Disobedience

I went to Disobedience because I enjoyed the book, which isn't always a good idea but worked out all right on this occasion. It probably helps that it's quite a few years since I read the book, so I wasn't hung up on the details.

Ronit  (played by Rachel Weisz) is  the central character. She is a rabbi's daughter and grew up in London in an orthodoxe Jewish community but now lives a secular life in New York City working as a photographer. Having heard the news of her father's death, she heads back to London, where she finds out that Dovit (who was her father's spiritual protege) and Esti (her best friend with whom she had a clandestine lesbian relationship when they were teenagers) are now married to each other which is a big surprise. The other big surprise waiting is that her father has left his house to the local synagogue and not to her.

Despite Esti being married, she and Ronit's feelings for each other haven't diminished with time. So the story is about what effect that has on each of their adult lives and how Ronit comes to terms with the death of a man she loved, but from whom she was estranged. It's a very tense movie and the tension comes from the impossibility of having or acknowledging a lesbian relationship in such a religious community. Disobedience is a fairly satisfying watch despite everything in it (including the weather) being gray or brown.

Anne's rating 3/5.

The Party

The opening credits roll to the slowest and most laid back rendition of Jerusalem I've heard, played on an electric guitar. We are ushered into the preparations for a small cocktail party to celebrate Janet's promotion to health minister in a fictional British Labour Government. While Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas) is joyfully juggling canapés and her cellphone in the kitchen, her unshaven husband Bill (Timothy Spall) is morosely drinking red wine in the lounge and changing LPs on the record player. Gradually the other guests (two and half other mismatched couples) arrive: her cynical best friend and some time adviser, April (Patricia Clarkson) and partner Gottfried (a German new-age life coach), another friend Martha (followed later by her younger partner Jinny) and young banker Tom (who is +1 to his delayed wife).

Filmed in black and white, The Party is a film from the dinner-party-from-hell genre. Where verbal jousting forms the bulk of the action. It's main departure from the genre is the lack of dinning room. The action taking place in the kitchen, lounge, bathroom and tiny garden of a London terrace house.

Beneath an all too easily shredded veneer of friendship, respectability, fidelity and good manners, lies contempt, insecurity, hypocrisy etc. The celebration of Janet's promotion descends rapidly into back biting and farce. The political and religious beliefs of the hosts and their guests seem barely skin deep.

The four female characters are all reasonably believable as four women who live in and around politics. Less believable are the three male characters, especially Bill who we are told is an atheist and an academic who has been offered a professorship at Yale but who comes across like someone with no beliefs, no life experience and an incomplete high school education. Tom, who arrives having just found out that his wife has been having an affair, is highly agitated but not angry at either her or her lover. Gottfried is a man without self awareness and whose education and outlook on life seems to have been gained from the lunatic fringe of Facebook, is not entirely unbelievable but it is unbelievable that he and Alice could have ever met let alone formed a relationship.

It is easy to see The Party as lampooning the post-Blair, pre-Corbyn Labour Party and others in the left leaning upper middle class around the world. But the political overtones are fairly light and it is essentially a film where four women get to be bitchy, in a classy way, about each other (and sometimes their menfolk) over a glass of champagne. At 71 minutes it doesn't outstay its welcome.

Ian's rating 2.5/5

The Trip to Italy

The Trip to Italy  (TTTI)  reunites the stars of, The Trip and takes them to (yes, you guessed it) Italy. The premise is essentially the same (go on a scenic gastronomic tour) but this time the stars go together on purpose because of the success of the newspaper articles about the previous trip.

I think I should say first up that I did really enjoy this film and it is very funny and there is no reason not to go to it. However, it is a bit lazy and it could have been even better. If we look at the five layers of entertainment potential I discussed in my blog about The Trip you can see why that is. The first layer is the scenery and of course Italy is lovely to look at. Their accommodation is a level up from the British version and is generally beautiful and historic. There's a bit of a theme of visiting the haunts of ex-pat English poets which adds a bit of interest.

The second layer is that of putting two funny people together to amuse us. This is TTTI's big strength. The jokes are good. There are more impressions (Hugh Grant, Batman, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino,  more Michael Caine, and the little man in a box) and there are amusing monologues.The third layer, the investigation of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's relationship and of them as people is where the film starts to fall down. If you want to be blunt, you could call this aspect the plot and the film's downfall is the lack of it. There's an inference that Steve Coogan has tidied up his act (hasn't been drinking for about six months) and he doesn't bonk the first attractive woman they meet), but we don't get any detail about that. And then its seems as if  someone said , "tell you what, let's make Rob Brydon's character the one who has casual sex" without really considering what that would add to the film or the dynamic, or if they considered it, didn't actually write it into the script.. Having done that, then Yolanda, the photographer from the first film is brought back which you'd think would make things interesting, but nothing happens and nothing is added to the plot. And Steve Coogan's son arrives from Spain (which is used to explain why they don't go to Sicily) and you think THAT might be a plot development, but no, the credits roll and you wonder why that happened.

(After I wrote the last paragraph I watched Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in an interview about The Trip to Italy on Youtube and apparently there was no script - Michael Winterbottom just outlined the premise and the actors had to improvise. This does explain the lack of plot.)

As in the first film, the food is merely background interest, although a wine called furore does provide fodder for some jokes. Unlike the first film, any celebration of englishness is only cursory, but there is some examination of aging which is amusing and well-done. So there we are - a very funny film, but only thought provoking in the sense that you think about how it could have been better. And now that I know it was improvised, to reflect that it's perhaps surprisingly cohesive.


Anne's rating 3/5 Ian's rating 3/5.

The Selfish Giant

I read the film festival programme, I rate things Id like to see, I see whether you I can timetable them, I buy some tickets and generally I have an entertaining and stimulating time going to watch films. Sometimes, however, I get it horribly wrong. Going to The Selfish Giant was one of those times.

I arrived at the Paramount to find I was in row M, which as Ian has already said is "unsuitable for people with legs" and this didn't bode well. The film turned out to be a much bigger problem than the seat. Five minutes in, I considered whether to go home but some masochistic or thrifty impulses prevented me.

So what was so terrible? The Selfish Giant is 93 minutes of all the characters being almost unrelentingly unpleasant to each other for no good reason. The main characters are two teenage boys, Arbor and Swifty and they are both unappealing. Arbor has ADHD and is as foul-mouthed as his parents and the only time I warmed to him was when he hugged his mother to comfort her. Swifty is slightly less obnoxious ( he's kind to horses)  but he gets killed off. The setting is industrial and grim and poor in a way the British can do so well.

I can hear you say "lots of films are about characters being unpleasant to each other" and that's true. Usually there's some point to it, or something uplifting comes from it and with this film this just not the case. The film festival programme says "exciting, tough and superbly acted" but I say "stay away". This is my first zero-rated film on this blog because cleaning the oven would really have been more fun than watching this. And cleaning the oven usually provides a sense of satisfaction.

Anne's rating 0/5

The Best Offer

Perfect clothes, perfect furnishings, perfect make-up, perfect looking extras, in other words perfect mise-en-scène. Populated by bunch of off-beat to downright weird characters. Virgil Oldman (Geoffrey Rush) is Italy's premier art auctioneer, always dines at the same restaurant, sitting alone facing the wall while wearing gloves. He is completely confident of his superior knowledge of art, and is not above exploiting that fact to his financial advantage from time to time. One of his two friends is an electro-mechanical genius who can repair or rebuild anything and is a babe magnet. The woman at the centre of the film, Claire Ibbetson, is an agoraphobic who no-one has seen for 10 years. She draws Oldman out of his routine with a bizarre series of phone calls and outrageous requests that no-one else would tolerate. Even some of the minor characters are outlandish.

Actually none of these characters or their situation would be possible in real world and that should cause the penny to start dropping. If they were more realistic I would class The Best Offer as a rom-com, mystery thriller. But given the combination of a magically perfect setting with larger-than-life characters I'm going out on a limb and classifying this as a modern fairytale. It is pity that there isn't a bit more humour.

Even though the film is set in Italy the cast is all English speaking. It is as if the population of Italy has been replaced by British people, though with Italian tastes and Italian clothes! Like art itself there is more style than substance here.

Ian's rating 3/5

Shadow Dancer

In 1993 Collette is on a mission to plant a bomb for the IRA on the London Underground, meanwhile negotiations that will lead to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 are underway. Collette is snatched by MI5 and offered the choice between returning home to her young son (and her IRA pals) as an informer, or a trial and long prison sentence in England and away from her son. Her new handler, Mac, reassures her that MI5 has never lost an informer in Northern Ireland.

Returning home she discovers that she is expected to come up with useful information every week. Meanwhile Mac's boss insists on using the first useful tip immediately and consequently the IRA suspects that someone in her family is an informant for the British. Mac also smells a rat and to protect his new informant has to use his spy skills against his employer to figure out what's going on behind his back.

The film exposes the dark underbelly of spy work; the testy and interdependent relationship between an informer (who is betraying family and friends and runs the risk of death if discovered) and the handler who's job it is to reassure, gain the confidence of and persuade the informer to keep on betraying. Its a relationship that must surely be soul destroying for both parties involved.

This is not a James Bond style spy thriller, while there are action scenes, the centre of the film is the relationships between Collette and her family and IRA associates, between Collette and Mac and between Mac and others in MI5. The is no glamour in Shadow Dancer (apart from Collette's red coat), just the general grimness of life in Belfast, and the potential for things to go fatally wrong.

Ian's rating 3/5, Anne's rating 3/5

The Angel's Share

One of The Angel's Share's claims to fame is that it's directed by Ken Loach, who is famous for gritty films with kitchen sink realism. There's a chance that grit and realism might not be what you're looking for in your evening's entertainment and so this might put you off and I do hope this isn't the case. Like Looking for Eric, (a film we both loved, also directed by Ken Loach),  The Angel's Share mixes grit with humour and charm and a slightly fanciful feel-good story.

Our story is set in Glasgow and features Robbie, a slight but good-looking troubled youth with a pregnant girlfriend who narrowly avoids going to jail at the opening of the film.He leads a somewhat desperate existence, plagued by beatings from some life-long rivals and his girlfriend's relatives who are less than keen on  the relationship. He's sentenced to community service and so makes the acquaintance of Harry the supervisor and Rhino, Albert and Mo, who are similarly troubled youths.

Harry gives Robbie a ride to the hospital when his son is born and then takes him home for a celebratory whisky afterwards. Robbie's appreciation of the subtleties of whisky inspire Harry to take him (and in fact the rest of the community service crew) to a  distillery and later to a formal whisky tasting. Robbie comes up with a cunning plan to steal some of a very rare single malt from an isolated distillery and  sell it to solve his financial woes. He conscripts Rhino, Albert and Mo to help him and the next part of the film is reminiscent of a Famous Five adventure with Scottish accents - it only lacks Timmy the dog. This is not a criticism - this is all rollicking good fun although the jolly life-affirming stuff is tempered with doses of violence.

You'll have to concentrate to make sure you catch all the dialogue which is delivered with broad Scottish accents and you'll have to be comfortable with plenty of four letter words but it's all worthwhile and the happy ending is most satisfactory

Anne's rating 4.5/5 Ian's rating 4/5

Sightseers

Anyone who has watched an episode of Top Gear will know about the evils of caravans, and of course Mr Bean is an object lesson in the dangers of the socially awkward. Dial down the social awkwardness to slightly lower than Ricky Gervais in The Office and you have Tina and Chris. Chris owns the caravan and is keen to get some alone time with his new girlfriend and see the sights of Yorkshire. Tina is excited to have a boyfriend and grasp at the chance to escape from her suffocating mother. Chris is not only interested in trams and innovative caravans, he has a low tolerance for loutish behaviour and snobbery. Tina becomes suspicious of the coincidental deaths that follow them and keen to impress her boyfriend joins in the killing spree. Such one-upmanship is not healthy for the bystanders and eventually takes its toll on the happy couple to a sound track dominated by Tainted Love.

Sightseers follows a simple recipe of humour and shock. Unfortunately there is only enough good material for a 50-60 minutes film (or TV drama). So by the end of 95 minutes the shocks were wearing a bit thin and the gaps between jokes were getting tedious. That said Chris voiced everyone's darkest desire when he whined "I just want to be feared and respected. Is that too much to ask?".

Ian's rating 2/5 Anne's rating 2/5

Sightseers was preceded by a short film called Bear about a woman who wakes up on her birthday and thinks her boyfriend has forgotten it and she heads out on her mountain bike. Meanwhile her boyfriend has planned a surprise picnic, which doesn't go as planned. The ending would seem more realistic if the film was set in a country with bears rather than Australia!

The Trip

As its name implies, The Trip is a road trip movie, and it's done really, really well. I discovered after I started writing this blog that it's actually a condensed version of a 6 part BBC TV series of the same name - so I'm not sure if we or the TV audience got the best of the deal. British Comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon go on a gastronomic trip around Lancashire, Cumbria and Yorkshire, purportedly because Steve Coogan's girlfriend dropped out at short notice.

This premise provides layers and layers of entertainment potential. Firstly, the scenery is great, and since we went to most their destinations 20 years ago it had the pleasure of the revisiting old haunts. In particular, Malham Cove in Yorkshire is just as spectacular as I remember.

Secondly, it puts two very funny people together to amuse us. Lots of time is spent in idle banter, competitive impersonation of other actors, making puns and singing. It's just fun to be tagging along.

Thirdly, there's an interesting investigation of Rob and Steve's friendship, with a clever contrasting of their personal lives and personalities. Steve is portrayed as sexier but more troubled - the bigger woman magnet and the one with the broken marriage. Rob is portrayed as the devoted new dad with a loving wife waiting at home. Their relationship is portrayed as superficial and competitive, but as the film unfolds it seems that genuine affection and enjoyment of each other's company emerges. An insight into how much this is fact or fiction appears in a Guardian Article if you want to know more.

Fourthly, there's a background of gourmet food - I thought this was going to part of the comedy, a sort of piss-take on pretentiousness but this wasn't the case. Maybe the food was a bigger part of the TV series.

And fifthly, there's a kind of celebration of Englishness - epitomised, I thought, by Steve Coogan's parents - cups of tea, an enthusiastic dissertation on the best route from A to B and a dismissal of Steve as being not as funny as his siblings.

The Trip is laugh-out-loud funny and I think you should go.

Anne's rating 5/5. Ian's rating 3/5.

Submarine

Oliver, the subject of Submarine, is the only son of a depression-prone marine biologist and an office worker . He worries a lot about his parents relationship (particularly since one his mother's old flames has moved in to the house next door) and about the fact that he's still a virgin. When he's not mooching about in his bedroom he's walking on the beach or on industrial wasteland near home.

One of his school mates, Jordana, who is equally odd but more outgoing, initiates a relationship and then they mooch together. She burns the hair on his legs because it amuses her, and they sit in an old bath in the aforementioned industrial wasteland. They have sex. Eventually Oliver is brave enough to tell her about his fears for his parents relationship, and she confides that her mother has a brain tumour. They teeter towards a meaningful and supportive relationship but Oliver misses his chance to really secure Jordana's affections. She asked him to come with her to the hospital the day her mother has an operation and he doesn't, so she dumps him. Meanwhile, his parents sort their differences.

Submarine takes place in the winter in Wales and so the landscape is gloomy as well as the plot. Sally Hawkins and Noah Taylor (Oliver's parents) are completely unbelievable caricatures - think George and Mildred with slightly higher IQ's. Oliver and Jordana are more believable but not very likeable. You could call Submarine a teenage love story or you could call it an oddball coming of age movie. For either of those genres to be successful its necessary to like or at least sympathise with the protagonists - and I didn't.

Anne's rating 1.5/5

Weekend

Weekend is a gay romance which takes place over the course of three days. Russell, a quiet and tidy swimming pool life guard meets Glen, who is off to the USA to study, in a gay bar. Despite Russell thinking Glen is out of his league, they end up having sex at Russell's flat.

In the morning, over cups of coffee in bed, Glen indulges his habit of interviewing the person he's just had sex with about how it went and what they were thinking, recording the conversation on a small dictaphone. He confesses to sharing the recordings with his female flatmate. And so Russell and Glen get to know each other better.

Watching this process is really the guts of the movie, and it's done with some charm. It turns out Russell likes to keep a record of sexual encounters too - he has a diary on his computer, and he reads it to Glen. They talk about coming out, about Russell being a foster child, about public displays of affection and their attitudes to goodbyes. There's drinking, drug taking and more sex, but, crucially, more talking. So, when 4 o'clock on Sunday afternoon arrives and Glen has to catch a train as the first stage of traveling to the USA, Russell achieves a personal breakthrough by publicly kissing him goodbye at the station and we feel a potentially great relationship has been formed.

Visually, I found the grainy appearance of this film quite annoying. Perhaps it was supposed to underline the slightly gritty nature of the environment - Russell's flat is in an ugly high rise block in Nottingham. Whatever its purpose, eventually I forgot about it. In contrast, the two leads were visually appealing and the dialogue was great. I don't think this is a film to set the world alight, but it was absorbing and well-acted. I liked how what started as a one-night stand blossomed into something more meaningful and fulfilling, even it was doomed by circumstance not to last.

Anne's rating 3/5.

Another Year

Another Year is the latest offering from British writer and director Mike Leigh. I feel like I should have seen a lot of his films, but the only other one I'm sure I've seem is Secrets and Lies - which I have a soft spot for since it's one of the few films out there with an optometrist as one of the main characters. And it's got Timothy Spall in it, for whom I also have a soft spot. Both Secrets and Lies and Another Year are the British antithesis of a Hollywood movie. The stars look like ordinary people, rather than beautiful people chosen for their looks. They're filmed in ordinary homes (although I'd have to says Tom's brother's terraced house was almost extraordinary in its dreariness) and the characters are portrayed warts and all.

The characters and their warts are pretty much the point of the film. The central characters are a married couple called Tom and Gerri who seem remarkably contented with their lives and each other. He's an engineering geologist and she's a counsellor at a medical practice and they live in a very pleasant house in London. Their alotment garden is a big feature in their lives as is their adult son Joe.

Another year watches the rhythm of Tom and Gerri's life- they are the sun and friends and family spin around them like planets, using them for light and warmth. Mary is one of the friends - she's a typist at the medical centre. She's single, fond of a drink and Tom and Gerri's son Joe and short of money and consideration for others. Her life is chaotic and her planet seems liable to spin off course. And then there's Ken, whose life is equally disastrous, and Ronnie (Tom's recently bereaved brother), and the aforementioned Joe and his new girlfriend.

Not all that much happens in Another Year. The rewards of watching it are the amazingly convincing acting (it's almost like a documentary) and the human interest factor. Mary is particularly well-acted and she's splendidly self-centred. Tom and Gerri come across as generous with their time and resources but a bit self-satisfied with it. Definitely not an escapist movie - more an examination of the human condition

Anne's rating 3.5/5 Ian's rating 3/5

Looking for Eric

You might find this hard to believe, but Ken Loach has made a life-affirming,
cheer-you-up-and-make-you-laugh movie to which you must go, without further ado. Looking for Eric has plenty of trademark Ken Loach grittiness, realism, swearing and terrace houses but it also has charm, imagination, humour and a happy ending.

Eric is postman in his fifties who is prone to panic attacks. He lives in one of the aforementioned terrace houses with his 2 obnoxious stepsons and he hasn't had sex in a long time. Fortunately for Eric, his fellow postmen are particularly supportive friends, and one of them introduces him to the self help concept of imagining yourself and your life through the eyes of one of your heroes. Eric's hero is Eric Cantona the footballer, and before you know it, there is Eric Cantona (played by Eric Cantona) in Eric the postman's bedroom, giving him advice.

Watching Eric help Eric sort out his life is an experience you shouldn't miss - so don't.

Anne's rating 5/5

In the Loop

In the loop is the antithesis of Louise-Michel. It's British, it's loud, it's fast-paced, its gloriously crude and best of all, it's actually funny. And not just funny, its truly a laugh a minute - while you're laughing at one joke you're missing the next one.

ITL is a political satire and focuses on the Secretary of State for International Development (Simon), his new aide (Toby) and the Prime Minister's director of communications (Malcolm). Malcolm is a foul-mouthed sarcastic Scot while Simon and Toby are somewhat self-effacing Englishmen. The film's scenario is that, while the UK and USA are planning to go to war in the Middle East, Simon says in a news conference that war is "unforeseeable".(I'll never see or hear that word again without thinking of this film!) This renders Malcolm apoplectic and the movie is a roller-coaster ride from there, hopping rapidly between London and Washington and Simon's constituency. The dialogue, the sarcasm and the humour are relentless and as long as you can handle bad language in abundance you should enjoy this movie immensely.

Anne's rating 4.5/5 Ian's rating 4.5/5

An Education

Parents of teenage girls in the 21st Century should pause to consider that limiting their daughter's internet access so that they don't meet predatory men online isn't foolproof -they could meet a predatory man in the street, while waiting for a bus - and that's what An Education is about - a teenager who meets a man while she's waiting for the bus, and the consequences of that meeting for her and the entire family.

This film is set in London in the 1960's and while the schoolgirl-dates-older-man scenario gives you a feeling of foreboding you also see that its tremendous fun for a smart schoolgirl whose world revolves around homework and youth orchestra to be taken out to concerts and away to Paris for the weekend by a man who manages to convince her parents its a good idea.

The unfolding of the plot is one of the joys of the movie - others include a great script, great acting and sixties clothes, cars and attitudes. My few criticisms are that Jenny seemed too self-possessed a teenager to be entirely believable and that there was a little too much explanation at the end of the film (it could have been five minutes shorter and not suffered at all) but I enjoyed it completely. It's not a straightforward romance, but its all the more absorbing because of that.

Cleverly, hints about the ending are dropped throughout the film but I only noticed them in retrospect -- Ian

Anne's rating 4.5/5 Ian's rating 4/5