Rosie the Riveter meets Nora Ephron in Their Finest, where Gemma Arterton plays a wannabe secretary summoned to write the female dialogue in a British propaganda movie aimed at easing America into WW II. Of course, she discovers that she has a gift for screenwriting and a passion for it. As in Mad Men, there are plenty of snickers at the assumed sexism the of the era. The driven lead writer (Sam Clafton) is a contrast to her nogoodnik common law husband (Jack Huston).
Originally, the plot of the movie-within-the movie is set to be a more or less true (okay – less true) account of the Dunkirk seaborne rescue, but a hook for American audiences is required. So the filmmakers slap on a superfluous character to be played by a bonafide war hero (Jake Lacy): he’s a real hero, he’s American, he’s stunningly handsome with a gleaming smile, but he’s absolutely talentless.
One of the sound reasons to watch any movie, and this especially applies to Their Finest, is Bill Nighy. Here, he plays a vain actor sliding down the down slope of his career. Nighy, as always, is able to summon both hilarity and poignancy, from his character’s foibles and vulnerability.
I’ve always liked Gemma Arterton, and she’s good here, too. Arterton is an underappreciated actress, with winning roles in Gemma Bovary, Tamara Drewe and as the Bond Girl in Quantum of Solace.
Their Finest contains elements of the romance, comedy, historical and Girl Power genres. The romantic element might have worked had not Sam Clafton delivered such a one-note performance. Jack of some aspects and master of none, Their Finest is a harmless and appealing diversion.
Charlie Hunnam in THE LOST CITY OF Z photo courtesy of SFFILM
In auteur James Gray’s sweeping turn of the 20th Century epic The Lost City of Z, a stiff-upper-lip type British military officer becomes the first European to probe into the deepest heart of unmapped Amazonia. Finding his way through the lush jungles, braving encounters with sometimes cannibalistic indigenous warriors, he becomes obsessed with finding the lost city of an ancient civilization. I know this sounds like Indiana Jones, but it’s based on the real life of Percy Fawcett as chronicled in the recent book Lost City of Z by David Grann.
The Lost City of Z opens tomorrow in Bay Area theaters. I saw The Lost City of Z at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival) at a screening with director James Gray. I’ll be sharing some snippets from Gray’s Q & A on Sunday.
The Lost City of Z begins with an Edwardian stag hunt through the verdant Irish countryside, complete with horses spilling riders. This scene is gorgeous, but its point is to introduce the young British military officer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) as a man of unusual resourcefulness, talent and, above all, drive. Despite his abilities, he has been chaffing at the unattractive assignments that have precluded his career advancement. In the snobby Edwardian military, he has been in disfavor because his dissolute father had stained the family name. One of Fawcett’s commanders says, “He’s been rather unfortunate in his choice of ancestors”.
That yearning to earn the recognition that he believes he merits – and to attain the accomplishments of a Great Man – is the core of this character-driven movie. Fawcett resists yet another assignment away from the career-making action, a mapping expedition designed to have a minor diplomatic payoff. But it takes him on a spectacular Amazon exploration that brings him celebrity – and backing for more high-profile expeditions. Fawcett was surfing the zeitgeist in the age of his contemporaries Roald Amundsen (South Pole), Robert Peary (North Pole) and Howard Carter (King Tut).
In that first expedition, Fawcett becomes convinced that he can find the magnificent city of a lost civilization deep in the Amazon, a city he calls Z (which is pronounced as the British “Zed”). The Lost City of Z takes us through two more Amazonian expeditions, sandwiched around Fawcett’s WW I service in the hellish Battle of the Somme.
That final expedition ends mysteriously – and not well.
No one knows for sure what happened to Fawcett. In The Lost City of Z, Gray leads us toward the most likely conclusion, the one embraced by Grann’s book. If you’re interested in the decades of speculation about Fawcett’s fate, there’s a good outline on Percy Fawcett’s Wikipedia page.
Fawcett comes with his own Victorian upper class prejudices, but he has the capacity to set those aside for a post-Darwin open-mindedness. Gray made it a point that the indigenous peoples in the movie are independent of Fawcett; Gray shows them living their lives in a world that Fawcett has found, not just advancing the plot points in Fawcett’s quest. Four real tribes – and their cultures – are shown in the film.
As Percy Fawcett, with his oft-manic obsession and fame-seeking that color his scientific curiosity and his old-fashioned Dudley Do-Right values, Charlie Hunnam gives a tremendous, perhaps carer breakthrough, performance. He’s been a promising actor in Sons of Anarchy and the overlooked thriller Deadfall) (and such a good actor that I never dreamed that he’s really British). Hunnam will next star as the title character in the King Arthur movie franchise.
Robert Pattinson is unexpectedly perfect as Fawcett’s travel buddy Henry Costin. With his Twilight dreaminess hidden behind a Smith Brothers beard, Pattinson projects a lean manliness. It’s probably his best performance.
Sienna Miller shines as Fawcett’s proto-feminist wife Nina. I first noticed Miller (and Daniel Craig) in the underrated neo-noir thriller 2004 Layer Cake. Now Miller is still only 35 years old and has delivered other fine recent performances in Foxcatcher, American Sniper and (in an especially delicious role) High-Rise.
Director James Gray (The Yard, Two Lovers, The Immigrant) is a favorite of cinephiles and of other filmmakers, but regular audiences don’t turn out for his movies. That may change with The Lost City of Z, a remarkably beautiful film that Gray shot, bucking the trend to digital, in 35 mm. The jungle scenes were filmed in a national park in Columbia. The cinemeatographer is the Oscar-nominated Darius Khondji. Khondji shot The Immigrant for Gray and has been the DP of choice for David Fincher (Se7en) Alan Parker (Evita), Michael Haneke (Amour), and Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris). Along with the stag hunt and the voyages up and down the jungle rivers, there is also a breathtakingly beautiful ballroom scene and a gaspingly surreal nighttime discovery of a rubber plantation’s opera house deep in the jungle.
There have been other Lost Expedition movies, most famously Werner Herzog’s Aquirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. The Lost City of Z shares an obsession, a quest and a mysterious tragic end with those films, but it stands apart with its exploration of the motivation of a real life character and the authenticity of Gray’s depiction of the indigenous people.
Movie studios used to make an entire genre of very fun movies from Gunga Din and The Four Feathers through Lawrence of Arabia and Zulu that featured white Europeans getting their thrills in exotic third world playgrounds. We often cringe at the racist premises and the treatment of “the natives” those movies today. Since the 1960s, the best examples of the genre, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, have had an ironic tinge. With The Lost City of Z, James Gray loses both the racism and the irony, and brings us brings a straight-ahead exploration tale.
The Lost City of Z revives the genre of the historical adventure epic, with all the spectacle of a swashbuckler, while braiding in modern sensitivities and a psychological portrait. This is a beautiful and thoughtful film.
[And here are some completely random tidbits. There’s a cameo by Spaghetti Western star Franco Nero. The closing credits recognize the “animal weath coordinator” and the “data wrangler”.]
The veteran actor Jim Broadbent paints a remarkable portrait of Tony, the main character in the British drama The Sense of an Ending, and he makes it look easy. Retired and long-divorced, Tony is entirely comfortable is a solitary life that he has chosen, perhaps not voluntarily, by being so damn selfish and curmudgeonly. In some very funny moments, we learn that he does not suffer fools. An incident revives a brief period of passion in his youth, and he can’t let it go (although we know that he really should). As he plunges on, he unpeels the mystery, layer by layer, and discovers more emotional turmoil than he is prepared to deal with. He learns that we cannot always find closure, especially if it depends on the feelings of others and acts and words with cannot be undone.
As good as Broadbent is, the best scenes are with Tony’s ex-wife (Harriet Walker – who really shines in this film) and the romantic interest of his youth (the irreplaceable Charlotte Rampling).
You are forgiven if, after reading a capsule or watching the trailer, you think that The Sense of an Ending is another 45 Years; after all both focus on a retired British gentleman whose life is rocked by an unexpected call or letter and both feature stunning performances by Charlotte Rampling. But it is not. 45 Years meditates on the power and durability of memories and then shifts into a study of relationships; we see intimacy without the sharing of all truths, and see how the truth can be toxic and destructive. In contrast, The Sense of an Ending explores how emotional detachment is very protective, and what happens when one ventures into emotional vulnerability. 45 Years was Charlotte Rampling’s movie, while she has only a couple of brief, although hard-hitting, scenes in The Sense of an Ending.
The Sense of an Ending played at Cinequest before its theatrical release and was well-received by the audience. I like The Sense of an Ending more than does the critical consensus, perhaps because it’s the best new movie widely released in the Bay Area this week.
In the winning British dramedy For Grace, Ben (Andrew Keatley) is a young can-do guy who has started his own successful company. He’s adopted, so when he becomes a dad, it triggers a need for him to track down his biological family. He even hires a documentarian to film his quest. Of course, Ben’s journey doesn’t go as he might expect. Along the way, For Grace explores the kinds of connections to other humans that we need. And what, at its core, is “family”?
Ben is more than a little self-absorbed. After all, who makes a movie about a such personal moment, assuming that his experience will merit being documented and that others will want to watch it? Ben also has an odd way of dealing with difficult feelings; he completely withdraws until he has processed his feelings himself. Until he emerges from self-isolation, he really can’t hear what others have to say.
The hard-charging Ben encounters the laid-back Peter (Jacob Casselden), who seems nothing like Ben. Ben has had every advantage, but he is ever restless; Peter has a disability and grew up as an institutionalized orphan, but he seems sublimely free of resentment. Both men feel something missing in their lives, but only Ben aspires to fill that void. Peter is sweet and simple, and Peter has protected himself with low expectations.
I hesitate to call For Grace a “mockumentary” because it’s not a straight Best in Show-like comedy. But the pseudo-documentary format is very effective – for the first 15-20 minutes, I kept asking myself whether this was a real documentary that had been mislabeled as a narrative feature.
For Grace maintains a very clear-eyed perspective on human nature, which results in some acidly funny observations of human behavior. Watch, for example Ben’s reaction when his adoptive parents learn that he is hunting for his biological parents – it doesn’t go AT ALL as he had expected.
For Grace is a an especially promising first feature for director Sebastian Armesto. Keatley wrote the story, and the dialogue was improvised by the cast. For Grace works because it is essentially character-driven, and Keatley’s and Casselden’s performances are very strong.
And there’s a Big Plot Twist.
For Grace is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. Have a hankie ready for the ending. I’ve seen over twenty films from this year’s Cinequest, and I will be shocked if For Grace fails to win an audience award.
Here’s a delightful movie that you haven’t seen – the grievously overlooked romantic comedy Man Up. The British Man Up had a very brief US theatrical run last November that did not even reach the Bay Area. I suspect that’s because it doesn’t have any big name American stars. But it’s better than any other romantic comedy from 2015.
Nancy (Lake Bell) is on a four-year dating drought and has given up all hope when she inadvertently stumbles into a blind date meant for another woman. She’s intrigued with what she sees in Jack (Simon Pegg from Shaun of the Dead) and decides to impersonate his real date. As they get more and more into each other, the elephant in the room is when she will be exposed.
Like many of the best recent romantic comedies, Man Up was written by a woman, the British television writer Tess Morris. Again and again in Man Up, Morris authentically captures dating behaviors and female and male insecurities. Nervous at meeting Nancy, Jack just can’t stop talking; in a later date with someone who he’s not so much into, he checks off the same conversation points in a fraction of the time. Everyone who has dated will recognize himself or herself at some moment in this film.
The very talented Lake Bell wrote/directed/starred in the American indie comedy In the World…, which I really, really liked. Simon Pegg is a comedy star, and he’s very appealing here, but Bell has seriously good comedic chops.
Rory Kinnear, who you might remember as persistent but sensitive detective in The Imitation Game and as Tanner in the James Bond movies, plays an outrageously inappropriate admirer from Nancy’s youth.
Man Up is available to stream from Netflix Instant, Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Flixster.
The British comedy Dough treads the familiar territory of the mismatched buddy movie, specifically the Old Guy/Young Guy type. Dough is distinguished from the rest of the genre by a culture clash element and the eminent actor Jonathan Pryce. The story is set in contemporary London and the Old Guy is an Orthodox Jewish bakeshop owner (Pryce) and the Young Guy is a Muslim African refugee drug dealer (Jerome Holder).
The main characters are thrown together uncomfortably in the bakeshop, which is inexorably dying until Young Guy accidentally launches a new product line when he drops marijuana into the dough. Suddenly business begins to boom, and all would be well but for two villains, a reptilian business rival and a scary skinhead drug lord.
Jonathan Pryce and Holder act as well as they can with this material, as does the sprightly Pauline Collins (Shirley Valentine). But you’ve seen every one of Dough’s plot developments in a movie before. The villains and the physical comedy are WAY too broad. Overall, Dough is better than the average sitcom on broadcast TV, but pretty banal.
Light, fluffy and empty, Dough is the Twinkie of movies. I don’t choose to eat Twinkies myself, but I understand that sometimes you might want one.
Thriller meets thinker in Eye in the Sky, a parable from modern drone warfare. Eye in the Sky poses this question: is it acceptable to neutralize the very worst evil in the world when it requires the simultaneous taking of the most innocent life?
If we are to pursue drone warfare as a morally acceptable military option, we must see what happens on the ground so we understand it. Eye in the Sky asks if we can stomach it once we’ve seen it.
Is the choice framed too simplistically in Eye in the Sky? No, the starkness of the choice in this film brings clarity to the question that we must ponder. Star Helen Mirren and director Gavin Hood have said in interviews that they expected married couples to argue different points of view after seeing this movie.
As Eye in the Sky’s star, Mirren commands the screen as few can and is especially fierce here. Jeremy Northam excels as the chief ditherer. Barkhad Abdi (Oscar-nominated as the Somali pirate in Captain Phillips) delivers another charismatic performance.
But this is Alan Rickman’s movie. In one of his final performances, Rickman plays the military commander who understands how difficult the choice is – because he’s already made it. Now he must navigate through all the other characters as they behave with varying degrees of belligerence, ambivalence and avoidance. It’s a supremely textured performance, layered with his wry humor, contained frustration and quiet determination.
At its Cinequest screening, director Gavin Hood said that he is as proud of Eye in the Sky as he is of his earliest films, A Reasonable Man and the Oscar-winning Tsotsi. He should be.
It’s 1947 and 93-year-old Sherlock Holmes has been self-exiled to the Dover coast in retirement for almost thirty years. He’s still keenly observant, but his memory is deteriorating with age, and he knows it. That’s a problem as he feels an urgent need to summon up the facts of his final case, left unresolved in 1919. In Mr. Holmes, Ian McKellen plays Sherlock in his 1947 frailty and desperation and in the flashbacks to 1919, when he’s at the top of his game.
As Mr. Holmes, opens, Sherlock has just returned home from a trip to Japan. So desperate to refresh his memory, he has sought a Japanese homeopathic cure (“prickly ash”), in the process meeting a Japanese family with an unsolved disappearance of their own. Back home, he lives with his housekeeper (Laura Linney) and her gifted son, Roger (Milo Parker). Holmes recognizes the boy’s exceptionalism and quasi-adopts as a grandchild. The boy has lost his father in World War II, and his relationship with the old man is another central thread in the movie.
Ian McKellen is delightful and endearing as the crusty Holmes. McKellen is an actor of enough stature to pull off this iconic role, and he is able both to project the Holmes genius and to deliver the humor in this very witty screenplay.
Holmes resents how his former roommate Dr. Watson has depicted him in fiction – and doesn’t like fiction at all (until the very last scene). At least, when they lived together, Watson avoided an onslaught of tourists by publishing the wrong address for their rooms (they actually lived across the street from 221B Baker Street). And Holmes goes to a theater to see a very bad 1940s Sherlock Holmes movie.
I saw Mr. Homes at the San Francisco Film Festival at a screening in which producer Anne Carey and screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher spoke. When Carey read the source material – the novel “Slight Trick of the Mind” by Mitch Cullin – she recognized the appeal of the central role, the settings and the theme of “don’t wait too long for things important to your heart”. It took her eight years to get director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Dreamgirls) on board, who brought in McKellen.
Hatcher was attracted by Holmes’ relationship to the boy Roger and by theme of how we rewrite our own stories. He pointed out that the 1919 story in Mr. Holmes has four versions: what really happened, how Watsone added a happy ending in his book, the Hollywood melodrama of the film-within-the-film and, finally, as Holmes himself connects it to the Japanese story thread at the end.
Carey and Hatcher revealed that Condon playfully referenced Hitchcock in Mr. Holmes: Ambrose Chapel from The Man Who Knew Too Much, carrying of tea a la Notorious and a “Vertigo” sequence under the arches.
It’s a good story with a superb performance by McKellen. Mr. Homes opens tomorrow.
It’s 1947 and 93-year-old Sherlock Holmes has been self-exiled to the Dover coast in retirement for almost thirty years. He’s still keenly observant, but his memory is deteriorating with age, and he knows it. That’s a problem as he feels an urgent need to summon up the facts of his final case, left unresolved in 1919. In Mr. Holmes, Ian McKellen plays Sherlock in his 1947 frailty and desperation and in the flashbacks to 1919, when he’s at the top of his game.
As Mr. Holmes, opens, Sherlock has just returned home from a trip to Japan. So desperate to refresh his memory, he has sought a Japanese homeopathic cure (“prickly ash”), in the process meeting a Japanese family with an unsolved disappearance of their own. Back home, he lives with his housekeeper (Laura Linney) and her gifted son, Roger (Milo Parker). Holmes recognizes the boy’s exceptionalism and quasi-adopts as a grandchild. The boy has lost his father in World War II, and his relationship with the old man is another central thread in the movie.
Ian McKellen is delightful and endearing as the crusty Holmes. McKellen is an actor of enough stature to pull off this iconic role, and he is able both to project the Holmes genius and to deliver the humor in this very witty screenplay.
Holmes resents how his former roommate Dr. Watson has depicted him in fiction – and doesn’t like fiction at all (until the very last scene). At least, when they lived together, Watson avoided an onslaught of tourists by publishing the wrong address for their rooms (they actually lived across the street from 221B Baker Street). And Holmes goes to a theater to see a very bad 1940s Sherlock Holmes movie.
I saw Mr. Homes at the San Francisco Film Festival at a screening in which producer Anne Carey and screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher spoke. When Carey read the source material – the novel “Slight Trick of the Mind” by Mitch Cullin – she recognized the appeal of the central role, the settings and the theme of “don’t wait too long for things important to your heart”. It took her eight years to get director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Dreamgirls) on board, who brought in McKellen.
Hatcher was attracted by Holmes’ relationship to the boy Roger and by theme of how we rewrite our own stories. He pointed out that the 1919 story in Mr. Holmes has four versions: what really happened, how Watsone added a happy ending in his book, the Hollywood melodrama of the film-within-the-film and, finally, as Holmes himself connects it to the Japanese story thread at the end.
Carey and Hatcher revealed that Condon playfully referenced Hitchcock in Mr. Holmes: Ambrose Chapel from The Man Who Knew Too Much, carrying of tea a la Notorious and a “Vertigo” sequence under the arches.
It’s a good story with a superb performance by McKellen. Mr. Homes is scheduled for a theatrical release on July 17.
Queen and Country is director John Boorman’s autobiographical look back at his own young manhood. In 1987, Boorman’s Hope and Glory revisited his London childhood during WW II, and now we see Boorman’s experience as a very young man drafted into the Korean War-era British army. The protagonist goes through basic training and is posted in the home nation as a military typing teacher. Along the way, he learns what happens when 1) a petty tyrant subjects you to ridiculously stupid requirements and 2) when you become infatuated with someone crazier than you are.
Boorman (Deliverance, Excalibur, The General) is an excellent filmmaker, and Queen and Country is well-crafted. The story isn’t compelling enough to make this a Must See, but it’s wry and warm-hearted, and moderately entertaining.
I saw Queen and Country at Cinequest 2015 at a screening with John Boorman present. Boorman was more memorable than was Queen and Country, especially when he reflected on his eccentric cult sci-fi film Zardoz: “It went from failure to classic without passing through success”.
