sjmrheathrow Reviews

Bloody Sunday (2002)

Humbling Story Of Massacre In Derry

[9/10 · 8 March 2019]

Paul Greengrass film inspired by Don Mullan's book Eyewitness Bloody Sunday tells the awful story story of Irish civilians shot by British soldiers on 30th January 1972. The first British massacre carried out since my own birth in England in 1956 or was it ? The first had been the massacre of Indian nationals (Sihks) in Amritsar in 1919. The second was at Croke Park, Dublin on 21st November 1920 where 14 civilians attending a football match were shot dead.

30th January 1972 was the day we paid our renewal subscription to the International Massacre Club, unequivocally re-joining the ranks of Amritza in 1919; Dublin in 1920; Maille in 1944; Sharpville in 1960 ; My Lai in 1968; Derry in 1972.

If there were an awards ceremony for massacres, Britain would have won the Oscar - with a hat trick - easily.

At a time when Britain was feeling as self-satisfied at having its first female Prime Minister as the USA may have felt when the first black President was sworn into office in 2009.

Excellent performance by Jimmy Nesbitt as Ivan Cooper the local MP for Derry

A great film that shows the British Army at its brutal, destructive worst.

One of the best films about Ireland ever made by an Englishman.

What was heroism in the previous generation is seen by my own in the same light as Selma (2014) where the people are the children of a different God whose skin just happens to be a different colour.

Calvary (2014)

Father, forgive them

[9/10 · 24 January 2019]

Written and Directed by John Michael McDonagh; this film goes a long way towards answering nagging questions that had been on my mind about everyday life in rural Ireland since I worked as a teenager with homeless expatriate Irishmen in Oxford. They seemed to know so much about me - who knew so little. I've tried to understand, for a long time, the nature of the communities they came from.

In the film we see the main character Father James (Brendan Gleeson) as he goes about his work in the most challenging circumstances he's yet faced in his vocational life as a Roman Catholic priest.

The time frame of the story is set early on in the film, when the local butcher Jack Brennan (Chris O'Dowd) makes a startling and disturbing disclosure in the confessional. He has lived (as so many sexually abused children do) with the awful secret for much of his adult life, to the extent that when he's ready and able to take on the Church and hold the individual concerned to account, he finds that he has died and his sins have effectively died with him.

Like the girls, whose unplanned pregnancies led them to the Magdalene Laundries and left their children as abandonned orphans of the most unnecessary kind, Jack sees his options as few, and reasons that to find another offending priest and take his revenge on them would be less meaningful than to murder 'a good priest'. For want of a suitable alternative, Father James fits the bill and Jack gives him notice to get his affairs in order and meet him on the beach in a week's time.

As Father James tries to get helpfully involved in the tragedies of his suicidal daughter Fiona (Kelly Reilly);a wealthy financier (Michael Fitzgerald) whose wealth and family seem meaningless to him; Jack Brenan's wayward wife Veronica (Orla O'Rouke); Inspector Stanton's theatrical, gay, young paramour Leo (Owen Sharpe); the bereaved wife (Marie-Josee Croze) of a dying road accident survivor to whom Father James administers the last rites and supportive counsel; a troubled young man, Milo (Killian Scott); an elderly American writer, living in a remote coastal cottage (M. Emmet Walsh) and fearing his own imminent death; a publican upon whom the banks have foreclosed which will destroy his livelihood.

While he attends as best he can these troubles of other people within his orbit, his own world begins to cave in as his church is burned down and his dog is deliberately killed. He takes to drink and while drunk misuses the gun he has loaned from Inspector Stanton (Gary Lyndon) causing Brendan Lynch (Pat Shortt) even more pain and anguish - for which he retaliates with violence.

Father James shows tremendous fortitude under all this pressure and having counselled his daughter that, among virtues 'forgiveness is under-rated' - keeps his appointment with Jack Brennan on the beach.

Ill Manors (2012)

To The Manner Born, like - Not

[7/10 · 24 January 2019]

Listen to the narrator's warning at the opening of the film, because a rough and dangerous ride follows as the film unfolds.

The only reason that I'm able to write a coherent review of the film is because some, but not all, of the subject matter is entirely foreign to me and to most of the people who have been around me for most of my long, adult life.

The narration is in a foreign language (hip-hop) that I never learned at school, but I'm a quick learner. If you aren't - it'll be hard to work out what's going on in the confused and disjointed lives that confront you - but persevere.. because it will make sense - eventually. Learn the language of the narrator, because he's explaining what's happening as we shift back and forth in time.

Writer and Director Ben Drew / Plan B presents a shockingly realistic portrayal and insight into the hapless lives of the damaged individuals that we get to know in the course of the story.

If society, as a whole, has not got the message that comes out loud and clear from the film, it's 'Keep drugs, fireworks, sharp instruments and unloving care-takers away from young children - if you want a happy ending in the longer term'.

This film charts the everyday outcomes which follow early exposure to forbidden fruit and the inability of people to recover from exposure, later on in life - whether due to premature death or permanent, irreversible psycholgical damage. All the way through it's a long catalogue of unhappy endings without any hope of remission.

An old story, well-told; dressed up in the newest generation's clothes, sex, drugs and rock and roll.

I, Daniel Blake (2016)

A test that anybody who's ill can fail

[8/10 · 24 January 2019]

Ken Loach's film of Paul Laverty's screenplay shows a telling and painful story of governmental abuse of the temporarily unwell. By mistreating and undermining the noble spirit and unshakeable good faith of Daniel Blake (Dave Johns), we see the malign bureaucracy claiming another avoidable fatality.

In the Heat of the Night (1967)

Black and White, North and South, Strange Fruit

[9/10 · 23 January 2019]

Based on John Ball's 1965 novel, Norman Jewison directs Stirling Silliphant's gripping screenplay that must be the archetype of unlikely professional associations between white police chief Gillespie (Rod Steiger) and black Philadelphia police detective Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier). Set in Mississippi, Tibbs is initially mistakenly arrested on suspicion of murdering important local businessman Philip Colbert.

As it begins to dawn on Chief Gillespie, that not only have they brought in the wrong man, but that the man is an out-of-town big city police homicide expert, a prickly and uneasy alliance begins to build between the two men which challenges both their respective deep-seated prejudices and mistaken expectations almost to the limit.

Understandably unenthusiastic about involment in a local murder enquiry, Tibbs' boss volunteers his help to Gillespie who recognises that he's out of his depth and may well benefit from Tibbs' obvious expertise.

No stranger to the territory or to the prejudice he will face; he pitches in and builds a mutually ditrustful, but somehow respectful working relationship with Gillespie, whose clear unease despite their deap-seated hostily towards one another in the electric initial encounter.

The release of this film was delayed, by the assassination of a man whose life was dedicated to the peaceful reconciliation of black and white, slave and master under a new basis of equality and freedom. His name was Martin Luther King.

The Way (I) (2010)

I am the way; the truth and the life

[9/10 · 20 January 2019]

Rooted in Jack Hitt's book 'Off The Road' (which seems to borrow something from the title of Jack Kerouac's 1957 book 'On The Road') Emilio Estevez directs a film which explores a spiritual journey experienced by four people who are ostensibly retracing the pilgrim's path that Daniel (Emilio Esteves) has died in the attempt of following.

Daniel literally haunts his bereaved father, Tom (Martin Sheen), as Tom embarks - unexpectedly - on the journey that his son had planned and equipped himself to complete. He realises how he is suddenly very much alone.

Tom is initially very troubled by the last conversation that he has had with Daniel as they travelled together to the airport near their home town. He is replaying his son's words as he begins to take in the awful realisation that his son has died in his attempt to see and experience actually being in places that are foreign to their home on the U.S. West Coast.

Daniel has reached a crisis in his own life where he realises that he simply must go travelling and see the rest of the world for himself - with his own eyes.

The fact that actor Martin Sheen (given name - Ramon Esteves) is the Director's own father in reality, puts one in mind of John Huston directing his own father, Walter Huston, in 'The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre' - a Hollywood generation earlier.

But when we discover that Galicia is the ancestral home of the Estevez family, the possibilty that the film operates on more than one level becomes more and more likely. The film is dedicated to Emilio Esteves' grandfather.

The film starts with Daniel's death from exposure. He has travelled to the Pyrenees in northern France to begin his pligrimage, but is caught out in bad weather that proves fatal.

In the biblical gospel of John - a surviving disciple of Christ - he quotes Christ as having said 'I am the way; the truth and the life', in the sense of being a role model for the lives of the people who came after him.

This seems to be, in one sense, 'The Way' in the title of the film.

As the film unfolds and the various past experiences of the key characters become clearer, their participation in a journey is that as much spiritual as physical and the reconciliation to their plight and situation in life as they are travelling across northern Spain to a holy place which has held a special significance to many over the previous millenium - begins to profoundly affect the group of haphazard friends as they journey together.

Tom wrestles with his grief at the loss of his son, who was struggling to achieve his ambition to travel and learn more of the world at first hand. Sarah (Deborah Kara Unger) is struggling to reconcile herself to her failed marriage to an abusive husband compounded by her decision to end the life of her unborn child. Joost (Yorrick van Wageningen) is struggling with his weight and his inability to lose it. Jack (James Nesbitt) is a writer who is, for some reason he can't quite understand, unable to write.

But in the course of their physical journey to Santiago de Compostella, each of the pilgrims undergoes changes to their outlook on their own situation and we see them managing to help each other out of the apparent hopelessness of their state of mind at the beginning of the trek.

Tom manages to embrace, celebrate and fulfill his dead son's ambition to travel; Sarah manages to speak for the first time about her guilt over her failed marriage and lost child whose imagined voice haunts her; Joost manages to realise that all he needs to succeed is to accept himself for how he is and buy a new (and bigger) suit for his brother's wedding; Jack begins to make sense of the people around him and realise the everyday grandeur and frailty of their troubled human spirit - obtaining permission from even Tom, to include his son's death and his own grief in the story he is finally able to write.

But the people, themselves, do not understand how this process is happening. They just know that - mysterious as it is - they are being healed by it and being made whole where they were inexplicably broken and fragmented.

It's a highway that they have walked down - but it's a new way of life and way of living it that they have all experienced by the end of the film. Each helping the other on the way to reach it.

Let There Be Light (1980)

Moving Real Life stoty

[9/10 · 19 January 2019]

John Huston's (1946) documentary film was shot at Mason General Hospital on Long Island at the end of the Second World War for the U.S. Government during the director's time as an officer in the U.S. Signal Corps.

One of a number of documentary films he made in this capacity including 'Report From The Aleutians' and 'The Battle of San Pietro', it did not see 'The Light' for a number of years. As copyright holders and owners of the film, the U.S. Government chose not to release it.

The techniques used in making the film are described in John Huston's autobiography 'An Open Book' published by Macmillan and also in an interview recorded by Richard Leacock and Midge McKenzie in 1982.

The film follows the progress of a particular intake of men returning from active service in various theatres of war. These men have returned deeply disturbed by their battle experiences and we follow their progress as they are helped to come to terms with their distress and to rebuild their fragile lives.

Huston captures the most unusual and remarkable sequences that document the work of the gifted psychiatrists at Mason General as they assist the men to reconcile themselves to the awful experiences they have endured.

This film was way ahead of its time in recognising and understanding how conditions that were variously known as 'shell shock' and 'battle fatigue' can respond to treatment and give their unfortunate sufferers a renewed lease of life.

Despite the dated soundtrack, the narration by Huston's own father - Walter - makes the confusing and sometimes disturbing footage accessible and meaningful to the audience.

How tragic that such a well-made and important film should have been kept from us for so long.

Sex in a Cold Climate (1998 TV Movie)

Suffer Little Children

[9/10 · 19 January 2019]

Steve Humphries' (1998) documentary is a piece of original photojournalism and social history which documents the testimony of four women who recount their early lives and enounters with a chain of institutions in Ireland which were known by the name of the biblical figure Mary Magdalene.

Children and young women who found themselves arriving at these places became known to the outside world, and even the children from the orphanages which became an awful logical adjunct to them, as 'Magdalenes'.

Mary Magdalene is, like the Laundries in Ireland which bore her name until very recently, nothing if not the source of considerable and enduring controversy. She ranges from being a fallen woman, or harlot to being a saintly disciple of Christ who was present both at his crucifiction and resurrection.

Through the course of the documentary, we come to know Martha Cooney, Christina Mulcahy, Phyllis Valentine and Brigid Young as they tell their own story as best they can. In the testimony of these brave women, we begin to get a feel for the places in which they grew up and what went on there.

Phyllis and Brigid were orphans to begin with, but as their story unfolds the meaning of the word 'orphan' in this context becomes a little suspect. And as Brigid's story takes on it's own powerful momentum, we begin to realise that the orphanages attached to The Magdalene Laundries were an unnatural consequence of the way that the inmates of the Laundries were selected and their natural emotional bonds with their infant children broken.

Many of the worst abuses that these women recall and describe are dramatically reconstructed in Peter Mullan's (2002) feature film 'The Magdalene Sisters'.

As the documentary develops, and the testimony of the four women builds, an uncomfortable pattern begins to emerge. A terrible and unmistakable inversion of the vision of the Christ who said 'Suffer little children to come unto me' is perversely transformed into a dark vision of a Christ who might have said instead 'Make little children who come unto me suffer'. This seems quite clearly to have been the fate of these children who came into the care of the Church as involuntary inmates of the Magdalene Orphanages and Laundries.

Like the great documentaries of earlier times, Steve Humphries film begins a deep social catharsis that alone has the power to transform the lives of vulnerable children in the future. No parliamentary enactment can ever protect them as comprehensively as a well-informed public who clearly understand the nature of the mischief which is being made in their name and with their apparent consent.

Manchester by the Sea (2016)

Full Use of the Gun

[9/10 · 17 January 2019]

This film, that was both directed and written by Keneth Lonnergen, focusses on the adult life of Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) whose extended family still seem to reside in and around the eponymous Manchester by the Sea.

Let me say first off, that this film will not be good value for money if watched, once only, among other pre-paying customers at a movie-theater or drive-in. I watched it, twice, on a widescreen computer monitor via the English BBC TV public screening on 'Iplayer' and did enough research before watching it a second time to recognise the face of Keneth Lonnergen, himself, playing the passer-by in light blue - who makes a judgemental and inflamatory comment while Lee and his nephew Patrick are arguing.

I recently watched a profile of film director Nicholas Roeg, which included his own story of his early involvment in film-making, as a cinematographer. It showed me one of the keys to unlocking the sense of Manchester By The Sea and the character of Lee Chandler.

It's also in John Huston's story (in his autobigraphy) of the very early days of Hollywood when he visited as a sick child, with his mother. He, too, was fascinated by how film when edited or simply reversed could make swimmers dive back out of the swimming pool and seemingly jump back up onto the diving board. A great film star of the silent movie era, Charlie Chaplin, explained to the child how this is done.

Film-makers can not only conquer the conventional experience of space; but also the conventional experience of time.

This film, like most others, has a beginning - signalled by the opening frames of the idyllic seaside village of Manchester and an end - which is signalled by the credits rolling. But in between, and also by way of explanation or insight into Lee Chandler's earlier life and subsequent behaviour, includes a number of flashbacks which include the audience of the film in the probable effect this may have had on Lee's life.

The fact that film is a serial medium is what makes it nearly impossible to 'get it' at the first viewing of the film. Time is jumbled up in this film and also the interraction of the characters does not always include handy hints like them addressing one another by name in the dialogue. After nearly a day with the IMDB cast list and photos, I had worked out more or less who was who. I'd written down most of the action that I could remember from the first viewing, before watching it for a second time.

Only by the end of the second viewing did I feel I'd 'got it'. Only at the end of the second viewing did it all make sense.

'Full use of the gun' is a phrase from English clay pigeon shooting (target shooting with shotguns at moving clay targets launched at angles and speeds which challenge the shooter's skill). It means that you may load 2 shells and fire both if you need to, to break the moving target, without penalty.

Guns feature twice in this film and both instances it involves Lee. But by the second instance, Lee's mind is working in quite a different way and his intentions are much more in tune with his brother's puzzling intentions when formally appointing Lee as Patrick's guardian in the event of his death, which occurs unexpectedly soon.

Enjoy it and give yourself time to unscramble what has happened.