I caught this just in time, after declaring months ago that I wanted to see it. I read the book several years ago and you can read my review here. At the time, I was rather dubious about Nicole Kidman in the main role, although now having seen it, I think it could have worked.
It certainly is beautifully filmed, with almost every shot self-consciously framed as art in its own right. The real story (complete with photographs of the original Lily Elbe) can be found here. The film felt somewhat too much like a costume drama with a sad ending and that a final scene that seemed too ‘storied’. Excellent acting from both main characters, but when I re-read my review of the book, the film seems to have had much of the complexity stripped out.
Some of the reviews that I’d read of The Big Short criticized it for being overly-didactic. “Didac away!” I say, because I found the details of the Global Financial Crisis rather mind-numbing and- as any of you who have met me will testify- I’m really no good with numbers. And so, this film is a bit “GFC for Dummies” but hey- that’s me. It’s told in a furiously fast, deliberately self-mocking fashion with lots of thrash metal music and swooping camera shots, but it was a very accessible way to approach something that could be as dry as dust. My repugnance for the moral hazard that these men (and it is overwhelmingly men) exposed themselves to in betting that the whole financial system would crash was soon sidelined by my repugnance for the power structures that allowed the bankers to get away with it.
This Guardian review discusses the historical accuracy of the film, and gives it a thumbs-up. Combined with the film 99 Homes (which I reviewed here), you’d get a pretty rounded history of recent events.
UK and US armies are co-operating in drone surveillance of suspected Al-Shabab terrorists in Kenya. When it seems that an attack is imminent, the decision needs to be made whether or not to make a pre-emptive drone strike.
Yes, it’s taut and on-the-edge of your seat. But it also feels a little bit like a simulation game in Ethics 101, with the ethical dilemmas being racheted up, bit by bit. At first I was sceptical, thinking that there wouldn’t be any question that the attack would be made ( a feeling reinforced by seeing the attack on the Pakistani playground on tonight’s news). But then the film reminded me of the propaganda value of YouTube videos of a drone attack, like those released by Edward Snowden, and the challenge made to unthinking obedience when the military environment is more reliant on computer experts than grunts laden with weaponry.
A film about a Kenyan terrorist attack is all a bit close to the bone for me, given my son’s presence there, but I reassured myself that it wasn’t really filmed in Kenya but in South Africa- and I’m very proud that I deduced that myself from minor infelicities in the film (the airport; the lines on the tarmacced road; too few people in the market).
Nonetheless, a solid 4/5 for me although I did come out feeling exhausted and as if I’d been coerced into participating in a very unpleasant hypothetical exercise.
Okay, I confess that I’d never heard of Dalton Trumbo but I had heard of the House Un- American Committee that trawled through Hollywood looking for Communist sympathizers. I only watched the first series of Breaking Bad, so I have only warm feelings towards Bryan Cranston, who was wonderful in this movie. I kept looking at Helen Mirren, wondering if it was her or not (it was), and I enjoyed the re-creation of black-and-white film vision which was inserted into the movie at various times. I was amazed to think that the HUAC was only finally terminated in 1975. And I’m sure that it’s no surprise that the movie was produced during a time of surveillance and judicial control of radical Islam and ‘Un-American’ activities.
Mr Judge rarely wants to accompany me to the movies, but if its a Coen Brothers movie, then that’s different. So there were both were, frocked up to see Hail, Caesar!
Hail, Caesar is like a mash-up of every 1950s Saturday afternoon movie you ever saw. It follows Eddie Mannix, the ‘fixer’ at Capitol Movies over one day as he juggles stars and starlets between movies, sorts out their private lives, soothes egos and fends off the press. All in a day’s work, it seems, including negotiations the ransom of the star of Hail Caesar, a biblical blockbuster when he is kidnapped by Communist Hollywood film writers (yes, Virginia, there really were Communists in Hollywood). In passing, the studio door opens and shuts on Esther-Williamesque swimming sequences, tap-dancing sailors, and a costume drama with an ill-chosen lead actor who is more comfortable in westerns. T’were that it were so simple.
This film reminded me a bit of Monty Python films in that in small snippets it is hilarious, but you’d be hard pressed to find any overarching meaning in the whole thing. I watched it still under the influence of jet-lag and must confess to ‘resting my eyes’ just a little during the film. When it finished, I wondered if it had actually finished, or whether it was going to start again after the credits? Had missed I something crucial that made it hang together? No, it was just a self-referential spoof with a wink. Good fun though, and like Monty Python, may become better known for its parts than for the whole.
lt seems as if I’ve been seeing trailers at the Nova advertising Carol for months and I felt as if I knew what the story was going to be before I sat down to watch it at last. So I was rather surprised to find that Rooney Mara’s character Therese was an observer as well as a protagonist for events faced by Cate Blanchett’s character Carol. It was a quieter, more detached movie than I expected and I (dare I say it?), I felt that it was a little slow.
Set in Boston in 2001, this film explores the exposure by the Boston Globe of the widescale abuse of children by Catholic clergy, and the part of Cardinal Law in covering it up.
I enjoyed this much more than ‘Truth‘, which was a similar movie. At the end of the film there are two screens of cities where similar cover-ups occurred, and there was palpable curiosity to see whether Melbourne would be included (it was). I came out feeling proud that I still subscribe to two hard-copy newspapers and one digital one.
I don’t know why it took me so long to see this film. Perhaps it’s because I’m not really a fan of black-and-white musicals and comedies of the 1940s and 1950s. I hadn’t heard of Orry-Kelly at all, but I guess I’m not alone in that. It’s largely because Orry-Kelly, three time Oscar winner for costume design is largely unknown in his home country that film maker Gillian Armstrong was drawn to make this documentary about him.
Orry George Kelly (his name was shortened and hyphenated as part of the Hollywood branding: he was ‘Jack’ to his friends) was born and grew up in small-town Kiama on the NSW coast in 1897, at a time and place not friendly to men attracted to gorgeousness and other men. He was drawn to America to pursue an acting career, where he lived for some time with the actor who would become Cary Grant. It was not made public at the time, or for decades afterwards, that he was in a relationship with Cary Grant, and interestingly, his Wikipedia entry is likewise delicate about the liaison. It was through Grant’s influence that Orry-Kelly became Chief Costume designer at Warner Brothers.He designed the costumes for 285 films; at one stage he did fifty films in a year.
Orry-Kelly wrote his memoirs, which have only recently been published. I think that it would be a fascinating read. ACMI, which is screening Women He’s Undressed for a few weeks more is showing an accompanying exhibition. Many of the photographs are annotated by quotes from his memoir, where he displays an incisive, if lacerating wit.
Women He’s Undressed is a documentary, framed by a rather dorky but affectionate current-day staging of the biographical aspects (you are never in any doubt at all that you’re watching a re-creation!), supplemented by talking heads including Jane Fonda, Angela Lansbury, Catherine Martin and other costume designers. And there’s film clips- lots of them- from the movies that featured his designs: Some Like it Hot, 42nd Street, Casablanca, Auntie Mame. You look at the clips with new eyes.
It’s only on at ACMI for two more Saturdays, I think. Pop into the free exhibition while you’re there.
A movie shot almost completely inside a tax from a dashboard mounted camera? Ah, but this is not any ordinary taxi, and the driver is no ordinary taxi-driver (indeed, he’s not a taxi-driver at all). Instead, he is the Iranian film maker Jafar Panahi, who in 2010 was placed under house arrest and banned from making films for twenty years by the Iranian authorities.
He drives his car as a taxi, people get in and people get out. One is his niece (who actually accepted the award for this film at the Berlin International Film Festival on her uncle’s behalf) but the others are unnamed, amateur actors. The car door opens and shuts, as people enter and leave the taxi. A petty thief, an undercover video seller, a teacher, a lawyer, two women with goldfish, a couple injured in a motorcycle accident all share the taxi, sometimes interacting with each other, other times staring out the window. I stared out the window too, fascinated by glimpses of Tehran through the windows- such a European city, with sealed roads, traffic lights, tunnels- all the infrastructure of a modern city.
But gradually things are not as they seem. I won’t say more. If there’s any chance of catching it- do. (It’s on at ACMI in Melbourne at the moment.) Very, very good- 4.5 stars
It’s been a long time since I saw the 1974 BBC series Shoulder to Shoulder about the British suffragette movement. I watched it myself on television at the time and the next year our lecturer in Women’s History screened it for us at special night-time viewings (class timetables then didn’t stretch to watching videos). As noted by a recent article noting the 40th anniversary of the BBC series on the LSE blogsite and a report on the accompanying symposium celebrating the anniversary, the story of the suffragettes was largely forgotten in 1974 and has languished in the BBC archives since. Hah! the wonders of YouTube! (Apparently the whole series is available).
It’s precisely because the suffragette story is so rarely depicted on the screen that I’m more willing than many to cut the current movie ‘Suffragette’ some slack. My 87 year-old father had not heard of the suffragettes; I don’t think my daughter would know about them either. The gasps at the end of the film at the rollcall of dates when female suffrage was achieved internationally suggests that it’s a battle that we overlook.
The film- and let’s remember that it is only a 2 hour film- focusses on a fictional working-class laundress who becomes swept up with the suffrage movement, culminating at the racecourse on the 1913 Derby Day. The movie deals with the Pankhursts only obliquely; it consciously chooses a working-class protagonist instead of one of the more articulate middle-class leaders. It does not, it’s true, deal with women of colour, or the colonialist attitudes of the leaders; nor does it deal with the philosophical splits between the leadership. It tells the story of one woman, and in a nod to our everywoman sensibilities today, she’s a fictional, bit-part woman. I’m satisfied that the film takes a broad sweep at a plot level, even if at an emotional level it didn’t explore Maud Watt’s change in sensibility sufficiently. Let’s not drown this movie with expectations and our disappointment in what it is not.
Let it just tell the story. All of the nuances and disputes and historical arguments can be explored in detail once the suffragette story is worn smooth with retelling. Forty years on from the first BBC telling in Shoulder to Shoulder, with the story largely forgotten and so many people completely unaware of it, the time for complexity is not yet.
By the way there’s some silent British Parthe footage of British Derby day in a 7 minute clip, showing both before and after. It’s silent, and it shows the day from the start, leading to an odd buildup in tension, knowing , as we do, how it ends. I encourage you to watch the whole thing but if it’s spectacle you want, it’s at 6.04.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 