Month: July 2011

This is a movie about the most inefficient interstellar gold-mining operation ever conceived.

More than any other movies, including those from the Pixar studio, the Harry Potter series is one I can only really watch through the eyes of my children. The publication span of the books almost exactly mirrors my older son’s time from entering kindergarten to entering high school, with the movies occupying the same period for my younger son (who starts high school in a month). There was a time, right after the Goblet of Fire appeared, when my older son read the four books in a continuous cycle for what seemed like months, to the point that he barely looked at each page before turning it, so well did he know the lines. As a result I have evaluated them as events in my children’s lives, for how satisfied or disappointed they were; my own reaction has been much harder for me to parse. Continue reading Deathly Hallows Part 2

I feel sure that there is already a thread on this topic but I can’t find it, even by typing in Matewan. So a short post about Made in Dagenham, mostly to say how much I disliked it. The movie tells the important story of 187 female machinists at the Ford Dagenham plant, who went on strike in 1968 for the principle of equal pay. It is an important story, both because it was path-breaking, and because the strike played some part in the passage of equal pay legislation both in Britain and elsewhere (though not as much as the movie claims).

But this movie is just a shining example of the worst kind of tear-jerking, melodramatic, feel-good crap that passes for social realism these days. Is there some factory buried deep beneath the BBC building in central London that pumps out these miserable excuses for movies about the class struggle? Brassed Off, Full Monty, Billy Elliot… we have got a steady diet of films feeding off a caricature of British class society to give us heart-warming drivel. This is little more than class porn.

Anyway, Made in Dagenham is utterly predicable: strong working class women; their menfolk who first support them, but then prove to be more sexist than interested in class solidarity; cowardly unions; personal tragedies that throw obstacles in the way of the strike; evil American Ford management (the UK Ford management is just incompetent); a ludicrous portrait of Barbara Castle (Labour minister for employment at the time); and most nauseating of all, a side story of the friendship between Rita (Sally Hawkins), the strike leader, and Lisa (Rosmund Pike), the wife of one of the Ford bosses. We even have Lisa visiting Rita in her council house to tell her how proud she is of the struggle for equal rights. Oh, and Bob Hoskins plays an adorable and saintly union steward. At a time when we desperately need good films about labor, when we need to be reminded of the central role the working class has played in constructing a civilized society, we get this instead.

Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins is set in the middle of the 19th century, as the age of the samurai became unsustainable, and the clash of its values with those of modern politics rendered the former more quaint than noble. Of course, these values were always at least as mythologic as real, but Miike offers a fresh take on the familiar theme of competing notions of duty: service to authority versus honor in the face of the immorality of those in authority. The film opens with a graphic, yet almost bloodless, act of harakiri. The camera lingers on the man’s face, but the sound of the blade tearing at his insides is powerfully gruesome. The story follows a band of samurai who take it upon themselves to assassinate the half-brother of the Shogun, a man whose careless brutality threatens the entire social order. Much of the film is taken up with the recruitment of the assassins, and their own internal moral debates, but the final 35 minutes is a tour de force of swordplay. The 13 take on close to 200 retainers without the noticeable help of CGI. The quiet dignity of the samurai, as they face near certain death in their quest to rid Japan of a madman, is hardly original to the genre, but somehow it works here. I have often found Miike to go way over the top in his films, for my taste at least, but he gets this one just right.

A quick word about the previews on the DVD for 13 Assassins. There was Hobo with a Shotgun, starring Rutger Hauer in the title role, an extraordinary movie called Rubber, about a killer tire (yes, the thing you put on the wheels of your car), and a bizarre and macabre horror flick starring David Hyde Pierce and entitled Perfect Host. Watching these was like being invited to an evening of grindhouse with Quentin Tarantino.

Loved this. I never imagined they’d try to make make a sequel to Tristram Shandy – or rather Coogan/Winterbottom’s film version of it – yet here it is, much more casual, charming and enjoyable.

Rob Brydon – a guy I had completely forgotten about – reprises his role as himself as well, accompanying Coogan on an Observer (newspaper) sponsored trip of fine restaurants around the north of England. Coogan had originally intended to take his American girlfriend on the trip, but they’ve semi split-up, so he asks Brydon, who, while seemingly much less of a louse than Coogan, is incredibly annoying, never more than 2 seconds away from an impersonation of Al Pacino or Anthony Hopkins.

Michael Caine also plays an important part, as anyone who has seen the preview knows.

Continue reading The Trip / Steve Coogan: She Was Only Sixteen