The anbaric journal of Dan Slevin, gentleman, of Newtown
The allotment is one of the United Kingdom’s greatest achievements, unrepeated I believe anywhere else. In exchange for moving in to shoeboxes stacked upon each other the British poor were given a back garden somewhere else - a nearby shared field converted into small plots where they could grow some food and still experience something of a life outdoors, connected to the seasons. And who could have guessed that, at the same time, the allotment could also be such an effective metaphor for life in modern England.
In Richard Laxton’s film Grow Your Own, the spare plots at a Liverpool allotment are being allocated to refugees, to help them adjust to life in their new country and give them something to do during the otherwise long days. The locals, led by ex-cop Big John (Philip Jackson) with the help of his downtrodden son Little John (Eddie Marsan from Happy-Go-Lucky), don’t like the idea of their patch being invaded by “gypos” and turn a cold shoulder to their new neighbours.
When a mobile phone company arrives wanting one of the plots for a new mast the locals see an opportunity to start throwing their weight around. Meanwhile, Chinese refugee Kung Sang (Benedict Wong), broken by the loss of his wife during their journey, discovers a kind of rebirth via the soil and shark fin melon.
Grow Your Own is the best of the three contemporary UK films released in the last month (Happy-Go-Lucky and Brick Lane are the others). An excellent script by Carl Hunter and Frank Cottrell Boyce (24 Hour Party People and Welcome to Sarajevo) contains plenty of diverting comic moments while never losing sight of the human stories unfolding close at hand, reminding us that Social Workers may well be the heroes of the 21st century.
The strengths of Grow Your Own (good characters with story developments driven out of those characters, or rather the character of those characters if I may) can also be found in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, the excellent sequel to The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe from 2005. It helps that CS Lewis knew what he was doing when he wrote the books but there’s something very satisfying about seeing a story moved forward, seemingly inevitably, by the nature of the characters. Peter’s pride, Lucy’s faith, Edmund’s ADD and Susan’s hormones all play a part in either getting the children in to or out of trouble as they return to Narnia after a year in Finchley.
1300 years of Narnia time after they left they have been summoned back by Susan’s magic horn, now in the possession of young Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes). Caspian is the rightful heir to the Telmarine throne but his Uncle (King Miraz, played superbly by Italian favourite Sergio Castellitto) wants him out of the way. To make things worse, the Telmarines don’t even belong in Narnia but are fascist invaders who have forced the talking animals and mythical creatures into hiding. Aslan, as you might expect, is nowhere to be found.
Caspian chugs along at an excellent pace and the whole thing is sprinkled with plenty of wit. The casting is superb: Castellitto as I have already mentioned; Peter Dinklage must be sick of playing dwarves but he won’t find a better one than Trumpkin; Eddie Izzard is the voice of the very amusing Reepicheep, mouse musketeer, and I just loved Trufflehunter the badger (Ken Stott).
Australian thriller The Jammed is a tightly-wound piece of work about people-trafficking and prostitution in present day Melbourne. Not quite as spiritually desolating as the similar Lilya 4-ever, it still effectively mines the same rage. Through a series of (possibly unlikely) coincidences, young office worker Ashley (Veronica Sywak) is helping a Chinese woman find her missing daughter. The trail leads to an illegal brothel where “Rose” (Anna Anderson), strung out on drugs, shares a room with “Crystal” (Emma Lung) and Vanya (Saskia Burmeister), all of whom have been conned, trafficked into Australia and then kept out of sight of all except clients and bosses.
If the film is correct, and these people are treated not as victims of a heinous human rights violation but as illegal immigrants and locked away in detention centres, then it is another stain on Australia’s record and I hope it isn’t true.
Finally this week, tickets for the 36th Wellington Film Festival went on sale Tuesday and the programme was launched last week with a screening of Marjane Satrapis’ excellent animated autobiography, Persepolis, about growing up either side of the Iranian Islamic revolution. Recommended.
Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 25 June, 2008.
I have linked to it, above, but would like to draw your attention to NZ playwright Gary Henderson’s 2002 interview with Frank Cottrell Boyce, conducted while both were at the Cannes Film Festival.
I first heard of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep when it was admiringly referenced in Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Anderson’s witty and knowing appreciation of LA in the movies, during the 2004 Film Festival.
I’ll confess that it didn’t seem all that promising - a black and white, neo-realist, micro-budget drama set among the black community of Watts, LA. But the screening on Monday night, as part of the Wellington Film Society Charles Burnett retrospective, confirmed that Killer of Sheep is a stone-cold masterpiece.
Essentially about one man (Henry Gayle Sanders) trying to keep his family going in a community of fecklessness and poverty, Killer of Sheep keeps coming back to the Watts children, roaming the empty streets, fighting each other, throwing stones, amusing themselves while the adults either work until they drop or drift off in to disinterest via alcohol or drugs. I kept thinking that this could be Cannons Creek today.
Killer of Sheep was a student graduation project for Burnett, never intended for distribution. The soundtrack alone, full of R&B, jazz and blues classics would prove prohibitively expensive to any company wanting to screen the film commercially. But it is the soundtrack, and the placement of the songs, that is the film’s crowning glory and I’m glad that no one was tempted to re-score the film cheaply (as is done with DVD releases of tv shows from the era).
In honour of Killer of Sheep here’s Dinah Washington singing the unbearably haunting “This Bitter Earth” from that soundtrack.
I think we can safely call a halt to these semi-annual Hulk movies now - the new one is good enough that we can all move on (Ant-Man is evidently next). The Incredible Hulk is Marvel’s attempt to wrestle back the franchise that got away from them under Ang Lee in 2003 and eventually re-unify the Marvel universe under the suave, unstoppable box office force of Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man. To retrieve The Hulk, Marvel cast Hollywood’s weediest leading man, Edward Norton (Fight Club), not realising that Norton also has a reputation as a bit of a meddler who then re-wrote the script and sat in on the editing.
The result, as you might expect, is a bit of a noisy mess, but far from disastrous. After a splendidly condensed opening title sequence which takes us through the back-story of the original experiments that Gamma-ized poor Bruce Banner, we meet him on the run in Brazil, labouring in a bottling plant, taking anger management classes and collaborating online with a mysterious scientist who may hold the key to a cure. Unfortunately for him, the General (a suitably comic-book performance by William Hurt) arrives with a squad to take him home. This makes him angry, of course, and unleashes the green beast within.
If anything, it is more respectful of the TV series than the comic book, featuring cameos from original Hulk Lou Ferrigno and a clunky posthumous cameo from TV Banner Bill Bixby. In fact, looking back on it the film spends more time honouring the past than it does driving into the future, often falling prey to cutesy touches like having Norton Anti-Virus fire up when Banner logs on to a computer. Chief Villain Tim Roth looks like Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich, which makes his character name, The Abomination, perfectly apt.
Paul Haggis created the Oscar-winning Crash back in 2004 and, after helping reinvent Bond in Casino Royale, has gone back to the political well with the heartfelt In the Valley of Elah, starring Tommy Lee Jones. Jones plays former Army investigator Hank Deerfield. His son has just returned from Iraq but immediately gone AWOL so Hank travels across Texas to find him. What he discovers shakes his faith in his country and the military and (I’m guessing) is supposed to have some metaphoric weight about the state of the nation and the world and it probably does. I was one of many who found Crash to be appalling, un-watchable, rubbish but Elah (perhaps because it doesn’t try and do so much) is better.
While Haggis wears his heart on his sleeve, what he really needs is a copy editor on his shoulder. Someone needs to tell him that when you cast someone as soulful as Tommy Lee Jones you can just let him tell the audience what is going on with his eyes - you don’t then have to then verbalise it in the next shot. Probably an easy mistake to make when you are a writer first and a director second…
If Haggis needs a copy editor then M. Night Shyamalan needs a security guard on the door of his office, holding the keys to his typewriter. The Happening is an eco-thriller about a mysterious “event” that causes people across the North East of America to lose their minds and then do away with themselves. Among those caught up in the mess is high school science teacher Mark Wahlberg who thinks the mysterious disappearance of America’s bee population might have something to do with it.
Shyamalan has obvious talent as a director: he has an eye for an arresting image and has seen enough Hitchcock to construct effective set-pieces but he can’t write dialogue that human beings can actually say which continually drops the audience out of the moment. Luckily, whenever I lost connection to the story, there was Zooey Deschanel (as Wahlberg’s wife), whose electric blue eyes should be categorised as an alternative fuel source.
Outsourced is returning to cinemas after a brief turn at the World Cinema Showcase. It’s a beguiling tale of a Seattle call centre manager (Josh Hamilton) who has to go to India to train his replacement when the novelty company he works for relocates “fulfilment” to Gwaripur. The usual cross-cultural misunderstandings occur but the characters all grow on you, much like India grows on our hero.
Finally, legendary social commentator Adam Sandler takes on another pressing political issue (after gay marriage in I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry) and helps solve the conflict in the Middle East with You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, a hit and miss comedy that is mostly hit for a change. Sandler is the Zohan, number one Israeli counter-terrorist operative, who is tired of the endless conflict and yearns to emulate his hero (Paul Mitchell), cut hair in New York and make everything “silky smooth”. So he fakes his own death and smuggles his way in to America where the only job he can get is in a Palestinian salon. His unorthodox methods with the ladies soon make him very popular indeed but the conflict is never far away.
There are plenty of jokes per minute and the relentless teasing of Israelis for their love of fizzy drinks, hummus, disco and hacky-sack is pretty entertaining.
Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 18 June 2008.
Nature of conflict: Outsourced is distributed in New Zealand by Arkles Entertainment who I do a little work for now and then.
"A richly detailed screenplay supports the clever structure and the film ends on a perfectly satisfying note."
0.3
"... wears it’s irony rather too consciously on its sleeve ..."
0.3
"I’m sure there is a lot in there to reward a patient and attentive viewer but, apart from watching one of the great modern screen actors at work, I couldn’t find it."
0.3
"... worth watching for the impeccable early-70s, East End art direction ..."
0.3
"Understandably light on laughs but heavy on everything else ..."
0.3Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008)
2008-08-04 18:00
"... needs more pacy direction and snappier cutting to really come to life ..."
0.3
"... would have been infinitely more interesting if the casting of Cooper and Brosnan had been reversed."
0.3
"... a film with a good heart and it serves very nicely for a wet Sunday afternoon."
0.3The X Files: I Want to Believe (2008)
2008-08-02 14:25
"... preposterous (or should that be post-posterous considering how many times they have already been around this block) ..."
0.3
"It is disappointing that Nolan’s vision of Gotham City from the first film seems to have faded. Instead of the hyper-modern city in disrepair we got last time, now it looks like plain old modern day New York crossed with Chicago crossed with Toronto, and I guess that was one of the sacrifices made in the decision to ditch digital but the city itself is well short on atmosphere."
0.3
"... carefully directed Apron Strings' flaws are on the page rather than on the screen."
0.3
"All the ABBA hits are performed with considerable karaoke-style energy from the mostly non-singers and Streep provides a lesson for the likes of Robert De Niro that when you take on a frothy commercial comedy you don’t have to leave your talent in your trailer."
0.3
"... contains plenty of diverting comic moments while never losing sight of the human stories unfolding close at hand, reminding us that Social Workers may well be the heroes of the 21st century."
0.3The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian...
2008-06-22 12:45
"... chugs along at an excellent pace and the whole thing is sprinkled with plenty of wit."
0.32008-06-19 15:30
"The usual cross-cultural misunderstandings occur but the characters all grow on you, much like India grows on our hero."
0.3
"... an adorable confection, easy to praise and a pleasure to recommend."
0.3
"... the images are ravishing, the performances are uniformly excellent and you could do a lot worse on a wet weekend."
0.3
“Gosling’s performance is a thing of wonder but it wouldn’t be half as successful without great work from Paul Schneider, Emily Mortimer and Patricia Clarkson to play off. Kudos to them all. Not to be missed.”
0.3
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