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Reviews
Silent Hours (2017)
Utter shite!
Sick, serial killer genre, which diverts the viewer from the discovery of the murderer by showing him acting in a way that implies he is not guilty - therefore it being impossible to guess. This breaks even the most basic rules of the genre and is deeply frustrating.
The plot has more holes than a colander, the acting is woodentop level, we are expected to believe that the aging lead is a Lothario who has young women desperate to be sexually abused by him at every opportunity. It is painful to watch the unfolding, incoherent nonsense. How this sort of rubbish manages to get funding is beyond me, and is an offence to filmwatchers.
Tenet (2020)
For teenagers and those easily fooled.
This film is dressed up as something profoundly ingenious and inventive, yet it is so poorly thought-through and lacking in any coherence that it is painful to watch. Rarely have I seen such a poorly directed film; each scene was awkwardly put together, poorly coordinated, and unintelligible, from the opening attack at the Kiev opera, to the nonsensical ending with soldiers running about shooting at the air like headless chickens.
The acting from Washington was abysmal. Wooden and awkward, and most of the dialogue from all the cast was as spoken as if being read from the script. Even Branagh, who at least put a little energy into his sadistic and nihilistic villain, couldn't do much with such a cardboard cut-out character.
The scene with Michael Caine, who even as old as Methuselah, would still out act the rest if his scene wasn't both irrelevant and hurried through, was wasted. Again, direction woeful, or was Nolan handing scenes over to assistants?
A film for die-hard numpties who believe that incoherence is the sign of a master.
The Sense of an Ending (2017)
Great performances in a powerful and moving film.
This is a film which centres on its main character Tony Webster, played with great subtlety by Broadbent, uncovering some of the unintended effects of earlier actions, long forgotten and submerged under a conventional and safe life. A letter out of the blue from a lawyer reconnects the intelligent but somewhat oblivious Tony to both people and events from his past. In the film, like the novel, this exploration is partly worked out in conversations with his knowing and somewhat arch ex-wife superbly portrayed by Harriet Walter. Even though the memories are Tony's, his wife always seems to be one step ahead in understanding their deeper significance and and recognising her ex-husband's obtuseness and self-deceptions. Through the discussions and flasbacks, a painful affair is slowly uncovered involving Tony's erratic first girlfriend and his best friend from school, and the flurry of interactions between all those involved at the time have powerful and lasting consequences, most of which were hardly foreseen by Tony, who seems to have settled for a lack of curiosity through the long years that followed. It is the unravelling of those consequences and the affect that has on the main character that soon becomes the centrepiece of the film. In fine humanist fashion, Tony is dragged through slow realisation, regret, humiliation, introspection, and an honest reappraisal of what he has become, to finally reach a level of resolution that is both persuasive and heartening. The film and the performances manage to avoid any hint of sentimentality and self-congratulatory smugness in a completely satisfying way. An excellent film!
The Party (2017)
A very sharp piss-take of modern intellectuals and the chatterati.
Short and very much to the point with some fine lines. The dialogue is tight and focused on the cliches of each characters' beliefs, delivered with excellent, pent up performances, deliciously, and unflatteringly revealed in intense black and white close ups. A small group of self-regarding, thinking bourgeoisie, each with their own set of life-style ideals, each complacently convinced of their own brilliance, all thinking they are right and very right-on, meet each other in the raw. Secrets, lies and betrayal lurk slightly beneath the surface of their self-satisfied lives. Yes, this does pick on the contemporary, unquestionable, politically-correct shibboleths of a particular group of people, admittedly in an exaggerated and very focused way, but how better to really get to the soul of their self-obsessed narcissism. Look a little deeper, though, and it mirrors much that is going wrong with our media-obsessed, sound bite, reality tv, celebrity worshiping, disfunctional times. It could be called 'close up' because that's what it is, a close up look at our own vanities. Modern theatre at its best, and brilliantly brought to the big screen.
Churchill (2017)
Melodramatic nonsense
All evidence points to Churchill being the main actor behind the idea of the Normandy landings. He pushed for it for over two years with increasing impatience, trying to persuade Roosevelt to agree. The second front was seen in Britain as an absolute necessity in order to prevent Hitler defeating the Russians, consolidating their mainland European forces, and gaining the resources they needed, including oil from the Caucasus, to mount a full-scale attack on England. After the Russian victory at Stalingrad, it was seen as necessary to shorten the war, and to stop the Russians becoming too dominant on the continent.
As the noted historian Martin Gilbert notes: "It was Roosevelt, not Churchill, who postponed, the Second Front for a full two years. In the long run-up to D-Day, Churchill was convinced that a cross-Channel landing was the way to Germany's defeat."
Churchill was the inspiration behind the floating Mulberry harbours needed for unloading heavy weaponry and equipment from ships - hollow concrete, floating blocks that were towed across the Chanel by tugs. He was also intrigued by, and personally oversaw, the projects to modify tanks specially developed for tackling the particular difficulties of landing in sea water and mounting beach defenses. Far from being out-of-touch and stuck in ideas held in the previous war, as falsely portrayed in the film, he was a very strong advocate of modern, technical solutions to the problems of the defeat of Germany.
Again, according to Gilbert: "In the last months of 1942 Churchill was still seeking August or September 1943 as the date of the cross-Channel landing. At a Staff Conference on 16 December 1943, however, the three British Chiefs of Staff, headed by General Sir Alan Brooke, told him that it could not be done." Brooke, the very man portrayed in the film as resenting Churchill's 'reservations' and 'fears' about the landing.
On the History Today site you can read: "Addressing a joint session of Congress, Churchill warned that the real danger at present was the "dragging-out of the war at enormous expense" because of the risk that the Allies would become "tired or bored or split"—and play into the hands of Germany and Japan. He pushed for an early and massive attack on the "underbelly of the Axis." And so, to "speed" things up, the British prime minister and President Roosevelt set a date for a cross-Channel invasion of Normandy, in northern France, for May 1, 1944, regardless of the problems presented by the invasion of Italy, which was underway. It would be carried out by 29 divisions, including a Free French division, if possible."
On the evening before the landings, Churchill happily phoned Stalin to tell him the attack was finally on.
The film's basic premise seems to have been conjured out of a remark that was recorded in Churchill's wife's diary, when, again, on the night before the attack, she writes that he "lamented that by morning 20,000 young soldiers would be dead." Of course he was concerned about the loss of life, but not in the way that the film shows as being a debilitating condition, almost suggesting senility, and such an obstruction to his generals.
None of this would matter so much if the film were a dramatic success. Unfortunately, it is a tawdry, over-sentimentalised bore, with contrived emotional, schmaltzy scenes, and quiet, tinkly fairy music in the background. The scene (also historically inaccurate) between Cox (Churchill), and Purefoy (the King) is played so gauchely that at one moment I thought, as the gentle music started to rise and Purefoy moved forward, that Purefoy would kiss Churchill.
That scene distorts a much more interesting reality, turning something that in reality was actually very clever into fictional schmultz; a case of fiction being much less interesting than reality. Churchill did insist to Eisenhower that he wanted to sail on D Day on HMS Belfast, even insisting, if necessary, that he would obtain a naval commission to do so. Churchill did not ask the King to go with him. In fact it was the King, on being told of Churchill's plans, who cleverly insisted he would go along too. This put Churchill into an interesting difficulty since he saw the King's gesture as a foolhardy and an unacceptable risk to a far too important symbolic figure, and so Churchill refused to countenance it, seeing at the same time that he would also have to abandon his own foolhardy plan.
Other scenes, especially those between Churchill and his assistant, were typical, overblown, and contrived set pieces for the sake of some 'stirring' rhetoric, with about as much subtlety and nuance as a party political broadcast.
Good actors, some good performances, some terrible casting (Purefoy) but really, who wrote this drivel?