This is one of those titles you may know, you’ve seen it somewhere or have heard of the author, Vera Brittain… it rings bells.
But you may be like me, know of it but not know it? I’d heard of it, I’d seen the cover, I knew the author (not personally) but it didn’t appeal enough to buy, beg or borrow a copy to read.
I’m glad I didn’t now – I’m glad I waited for this lush, rich adaptation which only makes me want to whizz out and buy a copy to read it and savour every detail.It’s an epic tale, set against the fight for women’s rights, struggles in Edwardian England that then faces the First World War, and all that this entails for the youth of that time – the lost generation.I can only imagine what it was like, but this film helps show it – the life of privilege for upper middle classes, women wanting equality and suffering for it, the horror of going to war and the horror of waiting at home for news of loved ones.It only briefly touches on it in one scene, but it also mentions the love that dare not speak its name, as Vera’s injured brother clutches to a letter from a fellow officer.This is an amazing adaption; the script is rich with Brittain’s words, the scenery gritty and pretty in equal measures and the acting superb.
Kit Harrington and Alicia Vikander are perfect as the slightly awkward lovers, separated by war and a society that still insists on chaperones for young unmarried couples.
They are more than ably supported by Taron Egerton as Vera’s brother, Miranda Richardson as a stand offish Oxford tutor, Dominic West as Vera’s father, the list goes on…
For all its epic proportions and massive story – this is still a very personal film and I defy you not to be touched by it.
This rather tense drama opens with Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari been awoken by Investigators in his mother’s house in Tehran and subsequently hauled off to jail. Then in a flashback, we see Bahari in London 11 days previously with his heavily pregnant English wife discussing his assignment from Newsweek Magazine to cover the impending Presidential Elections in Iran. They are both aware of the danger particularly as both his late father and sister had both been imprisoned by Ayatollah Khomeini for being communists.
When Bahari arrives in Tehran a chance meeting hooks him up with a young driver who zips him around the city on his motor bike introducing the Journalist to his own liberal minded friends who are concerned that the present corrupt regime will rig the Elections to insure that their Candidate running against the incumbent President fails completely. When their worse fears are realised and the Government falsely declares that the President has been reelected with a landslide majority, the streets of the city are overrun with hundreds of thousands of protesters. The authorities react by sending out armed troopers to fire into the crowds, and when Bahari captures some of this on video that is shown on US TV, he has become a wanted man.
He is thrown into solitary confinement in Evin prison and is accused of being a spy for the CIA, the MI6, or any other Western organisation his captors claim are set on bringing the downfall of the Iranian Nation. Its a combination of paranoia and panic as the Investigator clutches at straws to make his claims stick. Bahari is blindfolded most of the time, and he establishes some sort of relationship with his tormentor…. known as Rosewater for his predilection for spraying himself liberally with the scent … who seems to bumble his way through their daily sessions of interrogation without gaining any information or a ‘confession’ from Bahari after several weeks.
As time passes and ‘Rosewater’ is pressured by his Superior to get a ‘result’ he taunts Bahari more and deprives him of anything to read and feeds him with ant infested food, but beyond depriving him of his liberty and hope, he surprisingly never really resorts to physical torture that one may have expected
This re-telling of the ghastly imprisonment of London based Iranian Newsweek Journalist Maziar Bahari in a Tehran jail for 118 days is the directing/writing debut of US TV journalist Jon Stewart whose own celebrity rather overshadows that of his subject.
Whilst Stewart does an admirable job, he still doesn’t quite succeed in overcoming his main difficulty in maintaining the tension in a true story the greater part of which is just about these two men in jail, that we already know the outcome off, and that Bahari will survive.
Gael Garcia Bernal however does an excellent job portraying the scared imprisoned journalist, and Shohrer Aghdashloo steals all her scenes in the cameo role of his mother.
The movie opens with a very hunky bare-chested young man in a New York street late at night trying to cover up and keep warm. You can hear him start to explain. “I’m not going to bulls*** you, it was the greatest party in the history of the world. My boss said the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Maybe it did. One thing for sure it was the ultimate escape from a f***ed up city in a f***ed up time. But like any great escape, it never lasts”
He’s talking of course about the infamous Studio 54 which was THE dance club in Manhattan, that for a few short years in the late 1970s was where all the celebrities hung out and partied whilst all the desperate would-be’s were kept outside behind the velvet ropes begging Steve Rubell the co-owner and ringmaster to be let in. Their efforts were all in vain as you had to have either a certain look or a gorgeous body for him to relent and admit you in to mingle with the stars. Shane a rather gormless New Jersey boy who was as cute as hell was in the latter group. This is his story, which started off when Rubell told him to remove his shirt and after he stripped to his waist he got invited into more than just the Club, and he stayed until the party ended.
What naïve Shane encounters inside the Club quickly blows his mind. Hedonistic excess and debauchery with people openly having sex whilst bare-chested glitter-painted waiters nimbly passed around the packed dance floor with silver trays carrying drinks laced with phials of coke. There are bodies everywhere and all of them behaving badly. Hesitant at first he soon joins in and as he discovers that he loves being the centre of attention he learns to parlay that into getting what he wants. He is very soon a regular fixture and asking a somewhat besotted Rubell for a job. He starts at the bottom as a lowly barboy but literally f***s his way to becoming the next new hottest bartender which is one of the most coveted jobs in the place.
Rubell’s self-indulgent rapacious greedy lust for money and power knows no bounds and the seemingly unstoppable raging success of the club means endless drug-fuelled sleepless days and nights as he lures Shane and his other young staff into satisfying his sexual needs with the promise of promotion or a handful of cash. His creepy persona (a startlingly wonderful dramatic performance from Mike Myers) influences the once innocent straight Shane who readily now jumps in bed with older celebrities of both sexes as he earns a reputation of being able to literally screw them unconscious. His now insatiable appetite has him also making passes at both his married best friends who are also his roommates.
For Shane, it’s simply a case of rags to riches story and when the IRS finally takes heed of Rubell’s public boasting of tax-avoidance and raids the Club, it’s back to rags again. He’s had his trip to the dark side and now it’s time get back into a light that is not just from the reflection of a disco glitter ball.
Written and directed by Mark Christopher, this new Director’s Cut fulfils an ambition he has held since the original movie was released some 17 years ago. He’s added some 36 sparkling minutes, which makes a great deal more sense of Shane’s story, and it also reinstates all the sex and the morally ambivalent characters that frightened the distributors way back then. All’s well that ends well and Christopher’s love letter to the heady days of the New York disco scene is now a sheer joy.
With the exception of Myers, the cast was relatively unknown. Newcomer Ryan Philippe, whose experience prior to this had been playing a gay teenager on Days Of Our Life (the first gay character on US daytime TV), played Shane so passionately. He not only looks the part … be prepared to swoon like Rubell when he first takes off his shirt to reveal THAT chest … but he imbues his role so perfectly with such convincing innocence. Playing alongside him were a very young Salma Hayek, Neve Campbell, and almost totally un spottable in his very first movie role Mark Ruffalo. Christopher has scattered quite a few celebrities playing themselves as regular habitués of the Club, some of whom you may not even recognise until the credits role at the end.
As Shane so adroitly summed up the whole scene “one moment it is all around you and the next it’s gone forever”. Very true, but now thanks to this excellent entertaining movie we can relieve part of it again for at least 90 minutes.
★★★★★ Selma | This extraordinary wonderful new film that finally brings Nobel Peace Laureate Dr. Martin Luther King centre stage in a Hollywood movie focuses on just one of the most crucial periods in his life.
Add American Sniper to the list of good Clint Eastwood movies.
While it’s not his best film ever (see Unforgiven and J. Edgar) nor his worst film (see the recently poorly received Jersey Boys), it’s a loyal and factual re-telling of the true story of Chris Kyle, a member of the elite Nave SEALS. He was the most lethal sniper in the history of the US Military, having 160 confirmed kills. He was also a husband and the father of two children, but being the best sniper and serving his country were the most important things in his life.
Kyle (played valiantly and accurately by Bradley Cooper) in the beginning of the film is a ranch hand in Texas. His life doesn’t amount to much, especially after he finds his girlfriend in bed with another man. But after injuring his arm, he decides to join the navy. His commitment for his country becomes embedded in him after the catastrophic events of 9/11. After months of gruelling training, he and his team are sent to Iraq to fight the enemy. And they are tasked with some of the most dangerous missions in the military. This includes heading directly into enemy territory and looking for a man called Shiekh Al-Obodi (Navid Negahban), one of the leaders of the Taliban.
Kyle serves four tours, in between each one going home to be with his family but getting the pull to serve again. He’s urged against it by his pretty wife Tanya (an amazing Sienna Miller). Even the birth of his two children doesn’t keep him home. He continues increasing his sniper kill tally, which includes women and children who threaten to kill US soldiers. Kyle is also determined to kill a man called Mustafa (played by Sammy Shiek). Mustafa is a Syrian shooter who had competed for his country in the Olympics. He’s also killing the insurgents (the Americans on the ground). Kyle is determined to kill him as he has killed one of his fellow soldiers. The film then becomes a cat and mouse story to dramatic effect, where Mustafa aims to shoot the soldiers but Kyle aims to shoot him. It all culminates in an amazing shootout between the US soldiers trapped on a rooftop in Sadr City while the enemy comes in from all sides, all in the midst of a massive sandstorm. It’s one of Eastwood’s best film sequences I’ve ever seen.
However, American Sniper doesn’t end there. Kyle, after getting shot in the massive shootout, returns home, but has a hard time rejoining society, and his wife has a hard time getting connected with him. He’s a changed man, but seems to slightly recover after he starts helping soldiers at a local veterans hospital and also helps to train them on weapons and combat tactics to lift their spirits. American Sniper would’ve had a better impact if the film ended after the shootout in Sadr City. This last bit of the film seems to be tacked on to tell the rest of Kyle’s story.
Cooper plays Kyle to great effect, however, he’s a bit too old to be playing Kyle in his younger years. But Cooper is believable as a soldier during the war, he holds his gun and interacts with his fellow (younger) soldiers very well. It’s a performance that has just won him a nomination for the Best Actor Oscar. Miller is the standout of the film, she’s excellent as Tanya – it’s the best performance of her career. And while American Sniper looks and feels like a good film, the last ten minutes don’t need to be there. American Sniper is adapted by the book of the same name by actor turned-screenwriter Jason Dean Hall. Kyle was shot and killed in Texas in 2013 by a 25-year old Marine Corps Veteran, a veteran he was trying to help.
In 1979 257 people perished in an Air New Zealand flight in which an aircraft slammed into Mount Erebus in Antarctic, becoming one of the world’s worst air disasters.
The flight was a sightseeing excursion that left Auckland in the morning and was expected to return that evening. Sightseeing tours were a new and exciting breakthrough in the world of air-based tourism. Passengers were treated to breath-taking views, being wined and dined as a sub-zero, frozen world passed seamlessly beneath them.
When the DC10 aircraft failed to return alarm bells started to go off and operation Overdue was mounted. Within hours the lives of thousands of people would be changed forever, in New Zealand’s worst aviation accident to date. The nation was in shock for 200 of its citizens that died. Countless families, friends and a nation mourned for those lost on the inhospitable mountain side.
In this film, the story focuses on eleven ordinary police officers who were called upon to retrieve the shattered bodies of those victims. Eleven ordinary men who faced an extraordinary harrowing and life-changing battle against the bleak, forbidding landscape that forms Mount Erbus experiencing mass death on a massive scale.
Operation Overdue was the New Zealand police operation to lead a recovery operation. The first of these officers left from Christchurch on the 29th November 1979. It included the Chief Air Accident Investigator, Ron Chippindale, who led the site investigation, and the New Zealand Police search and rescue coordinator, Inspector Robert (Bob) Mitchell, who led the recovery operation. Just 11 New Zealand Police officers were selected from squads that included members of the Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) team and Search and Rescue. Accompanying these men was a handful of mountaineers. By the 10th of December, their job of recovering, bagging and repatriated bodies was complete. The DVI managed to recover 114 intact bodies, 133 bags of human remains and countless personal belonging back to the victims’ families.
Using a mix of archive and re-enactment, Directors Peter Burger and Charlotte Purdy have created a powerful documentary that uncovers the power of the human spirit. That even against the greatest odds, courage can overcome fear.
Although short, this documentary film manages to capture the emotional rollercoaster faced by those directly involved with the disaster.
In a rather radical departure from his last few very edgy movies acclaimed director Tim Burton has opted to make a biopic about Walter Keane the infamous plagiarist who in the 1950s claimed that his wife’s populist art was his own work. It’s a colourful lightweight drama that never gets dark even when Keane’s trickery is exposed, thanks mainly to the entertaining performances of its stars Christoph Waltz and Amy Adams.
The movie opens with a blond-wigged Margaret Ulbrich leaving her unseen husband and taking just Jane her young daughter, a suitcase and a handful of her artwork. Her destination is San Francisco’s new trendy hotspot North Beach but getting a job as a newly single mother is not easy and so she supplements her income at the furniture factory where she works by setting up shop at an outdoor art fair. Her signature style of painting forlorn looking children with enormous soulful eyes doesn’t attract many sales but it does attract the attention of the garrulous older man in the next booth who is pitching his pictures of street scenes of Paris.
A compulsive womaniser, Walter Keane turns on the charm for Margaret and she, still feeling vulnerable and lonely after her recent separation, agrees to go out on a date with him. The couple hardly know other when Margaret receives a letter from her husband’s lawyer threatening to sue for custody of their child, and so she accepts Walter’s spontaneous marriage proposal to safeguard her chances of holding onto Jane.
After they return from a romantic wedding and honeymoon in Hawaii, Walter starts hawking their art around town and despite the fact he is a sharp fast-talking salesman, the best deal he can come up with is renting a couple of walls in a Jazz club to display their work. His Montmartre street scenes are totally overlooked but when the club patrons spot Margaret’s soulful eyed children and want to buy them all, he claims that they are all his own work too.
Margaret is somewhat infatuated with her new husband who she credits with giving her a new lease of life, so when she discovers the lie she goes along it. She is persuaded by Walter that having a man as the artist, is the only way to successful sell the art. He also manages to charm everyone into helping him make this new venture so successful including the San Francisco Examiner reporter Dick Nolan who plants stories about Walter and the art in his newspaper’s society pages.
As their success explodes all Margaret has to do is stay at home and churn out more paintings in complete secrecy as even Jane, now a teenager, must not be allowed to know the truth. When Walter hits on the notion of printing cheap poster copies of Margaret’s kitsch art the public cannot enough of them, and one of the very few dissenting voices is that of the New York Times Art Critic John Canady who denounces them to the world.
When his sheer greed turns Walter into a real menace, then Margaret finally packs up her suitcases once again and flees with her daughter, but this time to Hawaii. It takes Walter a year to track her down and when he calls her bluff about exposing him as a fraud, she finally goes public with the fact that she is the real artist. A supremely over-confident Walter immediately denounces these claims in the Examiner, but for once he has misread Margaret who is no longer frightened of him, and so she promptly sues him and the newspaper for slander.
The judge clears the newspaper of any liability at the Trial but when the rest of the proceedings degenerate into a public squabble between the couple, he deems the only way to resolve the true authorship of the Art is that both of the Keanes paint a picture there and then.
The chemistry between Waltz as the obnoxiously charming con-man and Adams as the pretty put-upon vulnerable Margaret with her fine Christian morals is what makes this story seem so believable even when it’s hard to even begin to conceive that all this appalling art could have resulted in amassing such a fortune. Burton makes this adaption of this true story an incisive commentary on how early 1960’s society even in a consumer-driven California still had these impenetrable expectations of what women could do.
This easy going movie will hardly rank as one of director Burton’s best but it is reasonably entertaining and easy on the eye and to that end we should give credit to the design team for the locations, the sets and costumes that were all so perfect down to the last detail.
After her cancer-ridden mother died just aged 45, Cheryl Strayed fell to pieces. Heavily in debt and with her marriage disintegrating she developed an obsession for sleeping with countless strangers and an addiction to heroin. Her solution to finding a path to recovery and do some major soul-searching was deciding to hike alone the entire Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) that stretches some 2663 miles from California right up into Canada.
The stunning scenic route takes in some extreme terrain such as the unforgiving heat of Mojave Desert and the deep snowdrifts of the Sierra Nevada. Even though the rigours of the PCT has defeated many experienced hikers, completely green newbie Cheryl was convinced that she nevertheless would succeed. However, on day one, she could barely lift her heavy backpack that she had stuffed it with too many things that she would eventually realise were unnecessary for this arduous journey.
As she starts the long hike northward Cheryl discovers that as she can barely manage 5 miles per day, she will never walk anything like the whole distance in the 3 months she had estimated. She also quickly discovers that she has the wrong gas for her primus stove so her diet now has to consist of cold mushy oatmeal and dried fruit. Racked with pain and a body full of red sores and a pair of bloody feet, Cheryl has to fight hard not to give into her inner voice that keeps telling her she can quit anytime.
With only the occasional rattlesnake and her well-worn poetry books to keep her company and relieve the tedium and the agony, she can hardly contain herself when she finally encounters a fellow hiker en route even though the advice he imparts to her both encourages and scares her rigid at the same time. By now it has really dawned on her that she is woefully unprepared for such a massive undertaking. The only thing that seems to sustain her besides her sheer stubbornness, is a real need to ‘find’ herself again.
Director Jean-Marc Vallee armed with a script by Nick Hornby fills the journey based on Cheryl Strayed’s own memoir with flashbacks of her tumultuous and troubled past which help us understand her determination to make this trip work. Bobbi her working class mother had suffered at the hands of a physically abusive husband which somehow never dented her sheer optimism and just before her untimely death she had gone back to college to get the education she had missed out on as a child. The bond between Bobbi and Cheryl, who was just 22 years old when her mother died, was the most important thing in both these women’s lives and the reason why the death propelled Cheryl so quickly into a downward spiral.
When Cheryl reaches the first town along the PCT which is a resting place for all hikers, she retrieves a care package that her ex-husband has mailed c/o the local Post Office. She also discovers that word has got out about her and her oversized backpack has been nicknamed ‘The Monster’ but it also elicits advice on how to discard half its contents to make it more practical.
As a lone woman on the Trail, Cheryl feels very susceptible and she views every man as a potential predator. One is a harmless roving reporter for the ‘Hobo Times’ who riles Cheryl up for insisting on calling her a hobo. Another is a kind farm worker who offers her a hot meal and a shower, and she even comes across a male hiker dipping naked in a stream who cannot get his clothes on quick enough when she appears. Her encounter with two hunters is however quite scary, but with quick thinking on her part Cheryl soon scrambles for safety.
The stunning setting makes this heartbreaking journey such a visual treat, and the story of self-preservation of this doggedly determined troubled soul is one that will resound with so many people on so many levels. Reese Witherspoon, the movie’s star and producer optioned Cheryl Strayed’s book even before it was published and topped the NY Times Bestseller List as a vehicle for herself and to kickstart her career that has been in the doldrums since her Oscar win in 2005. It paid off big time as she totally immersed herself in the role and gave an impressive career-best performance as Strayed (even though she was 12 years older than her, and even odder still, just 9 years younger than Laura Dern who was electrifying as Bobbi her mother).
The movie is bound to do more than just make us appreciate what a talented actress Ms Witherspoon really is, as it is also bound to inspire lots of other lost souls to buy themselves a pair of hiking boots and attempt this near-impossible journey, and maybe cause a ‘traffic jam’ or two along the P.C.T. in the future.
John Eleuthère du Pont the spoilt heir to the vast Dupont chemical fortune was a dangerous paranoid psychopath who ended up destroying lives when he didn’t get his own way. The fact that he was also a deeply disturbed closeted homosexual is also very obvious in this new chilling true crime drama based on his life, yet it is a fact that nearly all the critics, without exception, have chosen to ignore.
Du Pont lived in the shadows of his dominant elderly aristocratic mother on their vast estate in Pennsylvania which he had renamed Foxcatcher Farm. His mother’s one obsession was her herd of thoroughbred horses and the Trophy Room that housed all their awards was the most important place in their Mansion. Du Pont deeply resented his Mother’s preference to her stallions over him, and so he built a gym in the grounds to focus on his one big addiction to the sport of wrestling, well wrestlers in particular.
The year is 1987, and three years prior Mark Shultz and his brother Dave had won Gold Medals for wrestling at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Whilst Dave has settled down in Colorado and got married, had children and has a job coaching, Mark has a sad solitary life where his main daily function is to train for the next World Games. When he gets a phone call out of the blue from multi-millionaire du Pont inviting him to fly to Pennsylvania as his guest for a meeting, having nothing to lose, he accepts the free plane ticket and goes.
Du Pont tells Mark that he wants not just to underwrite all his expenses but for him to establish a team of wrestlers under the Foxcatcher banner that he would like to help train for the World Games. If they all live on campus, he will also pay them generous wages too. It’s an offer that loner Mark cannot refuse and without even questioning, du Pont’s possible motives, throws his few worldly possessions in a Uhaul truck and drives across country to his new rather lush quarters on the Estate.
Du Pont had wanted both of the Shultz brothers to lead his new team, but when Mark failed to persuade Dave to join him, du Pont lavished all his attention on just Mark. The new training facilities pay off, and three months later Mark won a Gold Medal at the World Games and schizophrenic du Pont started to treat the young athlete more like a son whenever he was in a good mood. Up to this point Shultz had kept to his highly disciplined routine which excluded things like alcohol but pressured by du Pont he tried and liked recreational drugs which would eventually lead to the decline in the two men’s relationships.
Director Bennett Miller shows that du Pont clearly gets off on physical contact with Shultz when the two men attempt to wrestle (du Pont misguidedly thinks he also has a talent for the sport too) and leaves the implication that this may have satisfied the effete older man’s homosexual desires. However, when du Pont doesn’t get what he wants and it seems that Shultz’s new unhealthy addictions render him unable to win matches, he throws a heap of money at Dave to persuade him to come and train the Team after all.
The vain du Pont who is now underwriting the US Wrestling Team for the Seoul Olympics insists on being recognised as the official coach even though Dave Shultz is actually doing the work. Dave accepts this to a point but a now sober Mark is deeply resentful of du Pont and his power, and although he is still prepared to accept his money, he refuses to have anything do with the man who he once allowed to fawn over him. After he fails to win a Gold Medal at the Olympics, Mark finally moves out of the Foxcatcher Estate leaving his brother to face a fate that no-one could have predicted.
Miller, working with a script by E. Max Frye & Dan Futterman, allows this excellent creepy tale to unravel at a pace that is a little too slow at times. It’s a great ‘vehicle’ for the talented comic actor Steve Carrell to show his remarkable range playing the thoroughly unpleasant du Pont, but as good as he is I don’t think he will join the list of actors who wore prosthetic noses and won an Oscar for their efforts. He was joined on screen by the great Vanessa Redgrave who had a very tiny lame role as the mother; Channing Tatum as Mark which was at least a role that suited his expressionless style of acting; and Mark Ruffalo who was totally superb as a beefed up Dave.
P.S. Back to the question of du Pont’s sexuality that Miller throws us so many clues about, from him waking up a near-naked Shultz after midnight to give him a book (!), to his insistence on demonstrating intimate crutch grabbing wrestling moves that he wasn’t trained to do, to the sight of his horrified mother watching her effeminate son getting ‘low’ on the mat etc. To a gay audience this will undoubtedly appear as a classic case of a rich older effete man chasing a big dumb blond sports jock: known as a ‘chicken hawk’: not too dissimilar to ‘foxcatcher’.
After you have watched Laura Poitras’s powerful documentary on the NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden you will never want to use your bank debit card, mobile phone or even turn your computer on ever again. Whilst it’s not always easy to totally understand the intricate technical details of what Snowden reveals, it is, however, impossible not to avoid his very serious warning that Big Brother is most certainly spying on every single one of us.
What’s remarkable about this extraordinary movie is that is that Poitras was part of the whole process of Snowden going public with his astonishing information, so what we see is a blow by blow account as she films this unprecedented event from the very beginning. Oscar-nominated Poitras (‘My Country My Country’) was in the middle of making another film about surveillance when Snowden contacted her anonymously, using the pseudonym ‘Citizenfour’, and asked for her help in exposing the government’s practice of indiscriminately wholesale spying on all its citizens. Unlike others with conspiracy theories Snowden, a computer intelligence expert who worked for one of the NSA’s main contractors, had hard proof to back up all his claims but as this was classified information he knew that revealing the details would be both difficult and dangerous.
In May 2013 he flew from Hawaii from Hong Kong where he had arranged to meet up with Poitras and Washington Post journalist Glenn Greenwald. They had deliberately chosen this Chinese territory as it has no extradition treaty with the US and both Poitras and Snowden knew that the moment they started to go public with the story the US Government (and maybe the British one too) would want to skin them alive.
When the three meet Snowden makes it clear about his intentions to reveal how widespread these surveillance programs are, but he is unsure about exactly what information he should make public without compromising national security. Here the journalists take the lead, and they with British journalist Ewan MacAskill, make the decisions on what to release to the media and when. These few days in with the ‘team’ in Hong Kong holed up in Snowden’s undisclosed hotel room are tense and nerve racking to witness, and asides from worrying about future consequences, Snowden also wants to ensure that when the story breaks that it focuses on the revelations themselves and not about him personally.
It turns out he was right to be concerned as when the world starts to reel with the news of the far-reaching relentless spying that government agencies have been doing aided and abetted by the likes of the major cellphone and broadband providers, the NSA and the US Government desperately try to move the focal point by accusing Snowden of traitorous acts rather than attempting to explain why all this surveillance is happening. His life is definitely in danger and the UN consulate in Hong Kong help spirit him away to a safer location whilst they can work out his next move.
The one thing that one is sure of after seeing Snowden at close quarters and intently watching and listening to him as he shares the information he is about to reveal and explain exactly why he feels the need to take such actions, is that this very regular-type-joe simply thinks that the world has a right to now. He is devoid of any committed political convictions and he even takes great strides to ensure that his actions do not place even the smallest risk to national security. Whatever doubts one may have had about him previously thanks to the highly personal vitriolic backlash in the media that followed the disclosures, they are totally banished when one realises what a responsible and sincere individual Snowden is. He is, in fact, a true patriot and hero.
Once he was publicly identified as being the Whistleblower, there is a very tense time when he is talking with his long-term girlfriend back home who had no inkling at all of his plans for her own good. Now he worries that the authorities will put pressure on her in retaliation, but one of the high points the movie finishes on is seeing the two of them reunited in their flat in Moscow after the Russians eventually gave him asylum.
Credit is also due to the intrepid Greenwald who became both the moderator and the front-man who articulately dealt with the world’s media throughout the whole process. His ‘reward’ was British Immigration Authorities ‘detaining’ his partner at Heathrow airport for four hours to ‘question’ him. In fact less we should think that this is whole surveillance thing is a problem for just the American public, Snowden makes it very clear that the UK agency GCHQ have far less legal restraints placed upon them and their spying on all British citizens is probably even more intense and widespread.
Although the movie ends with the concern of Snowden’s future (the Russians gave him a one year visa) there is naturally the much more vexing question of what will happen to all this wholesale spying once this current furore dies down. The sad thing is, we know the answer.
P.S. This excellent movie has just won the IDA’s Best Documentary Award and has also been shortlisted for a Nomination for the Academy Award for Best Documentary.
Mike Leigh’s stunning biopic of J.M.W.Turner is the portrait of the leading English Romantic landscape artist who was evidently also quite a philanderer and misanthrope too. Set in the 1820’s (although Leigh never tells us that) the movie focuses on the last 20 years of the painter’s life when he was at the height of his success and his work was being exhibited at the Royal Academy and also commissioned by wealthy aristocrats.
Leigh’s story starts when Turner returns from a painting trip in Belgium to his London home that he shares with his elderly father who dotes on him and acts as his studio assistant, and also the sad-looking maid who allows Turner to have his way with her whenever he gets the urge. The maid just seems to be the latest of several mistresses, as the previously estranged one who has two simpering grown up daughters by Turner often comes around to harangue him looking for support which he never ever gives them.
When his precious father dies, Turner sinks into a deep depression and is even more bad-tempered with nearly everyone he comes into contact with. In one rather glorious scene when he is visiting the Summer Exhibition as it is being hung at the Royal Academy he is openly disparaging about the work of the other Academicians who constitute a veritable who’s who roll call of every major artist of the day (Constable, Stothard, Callcot etc).
On a trip to the small seaside town of Margate, which would become the inspiration for many of his most famous paintings, Turner meets the twice-widowed Mrs. Booth who becomes his live-in mistress, and later the pair moves to a house in Chelsea where Turner lives out the rest of his days.
Leigh and his cinematographer Dick Pope don’t just show Turner in action manically slathering paint over his canvasses but also capture evocative and powerful images of the landscapes often at dawn just as Turner would have viewed them. They are a real visual joy. As too are the sets of Victorian Britain that production designer Suzie Davies has lovingly recreated.
Like all Leigh’s movies, Mr. Turner is created through an improvisational method from which the final script evolves. Enabling his actors to have more input than normal into creating their characters certainly plays off, as so brilliantly demonstrated by Timothy Spall who gives a career-best performance as Mr. Turner. With his expressive squashy face he so convincingly portrays the short-tempered genius that never lets anything distract him from his work. Even when he faces public ridicule after he experiments with his painting style, and also right to the very end when he is on his death bed he cannot but help himself seize one final perfect moment to sketch.
The talented cast is mainly made up of many of Leigh’s regular actors that include Dorothy Atkinson pitch perfect as the put-upon maid, Marion Bailey as the loyal Mrs. Booth and veteran actor Paul Jesson as Mr. Turner Snr.
Overly long with a running time of 150 minutes which makes the action seem too slow and stretched out at times, nevertheless this screen biography lovingly gives a wonderful portrait for the only artist to ever now have a whole permanent gallery dedicated to his work at The Tate Gallery in London. Mr Spall’s (potentially) award-winning performance also makes this an unmissable film.