Category Archives: Movies

Beautifully filmed, this documentary tells in real time the avalanche of 18 April 2014 that took the lives of sixteen sherpas and prompted their refusal to climb Chomolungma, the mother god of Earth that we know as Mt Everest. Big Western money was at stake here with customers ( because, let’s face it- this IS a business) paying big money to have Sherpas transport their every need from camp to camp so that they could cross ‘Everest’ off their bucket list.  Westerners crossed the treacherous and unstable Khumbu Icefall glacier just twice: the Sherpas crossed it twenty to thirty times, carrying heavy loads in the darkness because sunlight made the glacier even more treacherous and unpredictable.  There had been conflict in 2013 when a Westerner swore on the mountain, viewed by the Sherpas as a holy site, and after this avalanche the Sherpas were under government and commercial pressure to recommence their work.

You’re told in the opening sequence that the avalanche is going to occur, and I found myself holding my breath wondering just when it was going to happen. I felt angry at the manipulation exerted on the Sherpas, and the self-centredness of the disgruntled customers.  And, watching this in the knowledge of the death just recently of that young Australian woman on Everest, made me even more certain that there is no way, physically or ethically, that I would ever climb it!

I went to see this (just before it ended, as usual) largely on the strength of the positive review in received in The Age. I was a bit disappointed.  Based on the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, it is set in 1958 when other prosecutors refuse to take up charges against an ex-Nazi now working illegally at a school after ‘de-Nazification’.  A young prosecutor feels compelled to do so even though he is completely unaware of the pervasiveness and nature of Nazi atrocities. I guess that this is where I couldn’t suspend disbelief sufficiently, as 1958 post-dated the Nuremberg trials, and while I acknowledge wilful forgetting, I find innocent ignorance harder to believe.

Even if I am wrong about this- and I’m quite ready to acknowledge that I might be- I found the film very predictable. So predictable, in fact, that I was correctly anticipating lines of dialogue before they were delivered, and anticipated most of the plot-turns in advance.

So, no glowing review from me.  And now that I look, the Guardian didn’t think much of it either.

I was surprised to look back at my review of Brooklyn and find that I was muted in my appreciation of the book.  Let me proclaim in a big loud voice, then, that I absolutely loved the film.  Of course, having read the book, I knew what was going to happen and so every scene was pregnant for me with its later sorrow and complexity.

It was rather disconcerting to see that Nick Hornby was credited for the screenplay over Colm Toibin as the original author, especially as the film was so faithful to the book generally (with perhaps a reservation about the explicitness of the ending). What a strange priority.

It’s beautiful, as is Saoirse Ronan. One of my favourite films for the year so far.

I wish that the film maker had placed the notice that appears at the end of this film at the beginning instead.  In it, he says that much of the dialogue and ideas have come from testimony and writings generated in 17th century North America, when belief in witchcraft resulted in the Salem witch-trials. Then, by coincidence  I heard a podcast about Salem the very night that I’d seen the film that brought home to me how careful the research had been for this film and how well the filmmaker has constructed the world view it depicts.

Thomasin is the budding adolescent daughter of William and Katherine, who along with their small family have been expelled from their Puritan plantation. Exiled from contact, the family builds a small farm, surrounded by woods. The crops fail and the family is thrown onto its own resources and their deep belief in predestination and a stern, capricious and unyielding God. When the baby disappears and the eldest son dies, the family turn on each other.   There’s a very good feminist discussion of the film here.

If the historical note at the end had come earlier, I would have taken the film more seriously as an exploration of the 17th century mindset and worldview.  As it was, I kept expecting graphic horror effects to explode onto the screen the next minute, and never quite stopped feeling that I was watching actors bumbling around in a historical re-enactment tourist site.  The cinematography is beautiful and the music suitably distressing.  In fact, the film has unnerved and affected me more after hearing the BBC podcast and in the light of its historical credentials.  I just wish I’d known that earlier.

I normally find Holocaust films too difficult to watch, but this film received such glowing reviews that I decided to see it.  In the opening scenes, the camera focuses on Saul Auslander, a Sonderkommander at the Auschwitz crematorium. It remains focussed, intently and intensely, on Saul while everything around him is blurred.  When the camera isn’t trained on him, it shifts behind him, as if you’re looking over his shoulder, seeing through his eyes.  The noise is deafening; the shouted orders to keep hurrying are relentless, and the moral enormity of what he is being asked to do is overwhelming. The blurred vision is a protection for Saul and for us as viewers.  I must confess that I came out not really knowing whether Saul’s claims were true or not, and whether he was mad or not – I suspect that he was.  The real power of this film is the way it locates you as a viewer in a bleak and confronting nightmare. I can’t at all say that I ‘enjoyed’ it, but it is utterly memorable.

I have recently discovered the joys of Miserly Monday or whatever you call the cut-price day at the Nova Cinema in Carlton, along with the many other recently-retired baby boomers I’ve observed there over this past six months.  I certainly felt as if I was in musty company with this film, which is obviously aimed at an older audience; a cohort which no doubt will grow larger with the numerical bulge of retirees filling in their days at the cinema.  Is that a bad thing? No, says my Lunchtime Companion, but I’m not so sure. I don’t know if I like being demographically pegged and marketed to quite so blatantly.

Retired couple Kate and Geoff live a very quiet life in rural Norfolk, and the action takes place over the days preceding their 45th wedding anniversary celebration party, which had been postponed on account of Geoff’s illness five years earlier.  Theirs is a routinized, comfortable, intellectual,  quiet (I can’t emphasize how quiet!) relationship, with Geoff diminished because of illness and age. However, when news arrives from the past, Kate finds herself judging their time together with an unforgiving severity.

The film is based on a short story and I can imagine that it would work very well in a more compressed format.  As it is, though, I don’t think that it sustained a ninety minute film which both actors- consummate and brilliant as they are- could have captured in a shorter film.( In fact, I’m surprised that it was only 90 minutes because it felt longer) The scenery while glorious, became rather laboured with such blatant pathetic fallacy treatment.  That said, though, the acting was first-rate and the emotional rendering subtle and adult. Just perhaps a bit too adult!

The setting is often a powerful force in a movie and this is certainly the case in ‘Rams’, set in a small rural town in Iceland.  The local economy and community identity revolve around sheep. When scrapie is diagnosed among one of the flocks, it spells ruin for everyone, including two estranged brothers.  Although they live next door to each other, conscious at all times of each other’s movements, they have not spoken for decades. The bleak, unforgiving environment is an unlikely but memorable setting for an  unexpected love story.

A very British movie which I doubt could be made anywhere else, combining as it does that English reserve with a similarly English tolerance of eccentricity. The technique of double narrators captured well Bennett’s ambivalence and archness. I was disappointed that it descended into whimsy in the last scenes, though. Perhaps I should have left three minutes before the end.