Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Film Premiere
Passport to Liverpool
April 2oth Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, 7 pm
Bright Moon Films
See preview
Passport to Liverpool
April 2oth Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, 7 pm
Bright Moon Films
See preview
Labels: Films
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
AtonementOne of my iron laws is– the film is never as good as the book. In two to three hours a film can never adequately examine a complex and involved plot, inevitably scenes, sub-plots and characters are completely excised.
Having said that, in many ways ‘Atonement’ is a great film; the cinematography is excellent, the shots linking different sections are stunning and the use of flashback to view stories from the viewpoint of different characters is highly effective.
Inevitably comparisons have been made with ‘The Go Between’ – a lazy summer in an upper class household just before war, a love affair across the class divide and a messenger accidentally drawn in and subsequently scarred for life by their unwitting involvement.
Robbie (played by James McAvoy) is the housekeeper’s son, as a Cambridge graduate he is bridging the gulf between the classes, yet somehow I didn’t get that sense of brooding tension that an actor from a previous generation like Alan Bates would have given to the role. His affair with Cecilia (Keira Knightley) ignites a tragic sequence of events.
One of the key scenes is when after a gap of four years Robbie, newly enlisted in the army and on his way to France, meets Cecilia in a crowded London café. Brief Encounter it wasn’t, the stiff-upper lip detachment that masked a smouldering passion? It just didn’t happen, the earth didn’t move for me.
The most effective scenes are in Dunkirk. The images engrained on most people’s memories are of the evacuation by the small ships, British soldiers patiently queuing in the sea and then the Pathe newsreel footage, pictures of unshaven Tommies drinking from mugs of tea served by jolly WI types. ‘Jerry hasn’t broken these chaps spirits!’
The reality was of course different, a chaotic retreat, the bacchanalian hell of the beaches, soldiers wandering around trying to find their regiment, horses shot, lorries destroyed, supplies burnt, constant strafing by the Luftwaffe. The BEF rescued more by luck than judgement.
Briony the messenger and architect of Robbie’s disgrace eschews a place at Cambridge and in an attempt at redemption nurses the troops that Pathe missed – the amputees, the burnt and the dying.
The film effectively conveys Ian McEwan’s concluding dramatic twist. Vanessa Redgrave as the older Briony, confronting her mortality, steals the scene with a brilliant under-stated cameo performance, it questions the role of the writer and that grey area between fact and fiction in literature.
A disappointment for me with both film and book is the failure to examine the social and political background to war. In the late 30s there was a strong pacifist mood (enhanced by the memory of the slaughter in the trenches during the ‘Great War’) this was also reflected in the upper classes i.e. the 1933 vote at the Oxford Union not to fight for ‘King or Country’. The ‘Cliveden Set’ went a step beyond; they wanted appeasement with Hitler and supported the ‘war against Bolshevism’.
‘Atonement’ a classy adaptation that didn’t quite make it.
Labels: Films
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Liverpool’s Cunard YanksSome aspects of working class history are well documented – trade unions, strikes, housing, diet. Liverpool’s Cunard Yanks records something that was ‘hidden from history’. Employed as waiters on the Cunard Line in the 1950s and 1960s they were pioneers, bringing back to Britain a new musical culture.
During that era over 20,000 seamen sailed out of Liverpool. Working either in the merchant navy or the liners was almost a rite of passage for many young people. That industry combined with the docks helped to form the character of the Liverpool working class (an interesting contrast can be made with Manchester where employment tended to be in stable, skilled industries like textiles and engineering). Even up to the 1960s the dock industry was notorious for casualisation, men queuing up every day for work. Seamen would traditionally ‘jump ship’ if they found conditions on board too onerous. The film highlights a group of rebels, chancers and outsiders – the Cunard Yanks.
Fifty years on they haven’t lost their touch or fashion sense (they were working class dandies long before Jonathan Ross tried to purloin the title). John Gilmour talks about the months he spent in prison in Havana, routinely rejecting the food on offer. Their normal port of call was the Market Diner at Pier 92 in Manhattan, New York.
Tips from the wealthy clientele on the liners supplemented their meagre wages, (money was shared around the boat) enabling them to bring records, fashion and consumer goods back to Britain. David Kynaston’s book ‘Austerity Britain’ describes just how grim life was in the 1950s, as wartime rationing continued for years. One of the Cunard Yanks commented, ‘Britain was black and white, New York was techicolor.”
In America as a musical revolution unfolded, jazz, be-pop, rock and roll, the charts in Britain were still dominated by ‘How Much is that Doggie in the Window?” Music from America had a huge influence in the revolution that transformed British pop culture. One of the Cunard Yanks Ivan Hayward even sold his guitar to George Harrison – he’s still waiting for the last £20!
Unofficial strikes, involving thousands of seafarers, were also a feature of the shipping industry during the 1950s. But they weren’t just fighting the employers they were battling against their own union the notoriously corrupt National Union of Seamen – ballot rigging was rife.
The film describes Liverpool as an ‘Edgy City’, never part of Lancashire, stuck down the end of the M62, a world apart. Like most port cities Liverpool was always ‘different’. A different accent and culture from its hinterland.
How long will that dissonance and rebelliousness last? The docks used to employ 20,000, now, after the defeat of the 1995-6 lockout and with the impact of containerisation, there are a few hundred non-union dockers left. Apart from a few British officers, seafarers come from Third World countries, shipbuilding and ship repair has all but vanished from the Mersey and the insurance industry is closing down and relocating their call centres to Bangalore.
The Cunard Yanks spoke about ‘The Pool’ the shipping employment agency by the Pier Head, “hundreds would congregate every day waiting for ships.” Those who sailed out of Liverpool brought back music, different cultures and an irascible, irreverent spirit of rebellion. On the premiere night at the Philharmonic there was an enthusiastic audience that bathed in nostalgia. It got me thinking will Liverpool remain an ‘Edgy City’?
Trailer
Labels: Films
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
'Grow Your Own'An allotment in Bootle, just outside of Liverpool and a group of asylum seekers are introduced to gardening by a sympathetic social worker, as a means of healing their psychological scars. There’s some sharp, witty dialogue and shafts of humour as the allotment committee (some real crusty characters) try to impose new rules as a means of thwarting the ‘invasion’. When they try to get all the sheds painted red they have to deal with irascible rebel Kenny.
The film does deal with the trauma that many asylum seekers suffer during their journey, Kang, mourns the loss of his wife who died en route and he has a phobia about the containers they were forced to travel in. Through interacting and receiving advice from characters like Ali, a trained doctor, the allotment growers begin to change their attitude.
However, having set the scene the second half of the film chugs along like a 1950s Ealing comedy, or one of those amiable 1970s sit-coms. Unfortunately the film is dealing more with the prejudices of the 1950s – ignorance and fear of the unknown. There’s no real attempt to ask any awkward questions and get the audience thinking.
Asylum seekers are usually isolated and marginalized, placed in fractured and fragmented working class communities. The majority of asylum seekers in Liverpool were placed in damp, condemned tower blocks in Everton and were on the receiving end of almost nightly attacks from local youngsters (with few prospects themselves) who wanted to protect ‘their patch’.
The realities of racism in Europe are the French banalieues where youngsters of African descent face discrimination and police harassment, or East Germany where skinheads routinely attack people with darker skins. The film ‘East is East’ was a humorous take on race relations in the 1960s, but where is the contemporary film that deals with the riots in Oldham and Burnley or the 7/7 bombings?
On the other hand there is a danger that films can portray every asylum seeker as a ‘deserving case’ (the mass majority are) but neglect the way they are more likely to be exploited by people from within their own community – people traffickers and gang masters (the worst example of this the Morecambe Bay cockle pickers).
The main problem with the film is that there is no contrast, most of the characters are in soft focus. I read a study on Charles Dickens it made the point that what really lifted ‘Oliver Twist’ and put it on a different level was the introduction of pure evil – Bill Sykes. The raid by the Immigration Police and the menace of the mobile phone company are external threats, not from the community. The gardeners with their mugs of tea and zip-up cardigans are fairly harmless old buffers, it makes for a comfy slippers kind of film. The only character with any depth is Kenny, the rest we experience in a superficial way.
The premise behind the film is that with a bit of TLC and sympathy racism can be overcome and we can all work together, if only it was so easy. In some communities racism and prejudice is deep rooted, fuelled by the press ‘myths’ about asylum seekers being given free mobile phones and driving lessons. In the furore about council houses for white families the Dagenham MP John Cruddas said he knew of no single case where asylum seekers had ‘jumped the queue’. In fact the main problem has been the complete lack of council house building for the last ten years.
A much bleaker, darker film about a Russian asylum seeker in Sweden is ‘Lilya 4-Ever’, it doesn’t pull any punches, it isn’t afraid to make the point that many lonely old men will pay young girls for abusive sex.
‘Grow Your Own’ just doesn’t have a cutting edge. It needed a writer like Jimmy McGovern to draw this out. I remember a scene from the scripting sessions of the film ‘Dockers’ about the Liverpool lockout in 1995, the dockers had written a script that outlined the way they and their families had changed through the course of the dispute. Jimmy McGovern insisted that making one of the central characters a scab (played by Ricky Tomlinson) allowed the film to question why someone, a real character, would betray their work mates and their community.
‘Grow Your Own’ - a film that tried to press all the right buttons but just lost the plot.
How the film was made
Tiscali review
Labels: Films
Saturday, May 12, 2007
The Lives of OthersThe film could have been shot in monochrome black and white, so bleak is the portrayal of Stalinist East Germany. It is a gut-wrenching expose of the secret police, the all powerful, all seeing Stasi. Set in 1984 it is pre-Gorbachov and the grip of the regime appears unrelenting.
The Stasi assembled a grisly state within a state – 97,000 employees and 173,000 informers in a country of 17 million. If part time informants are included some estimates make the ratio 1 per 6.5 of the population.
Playwright Georg Dreyman is tolerated and indulged by the Ministry of Culture, actress and girl friend Christa-Maria Sieland is also involved in a self-loathing affair with a powerful party official. To satisfy an internal power struggle they are put under surveillance. Georg’s attitude changes when an old friend, a former theatre director, commits suicide.
Party loyalist Gerd Weisler is chosen to lead the surveillance operation and a team of Stasi bug the flat and install hidden cameras. Weisler and a colleague are ensconced in the attic to monitor everything. Weisler is drawn towards Georg and Christa, contrasting his joyless existence with their rich cultural life and wide network of friends. There’s a poignant moment as a young child gets in the lift with him at his grim tower block, ‘You’re the Stasi, and we hate you because you lock people up.’ It takes an effort of will to suppress the force of habit and acquire the name of the child’s father.
At times the film overplays the harshness of life in East Germany, there is a danger of parody – the Carling lager advert with smoky factories and workers chained to the production line. Nearly twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall there is high unemployment in the eastern states, and young people emigrate in their thousands. The former communist party the PDS attracts about 20% of the vote.
The opposite danger is Ostalgie – nostalgia for the GDR, which was evident in the film ‘Goodbye Lenin!’ The Stasi allowed no dissent the regime was run on the principle of, ‘you’re either with us or against us’. Fax machines, typewriters and duplicators were all licensed and restricted. Reprisals were extended to the children of dissidents who were denied university places and jobs. Many people didn’t want to leave the country but went into ‘internal emigration’, they knew the penalties for resistance but they with held any support for the regime.
During the dramatic fall of the GDR protestors occupied the Stasi offices and the full extent of the surveillance was revealed. People also discovered the painful truth about their betrayers – informants included, husbands, wives, lovers, sisters, brothers and friends.
The regime of surveillance and observation combined with the ridiculous targets inhibited initiative and innovation. It was recipe for stagnation, no one down the command structure wanted to make a decision, they waited for commands from the centre (shades of Ofsted?).
The justification for the Stasi was they were the ‘shield of the party’ in their 1930s mindset they were ‘protecting’ the people from fascism. Part of the propaganda effort was the endless films and documentaries about the Second World War. An excellent book about the period is Anna Funder’s ‘Stasiland’, it really shows the arbitrary manner in which people were caught in the net of the Stasi and there are some revealing interviews with former agents.
‘The Lives of Others’ is a reminder of what a monstrous police state the GDR was.
Labels: Films
Saturday, March 24, 2007
300This was a cross between Lord of the Rings and Carry on Thermopylae, cast list?
King Leonidas – Bernard Bresslaw
Queen Gorgo – Barbara Windsor
Leonidas' Mother – Hattie Jacques
Captain – Roy Castle
Ephor (diseased mystic) – Kenneth Connor
Theron (lusty old goat) – Sid James
Dilios (optimistic youth) – Jim Dale
Stelios – As himself
Xerxes – Charles Hawtrey
Brothel Keeper – Terry Scott
Ephialtes (traitor) – Frankie Howard
Messenger – Peter Butterworth
Thespians – Kenneth Williams
Oracle Girl – Joan Sims
This film was so bad it was hilarious!
Labels: Films
Saturday, March 10, 2007
The History BoysIt’s the sparkling dialogue and cracking one-liners (‘History is just one f’ing thing after another’) that carries the film of Alan Bennett’s ‘The History Boys’.
A boys’ grammar school in Yorkshire during the 1980s is trying to prepare its most talented cohort for Oxford and Cambridge. In attempt to give them some ‘polish’ the acerbic head recruits Mr Irwin. His moral relativism and intellectual detachment stands in contrast to Hector’s (played with gusto by Richard Griffiths) liberal, knowledge for knowledge’s sake, ‘pass it on, pass it on’. There’s a memorable conflict over the Holocaust.
However grammar schools those pale imitations of the independent sector – houses, masters in tweeds, classics – were largely gone by the 1980s. And Yorkshire in the 1980s? The social and economic background was the backwash from the Ripper trial, industrial decline and the miners’ strike. Cutler’s Sheffield Grammar School exists in a vacuum. See David Peace’s brilliant novels for the backdrop.
‘The History Boys’ fails to explore the tensions between the boys’ own home life and the faux public school values, something that Alan Bennett wrote about extensively in his autobiography (see also Richard Hoggart in ‘The Uses of Literacy’). Most teachers will be uncomfortable with the attempt to justify paedophilia as Hector having a grope with the boys on his motorbike; after all they even have a rota to enjoy this privilege.
Some of the comic acting is first rate; the re-enactment of ‘Brief Encounter’ by two of the boys was worth the ticket price, but the film does struggle in adapting from the stage, consequently the ending looks contrived.
Rating 7 out of 10.
Labels: Films
