Tag Archives: Film review

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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Arts, Films, United States

Film Review: Vice (15)

REVIEW

VICE, appropriately named, tells the life story of Dick Cheney, who was Vice President of the United States throughout the eight-year tenure of George W. Bush.

The film, which is written by Adam McKay, makes no secret of his own motivational objective. It stems from a Liberal Agenda, which deserves capitalising given his bias which runs from the first minute of this film to the last.

Whether you buy into McKay’s thesis that Cheney is one of the most manipulative and sinister men on the planet is another question entirely. For pure malignancy, Vice makes the present incumbent of the White House look like Forrest Gump. But it must be said he presents it very entertainingly.

Film critics would have noted that McKay deploys a similar set of idiosyncrasies to those he brought to his examination of the 2008 global financial crisis, The Big Short. He delivers jump-cuts, slow-mo, speed-ups, addresses to the camera, faux-closing credits, and whimsical narration from a character whose intimate link with Cheney is held back, only to be revealed in a late here-I-am kind of flourish.

It’s almost as if the director, and his editor, Hank Corwin, cannot shrug off a cinematic form of attention deficit disorder. It would be wholly wrong to categorise them as one-trick ponies; they have dozens of production tricks.

If the viewer can embrace all that, and its Leftie politics, then Vice is a hoot. It is also quite brilliantly acted. Christian Bale is deservedly the clear favourite to win an Academy Award for his remarkable lead performances. He renders himself almost unrecognisable and nails Cheney’s every mannerism and tic.

Gary Oldman won the Academy Award last year for his role as Winston Churchill, but he didn’t transform himself into Churchill like Bale does Cheney (both physically and temperamentally).

As Cheney’s wife, the terrifyingly ambitious Lynne, Amy Adams also richly deserves her Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress.

In the years since her breakthrough movie in 2002, Catch Me If You Can, Adams has acquired the acting adroitness in playing Lynne Cheney who is a relentless schemer. Indeed, McKay has said that when he spoke to local folk back in Casper, Wyoming, where Lynne and Dick started out, they told him that whoever she married would have ended up as the most powerful man in the land.

How he became such a powerful man, in the process confounding the famous assertion of one of his predecessors, John Nance Garner, that “the vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit”, is the film’s narrative.

 

IT BEGINS in Casper, where young Dick is a drunken driver and general wastrel until his intended, Lynne, gives him a furious pep talk.

They marry and make their way to Washington, where Cheney finds himself in thrall to another upwardly-mobile politician, Donald Rumsfeld (the suddenly ubiquitous Steve Carell). One of the fascinations of this film is the dynamic between Cheney and Rumsfeld. Gradually, the apprentice becomes the master.

After serving in the Nixon and Ford administrations, both men continue to climb the slippery pole, but it is Cheney, the more shrewder and Machiavellian of the pair, who climbs the highest – with Lynne pushing hard from below. There is a rather ludicrous – if not hilarious – scene in which she almost literally slips into the guise of Lady Macbeth.

Cheney’s appetite for power is gluttonous, yet he is clever and astute enough never to look or give the image of being greedy. When a dim-witted George W. Bush (played by Sam Rockwell, also Oscar-nominated) invites him to become his running mate – “a nothing job,” snorts Lynne – he plays hard to get. He insists he’s happy running an oil company.

Eventually, he says he’ll do it on the proviso that he takes some of the more “mundane” jobs such as running the military. Oh, and foreign policy. McKay’s only concession to Cheney’s humanity is his devotion to his wife and daughters; it causes him genuine angst when his two girls fall out over the sexuality of one of them.

Otherwise, his moral scruples are conspicuous only by their absence. He even has the pretence to turn the 9/11 attacks to his own advantage, and his vested oil interests are not incidental in the subsequent decision to invade Iraq.

McKay’ political bias is adept enough to remind his audience over and over that all this comes from a Leftist standpoint, perhaps as a pre-emptive strike to say: “I know it’s biased, but it’s also true.”

I doubt it will come as no surprise to see liberal Hollywood rise to Vice when the Oscar nominees gather in Hollywood, just as it has been no surprise, since its U.S. release in December, to see the film flop pretty much everywhere but on the East and West coasts.

The question of whether a film will appeal to mainstream America has long been defined by a simple question: will it play in Peoria, Illinois? In this case, the answer is an emphatic no.

Verdict: Left-leaning political bias, but well delivered.

★★★★

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Arts, Films

Film Review: Stan & Ollie (PG)

REVIEW

Intro: This bittersweet story of love, loss and friendship gets right to the heart of the real Laurel and Hardy

ACCORDING to the script writers and publicity material for Stan & Ollie, they claim that by watching it we should be able to laugh away the January blues.

Misleading, to say the least. This is undoubtedly a film of enormous charm, with matchingly superb performances from Steve Coogan (as Stan Laurel) and John C. Reilly (as Oliver Hardy). It isn’t, though – anywhere near it – the rib-tickling celebration of the silver screen’s greatest comedy double-act.

A critic will have noted that there are far more than a few chuckles in Stan & Ollie, but on the whole, it is rather maudlin, even melancholic of the original pair’s 1953 UK tour, the last time they worked together.

Their 1920s and 30s heyday are long behind them, and it has to be said they weren’t exactly warmly embraced by a country in the grip of post-war austerity. As they trudge from one barely half-full provincial theatre to the next, they are taunted everywhere – at least, as Jeff Pope’s screenplay tells us – by rhapsodies for the new kid on the block, Norman Wisdom.

The film begins, however, with a flashback to 1937, with the pair in their Hollywood pomp. Stan has just divorced for the second time and insists he won’t get married again. He’ll just find a woman he doesn’t like and buy her a house.

That’s an old gag, and a good one. But it might make you think for a second that maybe the drama would be compromised by a procession of faintly contrived one-liners.

You needn’t worry. With the experienced Pope as writer, and Jon S. Baird’s exceptional gifts as director, both audience and resurrection of characters are in safe hands.

By 1953, the double-act has foundered. This was primarily to do with Laurel’s Hollywood bust-up with powerful producer Hal Roach (Danny Huston). But almost at once comes the offer of a tour in Ulverston-born Stan’s native land. The somewhat more seductive suggestion was then made of a new British-funded movie project, based on the legend of Robin Hood.

The duo must learn to work together again. That was never going to be easy. Ollie’s failing health and the underlying tensions caused by the work he has done without Stan, their mutual respect and deep affection is subject to constant strain.

It also becomes clear, to Stan at least, that the Robin Hood picture dangled as an inducement for riches, probably isn’t going to happen. A prominent poster for Abbott And Costello Go To Mars offers another sinister reminder that times and tastes have changed.

This story of a brace of great-promising careers gently fizzling out is in danger of becoming just a little too forlorn, when, everyone – the audience as well as Laurel and Hardy – gets a boost like a surge of electricity with the arrival from America of their wives.

Happily, they have both found connubial bliss, and even more delightful, the casting of Mrs Laurel, a formidable Russian ex-dancer called Ida, and Mrs Hardy, the devoted Lucille, is as perfect a match as that of Coogan and Reilly.

The former is played, with glorious aplomb, by Nina Arianda. It does help that she gets some of the drama’s funniest lines, and a jolly running joke in her distaste for the oily impresario running the tour (Bernard Delfont, amusingly played by Rufus Jones). Nevertheless, underpinning both her character and Lucille’s (an equally fine performance by Shirley Henderson) is adoration and concern for their menfolk.

Indeed, on more than one level, Stan & Ollie is a love story. It’s about the love between husbands and wives, and about the love Laurel and Hardy engendered in their audiences, but mostly it’s about the love they had for each other. It’s made all the more poignant for being stretched to almost snapping point. Stan would never have made it without Ollie. He knows that he was one half of a whole.

As for the other half, many people would no doubt have loved to have seen Reilly winning a Golden Globe last week for his loveable, vulnerable turn as Ollie. Yet, in a way that would have been unfair on Coogan, who should also have been nominated and gives the best straight-acting performance of his career. But he has been duly included on last week’s BAFTAs shortlist announcement. That’s the least he deserves.

 

HE mimics well, of course, and captures almost perfectly Stan’s slightly nasal, mid-Atlantic vowels. The contrast between the performer and the man is impressively precise.

If there is a slight weakness it is within the stage routines – notably one involving a hard-boiled egg – which don’t adequately convey the pair’s comic genius. For those readers who grew up in the era watching Laurel and Hardy on Saturday morning television will hardly need telling why the duo were so joyously funny.

It is quite likely, then, that this heart-warming film is more likely to be cherished by those born in the mid-1960s, who will consider it a treat to watch.

Verdict: Charmingly tender

★★★★★

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