To the Wonder – 2012, Terrence Malick

by Allan Fish

(USA 2012 112m) DVD1/2 (eventually)

Love makes us one

p  Sarah Green, Nicolas Gondo  d/w  Terrence Malick  ph  Emmanuel Lubezki  ed  Keith Fraase, A.J.Edwards, Shane Hazen, Mark Yoshikawa, Christopher Roldan  m  Hanan Townshend  art  Jack Fisk  cos  Jacqueline West

Ben Affleck (Neil), Olga Kurylenko (Marina), Rachel McAdams (Jane), Javier Bardem (Father Quintana), Tatiana Chiline (Tatiana), Ramina Mondello (Anna),

There was a time when the idea of a new Terrence Malick film was something to be treated like the announcement that Brigadoon was due to show up again; something quite literally of myth.  The gaps between films have been getting progressively smaller, but here To the Wonder arrives barely twelve months after The Tree of Life and, even more wondrous, there are two more on the horizon.  Has Terry been holding back all these scripts for decades?  What has prompted him to suddenly make films not with the alacrity of a Bresson or a Kubrick but of a Fassbinder?

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Amour 2012 – Three Haneke colossi in a row

by Allan Fish

(France 2012 127m) DVD1/2

Aka. Love

Playing Beethoven’s Bagatelle

p  Margaret Ménégoz  d/w  Michael Haneke  ph  Darius Khondji  ed  Monika Willi, Nadine Muse  art  Jean-Vincent Puzos, Suzanne Haneke

Jean-Louis Trintignant (Georges), Emmanuelle Riva (Anne), Isabelle Huppert (Eva), Alexandre Tharaud (Alexandre), William Shimell (Geoff), Ramon Agirre (concierge),

It was not going to be easy viewing.  Amour isn’t easy viewing for anyone, but as I type I have a dear loved one suffering from the onset of dementia.  I’ve also lived with suicide in my time, for a period it was my good companion.  But despite my empathy on many levels watching it could never be as hard as making it was for Haneke, who himself had lost a loved one to suicide.

After the discovery of a body in an apartment laid out on a bed as if for a funeral, we are then taken back a little period, only a few months or so, to an evening concert at the Théâtre Champes Elysées.  An elderly couple take their seat in the fourth row and then join the applause as the pianist comes on stage behind the camera.  We see them meeting the pianist afterwards and then going home.  He takes a nightcap.  They go to bed.  We next see them round the breakfast table the next morning.  They’re talking when all of a sudden the wife, Anne, literally stops, as if in a trance.  Nothing her husband Georges can do can snap her out of it.  Then when he’s about to go for help, she snaps out of it and refuses to believe anything had happened.

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The Master 2012 – Anderson’s flawed masterpiece is a masterpiece all the same

by Allan Fish

(USA 2012 144mm)

To the poison

p  Megan Ellison, Daniel Lupi, Paul Thomas Anderson, JoAnne Sellar  d/w  Paul Thomas Anderson  ph  Mihai Malaimare Jnr  ed  Leslie Jones, Peter McNulty  m  Jonny Greenwood  art  David Crank, Jack Fisk, Amy Wells  cos  Mark Bridges

Joaquin Phoenix (Freddie Quell), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Lancaster Dodd), Amy Adams (Peggy Dodd (Jesse Clemons (Val Dodd), Laura Dern (Helen Sullivan), Lena Endre (Mrs Solstad), Madison Beaty (Doris Salstad), Ambys Childers (Elizabeth Dodd), Patty McCormack (Mildred Drummond), Amy Ferguson (Martha), W.Earl Brown,

When I first heard of The Master, long before it even went into pre-production, it had already become somewhat mythic.  It was supposed to be the film that looked at the sinister heart of cult beliefs and religions, a thinly disguised attack on Scientologists that to many potential viewers may have seemed long overdue.  But bear in mind the hotshots for whom L.Ron Hubbard’s dubious philosophy is part of their bloodstream, in particular the same Thomas Cruise Mapother IV who gave his greatest performance, and in money terms his seal of approval, in Magnolia by the self-same Paul Thomas Anderson.  There was a danger that modern cinema’s greatest potential master was out to blow himself up, like the naïve genius of Citizen Kane all over again.

When the finished film finally arrived, however, it turned out to be anything but that we might have expected or, for him at least, feared.  Indeed it’s hard at times to believe that it’s an original film at all.  You look at this mixed-up, anti-social, psychotic, almost impenetrable protagonists Freddie Quell and he feels like the antihero to one of the great American novels; that’s the genius, PTA has made the first great cine-novel.  It may be accentuated by the period (it’s set in the decade after World War II), but there are aspects of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Kerouac, even Ayn Rand. 

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49. The Crimson Petal and the White – 2011

by Allan Fish

(UK 2011 236m) DVD2

The City of Dreadful Night

p  David M.Thompson, Steve Lightfoot, Greg Dummett, Ed Rubin  d  Marc Munden  w  Lucinda Coxon  novel  Michel Faber  ph  Lol Crawley  ed  Luke Dunkley  m  Cristobal Tapia de Veer  art  Grant Montgomery, Ussal Smithers  cos  Annie Symons  make up  Jacqueline Fowler

Romola Garai (Sugar), Chris O’Dowd (William Rackham), Shirley Henderson (Mrs Cox), Amanda Hale (Agnes Rackham), Mark Gatiss (Henry Rackham Jnr), Gillian Anderson (Mrs Castaway), Richard E.Grant (Dr Curlew), Tom Georgeson (Henry Rackham), Claire Louise Connelly (Janey), Blake Ritson (Bodley), Katie Lyons (Clara), Liz White (Caroline), Elizabeth Berrington (Lady Bridgelow), Isla Watt (Sophie),

“Keep your wits about you.  This city is vast and intricate and you do not know your way around.  You imagine from other stories you’ve read that you know it well, but those stories flattered you.  You are an alien from another time and place altogether.  You don’t even know what hour it is, do you?”  It’s an opening narration to command attention, to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand to attention like school children upon the arrival of teacher.  It accompanies a sequence that has been described by some as resembling a laudanum induced nightmare and yet notice the person, for is much of that sequence not shot in subjective camera.  The critics are right to point out the drug-induced, shallow-focused haze in which much of the action takes place, as if entirely shot in front of gaslights playing tricks with the eyes.  The camera, prowling like a restless disembodied spirit, leads you quite literally by the hand, like Cocteau’s mirror walk on opium, to a place where you really are like an alien.  It plays for the first three episodes like Jane Eyre if Jane was a prostitute and Lowood a brothel. 

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Margaret (Extended Version) 2011/2012 – Kenneth Lonergan

by Allan Fish

(USA 2011/2012 186m) DVD1

No cowboy hats in the Upper West Side

p  Sydney Pollack, Scott Rudin, Gary Gilbert, Anthony Minghella  d/w  Kenneth Lonergan  ph  Ryszard Lenczewski  ed  Annie McCabe  m  Nico Muhly  art  James Donahue

Anna Paquin (Lisa Cohen), J.Smith-Cameron (Joan, her mother), Jeannie Berlin (Emily), Mark Ruffalo (Maretti), Jean Reno (Ramon), Sarah Steele (Becky), Matt Damon (Mr Aaron), Matthew Broderick (John), Allison Janney (Monica), Kieran Culkin (Paul), John Gallagher Jnr (Darren), Aidem (Abigail), Rosemarie Dewitt (Mrs Maretti),

The long awaited second film of Kenneth Lonergan had been shot in 2005, but only surfaced in 2011 after various lawsuits in a cut which was anonymously assembled by Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker.  (In the time that passed in between, two of its producers – Pollack and Minghella – had passed away.)  That original cut of Margaret was a series of affecting moments, but didn’t hang together as a whole.  This extended cut still doesn’t hang together quite, but the impact makes one realise it should never quite hang together, for that would suggest neatness, and Margaret is a film about disorder and ambiguity.  Even the title is a vague reference to a poem by Gerald Manley Hopkins.

Paquin plays Lisa, a seventeen year old girl from a self-described over-privileged liberal Jewish household.  Her mother Joan is a stage actress wanting her latest play to be a success.  She has a scholarship, has a boy called Darren so tongue-tied in love with her that he stutters out a date request and is about to go on a trip with her father to a ranch.  Wandering her local haunts for a cowboy hat with no success, she sees one just like she wants on a bus driver’s head.  As he’s driving off she tries to get his attention, which she eventually does, but in doing so he takes his eye off the road, runs a red light and fatally injures a middle-aged woman.  Lisa holds the woman as she dies in the street, but she doesn’t report the driver for causing the accident because she knows she was partly culpable.  But the accident begins to make her lose control, any interest in school, makes her seek out sex with not only a willing druggie deflowerer but with one of her teachers and try to get justice by having the bus driver fired and changing her statement. 

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A Simple Life 2011 – Ann Hui – one of the greatest films of the millennium

by Allan Fish

(Hong Kong 2011 118m) DVD1/2

Aka. Tao Jie

No road to the magic mountain

p  Roger Lee, Andy Lau, Ann Hui  d  Ann Hui  w  Roger Lee, Susan Chan  ph  Nelson Yu Lik-Wai  ed  Chi-Leung Kwong, Manda Wai  m  Wing-fai Law  art  Albert Poon

Deannie Ip (Ah Tao), Andy Lau (Roger Lee), Paul Chun (Uncle Kin), Hui Pink Kee (Aunt Kam), Hui So-ying (Mui), Suet-Fa Kong (receptionist), Tin Leung (headmaster), Hailu Qin (Ms Choi), Wang Fuli (Roger’s mother), Sammo Hung Kan-Bo (director Hung), Anthony Wong Chau-Sang (grasshopper), Eman Lam (Carmen), Tsui Hark,

Some films are a pleasure to write about.  You can just come to the keyboard and right away know what you want to say, how to say it and it just flows like taking copy from a Dictaphone.  A Simple Life is not one of those films, not one of those films you can make mental notes on while watching because before you know it, the film’s over and you have no idea how to begin your piece.  It’s the sort of film that makes suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune – or the Hollywood mainstream c.2011 – worth all the pain.  You come out, whether from the cinema or your front room, feeling ennobled, uplifted and put through the emotional wringer, all the more so because the film makes absolutely no effort to do so.  Even as I type, I imagine the Hollywood version and it’s a horrifying thought.

Roger – based on the real life experience of producer and writer Roger Lee – is a film producer who lives and works in Hong Kong.  Most of his family are now abroad, either on the Chinese mainland or in the US, and he lives with his seventy-something maid Ah Tao, who has looked after members of his family for six decades.  One day, after making him his favourite dish, she collapses with a stroke.  Visiting her in hospital she tells him, in her typical altruistic manner, that she wants to go into an old people’s home.  He finds her one and there she gets to know some of the fellow inmates, but Roger comes to see her as often as filming and meeting schedules permit, even takes her to his film premiere, but it becomes clear that her condition isn’t going to get better. 

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82. This is England ’86 2010

by Allan Fish

(UK 2010 184m) DVD2

Countdown from 13…

p  Rebekah Wray Rogers, Mark Herbert, Derrin Schlesinger  d  Shane Meadows, Tom Harper  w  Shane Meadows, Jack Thorne  ph  Danny Cohen  ed  Mark Eckersley, Chris Wyatt  m  Ludovico Einaudi  art  Lisa Hall

Vicky McClure (Lol), Joseph Gilgun (Woody), Thomas Turgoose (Shaun Fields), Danielle Watson (Trev), George Newton (Banjo), Perry Benson (Meggy), Chanel Cresswell (Kelly), Andrew Shim (Milky), Andrew Ellis (Gadget), Rosamund Hanson (Smell), Joseph Dempsie (Higgy), Perry Fitzpatrick (Flip), Jo Hartley (Cynthia Fields), Katharine Dow Blyton (Chrissy), Johnny Harris (Mick), Kriss Dosanjh (Mr Sandhu), Hannah Walters (Trudy), Michael Socha (Harvey), Stephen Graham (Combo),

On its general release in 2007, This is England was receiving bouquets from just about everyone who saw it.  “This is British cinema” said Peter Bradshaw.  It is indeed, Peter, and very fine cinema at that, but after watching it I was left with a feeling that it could have been so much more, that it just petered out.  An excellent film, probably Meadows’ best, but dare I hope for more.  A symbolic sequence on a beach with Thomas Turgoose’s Shaun tossing the St George flag into the sea resounded with memories of Truffaut, and it’s perhaps not inappropriate, for just as Antoine Doinel was Truffaut by proxy, so Shaun Fields, the 12 year old at the heart of This is England, was Meadows.

Several years on Meadows returned to Shaun, as Truffaut did several times with Doinel, but not just to Shaun.  Unlike Antoine Doinel, the central character is only part of the canvas, just one of those characters leaning against the wall in the original film’s iconic poster.  And like another of Meadows’ idols, Alan Clarke, he would do so this time on TV, at a time of the 1986 World Cup and unemployment over three million. 

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The Hollow Crown – 2012, A TV masterwork too late for the TV countdown

by Allan Fish

(UK 2012 520m) DVD2

Let this acceptance take

p  Rupert Ryle Hodges, Gareth Neame, Sam Mendes, Pippa Harris  d  Rupert Goold, Richard Eyre, Thea Sharrock  plays  William Shakespeare  ph  Danny Cohen, Ben Smithard, Michael McDonough  ed  Trevor Waite, Lesley Walker, John Wilson  m  Adam Cork, Stephen Warbeck, Adrian Johnston  art  Andrew McAlpine, Donal Woods, Max Berman  cos  Odile Dicks-Mireaux, Annie Symons

Tom Hiddleston (Hal/Henry V), Jeremy Irons (Henry IV), Simon Russell Beale (Sir John Falstaff), Ben Whishaw (Richard II), Rory Kinnear (Bolingbroke), Clemence Poésy (Queen Isabella), John Hurt (Chorus), David Morrissey (Northumberland), Alun Armstrong (older Northumberland), David Suchet (York), James Purefoy (Mowbray), Patrick Stewart (John of Gaunt), Lindsay Duncan (Duchess of York), Julie Walters (Mistress Quickly), Tom Georgeson (Bardolph), Joe Armstrong (Hotspur), Michelle Dockery (Kate Percy), Maxine Peake (Doll Tearsheet), David Dawson (Poins), Harry Lloyd (Mortimer), David Hayman (Worcester), Iain Glen (Warwick), David Bradley (gardener), David Bamber (Justice Shallow), Lambert Wilson (Charles VI), Melanie Thierry (Princess Katherine), Geoffrey Palmer (Lord Chief Justice), Paul Ritter (Pistol), Anton Lesser (Exeter), Owen Teale (Fluellen), Geraldine Chaplin (Alice),

2012 was always going to be a patriotic year for the British; Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, London Olympics and the 400^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. The BBC prepared for this landmark and, though the summer of 2012, we had a host of programming, from a typically gripping documentary from Simon Schama to behind the scene documentaries with actors Derek Jacobi, Jeremy Irons and David Tennant.  Yet all paled beside the adaptations of four successive Shakespeare history plays, from Richard II through Henry IV Parts I & II to Henry V.  What we were given was, despite limitations of budget, a series to at least bear comparison to the legendary An Age of Kings. 

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86. Sherlock 2010

by Allan Fish

(UK 2010-  532m) DVD1/2

I – O – U…

p  Sue Vertue, Rebecca Eaton, Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat  d  Paul McGuigan, Euros Lyn  created by  Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss  w  Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss, Steve Thompson  m  David Arnold, Michael Price 

Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock Holmes), Martin Freeman (Dr John Watson), Mark Gatiss (Mycroft Holmes), Una Stubbs (Mrs Hudson), Andrew Scott (Jim Moriarty), Rupert Graves (Chf.Insp.Lestrade), Lara Pulver (Irene Adler), Zoe Telford, Phil Davis, Louise Brealey, John Sessions, Russell Tovey, Amber Elizabeth, Douglas Wilmer,

We all have our own Holmes.  For the old brigade, no-one can top Basil Rathbone, and for sure on the large screen, while Robert Stephens and Peter Cushing were both admirable, he remains definitive.  Baker Street obsessives will say the best incarnations were on TV.  Hand on heart, if asked who the most accurate Holmes was on screen, it would be Jeremy Brett’s immortal incarnation that ran for a decade from 1984-94 and was faithful enough to build an entire Baker Street set (back to back with the Coronation Street set) on the Granada backlot.  Yet while they were the most authentic, the earlier series undoubtedly were the best (Brett’s ailments started to show towards the end).  Back a generation earlier there was a now rarely seen take with Douglas Wilmer a superb Holmes (he makes a lovely cameo appearance, aged 90, in the Series 2 finale).  Yet these were all faithful period recreations and they failed to make the main text, so how come a 21^st century updating could prove the best of the bunch? 

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87. The Story of Film – An Odyssey – 2011

by Allan Fish

(UK 2011 945m) DVD2

It looked like our dreams

d/w  Mark Cousins  ph  Mark Cousins  ed  Timo Longer  narrated by  Mark Cousins

with Sharmila Tagore, Kyoko Kagawa, Lars Von Trier, Stanley Donen, Xie Jin, Youssef Chahine, Norman Lloyd, Jane Campion, Amitabh Bachchan, Robert Towne, Bernardo Bertolucci, Yuen Woo-ping, Paul Schrader, Baz Luhrmann, Terence Davies, etc. 

There was a kids TV programme when I was growing up called Why Don’t You?  It showcased kids doing various things to amuse themselves and featured a theme song which told its viewer to “stop watching TV, turn it off, it’s no good to me”; the only TV programme that was basically repudiating its viewers.

Writing this essay gives me that feeling twice over.  This work is supposed to be a trawl through the great works of the moving image, but Cousins presents one with a dilemma; namely, that if the reader is coming to this as a beginner, he could do no better than to leave the screen or page they are reading and get the DVDs of this series and watch this before you start.  The problem is that even then I would be plagiarising Cousins; he told his readers to do exactly that in the book the series was based on, telling them to go off and watch certain Hitchcock films if they haven’t already.

The whole purpose of my work was to remove the blinkers, to say that, while canons and accepted film histories are fine and focus the would-be film student to certain definitive works, they also blinker, blur the periphery and lead to myopia.  As Cousins himself again said, setting out to show that movie history as we know it was “racist by omission.”  The purpose of Cousins’ original book was akin to trying to throw a lasso round the moon like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life.  To put all of film history in one single volume – it was an impossible task to begin with, but there are times when the attempt itself is significant and this was one such time.

I’d first seen Cousins like many of my generation as the presenter of BBC2s cult movie series Moviedrome and his inimitable, deliberate Belfast drawl either enchanted or infuriated.  He set about filming the documentary to go with the book the year it hit the shelves – 2004 – and interviewed dozens of people and visited countless locations in search of illustrations to the printed word.  Several of the interviewees listed after the ‘with’ had passed on several years before it came to air.

Then in the autumn of 2011, with little to no fanfare, it was shown on More4 in the UK prior to a film festival tour in 2012.  The pacing was ruined by those goddamned adverts that make almost all non-BBC TV impossible to watch with enjoyment and make you wait for the DVDs or Blu Rays.  While bemoaning the omissions from conventional film histories, many will be aghast at the absences here – no film noir, no Sturges, to name one to represent dozens – but the same had been true of Scorsese’s A Personal Journey for the BFI in 1995.  The difference was that Scorsese apologised for the omissions and listed them, much like I do in the Final Apologies here; Cousins makes no apology, and yet why should he?  It’s his personal journey after all, and the breadth of clips is amazing even to an old cynic like me who thinks he’s seen or heard of just about everything.  From the Lumières to Inception, from continent to continent and more establishing shots than a whole season of Alias, and with its capital seemingly in Dakar, Senegal, this is not for the complacent.  In his intro to each episode, he talked of how movies are “a multi-billion dollar global entertainment industry now.  But what drives them isn’t box-office or showbiz, it’s passion and innovation.”  And there we come to the crux of the matter.  Movies are all about money; art be hanged.  In Hollywood, the talented cannot escape the curse, they’re contaminated – the bauble, as Cousins would say.  This fifteen hour piece is his crusade against that, and anything written by the likes of yours truly cannot hope to have the same impact.  Yet like Cousins, I still write because, when failure is inevitable, how gloriously you fail matters.  And this is a truly glorious failure.

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