Category Archives: Films

Arts, Films, Literature

Film Review: All Is True (12A)

REVIEW

AT the Global Theatre in London on June 29, 1613, a stage cannon was fired during a performance of William Shakespeare’s play All Is True, which today we know as Henry VIII.

. See also Short Essay: Shakespeare’s Plays

Such a small and theatrical flourish would come to have devastating consequences, because the cannon set fire to the Globe’s thatched roof and within an hour one of the most famous playhouses, where most of Shakespeare’s plays had been unveiled, had burned to the ground.

The career of the country’s greatest playwright ended on the same night. He never wrote another significant play and died a couple of years later.

Those last two years are the focus of Kenneth Branagh’s All Is True. Heartbroken and bereft, Shakespeare returns to his home town of Stratford, and to the uneasy embrace of his wife Anne Hathaway and their two daughters, whom he has rarely visited over the previous two decades.

All Is True is heavyweight production, particularly in terms of those doing the acting. Branagh, who has done as much as anyone alive to bring Shakespeare’s plays to the silver screen, plays the great man himself.

Under a gleaming dome of a forehead, he is, though, barely recognisable. A knobbly prosthetic nose and a jutting bearded chin which, when added to a surprising lack of assertiveness, give him the air of a man who can’t decide whether he has entered a lookalike contest as Jimmy Hill.

Less compromised by the make-up department, Judi Dench plays Anne, and Ian McKellen has a highly enjoyable cameo as Shakespeare’s erstwhile patron, the Earl of Southampton. It is strongly hinted that the Earl was also the object of Shakespeare’s ardour. Or “Bardour”, if you prefer.

The script is by Ben Elton, who has tempered the jauntiness of his Shakespearean sitcom Upstart Crow to give us a barrage of sexual scandal and a whirl of emotions – grief, resentment, envy, lust – more suited to a modern soap opera like EastEnders. Or, maybe something else entirely different.

All Is True largely unfolds as an everyday tale of country folk, for which Dench unpacks her best rural vowels. Some might rather suggest it’s a ruff version of The Archers.

 

THE scandals concern both Shakespeare’s daughters. Susanna (Lydia Wilson) is unhappily married to a holier-than-thou Puritan doctor, to whom she is appearing unfaithful.

Judith (Kathryn Wilder) marries the more rakish Tom Quiney (Jack Colgrave Hirst), who has already impregnated another local woman, Margaret Wheeler (Eleanor de Rohan).

The grief is mostly Shakespeare’s, whose return to Stratford, without the distraction of writing and staging all those plays, re-ignites the pain of losing his only son, 11-year-old Hamnet, many years earlier.

“I’ve lived so long in imaginary worlds, I’ve lost sight of what is real,” he laments. At first, he gets precious little sympathy either from the stolidly undemonstrative Anne, or from miserable Judith, who was Hamnet’s twin, and feels certain that her father would prefer her to have perished instead.

Occasionally, Shakespeare loses his temper with these unappreciative womenfolk. “Through my genius I’ve brought fame and fortune to this house,” he bellows, and 400 years or so later there’s no real arguing with that, though Anne doesn’t look too convinced. But, gradually, the family learn to live with and even love each other again, despite Elton pulling out a rather startling late twist.

Branagh’s decision to cast Dench has raised eyebrows.

Anne was eight years older, whereas the actual gap between them is 26. Nevertheless, it’s a pleasure to see our greatest Shakespearean actress playing the Bard’s wife, and, All Is True contains many pleasures, not least the cinematography by Zac Nicholson.

Nicholson pounces like another 17th-century genius, Rembrandt, on the lighting opportunities afforded by all those candles, and all those sunbeams streaming through mullioned windows.

Outside, the panorama shots are ravishing. Warwickshire is a beautiful part of the country.

Verdict: An Intriguing tale.

★★★★

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Arts, Films

Film Review: Creed II (12A)

REVIEW

Creed II is unashamedly formulaic. Fortunately for the viewer, the formula is a good one.

Veteran boxing trainers talk about the old left-right combo. Here it is in narrative form: brutality in the ring, poignancy out of it, thumped by one, hammered by the other. That is, until finally, the audience are on the ropes, likely to feel somewhat drained, wholly entertained, and perhaps also just a little bit suckered, having fallen again for the venerable Rocky one-two.

More than four decades and seven sequels have passed since the 1976 original, so it’s no surprise that the formula is as polished as it is. Some things remain unchanged; Sylvester Stallone’s voice still seems to emanate from the bottom of a mineshaft. The Great Mumbler, also credited as producer and co-writer, is on top form here, just as he was two years ago in Creed.

As before, though, the acting laurels go mostly to Michael B. Jordan. He delivers a terrific performance as the newly crowned, world heavyweight champ Adonis Creed.

In the previous film, he discovered who his late father was. None other than Apollo Creed, who back in the day fought and befriended Rocky Balboa (Stallone). That’s why Adonis – sensibly known to friends and family as Donnie – wanted Rocky in his corner as he embarked on a pro boxing career that lacked the usual springboards of deprivation and delinquency. Adonis had money and was properly educated. What did he want with sweaty pugilism?

It was unresolved daddy issues that made a fighter of him. In Creed II, the psychology of parent-child relationship looms almost as large as Dolph Lundgren, back in the series for the first time since Rocky IV (1985) as big Ivan Drago, the man who battered Apollo Creed to death in the ring.

 

DRAGO has an equally sizable son, Viktor (Florian Munteanu), whose dearest wish is to flatten Adonis. That would avenge the humiliation that the old man later suffered at the fists of Rocky, leading not only to exile from Mother Russia but also the departure of mother Ludmila, Viktor’s own parent (Brigitte Nielson, the former Mrs Sly Stallone, also last seen in Rocky IV).

Ivan and Viktor duly turn up in Rocky’s home town of Philadelphia to throw down the gauntlet. “Because of you I lost everything,” growls Ivan to Rocky. “Country. Respect. Wife.” Not to mention possessive pronouns and definite articles.

So, there are mummy issues, too, in this film. What is more, Rocky is trying to address a painful father-son estrangement of his own.

And if all that weren’t enough, Adonis’s hearing-impaired girlfriend Bianca (Tessa Thompson) also makes him a daddy in the course of Creed II, so he must balance his new parental responsibilities with his obligations to his dead father as he decides whether or not (as if you really can’t guess) to take on Viktor Drago’s challenge.

Any good boxing movie was never just about the boxing. Despite the yawning gap, at times, between the story and any kind of plausibility, Creed II really is a good boxing movie. In the real world, fighters don’t just emerge from nowhere to challenge for world titles, just as punches don’t resound with thwumpfs like baby elephants landing on a mattress.

There’s a cracking soundtrack, some of it provided by the lovely Bianca (a successful singer, despite her deafness), and the film is directed with a tremendously sure touch by Steven Caple Jnr.

At just 30, he is even younger than Jordan, his leading man, but evidently Stallone wanted someone of that generation at the tiller. The film production released in late 2018 was a gamble, but it pays off.

Verdict: Deserves success.

★★★★

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Arts, Films

Film Review: Green Book (12A)

REVIEW

THIS is traditionally a strong time of year for powerful dramatic films, no doubt calculatedly released in awards season. For the upcoming Academy Awards, there will be many hopeful film directors that the shine of a few gongs will rub off handsomely at the box-office.

Green Book is another such potential Academy winner. Set in the early Sixties, is a sweet, engagingly unsubtle picture inspired by the true story of Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), a prodigiously talented African-American musician whose colour has prevented him from pursuing the career he has trained for, as a classical concert pianist.

Instead, he has formed the “easy listening” Don Shirley trio, which in the late autumn of 1962 is about to embark on a tour of the Deep South. Don, genteel and fastidious, needs a driver who might be able to protect him from the racial discrimination he is bound to encounter below the Mason-Dixon line.

By now we know just who this minder will be; the film opens at New York City’s Copacabana nightclub, where “Tony Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) is a no-nonsense bouncer not averse to currying favour with the mafia bosses who frequent the place. At home in the Bronx, where a volatile Italian-American life pounds around him, Tony shouts for the Yankees and eats 26 hotdogs at a sitting to win a bet.

That’s the kind of character persona he gives. He’s also a devoted family man who loves his wife Dolores (Linda Cardellini) and their two sons – and throws away a pair of drinking glasses because they have been used by black tradesmen.

He’s a racist, boorish and gluttonous, a full pendulum-swing from educated, sensitive, restrained Don, but that’s OK, because, as director, Peter Farrelly signposts in neon from the start, he is about to take a journey not just towards Kentucky, Georgia and Louisiana, but also towards enlightenment.

Tony needs a temporary job because the Copa is closed for renovations. An advert leads him to Don’s bohemian apartment above Carnegie Hall.

He is duly hired, and, trying to suppress the discomfort he feels about working for a black man, prepares himself for two months on the road, with a set of responsibilities that include making sure that Don has a Steinway piano for every gig.

He is also handed the film’s titular Green Book, a guide for “Negro motorists” driving in the South, advising them where they may eat and sleep to ensure a “vacation without aggravation”.

The film, which was co-written by Vallelonga’s son Nick, has resounding echoes of Pygmalion and even Cyrano de Bergerac as Don seeks to pass on some of his own refinement to the distinctly unrefined Tony.

It’s not exactly subtle. After all, Farrelly, who gave us Dumb And Dumber all those years ago, did not make his name through subtlety.

Some of this film’s minor characters, from New York mobsters to snarling Southern rednecks, are sketchily-drawn caricatures.

And several of the predicaments in which Don and Tony find themselves scream for a little more nuance, as when, having been given a lavish welcome at an ante-bellum mansion where his trio are providing the entertainment, Don asks for the bathroom and is directed outside, to a comic-book tumbledown latrine.

This might well be an accurate depiction of the bigotry and hypocrisy that scarred the segregated South before civil rights legislation, and indeed there really was a Green Book, but it feels more heavy-handed than it needs to be. So, too, does a climax of triple-ply sentimentality. But you may well brush away a tear as this film runs on.

That’s because, despite its shortcomings, this film really works, thanks in large part to the genuinely terrific and moving performances of Mortensen and Ali.

Both have been nominated for Academy Awards, and the latter is odds-on favourite to bag Best Supporting Actor, as he did three years for Moonlight.

In truth, however, it’s only in the second half of this odd-couple road trip that he is conspicuously stretched, as Don, predictably enough, begins to learn as much from Tony as he imparts. Until then, unlike his spectacular piano-playing, it’s rather a one-note performance.

Verdict: Engagingly unsubtle

★★★★

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