Category Archives: Movies

When, within the first ten minutes or so of the movie starting I saw a head sawed in half vertically and the skin peeled off, THEN I remembered that this was a J. G. Ballard story. I do not like J. G. Ballard stories (except perhaps for Empire of the Sun).  This was a dystopian, violent nightmare of a movie that I didn’t understand one little bit.

All those four and five star ratings! No, this was too bleak and ugly for this little old lady. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it.

Don’t read this posting. Go straight to iview instead and watch this movie/documentary before 1.58 a.m. on November 3, 2016 while it’s still available. It’s one of the most powerful pieces of cinema that I’ve seen in years.

I hadn’t heard of Andrea Dunbar. She was a young British writer who followed the adage ‘write what you know’. What she knew was the wasteland of a Bradford housing estate in Thatcher’s Britain of the 1980s, where the eponymous Brafferton Arbor was a bleak patch of blighted grass, surrounded by terraced public housing with boarded windows.  Her first play was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London when she was a 20 year old single mother, and her follow-up  Rita Sue and Bob Too was developed as a film in 1987.  She was dead by 1990 at the age of 29, leaving three children by three different fathers.

This film is based on interviews with the family, most particularly her two daughters, conducted by the filmmaker Clio Barnard. The oral interviews have been lip-synced by actors.  I only learned this later, and spent most of the movie, transfixed, wondering whether I was watching a movie or a documentary.  It was only when I recognized the actor who plays Inspector Barnaby in the new Midsomer Murders, and marvelling at his accent, that I realized that it wasn’t a documentary. It is interspersed with documentary footage from the 1980s of Andrea Dunbar, and a performance in 2010 of her play ‘The Arbor’ on the estate itself, watched by the current residents.  I was amused that this extract from the film had subtitles: I found myself craving them on several occasions:

It is a very dark film about intergenerational poverty and harm. Her two daughters have diametrically opposed views of their mother, and it’s so easy to judge.  Absolutely brilliant.

We caught this film last week at the Latin American Film Festival.  I actually knew who Pablo Neruda was, because we read several of his most famous poems in my Spanish conversation class at the local library.  He was a Chilean poet, who became famous through a collection of poems called Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair that he wrote in 1924at the age of nineteen. He went on to have a prominent political and diplomatic career.  He was a senator for the Chilean Communist Party, but when Communism was outlawed in Chile in 1948, he escaped to Argentina. His death has become increasingly controversial over recent years, with the Pinochet government assertion that Neruda died of cancer, being increasingly questioned.

This film is the imagined story of Neruda’s escape to Valparaiso and across the mountains to Argentina, pursued to a Javert-type policeman (think Les Miserables) who, although unfamiliar with him as a poet, sees the chase in very personal terms.

And no- I couldn’t follow the Spanish very well.

Set in Turkey, five orphaned adolescent sisters find their freedom increasingly circumscribed when the neighbours complain about the girls’ rambunctious behaviour with boys. Prompted by the girls’ uncle, their grandmother insists on them wearing shapeless, all-covering clothes outside, their schooling is discontinued and the wheels are in motion for the girls to be married off in traditional arranged marriages.

Although viewers are clearly intended to identify with the girls’ resistance to this familial and cultural oppression, I must confess that some  (just some) of my sympathies rested with the grandmother who was bullied by her son into bringing them into line, and who, in the final analysis, had to find some way to get these five (five!) sisters off her hands. They are all very close in age, all rather voyeuristically tactile with each others, and yes- they are out of control.  I found the contrast between their freedom inside the cloistered house incompatible with their restrictions outside it, and the sudden imposition of traditional values within a cosmopolitan city seemed forced and implausible.

So, three-and-a half stars from me.

A friend recommended this film as a feel-good, gentle comedy and that’s exactly what it is. It’s in Italian with English subtitles. A surgeon, who has rather a God-complex himself, is rattled when his son decides that he is going to become a priest.  The surgeon, who is certainly a sceptic if not an outright aetheist, decides to investigate the priest with whom his son has become friends and finds more to him than he expected.

It’s not deep or challenging in any way, but certainly worth considering if you want to while away an hour or two.

Oh NO!! I thought as I settled into my seat, looked around, and realized that I’d just paid good money to go to a kid’s movie, and worse still, there were kids sitting all around me. When did I become so ageist?

Well, as it turned out, one of the real pleasures was watching the little boy sitting next to me (kicking the back of the seat in front the whole way through) become increasingly involved in this delightful, engaging story (and even stop kicking).   The scenery is beautiful and it’s pure New Zealand gothic.  Ward-of-the-state and misunderstood ‘bed igg’ (it IS New Zealand) Ricky Baker worms his way into the affections of his foster-uncle as they set off on a escape from the Miss Truchball-esque welfare officer. I admit to a little tear in the eye and felt thoroughly satisfied by this feel-good family story.  In fact, if pressed, I felt so warm and squishy that could even extrude a grim smile at the little boy sitting next to me if I really had to.