Filmography
Jun. 13th, 2010 09:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyLogan's Run
This is one of those films you've heard an awful lot about but never actually seen. It was actually rather good, although the New Eden narrative was a touch heavy-handed. It's one of those distopia films about the future going horribly wrong that turned up a lot in the 1970s; the plot revolves around the conceit that the world exploded at some point, and now humans live in domes, their lives limited to 30 years, at which point they can apply to be regenerated via the Carousel or run. Either way, they die, although obviously there's always the chance of Carousel. (Or, you know. Not.)
Logan 5 is a Sandman, one of those responsible for chasing down people trying to escape their state-mandated death; he is given the task of finding Sanctuary, the place to which some runners are supposed to have successfully escaped. Instead, he finds the outdoors! Which has trees and running water and Peter Ustinov and cats! He is accompanied by Jessica 6, and lo! He saves her from things, they strip gratuitously to show off Jenny Agutter naked (*sigh*), and then they rediscover the archaic language of marriage and decide that it is good!
Look, it's daft, it's a classic of this kind of science fiction, and Michael York is jolly good as Logan 5. So is Richard Jordan as Francis 7, Logan's partner who hunts him down in the outside world. Jenny Agutter actually does a jolly good job, despite being required to perform as physical eye-candy from time to time. Peter Ustinov is a delightful crazy old man, although the final scene of the film, where he is surrounded by All These Young People wanting to touch age is bloody creepy, especially considering he's standing on the edge of quite a deep pool at the time. The script is also fairly reasonable, and the plot works. So four stars, for actually aging rather well, and being a good evening's watch. Despite the obvious influence of West Side Story.
Agora
C'mon, you knew I wasn't going to miss this, if only to see what it did to Gideon Nisbet's assertion that all that philosophers do is stand around and philosophise, and thus You Can't Do Greece in film. Let me preface this by saying that I spent the first half hour fuming over historical inaccuracy; the most outstanding offenders were the white-marble statues and the obvious ruin fetish of the set, although there did seem to be an attempt to ancient bookshelves and libraries some justice. However, I soon found myself drawn into the acting and the relationships of the characters, and that was so jolly good that I felt I could let the historical inaccuracy pass. G was not so generous about the failings of astronomical history; he felt a bit let down that a film where a major plot point revolved around an astrologer had to resort to her anachronistically discovering something that Johannes Kepler put together a good few centuries later.
It really was the relationships that made this film work. Rachel Weisz was excellent as Hypatia, and did a brilliant job of communicating someone's passionate engagement with intellectual material - not something I actually think I've seen quite as effectively done in film, particularly for a 'hard science' like astronomy. You really believed she was completely uninterested in the various men wandering about like lovestruck puppies, and devoted to her subject. Davus (Max Minghella), Hypatia's slave, actually did a good job as a slave, even if he ended up becoming a member of the Parabalani, a bunch of rogue Christian monks who essentially wandered around looking tough and killing people off. Orestes (Oscar Isaac), initially Hypatia's pupil and later governor, did a great job of basically being totally overblown and fundamentally naive and weak. There was also a large cast of supporting Christian bishops and philosophers, not to mention Jews.
Because that's how you get around doing philosophy in film - you a) make the central philosopher female; b) stick a couple of unrequited love plots; and c) set your philosophy in the middle of political upheaval that spares no-one's morals. The film focuses on two crisis points, the transition of power in Alexandria from the pagans to the Christians and then years later the struggle between the Jews and the Christians (which essentially turns out to be Christians vs. other Christians), and it is within the framework of violence that the study of the heavens takes place. Certainly makes things a bit more exciting.
That said, while this is a very rich and deeply realised film, there are some very simple things about it, which are not to its credit. For a start, characters tend to have very straightforward motives, without a hint of moral complexity. There's also a tendency to paint people in very black and white colours; for instance, the Christians are very unsubtly dressed in DEEP BLACK OF DOOM, including Bishop Cyril, who essentially wanders around a bit like a charismatic Mafia lord with a good hat. No hint that he did any actual thinking, despite the closing credits mentioning that he was made a Doctor of the Church. It's that sort of thing, which could have been quite meaty but got passed over, that makes this a four star rather than a five star film. I definitely need to come back to this for Reception work, and I need to think more about why it works and why it doesn't - but this deserves the awards it has won, and if you can find somewhere that's showing it, you should.
Kind Hearts and Coronets
Hurrah for Alec Guinness! This is a Very Silly Film, and I suspect may be one of the earlier examples of one actor playing multiple characters in a film. It is fairly revealing that the one drag character never actually speaks and is only on screen briefly, suggesting Guinness didn't want to be in a skirt for longer than absolutely necessary. The plot is pretty simple. Dennis Price plays Louis Mazzini, the son of a daughter of the D'Ascoyne family who has been disinherited because she married for love. After her death, and his humiliation at the hands of Sibella, the suburban girl he loves, he decides to kill his way to the top of the family and become Duke of Chalfont. The film follows his progress through killing various incarnations of Alec Guinness, and his sort-of-dilemma between two women - Sibella and the widow of one of the D'Ascoynes, Edith (the divine Valerie Hobson) who Has Views on things like alcohol and smoking, with the accompanying moral uprightness that is much more suitable for a Duchess than Sibella's brashness.
Sibella's husband, however, dies unexpectedly, and Louis writes his memoirs while waiting execution for his murder - ironic, given that's the one murder he didn't actually commit... but I shan't give the ending away. Suffice to say that it's a very amusing film with great acting in a variety of roles. G liked it because of the extended monologue nature, and what you learnt about the personality quirks of Louis; I enjoyed it because of the comedy of manners aspect, and the general Ealing Humour. One of the better examples of the brand, I think, and very definitely worth seeing. Five stars.
Valhalla Rising
OH GOD DO NOT GO AND SEE THIS FILM. Please. Please.
It was on at BAM last night, and G saw it on the program a few weeks ago and said 'look, Vikings!', and I shrugged and said 'what the hell', as we've had some luck doing that before. This was the KARMIC REPAYMENT for those times. Firstly, the film was introduced by its director, Nicolas Winding Refn, who was... well, let me say that his personality was not winning and his misogyny not attractive. Through five minutes of talk he managed to make me determined to never watch another one of his films, although I don't suspect there is much of a risk of that. He also mentioned that this film was shot in Scotland - AND IT SHOWS.
Basically, it looks like a really really cheap attempt to Do Herzog's Aguirre on the cheap. In Scotland. With a lot of mist. And comedy squelching-sound-effect violence. And some strange male-bonding stuff. And as little actual speech as possible, because real men talk in grunts and by STABBING EACH OTHER. There was supposed to be a plot in there somewhere, but there wasn't enough coherence to actually tell what it was. Mads Mikkelsen, as the not-particularly-imaginatively-named One-Eye, wandered around doing colossal violence to people, with a small boy in tow, and eventually sacrificed himself to mud-covered natives with sticks. The budget was truely minimal, and why that's not always a bad thing... GEEEEZ PEOPLE.
There were, in all fairness, some redeeming cinematic moments. Mikkelsen is actually quite pretty with the right light and a dreamy look in his (functional) eye with the Scottish highlands behind him, and if the soundtrack was having one of the rare moments when it actually fitted what was happening in the film in a way that didn't make one think of Hammer Horror, so much the better. But these were very, very rare moments, and I really wouldn't expect anyone to suffer through this bilge. Go watch Aguirre instead, which manages to be far more inventive with an equally tiny budget, and FAR BETTER. One star.
This is one of those films you've heard an awful lot about but never actually seen. It was actually rather good, although the New Eden narrative was a touch heavy-handed. It's one of those distopia films about the future going horribly wrong that turned up a lot in the 1970s; the plot revolves around the conceit that the world exploded at some point, and now humans live in domes, their lives limited to 30 years, at which point they can apply to be regenerated via the Carousel or run. Either way, they die, although obviously there's always the chance of Carousel. (Or, you know. Not.)
Logan 5 is a Sandman, one of those responsible for chasing down people trying to escape their state-mandated death; he is given the task of finding Sanctuary, the place to which some runners are supposed to have successfully escaped. Instead, he finds the outdoors! Which has trees and running water and Peter Ustinov and cats! He is accompanied by Jessica 6, and lo! He saves her from things, they strip gratuitously to show off Jenny Agutter naked (*sigh*), and then they rediscover the archaic language of marriage and decide that it is good!
Look, it's daft, it's a classic of this kind of science fiction, and Michael York is jolly good as Logan 5. So is Richard Jordan as Francis 7, Logan's partner who hunts him down in the outside world. Jenny Agutter actually does a jolly good job, despite being required to perform as physical eye-candy from time to time. Peter Ustinov is a delightful crazy old man, although the final scene of the film, where he is surrounded by All These Young People wanting to touch age is bloody creepy, especially considering he's standing on the edge of quite a deep pool at the time. The script is also fairly reasonable, and the plot works. So four stars, for actually aging rather well, and being a good evening's watch. Despite the obvious influence of West Side Story.
Agora
C'mon, you knew I wasn't going to miss this, if only to see what it did to Gideon Nisbet's assertion that all that philosophers do is stand around and philosophise, and thus You Can't Do Greece in film. Let me preface this by saying that I spent the first half hour fuming over historical inaccuracy; the most outstanding offenders were the white-marble statues and the obvious ruin fetish of the set, although there did seem to be an attempt to ancient bookshelves and libraries some justice. However, I soon found myself drawn into the acting and the relationships of the characters, and that was so jolly good that I felt I could let the historical inaccuracy pass. G was not so generous about the failings of astronomical history; he felt a bit let down that a film where a major plot point revolved around an astrologer had to resort to her anachronistically discovering something that Johannes Kepler put together a good few centuries later.
It really was the relationships that made this film work. Rachel Weisz was excellent as Hypatia, and did a brilliant job of communicating someone's passionate engagement with intellectual material - not something I actually think I've seen quite as effectively done in film, particularly for a 'hard science' like astronomy. You really believed she was completely uninterested in the various men wandering about like lovestruck puppies, and devoted to her subject. Davus (Max Minghella), Hypatia's slave, actually did a good job as a slave, even if he ended up becoming a member of the Parabalani, a bunch of rogue Christian monks who essentially wandered around looking tough and killing people off. Orestes (Oscar Isaac), initially Hypatia's pupil and later governor, did a great job of basically being totally overblown and fundamentally naive and weak. There was also a large cast of supporting Christian bishops and philosophers, not to mention Jews.
Because that's how you get around doing philosophy in film - you a) make the central philosopher female; b) stick a couple of unrequited love plots; and c) set your philosophy in the middle of political upheaval that spares no-one's morals. The film focuses on two crisis points, the transition of power in Alexandria from the pagans to the Christians and then years later the struggle between the Jews and the Christians (which essentially turns out to be Christians vs. other Christians), and it is within the framework of violence that the study of the heavens takes place. Certainly makes things a bit more exciting.
That said, while this is a very rich and deeply realised film, there are some very simple things about it, which are not to its credit. For a start, characters tend to have very straightforward motives, without a hint of moral complexity. There's also a tendency to paint people in very black and white colours; for instance, the Christians are very unsubtly dressed in DEEP BLACK OF DOOM, including Bishop Cyril, who essentially wanders around a bit like a charismatic Mafia lord with a good hat. No hint that he did any actual thinking, despite the closing credits mentioning that he was made a Doctor of the Church. It's that sort of thing, which could have been quite meaty but got passed over, that makes this a four star rather than a five star film. I definitely need to come back to this for Reception work, and I need to think more about why it works and why it doesn't - but this deserves the awards it has won, and if you can find somewhere that's showing it, you should.
Kind Hearts and Coronets
Hurrah for Alec Guinness! This is a Very Silly Film, and I suspect may be one of the earlier examples of one actor playing multiple characters in a film. It is fairly revealing that the one drag character never actually speaks and is only on screen briefly, suggesting Guinness didn't want to be in a skirt for longer than absolutely necessary. The plot is pretty simple. Dennis Price plays Louis Mazzini, the son of a daughter of the D'Ascoyne family who has been disinherited because she married for love. After her death, and his humiliation at the hands of Sibella, the suburban girl he loves, he decides to kill his way to the top of the family and become Duke of Chalfont. The film follows his progress through killing various incarnations of Alec Guinness, and his sort-of-dilemma between two women - Sibella and the widow of one of the D'Ascoynes, Edith (the divine Valerie Hobson) who Has Views on things like alcohol and smoking, with the accompanying moral uprightness that is much more suitable for a Duchess than Sibella's brashness.
Sibella's husband, however, dies unexpectedly, and Louis writes his memoirs while waiting execution for his murder - ironic, given that's the one murder he didn't actually commit... but I shan't give the ending away. Suffice to say that it's a very amusing film with great acting in a variety of roles. G liked it because of the extended monologue nature, and what you learnt about the personality quirks of Louis; I enjoyed it because of the comedy of manners aspect, and the general Ealing Humour. One of the better examples of the brand, I think, and very definitely worth seeing. Five stars.
Valhalla Rising
OH GOD DO NOT GO AND SEE THIS FILM. Please. Please.
It was on at BAM last night, and G saw it on the program a few weeks ago and said 'look, Vikings!', and I shrugged and said 'what the hell', as we've had some luck doing that before. This was the KARMIC REPAYMENT for those times. Firstly, the film was introduced by its director, Nicolas Winding Refn, who was... well, let me say that his personality was not winning and his misogyny not attractive. Through five minutes of talk he managed to make me determined to never watch another one of his films, although I don't suspect there is much of a risk of that. He also mentioned that this film was shot in Scotland - AND IT SHOWS.
Basically, it looks like a really really cheap attempt to Do Herzog's Aguirre on the cheap. In Scotland. With a lot of mist. And comedy squelching-sound-effect violence. And some strange male-bonding stuff. And as little actual speech as possible, because real men talk in grunts and by STABBING EACH OTHER. There was supposed to be a plot in there somewhere, but there wasn't enough coherence to actually tell what it was. Mads Mikkelsen, as the not-particularly-imaginatively-named One-Eye, wandered around doing colossal violence to people, with a small boy in tow, and eventually sacrificed himself to mud-covered natives with sticks. The budget was truely minimal, and why that's not always a bad thing... GEEEEZ PEOPLE.
There were, in all fairness, some redeeming cinematic moments. Mikkelsen is actually quite pretty with the right light and a dreamy look in his (functional) eye with the Scottish highlands behind him, and if the soundtrack was having one of the rare moments when it actually fitted what was happening in the film in a way that didn't make one think of Hammer Horror, so much the better. But these were very, very rare moments, and I really wouldn't expect anyone to suffer through this bilge. Go watch Aguirre instead, which manages to be far more inventive with an equally tiny budget, and FAR BETTER. One star.
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