bennett – finds itself linked to the impossibly handsome Gaetan Dugas aka Patient Zero (Jeffrey Nordlin) that French-Canadian air steward the carrier who is symptom-free until he gets Kaposi’s. It’s like all the plagues in the history of the world got squeezed into one. When it’s not just gay men but African women in Paris and Haitian people in the US and babies in NYC dying from what Prince called the big disease with a little name, the strands of the narrative are united just as the personal issues are pushed to the forefront with a race to find a vaccine. The sparing use of archive, timed to punctuate developments and place them in an historical context, assists the affect of the performances. I want to stop you from turning this holocaust into an international pissing contest. On the political front there are a number of interests – the Reagan administration, the CDC, the doctors whose big pharma investments are at risk, the blood banks, the gay activists resistant to the bath house closures and then there’s the rivalry between Gallo and the Pasteur Institute which the American narcissist insists is a competition between countries. When doctors start acting like businessmen, who do people turn to for doctors? The irony that the man preaching safe sex finds himself infected is wonderfully exposed in McKellen’s subtle performance. Ultimately progress comes down to the same sample leading the competitors to discover the first new human retrovirus. This is where the diseases are. In an impressive ensemble, which doesn’t extol one individual over any other, Modine as Francis is the motor and the conscience, the protagonist whose original findings in Africa trigger his understanding of the spread of the disease creating empathy for a difficult front line that involves the everyday problems besetting the medical profession. The credits rollcall of the dead – from Arthur Ashe to Ryan White – and the movement’s activists, over Elton John’s The Last Song, is sobering indeed. Elegantly directed by Roger Spottiswoode who delivers a coherent, moving and emotive docudrama with a powerful political punch about stigma, prejudice, ignorance and self-interest that still has the capacity to make jaws drop in chronicling an epidemic with lessons for everyone. Will we ever learn? And will anyone ever commit to the fact that the origin of the protein that evolved alternately into HIV/AIDS or Ebola in humans came from Africans eating monkeys? This was known in 1993, when this film was produced, six years after Randy Shilts’ book was published but presumably nobody dared bring it up. We still fear a little reality about the transmission of disease in a world where borders no longer exist in the rush for globalised profit and concomitant unstoppable uncontrolled migration. This didn’t have to happen. We could have stopped it

BlackBerry (2023)

We call it PocketLink. 1996: Waterloo, Ontario. The co-founder and CEO Mike Lazirides (Jay Baruchel) of Research in Motion and his best friend and co-founder Doug Fregin (Matt Johnson) are preparing to pitch their ‘PocketLink” cellular device to businessman Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton). Lazaridis is bothered by the incessant buzzing of Balsillie’s Chinese intercom and fixes it before Balsillie arrives to the meeting. Their pitch is unsuccessful but when Balsillie is fired from his job due to his aggressive ambition, he agrees to work with them provided he is made CEO of RIM and given one half of the company. They hesitate but after they confirm Basillie’s suspicion that their deal with US Robotics was a malicious attempt to bankrupt them, they bring Balsillie in as co-CEO with one third of RIM for a cash infusion that requires Balsillie to mortgage his house. Balsillie arranges a pitch for the PocketLink with Bell Atlantic and forces Fregin and Lazaridis to build a crude prototype overnight which he and Lazaridis take to New York. Lazaridis forgets the prototype in their taxi, leaving Balsillie to attempt the pitch alone. Lazaridis recovers the prototype at the eleventh hour and finishes the pitch, rebranding the PocketLink as the ‘BlackBerry’ which becomes massively successful. 2003: Palm CEO Carl Yankowski (Cary Elwes) plans a hostile takever of RIM which forces Balsillie to try to raise RIM’s stockprice by selling more phones than Bell Atlantic’s (now Verizon Communications) network can support. This crashes the network, as Lazaridis had warned, so Balsillie poaches engineers from around the world to fix the problem, as well as hiring a man named Charles Purdy (Michael Ironside) as RIM’s COO to keep the engineers in line but this upsets Fregin who values the casual fun work environment he and Lazaridis had created. The new engineers fix the network issue under Purdy’s strict management enabling RIM to avoid Yankowski’s buyout. 2007: RIM’s upcoming pitch of the BlackBerry Bold to Verizon is thrown into chaos when Steve Jobs announces the iPhone … You’re not selling togetherness any more. You’re selling self-reliance. The story of the original smartphone is equal parts horrifying and hilarious. The original Canadian tech bros vs their own boss (with differences cleverly signalled by their in-car musical choices) whose acquisitiveness culminates in a funny aeroplane chase across the US trying to buy out the National Hockey League is on the money when it comes to the cultural differences between creatives and financiers. Maybe we could call it the prophet: profit margin. The core initially is the long-term friendship between Mike and Doug which is gradually usurped by Mike’s dealings with the reptilian Jim who is performed with vainglorious precision by Howerton. His presence prises the friends apart as Mike cannot handle the pressure and Doug cannot comprehend his fraility. This has the virtues of a whistleblower-style docudrama, recounting that insanely good idea to combine a cellphone with a pager and email. The dark moment when Steve Jobs announces the iPhone triggers a chain reaction of events of a desperation that is blackly comic and (almost) tragic. Mike’s presentation to Verizon is a model of a public nervous breakdown. How a small operation of laidback tech geniuses is transformed into an impersonal profit-driven major player (albeit briefly) with grownups in the once friendly groovy music-filled workplace being supervised as though they’re retarded teens in a silent call centre is sobering but explains much about our paranoid surveillance society and the men who control it. This razor-sharp comedy drama is directed by co-star Matt Johnson from a screenplay co-written with producer Matthew Miller. I created this entire product class!

Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012)(TVM)

There’s war and there’s war. 1990s: Renowned war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (Nicole Kidman) is recalling her youthful relationship with novelist Ernest Hemingway (Clive Owen). 1936, Key West, Florida. She meets him by chance in a bar and back at his house run by his wife Pauline Pfeiffer (Molly Parker) the two’s undeniable attraction is noted. My husband always says kill enough animals and you won’t kill yourself. The two writers encounter each other a year later in Spain where both are covering the Civil War, staying in the same hotel on the same floor. Initially, Gellhorn resists romantic advances made by Hemingway but during a bombing raid the two find themselves trapped alone in the same room and are overcome by lust as dust from the conflagration covers their bodies. They become lovers and stay in Spain until 1939. Hemingway collaborates with Joris Ivens (Lars Ulrich) to make the film The Spanish Earth. In 1940 Hemingway divorces Pauline so that he and Gellhorn can be married. He credits her with having inspired him to write the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and dedicates it to her. Over time however Gellhorn becomes more prominent in her own right, leading to some career jealousies between them. Gellhorn leaves Hemingway to go to Finland to cover the Winter War by herself. When she returns to the Lookout Farm in Havana the maid has quit and she tells him the place looks like a Tijuana whorehouse. Hemingway tells her that he has divorced Pauline. The two marry and travel together to China to cover the bombings by Japan. In China, they interview Chiang Kai Shek (Larry Tse) and his wife (Joan Chen) who Gelhorn can’t best when she expresses her horror after visiting an opium den where she has spotted a little girl. Chiang Kai shek is fighting the Chinese Communists and Japanese invaders. Hemingway and Gellhorn secretly visit Zhou Enlai (Anthony Brandon Wong) the revolutionary content to play both ends against the middle until his time comes. Gellhorn covers D-Day in Normandy. She reports on the Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps and his so horrified she runs out of them … There’s nothing to writing. Sit at your typewriter and bleed. Bluster and confidence, the devastation of war, lust and fine writing, a universe of division and conflict and conscience, all are called upon as the affair and marriage of two of the twentieth century’s best writers bear witness to unfolding history. Beautifully shot by Rogier Stoffers using different camera effects and archive montages to insert the characters into both colorised and monochrome footage, there is an uneven tone to this biopic as well as shifts in performance particularly by Owen who doesn’t quite capture the self-aggrandising charisma of Hemingway but certainly asserts his sexist boorish aspect. There is a certain comedy to the introduction of the famous characters, who take time to establish themselves in the narrative and sometimes play minor roles, there to augment and embellish the self-mythologising author who is hard to pin down here (Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris does this with caustic aplomb). Surrounded by an entourage of sycophants and hangers on, only John Dos Passos (David Strathairn) appears to question Hemingway’s macho posturing. When Hemingway admits he’s taken her Collier’s contract, Martha repeats what the man he calls the second best American writer has said of Hemingway and he hits her across the face: we know the marriage must be over. But not quite. There’s still a final act of war and humiliation. They have persuasively created a sexual and co-habiting relationship that is sometimes hard to watch when they exchange harsh words – but then wind up laughing at the good of it all. Until they fight again and it becomes ever more vicious. They’ll still be reading me long after you’ve been eaten by worms. Hemingway’s demise following his marriage to Mary Welsh (Parker Posey), who’s written as a celeb-hunting nicompoop, which may not be quite fair, is dramatic and swift in storytelling time (those presumably causative head injuries in the later aeroplane crashes are not covered albeit the car crash here with Welsh probably contributed to it). It’s a rich tapestry and while not successful overall, with an occasional (if forgivable) lurch into domestic melodrama, there are moments of genuine humour, black comedy and horror. For instance when Kai Shek dumps his dentures into a teacup and his verbose spider spouse does the talking and makes an unwilling Gellhorn take a gift. That’s history. The only thing that really interests me is people. Their lives. Their daily lives. And there are instances in war zones when Gellhorn scoops up children as their parents bleed to death and Hemingway, the father of sons by his previous wives, scoffs yet paradoxically admires her humanity. When Gellhorn walks into Dachau but then says Auschwitz was unbelievably worse and just takes off running we sense her disbelief. Kidman is quite splendid for much of the film. This is an amazingly comprehensive and visually immersive portrait of a man and a woman who were at the heart of a decade of world-changing events whose impact we still live with today. However their characters are almost too big to contain (and the gargantuan 2021 Ken Burns and Lynn Novick docu-series Hemingway has far more biographical information), literally covering too much ground with the prism of a domestic battle perhaps too slight for such an enormous focus. Necessarily episodic, the protagonists’ differences are sketched out schematically so this goes just a little way toward explaining why both are legends and Gellhorn fought so hard for her individuation. As she says here, she’s more than just a footnote to Hemingway. Consider this film restitution. At 155 minutes, this was premiered at Cannes but broadcast as a mini-series by HBO. Written by Jerry Stahl & Barbara Turner and directed by Philip Kaufman. We were good in war. And where there was no war we made our own. The battlefield we couldn’t survive was domestic life

One Life (2023)

Lots of them grew up thinking the worst thing that was ever going to happen to them was piano practice. 1987, Maidenhead, England. Retired 79-year old Nicholas Winton (Anthony Hopkins) cleans up some of the clutter in his office, which his wife (Lena Olin) Grete asked him to do. He finds old documents in which he recorded his pre-war work for the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia and a scrapbook with photos and lists of the children they wanted to bring to safety. Winton still blames himself for not being able to save more. In 1938 just weeks after the signing of the Munich Agreement 29-year-old London stockbroker Nicholas (Johnny Flynn) encounters families in Prague who had fled the rise of the Nazis in Germany and Austria. They are living in bad conditions with little or no shelter or food and in fear of the invasion of the Nazis. Winton is introduced to Doreen Warriner (Romola Garai) (BCRC). Horrified by the situation in the refugee camps, Winton decides to save Jewish children himself. Actively supported by his mother Babette (Helena Bonham Carter) herself a German-Jewish migrant who has since converted to the Church of England he overcomes bureaucratic hurdles, collects donations and looks for foster families for the children brought to England. Many of them are Jews who are at imminent risk of deportation. When the Nazis invade, Doreen and Trevor Chadwick (Alex Sharp) face unimaginable danger themselves. 1987: at lunch with his old friend Martin (Jonathan Pryce) Nicholas thinks about what he should do with all the documents. He is considering donating them to a Holocaust museum but at the same time he wants to draw some attention to the current plight of refugees, so he does not do it. I started the whole thing so I have to finish it. 1938: A race against time begins as it is unclear how long the borders will remain open before the inevitable Nazi invasion. The ninth train has yet to leave the platform when the Nazis invade Poland … You have to let go for your own sake. Based upon Winton’s life story which culminated in an absurdly moving reunion on a 1988 edition of TV’s That’s Life show hosted by Esther Rantzen (played here by Samantha Spiro), this true story from a screenplay by Lucinda Coxon & Nick Drake is a timely reminder of the ongoing plight of Jewish children in an anti-semitic world and the bravery of the pre-war humanitarians who sought to save them from certain and brutal death at the hands of the Germans. Part of the drama is the underplayed revelation that Winton himself has been assimilated in the UK, pivoting his role into one of recognition of the There but for the grace of God variety. Fifty years later Winton is still raising funds for refugees, still plagued by a sense of guilt that he could have done so much more for his own Kindertransports. I’ve learned to keep my imagination in check so I can still be of use and not go raving mad. Perhaps the feel-good factor predominates as opposed to the reality of what the children experienced but this is intended as an uplifting tale, hooking into the curated balm of a startling and beloved TV event. Based on the memoir If It’s Not Impossible …The Life of Sir Nicholas Winton, written by his daughter, the late Barbara Winton, who personally requested Hopkins play her father, he offers a performance of pitch perfect emotion, decent and unfussy – a thoroughly upstanding Englishman who wanted to do the right thing and now reflects on what he perceives as his tragic failure. He said: I was only interested in getting the children to England and I didn’t mind a damn what happened to them afterwards, because the worst that would happen to them in England was better than being in the fire. Praise too for Bonham Carter who is wonderful as his super efficient no-nonsense mother Babi, rattling the doors of Whitehall. (Shall we gloss over the fact that Marthe Keller is cast as Elisabeth Maxwell?) It’s not about me. In an era of shocking narcissism this is a wonderfully sobering story of selflessness and the consequences of bearing witness when the German tanks are rolling in. Absurdly moving, in its own very quiet way. Directed by James Hawes making his feature film debut. Save one life, save the world

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)

Aka Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios. Women aren’t dangerous if you know how to handle them. Television actress Pepa Marcos (Carmen Maura) is depressed because her boyfriend fellow actor Iván (Fernando Guillen) has left her. They dub foreign films, notably Johnny Guitar starring Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden and she has missed their morning recording because she took a sleeping pill. Iván’s sweet-talking voice is the same one he uses in his work. About to leave on a trip, he has asked Pepa to pack his things in a suitcase he will pick up later. Pepa returns home to her apartment to find her answering machine filled with frantic messages from her friend Candela (Maria Barranco) a model. She rips out the phone and throws it out the window onto the balcony of her penthouse where dozens of her animal friends live including a pair of ducks. Candela arrives but before she can explain her situation Carlos (Antonio Banderas) Iván’s son with his wife Lucía (Julieta Serrano) arrives with his snobbish fiancée Marisa (Rossy de Palma). They are apartment-hunting and have been sent by an agency to tour the apartment. Carlos and Pepa figure out each other’s relationship to Iván – they had already met at the phone booth outside Carlos’ home the previous evening. Pepa wants to know where Iván is, but Carlos does not know. Candela tries to kill herself by jumping off the balcony. A bored Marisa decides to drink gazpacho from the fridge, unaware that it has been spiked with sleeping pills. Candela explains that she had an affair with an Arab who later visited her with some friends. Unbeknownst to her, they are a Shi’ite terrorist cell. When the terrorists leave, Candela flees to Pepa’s place; she fears that the police are after her. Pepa goes to see a lawyer whom Carlos has recommended. The lawyer, Paulina Morales (Kiti Manver) behaves strangely and has tickets to travel to Stockholm. Candela tells Carlos that the terrorists plan to hijack a flight to Stockholm that evening and divert it to Beirut to demand the release of an incarcerated friend. Carlos fixes the phone, calls the police, hangs up before (he believes) they can trace the call and kisses Candela. Pepa returns; Lucía calls and says that she is coming over to confront her about Iván. Carlos says that Lucía has recently been released from a mental hospital. Pepa, tired of Iván, throws his suitcase out (barely missing him); he leaves Pepa a message. Pepa returns to her apartment and hears Carlos playing the Lola Beltran song Soy Infeliz. She throws the record out the window, and it hits Paulina. Pepa hears Iván’s message, rips out the phone and throws the answering machine out of the window. Lucía arrives with the telephone repairman and the police, who traced Carlos’ call. Candela panics, but Carlos serves the spiked gazpacho. The policemen and repairman are knocked out, and Carlos and Candela fall asleep on the sofa; Lucía aims a policeman’s gun at Pepa, who figures out that Iván is going to Stockholm with Paulina and their flight is the one the terrorists are planning to hijack … Weird things happen all of a sudden. Enfant terrible Pedro Almodovar’s international breakthrough, this was a smash hit from its initial release in Spain and became the biggest grossing foreign film in the US since Fellini’s 8 1/2 – which is just one of the many ironies proliferating in this story because it’s the first homage in a meta referential narrative centering on film, recording, dubbing and projection. Ludicrous coincidences, general hysteria, a suitcase that keeps changing hands, repeatedly pulling the phone and answering machine out of the wall, using prescription meds to control every situation, a mambo taxi stocked to the gills with every magazine, music genre and toiletry known to humanity that shows up every time Pepa needs a lift, all life is here in the most confident expression yet of Almodovar’s art. For once Maura is suited and booted in great tailoring in a setting that’s colour coded to the max with red the ultimate flashpoint for this sincerely crazy tribute to melodrama, with Joan Crawford providing the film within a film. I thought this sort of thing only happened in films! A vivid, nutty melodramatic farce, this is simply unforgettable. Released 25th March 1988, that means it’s time to wish Women a very happy birthday! What an insane story!