Romeo and Juliet

I’m hardly going to criticise or even describe the plot. Well established as one of the greatest stories ever told and this 1968 film version by Franco Zeffirelli is one of its best tellings. It stars the lovely Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting who were 16 and 17 when the film was made. The youth of the leads is one of its best features. In the play Juliet and Romeo are 14 and 15 and yet they are mostly portrayed by actors at least in their twenties with a resulting loss of authenticity, but more importantly of youthful innocence and energy, which is so evident here. The balcony scene is an absolute joy to behold and comes to life as I have never seen it before.

As a complete aside, this film reminded me of a movie I saw many years ago. I could not remember much of it, except that in the movie two of the characters go to see this film version of Romeo and Juliet. Through the miracle of IMDB I managed to figure out that the movie is called “Follow Me!”, although to confuse matters further it was also released as “The Public Eye”. It starred Mia Farrow and Topol and is set in London during the 1960s. Sadly, as I would very much like to see it again, it is not yet available on DVD. Let us hope it gets released, but in the meantime there are a few snippets posted on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8wj-f5vCqQ) which brought back many further memories for me.

Raging Bull

Probably the best output from the paring of Scorsese and De Niro. It’s a movie that features some of the best and bloodiest fight scenes ever made, but its not really about boxing. Its about the dumb, bloody minded jealousy of the former prize fighter Jake LaMotta, a man with such low self esteem that he cannot accept that his wife would want to sleep with him or that she could possible not be having affairs with just about any other man. LaMotta is a real character who rose to be the middle weight world champion in the 1940s, but then sank into oblivion as a third rate stand up comic and ended up in jail for corrupting the morals of an underage girl. De Niro is completely committed to the performance, for which he won an Oscar. He became LaMotta, gaining weight to the extent that he looks completely different at the end of the movie.

Moolaade

This film, about the curse of female genital mutilation, a cruel and dangerous practice which still exists in parts of the world, was made by the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene when he was 81. It’s a remarkable feat. It manages to be entertaining and, because of the colours and simple architecture of the village, quite beautiful, whilst portraying and denouncing an ugly superstition. There is sadness and tension, but also much humour and it’s a joy to watch the, very real and believable, characters develop. Sembene was a remarkable man. He died last year. From very humble beginnings he had an astonishingly varied career during which he was a mechanic, bricklayer, soldier, labor leader, autoworker and stevedore. He went on to write six novels and make many movies.

Lord of the Flies

No doubt a great book by William Golding, but this is not the greatest of movies. It is of course the tale of a group of school boys marooned on a desert island who lose all sense of moral direction and revert to savagery by the end of the movie. The ending is one of its biggest problems. It’s all over too suddenly and you are left with no satisfaction or resolution. Not quite enough is made of the “Lord of the Flies” either which is meant to be a sinister and menacing presence in the story. The name (probably) comes from the Hebrew word for the devil, Beelzebub, which literally means Lord of the Flies. I found the boys’ acting a little stiff at the start of the film, but on the plus side they seemed to settle in the roles as it went on.

Good Night, and Good Luck

Watching George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck, I could not help but think that so much of history is a series of blunders and misdirection of effort based on faulty assumptions and incomplete information. The film is about the 1950’s US witch-hunt for communist supporters, lead by the notorious Senator McCArthy. It’s so easy today to scoff at the Senator and his supporters, but at the time many people were scared by his fear-mongering tactics. Another thing that we misunderstood completely with tragic consequences is also portrayed in this movie: smoking. In this movie, befitting of its 1950s setting, everyone smokes, and boy, do they ever. Edward Murrow the TV reported around whom the story is built more or less vanishes behind a fog of cigarette smoke on his show. I have little doubt that one day we will look back and wonder how anyone could have believed that we could stop climate change by cutting back on carbon emissions, but that’s a story for another time. This one is a good and gripping story and it works very well in black & white.

Say Anything

This was written and directed by Cameron Crowe, the writer for Rolling Stone, whose own early life is portrayed in the more recent autobiographical film, Almost Famous. Mr Crowe must be a nice guy. Say Anything is about telling the truth and about being true to yourself. The three central characters are honest and decent, true to themselves and each other. John Cusack plays Lloyd Dobler, who is in love with Diane (Ione Skye). Diane’s father, played by John Mahoney, is not too keen on this young man who seems to have no concrete plans for the future. Mahoney is one of the great unsung heroes of the acting profession. He played Frasier Crane’s dad for eleven years and in Say Anything his is the most interesting and complex character. The movie ends on an aeroplane with a lovely touch.

The Right Stuff

Phillip Kaufman’s, The Right Stuff is the film adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s book about test pilots and the space race. Wolfe is one of my favourite authors, but strangely I have never read The Right Stuff. It’s an epic movie, in length and subject matter. Filled with wonderful performances, such as Sam Shepard as Chuck Yeager, acknowledged as the best test pilot of his time, and Ed Harris as John Glenn, the pioneering Astronaut and later US Senator. There are great scenes, such as the very effective opening which portrays a test flight gone tragically wrong. The format switches to widescreen and colour from black & white at the moment of impact. I often wonder whether Wolfe’s sceptical humour can be translated to the screen – here it is done well, not pointedly, but you can tell how these pilots would have rankled at the idea of being substitutes for monkeys. In the first space missions no pilot input was required, all they had to do was sit tight. This should not demean in any way the courage it took to go up in these first flights. As someone says in the movie: “The monkey doesn’t know its sitting on top of a rocket.”

Strangers on a Train

A cracking Hitchcock thriller made all the better from an underlying current of creepiness. Two apparent strangers meet on a train and one suggests that they “swap murders” committing killings on each other’s behalf so that they both have watertight alibis for the deaths of the people they have a connection to, and a motive for killing. As is par for the course for Hitchcock the movie is full of innovative visuals. The one that stands out for me is of the crowd at a tennis match, where all the heads are moving from left to right watching the ball, expect for one, the villain watching the lead. Watch out for Hitch’s trademark cameo early on in the movie.

The Rules of the Game

In introducing The Rules of the Game, Jean Renoir talks about the controversy that it caused at its first screening in Paris in 1939. Apparently one viewer was so upset that he wanted to set fire to the cinema and had already lit a newspaper to do so. This level of reaction is hard to imagine now, but nonetheless, the movie pulls no punches in its satirical examination of the mores of the bourgeoisie. It examines the interplay between the upstairs and downstairs worlds of the upper class country house, much as Robert Altman would do in one of my all-time favourite movies, Gossford Park, many years later. The Rules of the Game is a work of genius and often ranks just behind Citizen Kane as one of the greatest films. It is filled with great scenes, such as where the clownish Octave (played by Renoir himself) runs around looking for someone to help him take off a bear suit, and where Robert proudly displays his latest acquisition - a clanging, animated, clockwork organ. This was my second viewing and it’s a film that will clearly become more enjoyable every time you see it.

Rashomon

Another innovative Japanese movie from Akira Kurusawa, the first to introduce the concept of flashbacks from multiple points of view. This concept has subsequently been used in numerous movies, ranging from The Usual Suspects to the kids’ movie Hoodwinked. A nice touch is to use the effect of torrential rain to distinguish between the time in which the story is told and the time in which it actually takes place. I found the heightened aspect of the acting a bit off-putting, but otherwise it’s enjoyable and quite thought-provoking. Kurusawa wrote in his biography that: “ "Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing." That essentially is the central theme here.