• Review: “The Great Gatsby”
  • Review: “Mud”
  • Review: “The Place Beyond the Pines”
  • Review: “Ginger & Rosa”
  • Review: “Stoker”
  • Review: “Side Effects”
  • Review: “Mama”
  • Review: “Zero Dark Thirty”
  • Review: “Gangster Squad”
  • Review: “Les Misérables”
  • Review: “This Is 40”
  • Review: “Any Day Now”
  • Review: “Anna Karenina”
  • Review: “Silver Linings Playbook”
  • Review: “Hitchcock”
  • Review: “Lincoln”
  • Review: “Life of Pi”
  • Review: “Flight”
  • Review: “Skyfall”
  • Review: “Argo”
  • Review: “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”
  • Review: “Looper”
  • Reviews: “Arbitrage” and “The Master”
  • Review: “The Words”
  • Review: “Celeste and Jesse Forever”
  • Review: “Lawless”
  • Review: “The Campaign”
  • Review: “Total Recall”
  • Review: “To Rome with Love”
  • Review: “The Dark Knight Rises”
  • Review: “Moonrise Kingdom”
  • Review: “Magic Mike”
  • Review: “The Amazing Spider-Man”
  • Review: “Brave”
  • Review: “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”
  • Review: “Prometheus”
  • Review: “Snow White and the Huntsman”
  • Review: “Bernie”
  • Review: “The Dictator”
  • Review: “The Raven”
  • Reviews: “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” and “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”
  • Review: “Chimpanzee”
  • Review: “The Cabin in the Woods”
  • Review: “American Reunion”
  • Review: “Detachment”
  • Review: “The Hunger Games”
  • Review: “Casablanca” (In Re-Release; 1 Night Only)
  • Review: “Silent House”
  • Review: “Wanderlust”
  • Review: “This Means War”
  • Review: “Safe House”
  • Review: “The Woman In Black”
  • Review: “The Grey”
  • Review: “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”
  • Review: “Contraband”
  • Review: “Shame” and “Young Adult”
  • Review: “War Horse”
  • Review: “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”
  • Review: “Like Crazy”
  • Review: “Hugo”
  • Review: “The Descendants”
  • Review: “My Week with Marilyn”
  • Review: “J. Edgar”
  • Review: “In Time”
  • Review: “Take Shelter”
  • Review: “The Thing”
  • Review: “The Ides of March”
  • Review: “Dream House”
  • Review: “50/50”
  • Review: “Moneyball”
  • Review: “Abduction”
  • Review: “Drive”
  • Review: “Contagion”
  • Review: “The Debt”
  • Review: “Our Idiot Brother”
  • Review: “The Help”
  • Review: “Fright Night”
  • Review: “Beginners”
  • Review: “Crazy Stupid Love”
  • Review: “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”

Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Tag Archives: shakespeare

Review: “War Horse”

26 Monday Dec 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

battle of somme, black beauty, celine buckens, emily watson, horses, janusz kaminski, jeremy irvine, nick stafford, niels arestrup, peter mullan, saving private ryan, seabiscuit, secretariat, shakespeare, spielberg, the godfather, war, war horse, world war I

“More than the Somme of Its Parts?”
Grade: C+ (Rent It)

WHEN WILL HOLLYWOOD stop horsing around?  From “Black Beauty” and “The Black Stallion” to “Seabiscuit” and “Secretariat,” equus ferus caballus, otherwise known as “the horse,” is rivaled only by our other favorite quadruped, the dog, for sheer screen time.  Wouldn’t the lasting power of “The Godfather” be somewhat diminished had studio head Jack Woltz awakened not to the severed head of his racehorse buried in those satin sheets but to a headless Fido or Rufus?

Early on in the new Spielbergian spectacle called “War Horse” a British soldier named Perkins tells Albert, as he’s forced to let his beloved horse head off to war, “He’s a horse – not a dog!”  And there’s a difference: one is allowed to share its master’s bed and the other remains a beast of burden, capable of dazzling strength and speed but always left out in the rain.

It seems as if wherever “War Horse” has galloped, it’s garnered awards.  When British playwright Nick Stafford adapted the original 1982 novel by Michael Morpurgo for the stage, he met instantaneous critical and commercial success, winning a Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2008 and the Tony Award for Best Play in 2011.  The stage production continues to pack theatres in London and New York.

Now there’s the major motion picture adaptation by Steven Spielberg, his first directorial effort since 2008’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (more horses).  With a script by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis, Spielberg’s version is just the kind of visual intoxicant we come to expect from his bigger-than-life aesthetic.  The on-screen “War Horse” is also meticulous.  With the photographic help of longtime collaborator, Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg brings each locale to life.  When we’re in the English countryside, the hillsides pop in verdant greens whereas, later, in the rat-infested trenches of war-ravaged France, bullets whistle past and soldiers explode with all the sound and fury of the Normandy invasion scenes in a far more powerful anti-war film by Mr. Spielberg: “Saving Private Ryan” (1998).

The war horse of the title is a half-thoroughbred named Joey, purchased at the film’s start by a dipsomaniac named Ted Narracott (Peter Mullan).  Ted is still traumatized by his own service to the British Empire in the Boer Wars.  Taking a deep and intimate liking to Joey, Ted’s son Albert (a glow-in-the-dark Jeremy Irvine) sets out to break Joey’s wild nature.  Alongside Emily Watson as his mother Rosie, Albert inhabits a rural town in Devon so small that nearly every villager comes to watch as Albert puts Joey to the plow.  From there, the plot is a fairly simple one: bridging cultures and breaking down the barriers constituent of warfare, Joey repeatedly changes hands and owners: from English to German hands with a brief stop along the way in a French farm operated by a jam-maker (a stirring Niels Arestrup) and his angelic granddaughter (Celine Buckens).  Still, the charms of “War Horse” are chiefly visual: the most striking scene involves little more than a confrontation between Joey and a tank, all life and organicism on one side and steely death on the other.

Weaker yet, there’s something not a little perverse about representing World War I, in which an astounding 8,700,000 lives were violently lost (including 780,000 British – nearly a entire generation of English men), through the eyes of a boy and his horse.  This is the great trauma of the twentieth century in which poison gas was introduced at the Second Battle of Ypres and the British use of tanks on the Somme (both in 1915).  The great moral and political potential of fiction is that it can be used to teach us something about history, even if it exists in the background, but “War Horse” relegates history too much to the sidelines and, paradoxically, uses the cacophonous battlefield to shake the viewer out of its default setting: sentimentality.

It’s all eerily similar to Shakespeare’s Richard III who, deranged and defeated, has lost sight of what’s truly important when he hobbles across stage, shouting: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”

Review: “The Descendants”

29 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

alexander payne, comedy, drama, george clooney, hawaii, jack nicholson, jim rash, judy greer, kaui hart hemmings, nat faxon, patricia hastie, shailene wooley, shakespeare, the descendants

“Welcome to Paradise?”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

NOT SINCE THE invention of the kitchen food-processor has a vegetable endured such abuse.  In Alexander Payne’s affecting new tragicomedy, “The Descendants,” an unfaithful thrill-seeker of wife named Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie) lies comatosed in a Honolulu hospital while various family members stomp their feet and shout at her.  Even her lover’s wife (a mousy and marvelous Judy Greer) comes around, bearing flowers with seemingly good intentions, and soon rages against the dying woman.  The lasting notion of Payne’s drama is that Elizabeth is a blank screen upon which her family members project their worst ideas about her.  Because she never speaks, because she’s prematurely sent to what Hamlet famously called that “undiscovered country, from whose bourn/No traveler returns,” her own side of the story remains the great missing puzzle piece behind her infidelity and ensuing family fracture.

Elizabeth’s husband, Matt King, a real estate lawyer subtly played by George Clooney, has a long list of grievances, principally that their 17-year-old daughter Alex (Shailene Woodley) spotted her with another man not long before the boating accident that put her in a persistent vegetative state.  A bikini’d Alex returns from rehab, angry and adolescent, and in a nod to “The Graduate,” sinks to the bottom of a leaf-strewn swimming pool upon hearing that her mom will soon be taken off life-support.  Left to fill Elizabeth’s shoes is a cuckolded Clooney who tells us in the film’s opening voice-over: “I’m the back-up parent, the understudy.” Going to the movies means that more often than not, Humpty-Dumpty families have to put themselves back together again – that’s what fiction means – but “The Descendants” is so sardonically real, so life-like, in its representation of modern families that the predictable reconciliation in the final reel doesn’t feel forced or fantastical.  It can be as quotidian and Friday-night as watching “The March of the Penguins” on the sofa while sharing ice cream as a family.

Based on his previous two knock-outs, “About Schmidt” and “Sideways,” Mr. Payne is a master of loco-description, bringing particular places (and all their eccentricities) to life. (This is the dramedy filmmaker, after all, who made an everyman out of the usually larger-than-life Jack Nicholson.)  Just as Nebraska and California wine-country were central to those earlier films, the lush landscape of Hawaii, particularly Kauai, is hardly backdrop in “The Descendants.”  The hibiscus patterns, beach-bums, and Tommy Bahamas are all there, but stripped of their far-off exoticism.  For once, Hawaii on screen is a place you don’t want to someday visit.  Clooney utters the film’s most powerful analogy: “A family is an archipelago, part of the same whole but drifting apart.”

Working from Payne’s (and Nat Faxon and Jim Rash’s) of adaptation of a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, the plot is devastatingly domestic: after Elizabeth’s accident, Matt has to lead a gaggle of children and friends toward coming to terms with her loss.  When daughter Alex informs him of the affair, he runs flat-footedly in loafers to a nearby house to demand the truth from Elizabeth’s closest friends.   In “The Descendants,” Clooney is buoyed by the best ensemble cast of the year:  as the flippant Alex, Ms. Woodley (“The Secret Life of the American Teenager”) is a revelation; so, too, is Robert Forster who, as Elizabeth’s doting father, appears in only two scenes and fills each with his wounded rage.  After a word of warning, he cold-cocks Alex’s teenage boyfriend, Sid, who, in a lesser film, would have remained a stoner stereotype but here instead shares a brief bit of dialogue with a sleepless Matt about his own grief.  It’s these realistic touches that make “The Descendants” hard, like family, to shake off.

Review: “My Week with Marilyn”

26 Saturday Nov 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

adrian hodges, arthur miller, ben smithard, blue valentine, brokeback mountain, colin clark, derek jacobi, eddie redmayne, joe dimaggio, judi dench, kenneth branagh, marilyn monroe, michelle williams, my week with marilyn, shakespeare, simon curtis, zoe wanamaker

“Good-bye Norma Jean”

Review: “My Week with Marilyn”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

“MY WEEK WITH Marilyn” – not to mention this year’s Oscar for Best Actress – belong to Michelle Williams (“Blue Valentine,” “Brokeback Mountain”) for her luminous embodiment of Marilyn Monroe or, as she was known in 1956 (the year in which Simon Curtis’s new film is set): Mrs. Marilyn Miller.  That was the year of Marilyn’s third marriage, this time to playwright Arthur Miller, which was a significant victory for American eggheads since the century’s greatest sex symbol had left Yankee Joe DiMaggio for the author of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible.  It was also the year in which Monroe crossed the pond to costar with Britain’s leading Shakespearean actor, Laurence Olivier, in “The Prince and the Showgirl.”  In many ways Olivier’s heir, Kenneth Branagh plays the great thespian, disappointed and angered by Marilyn’s ineptitude on set.  It’s the ultimate clash between English modesty and American super-stardom, and exasperated by Monroe’s acting coach (Zoë Wanamaker) and her many lapdogs, he barks: “Teaching Marilyn to act is like teaching Urdu to a badger!”  Olivier is gruff, arrogant, caked in makeup, and when he drops an F-bomb upon Marilyn entering the room, she asks in her characteristic breathiness: “Oh, they have that word in England, too?”

Based on his memoirs The Prince, The Showgirl and Me and My Week with Marilyn, both by British filmmaker Colin Clark, the film follows a 23-year old Colin, recently hired as a third assistant director on Olivier’s picture.  As Colin, freckle-faced Eddie Redmayne (“The Good Shepherd,” “Savage Grace”) goes all weak-in-the-knees upon meeting the bombshell though he quickly becomes something more to her, both the shoulder-to-cry-on as she feuds with Miller and yet another man whose erotic veneration Monroe needed as badly as the air she breathed.  Apart from Colin, the only other Brit pleasant to her on set is Dame Sybil Thorndike (played by another Dame, Judi Dench), who speaks to the film’s major conceit – the paradoxical pleasure and pain of unrequited love – when she tells Colin “First love is such sweet despair.”

Screenwriter Adrian Hodges (“Tom and Viv”) has a light touch here, well-suited to the both the source material, “The Prince and the Showgirl,” and the fact that Marilyn let Colin close but not too close.  A splendid scene follows an off-set excursion to Windsor Castle where Colin’s godfather, Sir Owen (Derek Jacobi), provides the pair with a private tour of the royal family’s library.  Once skinny-dipping ensues, director of photography Ben Smithard (“The Damned United”) lingers over their bodies with suitable sparkle and softness.  To reach that Marilyn-like glow, Williams reportedly required three hours of hair and makeup each morning and it shows: she radiates but also breaks your heart. “My Week with Marilyn” transcends verisimilitude to dramatize the fact that Marilyn’s off-screen role was just as laborious and ill-fitting as her onscreen persona; we get the sense that she’s trapped by expectations as sound stage bells ring and crazed fans crush in around her.  After a lovelorn week, Marilyn moves in close to Colin for a final kiss, whispers the line “Thanks for being on my side,” but after that, it’s goodbye Norma Jean.

Review: “J. Edgar”

14 Monday Nov 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

a. mitchell palmer, angels in america, armie hammer, bryan burrough, charles lidnbergh, clint eastwood, clyde tolson, dustin lance black, eleanor roosevelt, F.B.I., geoff pierson, j. edgar, james cagney, joe mccarthy, judi dench, leonardo dicaprio, machine gun kelly, martin luther king, naomi watts, orson wells, shakespeare, tony kushner

d

“Secret Agent Man”

Review: “J. Edgar”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

“WHAT DETERMINES a man’s legacy is what isn’t seen.”  This from J. Edgar Hoover, studiously embodied by Leonardo DiCaprio, in Clint Eastwood’s new bio-pic, “J. Edgar,” a tragedy in which quite a lot of Hoover’s secrets are begrudgingly brought to light.  The secret files shredded by his lifelong secretary Helen Gandy (played by Naomi Watts) at the film’s conclusion serve as a potent symbol for Eastwood’s study more generally: the files may be history, but our fearful fascination with Hoover remains just as potent as it was back in 1963 when the head of the F.B.I. was busy wire-tapping Martin Luther King, Jr. and deriding Eleanor Roosevelt as “old horse face” and lesbian.

With “Milk,” screenwriter Dustin Lance Black turned to gay-lib crusader Harvey Milk for an open book of love, laughter and liberation.  Turning to a droll anti-radical like John Edgar Hoover, the very antithesis of Milk, was a bold way to balance two extremes in twentieth-century American culture.  Hoover’s public achievements, of course, are extremely well-known.  Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation (later the F.B.I.) in 1924, Hoover served eight presidents before his death in 1972.  Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” gives us the sense that, at the zenith of his Orwellian power, it was really Hoover’s Washington while everyone else, including the Kennedy brothers, were merely his special guests.  Jeffrey Donovan, as Robert F. Kennedy, has to remind Hoover that communism is no longer an internal but external threat to effectively beat back the bulldog.

Spanning that long career, from a librarian to a crime-fighter, “J. Edgar” begins with a bang, literally, as the Washington home of A. Mitchell Palmer (Geoff Pierson) is bombed by anarchists in 1919.  Determined to destroy the source of the attack, Palmer soon recruited a 24-year-old law school graduate named John Edgar Hoover to arrest and deport those suspected of anti-American activities.  But Hoover was no Joe McCarthy, a scourge dismissed by Hoover as an “opportunist.”

As the new acting director, Hoover fought the cancer of communism on American soil with the same ferocity he fought facial hair and bowties amongst his employees.  Hoover’s involvement in the so-called “Crime of the Century” – the fatal abduction of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son, Charles Jr., from the second story nursery of the aviator’s New Jersey home in 1932 – brought instant notoriety.  So, too, did Hoover’s pursuit of gangsters Machine Gun Kelly and Vi Mathias.  It was the age of the Tommy Gun and James Cagney and Hoover saw himself as the tireless watchman at the center of it all. And centralize he did: Hoover’s innovations included a fingerprint database and state-of-the-art forensics.  Bryan Burrough, author of Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, observes that “in late 1933, the FBI was still only a shadow of the professional crime-fighting organization it was to become” since “Hoover’s College Boys were long on energy but short on experience.”

Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” also turns to Hoover’s lack of experience when it came to the opposite sex and draws a rather reductive line between Hoover’s alleged homosexuality and his closeness to his mother Anna Marie (a puppet-master in petticoats played by Dame Judi Dench).  She lurks about the house they share, asking “Are you abandoning me again tonight?” on hearing her little Edgar has plans.  One harrowing scene features a forlorn DiCaprio standing before the mirror, mother over his shoulder, telling her through euphemism: “I don’t like to dance with women.”  It’s staggering to think that DiCaprio, who could have easily passed as one of the Fanning sisters in his “Romeo and Juliet” days now looks like a young Orson Wells.  What follows DiCaprio’s pained admission is Dench’s narrative about the suicide of a gay man she called “daffy” (for daffodil), adding: “I’d rather have a dead son than a daffy son.”  DiCaprio and Dench’s scenes together elevate the psychology of “J. Edgar” to something like Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Volumnia, another oedipal duo in which a boy’s best friend, as Norman Bates put it, is his mother.  Cinematographer Tom Stern keeps the film half-lit to match an ambience of secrets and lies.

But the ambitious young man nicknamed “Speed” gets all tongue-tied upon meeting the handsome Clyde Tolson (played by Armie Hammer, the “Winklevi” twins in “The Social Network”).  Hoover and Tolson become fast friends and they remained so until the Director’s death, after which Tolson accepted the U.S. flag draped on his friend’s coffin and inherited Hoover’s half-a-million dollar estate.  Still, Black’s script is a work of historical revisionism, just as dependent on rumors and suspicions as Hoover’s own secret files.  No one knows for sure what Hoover and Tolson shared, but Black’s script, taking a cue from Tony Kushner’s treatment of Roy Cohn in “Angels in America,” casts the repression of Hoover’s own sexuality as the engine that drives his ruthless oppression of others.  It’s a bit simple but it forms the humanizing core of “J. Edgar,” a gay film from an unlikely source: cowboy auteur Clint Eastwood.

Eleven years before his death in 1975, Tolson suffered a stroke. Like an old married couple at the breakfast table, Hoover, every bit the control-freak, orders that Clyde better enunciate his words.  Tolson was later buried in the Congressional Cemetery only yards away from J. Edgar where perhaps the all-seeing Director could eternally keep an eye on him.  As Hoover’s secretary put it before every appointment, “The director will see you now.”

Recent Posts

  • It’s Alive…with Mary Shelley!
  • A Rare & Exclusive Interview with Plague-Writer Daniel Defoe!
  • Sign Posts!
  • What Killed Jane Austen?
  • Was Austen a Holy Roller?

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 260 other subscribers

Top Posts & Pages

  • Review: "The Descendants"
  • A Rare & Exclusive Interview with Plague-Writer Daniel Defoe!

Jane Austen

action alien alpha dog amanda seyfried animals anton yelchin blue valentine bradley cooper brad pitt British literature bromance carey mulligan charlize theron chawton christina hendricks christopher plummer colin farrell comedy crazy stupid love daniel craig dickens dracula drama emma stone england ewan mcgregor family frankenstein freud gay george clooney hampshire hbo horror jack russell terrier Jane Austen jessica chastain john lithgow joseph gordon levitt jude law kurt cobain mad men madonna mansfield park mary shelley matthew mcconaughey michael fassbender naomi watts oscars paris paul rudd philip seymour hoffman poetry politics portsmouth pride and prejudice romantic romantic comedy romanticism ryan gosling science fiction september 11 sex shakespeare shelley steven soderbergh summer blockbuster the hangover the help the social network thriller tim burton true blood twilight viola davis

Blog Stats

  • 52,644 hits
  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments

Colin Carman Twitter

  • #M3GAN is MORE fun than Avatar & its budget was a third of Avatar’s catering M3GAN 2.0 - SNL youtu.be/MAprAHEw18I via @YouTube 1 week ago
  • RT @70RA: Bruce Springsteen - Tunnel of love "So somebody ran out Left somebody's heart in a mess Well if you're looking for love Honey I'm… 1 week ago
  • @MadonnaGreece Las Vegas Oct & Denver Aug 1 week ago
  • @austenquotebot But you didn’t really mean what you said, right Jane? Hail @austenquotebot @ChawtonHouse 2 weeks ago
  • RT @JennyBoylan: Good night from Belgrade Lakes, Maine. https://t.co/3PWYUa26pI 2 weeks ago
Follow @ColinCarman

Colin Carman

Colin Carman

Archives

  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • July 2019
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011

Blogroll

  • Cinema Train
  • Dan the Man's Movie Reviews
  • Fogs' Movie Reviews

Category Cloud

Film Reviews Jane Austen Pandemic Posts Poems and Plogs (Poem-Blogs) Uncategorized

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Colin Carman
    • Join 175 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Colin Carman
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...